L’AUTRICHIENNE

Marie Antoinette: “a frightening destiny, sown throughout with intersignes.” She approached the point where the meanings were too many (and would later overwhelm her) when, as a fourteen-year-old betrothed in marriage, she arrived at Strasbourg in a glass carriage. The crippled, the elderly, and the diseased were kept hidden, as they had been for the young Buddha. An island in the middle of the Rhine was where the masters of ceremony had arranged for the archduchess to be handed over, naked, into the hands of her husband’s envoys. A building had been specially erected to receive her and its rooms decorated with tributes to the future queen. The magnificent large tapestries in the main hall were France’s inaugural gift to her.

Goethe, a young law student, stopped there several times before Marie Antoinette’s procession reached the city. Setting foot in the great hall, he was appalled. “It was hung with many splendid, sumptuous tapestries, surrounded by heavy ornaments and modeled on pictures by French painters of the moment. Now, I would no doubt have found a way of appreciating even this fashion, since it was most rare for my sensibility and my judgment to reject something altogether; but here the subject filled me with unspeakable horror. These tapestries contained the story of Jason, Medea, and Creusa, and were therefore an example of the most disastrous of marriages. To the left of the throne the bride was seen struggling against the most atrocious death, surrounded by the grief of those present; to the right the father, horror-struck at the sight of the murdered children at his feet; meanwhile the Fury rose up into the sky on her chariot drawn by dragons. And to ensure that such atrocity and repugnance lacked no touch of absurdity, seen to the right, behind the red velvet backrest of the throne, was the white, coiled tail of that legendary bull, while the fire-breathing monster and Jason in combat were entirely covered by rich drapery … ‘What!’ I exclaimed, regardless of those present. ‘Can anyone so thoughtlessly place before the eyes of a queen, and on her first setting foot in her new land, the example of the most horrible marriage that there has perhaps ever been! Does no one among the architects, the decorators, the upholsterers of France understand that pictures operate on minds and feelings, that they leave impressions, that they stir forebodings! It all seems as if they had wished to send the most ghastly specter to the frontier to welcome this lovely and, as we hear, most joyous lady.’” But Goethe’s young friends sought to calm him, to reassure him that nowadays “no one was concerned about searching for meanings in pictures; for them, at least, it would never have entered their minds, and the whole population of the city and region of Strasbourg who would be passing before those tapestries would certainly have no such notions, nor either would the queen herself, or her retinue.”

The cruel recklessness that intoxicates France between the Regency and the Estates General carries with it, among other things, a temporary obfuscation when it comes to images. As Madame Geoffrin told someone who was tiring her with a never-ending story: “Success in France requires large knives and brief stories.” Large knives held at the ready, brief stories told. And everyone could then move on. But images avenge themselves on those who do not see them. The life of Marie Antoinette is increasingly suffocated by symbols, while those around her notice them less and less.

For the handover, a wooden pavilion—the pavillon de remise—had been erected on an island in the middle of the Rhine. Maria Antonietta, as she was called as a child, became Marie Antoinette, now and for evermore. The handover took place on the frontier line, which divided the pavilion and a large table at the center of the main hall. She entered the pavilion on the Austrian side. In the last room before the frontier she was slowly undressed before the attendants who had accompanied her from Vienna. Not even a ribbon or a hairpin could remain in contact with her body. Naked, she was offered clothes made on her new French soil, a silk chemise, stockings from Lyon, slippers made by the shoemaker to the French court. Her brief, domestic, carefree past had to be forgotten. France was taking her as guest and hostage. The soft contact of the clothes brought to her from Versailles was the embrace of the new god. That pavilion was, for Marie Antoinette, like a ghotul, ephemeral, no place for games, the house of cruel initiation, where the transition through ritual death was marked by the many eyes that watched her and would continue watching her up until her clinical death. That gesture of sacrificial undressing entrusted her totally to the land that was clothing her with her fate. Etiquette is the last power to preserve abandoned symbols. Etiquette ensures that symbols, even when they aren’t perceived as such, can continue to act, even if a certain sarcasm is added to them. Here a Psyche is innocently entrusting herself to an Eros that is all too tangible in those silks, in that lace. The god to whom she was initiated had a form that was too precise and blasé, he no longer lived in a nurturing and protective cloud, he could no longer retreat into the invisible. It would be easy, one day, to strip him naked in just the same way. When she was imprisoned at the Conciergerie, Marie Antoinette was left with fifteen fine linen chemises trimmed with lace, a satin cloak, two dressing gowns, five bodices, and twenty-two cambric handkerchiefs. Presented as evidence at her trial were locks of hair, skeins of silk, a small mirror, a portrait of a woman, a piece of linen with an embroidery of a red heart pierced by an arrow. For the French, Marie Antoinette would bring the ceremony at Strasbourg to an end as simple Widow Capet, dressed in white piqué, sketched grudgingly by David on the tumbrel that takes her to the scaffold. At the end of the long ceremony in the pavillon de remise, once she had crossed the imperceptible frontier at the center of the table, Marie Antoinette hid her head for a moment, sobbing in the arms of the Comtesse de Noailles, her new lady-in-waiting.

A prisoner at the Conciergerie, she asks only to read fiction: she wants “the scariest adventures.”

 

Her own story belongs entirely to the dark century, to that meta-historical realm of revenge and expiation, of blasphemy and omen, which is apparent here even in the gossip. The guardian spirits, blazing at the door of the sepulcher, are Léon Bloy and Louis Massignon. Both are chroniclers of the mysterium iniquitatis: one of them the execrator of grocers, provoker of the Paraclete, the other the grand vizier of Fatima and of the Deuxième Bureau, of Lobachevsky and the Seven Sleepers.

Inside the oval, drawn with a single stroke, a forehead too rounded and childlike, counterbalanced by a protruding, pensive Habsburg lower lip, similar to that of Charles V bent over his clocks.

From the moment she crossed the table at Strasbourg, “l’Autrichienne,” as she was immediately called by Mesdames, the three daughters of Louis XV, was confronted by implacable hostility sine intermissione. But memory has been clouded by the bloodshed and the passage of time, faces superimpose and merge: ladies insulted at court, ministers, tricoteuses, sansculottes, favorites, royal provisioners—all come together in that hatred. We must return then to the Prince de Ligne, Marie Antoinette’s playmate who conspired with her to hide in another niche, behind the bust of Louis XIV that looked out over the groves of Versailles, the same bust that the young Comte d’Artois would sometimes salute: “Bonjour, grand-père.” Ligne had second thoughts that evening: he feared they wouldn’t give him a ladder to climb down from that awkward position, and that he might be left perched up there all night behind the marble bust.

The only crime that Ligne felt he could lay on Marie Antoinette was one of immense, charming “recklessness.” A crime above all of repeated “disregard toward bores of both sexes, who are always implacable.” And in order to punish her, a pact was reached among those Implacable beings, who would from then on produce tedium like exemplary English factory women produced pins, with appropriate division of labor among the dining rooms of the Third Estate, the tribunals of the people, and arrogant nobility, forever united by intolerance to any sign of frivolity and indulgence to any aspiration to mediocrity. Stendhal would be aware of this when he was struck by the incredible “vapidity of good company,” which had sought, moreover, between 1804 and 1830, to reestablish the salons of 1780. But this time, of course, without the “recklessness.”

A wicked thought lingered: might the capacity to generate boredom perhaps allow bon ton to be revived? The pact continued to work: nor was there any shortage of blood to bathe it. The trial of Marie Antoinette is the first, victorious insurrection of Bores, the only moment in which the people and the nobility were fused into one single mass.