‘Il faut bien que je me distraie et je n’en trouve les moyens qu’en multipliant mes amusements.’
‘I have to entertain myself, and the only way I have found is by multiplying my amusements.’
Marie-Antoinette (1755–93), in a letter to her mother, Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria
MARIE-ANTOINETTE HAS BECOME such a symbol of royal extravagance and arrogance that it is often forgotten how popular she was for the first few years after her arrival in France.
Stories about her kindness and compassion were common currency amongst ordinary French people in the early 1770s. The most famous concerned a hunting accident in October 1773. Marie-Antoinette was out watching her young husband exhaust himself chasing deer when a stag panicked and gored a peasant who was working in the forest. His wife fainted, and Marie-Antoinette got out of her carriage, revived the woman with smelling salts, and then gave her her purse. While the wounded peasant was being tended to, the wife was carried into Marie-Antoinette’s carriage and taken home. Later, royal doctors were sent to check up on the couple, and after this, Marie-Antoinette asked for regular updates until both the peasant and his wife were back on their feet.
Embellished versions of the story were written up, illustrated in cheap engravings and printed on fans, and soon the whole of France knew that it possessed an angelic Austrian princess. People began coming out to the sites of royal hunts to cheer her – and maybe also to throw themselves in the path of a passing stag in the hope of making some money.
The generosity of the young Princess and her husband extended to much larger sums than the few coins in a purse. We saw earlier how Marie-Antoinette and Louis donated money to the Parisian victims of the stampede after their wedding. While Louis XV was on his deathbed, the soon-to-be Louis XVI asked for 200,000 livresfn1 to be taken from his and his wife’s personal funds to be distributed amongst the paupers of Paris as compensation for the national sense of loss. The Austrian ambassador, Mercy, reported to Marie-Antoinette’s mother in Vienna that: ‘It was done immediately and created the greatest possible sensation amongst the public.’
The young couple went even further. On acceding to the throne, every French monarch was entitled to what was called a ‘gift on the happy succession’. This amounted to about 100,000 livres. At the same time, his wife was usually granted the less elegantly named ‘ceinture de la reine’, or ‘queen’s belt’, which was in fact a tax levied as an expression of the people’s love for the new lady on the throne, whether they loved her or not. Naturally, like most other French taxes at the time, this one didn’t apply to the aristocracy or the clergy.
In 1774, both Louis and Marie-Antoinette declined these gifts. One could argue that it was an empty gesture – they didn’t exactly need the money – but it was a gesture nevertheless, and was probably sincere. A year earlier, Marie-Antoinette had written to her mother after a visit to Paris, talking about ‘the tenderness and enthusiasm of this poor people who, despite the terrible weight of taxes, were transported with joy to see us’. She really does seem to have felt for the ill-clad, underfed residents of Paris’s filthy, narrow streets who came out in their masses to greet her – probably the first really poor people she had ever seen (and smelt).
Marie-Antoinette’s act of generosity over the ‘queen’s belt’ inspired an aristocrat from the north of France, the Comte de Couturelle, to pen a witty poem:
Vous renoncez, charmante souveraine,
Au plus beau de vos revenus;
A quoi vous servirait la ceinture de reine?
Vous avez celle de Vénus.
(You decline, charming sovereign,
The greatest of your revenues;
But what use would you have for the queen’s belt?
You have that of Venus.)
Admittedly this was a shameless piece of crawling from a man who wouldn’t have had to pay his share of the tax anyway, but it was the kind of well-expressed praise that could spread around the country and create a reputation. Refusing the ‘belt’ was an easily understood news item that told everyone who this new queen really was, in exactly the same way as Princess Diana would later shape public opinion by shaking hands with an Aids patient in the 1980s and walking through a minefield in the 1990s. It was both positive and astute, and established Marie-Antoinette’s place in the nation’s hearts as an admirable, kindly consort.
Sadly, instead of nurturing this capital of public goodwill, Marie-Antoinette seems to have taken it for granted, and she was soon frittering it all away in a series of public-relations disasters that would turn her from an angel into a figure of hate. Her mother wrote to her, advising that France was living through ‘a time when minds are undergoing the strongest fermentation’, and that ‘everything depends on this happy beginning – which has surpassed all expectations – being preserved, so that it makes you two happy, along with your people.’ The hint seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
It wasn’t entirely Marie-Antoinette’s fault. For a start, as we have seen, the young bride was being more or less ignored by her new husband, and was under huge pressure to turn the sexual situation around, via the non-stop stream of moralizing letters from her mother in Vienna and the constant, hectoring voice in her ear of the Austrian ambassador to Versailles. As well as wanting her to breed, they urged Marie-Antoinette to take on her role as the most senior woman at the French court. She had to impose her presence and shake off the ‘Autrichienne’ label.
Largely because of the free time and frustration imposed on her by her husband, and because of this pressure to act like a queen, Marie-Antoinette began her transformation into the snobbish, frivolous, over-spending narcissist who would later inspire the famous (and fake) rumour that she had joked about starving Parisians needing to eat cake.
The process started even before Marie-Antoinette became queen, with a war of supremacy against Louis XV’s mistress, the lower-class Madame du Barry. Obliged to fit in with the snobs, keen to stress her own royal origins, and no doubt a little envious of another woman’s sexual power, Marie-Antoinette turned her back – literally – on the official royal mistress, ignoring her whenever their paths crossed.
In the end, it was only her mother’s insistence that it would be diplomatic to please Louis XV that forced Marie-Antoinette to step off her pedestal. In a scene illustrating all the futility of life at Versailles, the teenaged Princess (who had just turned 16) was greeting a crowd of well-wishers on New Year’s Day, 1772, when she half turned in Madame du Barry’s direction, and said: ‘Il y a bien du monde à Versailles aujourd’hui’ (‘there are a lot of people at Versailles today’). This public concession caused a sensation at court, as if two battling generals had called a truce after a day of slaughter, and Louis XV was delighted that peace had broken out.
A few months later, Marie-Antoinette gave a similar performance, conversing about the weather with courtiers while facing the whole group, including Madame du Barry. Again, Louis XV was ecstatic, and Marie-Antoinette’s mother congratulated her on a diplomatic triumph.
But Marie-Antoinette’s heart was not in these gestures of reconciliation. She wrote to her mother that she had betrayed her principles. She would have preferred to carry on snubbing the low-class interloper, and winning moral victories that would keep the anti-Barry gossips busy. In short, she was being drawn into the cloying, cliquish atmosphere at court that would eventually bring down the whole regime.
In her defence, it is often pointed out by Marie-Antoinette’s admirers that she cut back on the senseless rules of etiquette at Versailles, and encouraged her husband to do likewise. Madame Campan explained this by saying that Marie-Antoinette had been brought up at court in Vienna where ‘simplicity was allied to majesty’, so that it was ‘not surprising that she wanted to free herself from constraints that she thought unnecessary’.
For example, in 1778 one of the palace’s most unpleasant traditions was scrapped. In the past, presumably to make sure that princesses and princes really were born of queens, anyone could enter the bedchamber as soon as it was announced that ‘la Reine va accoucher’ (‘the Queen is about to give birth’). But on 19 December 1778, there were so many courtiers crowded around the bed that Marie-Antoinette felt faint, and Louis XVI had to fling open the windows to let in some (dangerously cold) air, while servants chased out the spectators. From then on, it was decided, queens would deliver in peace – not that any more queens would ever give birth atVersailles after Marie-Antoinette. The most famous (and apparently true) story about Marie-Antoinette’s attitude to royal ritual came when she was left naked in her bedchamber in midwinter because of the absurd protocol as to who should hand her her clothes.
Madame Campan paints the scene vividly in her memoirs. The problem was, she says, that ‘dressing [Marie-Antoinette] was a masterpiece of etiquette; everything was regulated’. Each item of clothing had to be given to the woman of highest rank present, who would then put them on Marie-Antoinette. On one occasion, Madame Campan herself was about to clad Marie-Antoinette in her chemise (undershirt) when a dame d’honneur (a more noble courtier) entered the room. This lady naturally took off her gloves and claimed the chemise. However, just then, the Duchess of Orléans arrived, an even higher-ranking courtier. Etiquette demanded that the chemise be handed back to Madame Campan, who would then pass it to the Duchess, once she too had removed her gloves. Her hands were barely bare before the Countess of Provence (Marie-Antoinette’s sister-in-law) entered – a still more royal personage.
By this time, Madame Campan, says, ‘the Queen had folded her arms across her chest and appeared to be cold’. Seeing this, the Countess didn’t bother to take off her gloves. She quickly slipped the chemise over Marie-Antoinette’s head, knocking her hair out of place.
Madame Campan remembered that Marie-Antoinette ‘laughed to disguise her impatience, but only after muttering through her teeth: “This is unbearable! What effrontery!”’
No doubt echoing Marie-Antoinette’s own sentiments, Madame Campan went on to denounce this senseless protocol, talking about…
… etiquette that, in the domestic life of our princes, led them to have themselves treated like idols, and in their public life, made them victims of all these customs … At the palace of Versailles, Marie-Antoinette identified a whole host of established and revered traditions that seemed unbearable to her.
The chemise ceremony was duly scrapped, and Marie-Antoinette carried out an audit of the pointless rituals that had made Louis XIV’s Versailles such a nightmare. She complained that if she was thirsty, for example, only a noble lady-in-waiting could give her a drink. If none was present, she had to stay parched until a suitably aristocratic woman was found. This constraint was crossed off the protocol list.
Even more radically, Marie-Antoinette decreed that from now on, she wanted male servants. Until then, only women had been allowed to serve her directly. Men’s roles had been limited to specific tasks. For example, it was men who turned over the heavy royal mattresses, and if she wanted dust removing from under her bed, she had to call the valet de chambre-tapissier (upholstery valet). That, Marie-Antoinette decreed, would now change, and any of her male or female staff members would be able to perform any task (within reason) for her.
Marie-Antoinette also had her apartments transformed so that she would have a special room in which to receive her personal hairdresser and ‘physionomist’, a Parisian celebrity called Léonard. This was a scandalous breach of etiquette because normally, anyone providing such a personal service for a king or queen had to work exclusively for their royal client so that they wouldn’t give away intimate secrets. But according to Madame Campan, Marie-Antoinette ordered Léonard to keep his finger on the pulse of changing fashions (even though by all rights, Marie-Antoinette was meant to be creating all the latest trends): ‘The Queen, fearing that the hairdresser’s good taste would be lost if he changed his way of working, wanted him to carry on serving several women at court and in Paris.’ This was a very modern view – democratic even – but some people at Versailles thought it all very un-royal.
Marie-Antoinette also hated eating lunchfn2 in public. She saw it as an opportunity for curious people to come and stare, as Madame Campan humorously put it:
This spectacle thrilled the provincials. At lunchtime, the only people one met on the stairs were good folk who, having seen [Marie-Antoinette] drink her soup, were on their way to see the princes take their broth, and who would then rush breathlessly to watch Mesdames [Louis XV’s three spinster daughters] eat their dessert.
At first, Louis XVI disapproved of these loosening standards, toeing the official line that ‘appearances at court produce more effect than realities’. To uphold these appearances, he was willing to bow to some of Versailles’s worst traditions. Staff were allowed to sell off uneaten food and drink, just like in Louis XIV’s day. Now they went even further. Every time a member of the royal family left a room, candles were snuffed and replaced with new ones. In Marie-Antoinette’s apartments alone, 109 candles were lit on summer evenings, 145 in winter – not counting balls and parties, of course. Soon, the whole of Versailles was lit by these barely used candles that had been sold off at personal profit by servants. Marie-Antoinette’s staff even received a daily droit aux bougies (right to candles) of 80 livres each, to offset days on which few candles were saleable. This was a sizeable sum, about enough to buy two cows.
Maintaining these traditions caused other abuses, too. Palace guards were still paid a bonus for buying straw bedding, whereas their barracks were now fitted with mattresses. Servants received a travel allowance, even though monarchs no longer migrated around the country as they had done in medieval times. The Queen’s apothecary was paid 2,000 livres a year to buy drugs, whether she was ill or not. Most servants began to request – and receive – tips just to perform their duties. All this etiquette and tradition was coming at an extortionate price.
For at least the first few years of his reign, though, Louis XVI clung on to some of the appearances that ‘produced more effect than realities’. According to Félix d’Hézecques, Louis was highly conscious of his ceremonial role, and would lunch in public every Sunday – in Marie-Antoinette’s own antechamber, so that she had to join him. Hézecques says that:
For the Queen, this dîner was purely for show. She ate in her apartments later. But the King would eat with, if I may use the expression, all the frankness of his character. His vigorous, healthy temperament, bolstered by continual exercise, gave him an appetite that he satisfied with a good humour that it was a pleasure to see.
An English farmer and writer called Arthur Youngfn3 went along to one of these meals, and confirmed what Félix d’Hézecques said: ‘The ceremony of the King’s dining in public is more odd than splendid. The Queen sat by him with a cover before her, but ate nothing; conversing with the duke of Orleans, and the duke of Liancourt, who stood behind her chair.’
Louis XVI was putting on a good show for his audience, but his wife was just pretending – a neat summary of their early attitudes to life at Versailles.
Louis also made sure that Marie-Antoinette took part in one of her most important public duties. Despite her allergy to giving birth in front of a crowd, she did receive the hordes of unsavoury revellers when her first son was born in October 1781. Ordinary people greeted the event with almost tribal delight. Representatives of Parisian trades paraded out to Versailles to put on street shows – chimney sweeps carried a wooden chimney with a boy perched on top, sedan-chair carriers brought out a woman and a baby dressed up as the newborn Dauphin and his nurse, locksmiths hammered on an anvil, shoemakers made a pair of boots for the baby, tailors made him an army uniform, butchers came with a fatted calf. The only tradesmen kept away from the Queen were the gravediggers, who came out to Versailles armed with their spades. The police wisely sent them straight back to Paris.
Louis XVI greeted this spontaneous show of public loyalty from a balcony, while Marie-Antoinette stayed indoors. But she agreed to let fifty or so of the most raucous, and probably malodorous, visitors into her bedroom.
These were the poissardes, a name meaning vulgar women, coming from the French word poisse, or filth (itself derived from poix – pitch – rather than poisson – fish). They were loud-mouthed market women, not exactly Marie-Antoinette’s kind of people. Once inside the Queen’s bedchamber, the chief poissarde gave a speech that had been inscribed for Marie-Antoinette on the back of a fan. Much of the speech was addressed to Louis XVI, who came in to meet the women. The woman announced, in her coarse lower-class accent, that: ‘This child must be like you. You will teach him, Sire, to be good and just, as you are. We promise to teach others how they should love and respect their king.’
It was a key political moment. These were the woman who, almost exactly eight years later, would march out to Versailles again, this time in their thousands, armed with knives, pikes and even a couple of cannons, to storm the palace and demand bread.
More pleasurable elements of royal spectacle were preserved, largely as a sop to Marie-Antoinette. Grand balls were held at Versailles every Wednesday from the New Year until Lent. During these soirées, according to Félix d’Hézecques, ‘one still saw the nobility and magnificence worthy of a great king, and the gallantry worthy of France’.
Entrance to the balls was restricted to courtiers who arrived by carriage. Guests were encouraged to dress simply so that they could dance, and maids were on hand to ‘repair the disorder that lively dancing might bring to the costumes’. Supper was served at midnight, with the royal couple eating in full view of the guests. Louis XVI would usually leave at one in the morning, partly because he wanted to get up early to hunt, but also because he knew that the partygoers would only relax once he was gone. The dancing would carry on until dawn, but things rarely got out of hand. Hézecques says that these soirées reflected Louis XVI’s character, his ‘simplicité et bonhomie’ – young danced with old, and courtiers were encouraged to join in rather than sneak off to gamble, so that ‘never at court did one see such decency reign, or at the same time such open gaiety’.
True to character, though, regarding other aspects of palace life, Louis XVI gradually weakened. He took to moving about the palace as if he were just an ordinary courtier, or even a visitor. Observers were often shocked to see him wandering into a room unannounced. According to Félix d’Hézecques, the King ‘should have been set apart, surrounded at a distance, so that his subjects would have time to examine him, take in his image, and engrave it on to their memory’ – this was, of course, the tactic that had protected Louis XIV’s mystique for so long.
Under Marie-Antoinette’s influence, the very nature of life at the palace began to change. Instead of a place where royals and aristocrats gathered to affirm their own superiority and celebrate what Hézecques called ‘the magnificence worthy of a great king’, Versailles became the headquarters of Marie-Antoinette’s young in-crowd. True, the previous monarch Louis XV had allowed sexy and/or talented outsiders into his inner circle, but he was king. And besides, other less beautiful and gifted aristos had been welcome at his court. Marie-Antoinette excluded anyone she didn’t like.
This exclusion process had begun as soon as Louis XV fell ill with the first symptoms of the smallpox that killed him. Instantly, Madame du Barry was out – a move made easier because a dying king was always obliged to send away his mistress so that he could confess his sins and receive the last rites. And once Marie-Antoinette became queen, the only people she wanted to see at court were a crowd of pretty young things, all of them determined to have fun. Her frequently quoted motto was: ‘I don’t know why anyone dares to appear at court after the age of thirty.’
To be fair to Marie-Antoinette, she wasn’t alone in her disrespect for some aspects of palace etiquette. Her ‘undershirt scene’ has been immortalized on film, but less well known is Louis XVI’s own rebellion against the cérémonie du coucher, when selected courtiers were supposed to dress the King in his nightshirt. Louis XV used to submit to the ceremony before nipping away in secret to another bed. But Louis XVI had little patience for the ritual. He would perform it, but whenever a new courtier was given the honour of conducting the nightshirt ceremony, he would duck out of the way, forcing the embarrassed aristo to chase him around the bed, laughing all the while at the absurdity of the situation and, according to one observer, ‘tormenting people who were sincerely attached to him’.
Louis XVI also became disrespectful to the most esteemed members of the court, and not only in the privacy of his bedchamber. On 2 January 1776, he was due to attend the traditional procession of the Order of the Holy Spirit,fn4 France’s most prestigious, and most devoutly Catholic, noble order. But the weather was perfect for hunting, so Louis was impatient to get the ceremony over with, and his brother Charles yelled at the knights of the order to hurry up. The old-school aristocrats – coincidentally, to join the order, one had to be older than 30, Marie-Antoinette’s cut-off age for fashionable courtiers – were predictably ‘scandalized’.
Lack of respect from two young royal men went far beyond impatience with meaningless etiquette, and struck at the heart of the monarchy’s role. If the King was no longer the figurehead for France’s oldest institutions, if he was just a lout who wanted to go hunting, what was the point of him? The same went for Marie-Antoinette – if all she wanted to do was party and put on plays with her friends, why should the country finance her lifestyle, especially as she was foreign?
Such youthful exuberance might sound like a healthy rejuvenation of fusty court life, but more than anything else, it simply introduced a new level of snobbery. Versailles became divided between those who tried to maintain traditional court life, and those who turned up their nose at it. Older courtiers, even members of the royal family or the noblest dynasties, began to be ignored or snubbed by the youngsters. They took to staying away from Versailles, or to travelling there from Paris for specific occasions, such as the grand balls where appearances were upheld and where they were sure to outnumber the young trendies.
Meanwhile, artists, musicians and even hairdressers had constant access to the Queen’s apartments and could sneer at the unfashionable oldies who were excluded. As the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig put it in his biography of Marie-Antoinette: ‘Gradually the circle of privileged people around Marie-Antoinette formed an unbreachable barrier. The rest of court knew that behind this artificial wall lay earthly paradise.’ Older courtiers wondered, says Zweig:
What is the use of having a modest and honest young king, a sovereign who is not the plaything of mistresses, if we are still forced to beg from a favourite? … Are we really going to put up with being treated so negligently, with being excluded so insultingly, by this young Autrichienne who surrounds herself with foreign rascals and women of dubious repute?
Marie-Antoinette caused a scandal by inviting her old harpsichord teacher, the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, into her boudoir. Not only was he trying to make French opera lighter, comic even, he was, as Madame Campan put it, ‘allowed to attend the Queen while she was being made up, and all the time he was there, she would speak to him’. Even Marie-Antoinette’s closest (and youngest) attendants were shocked by this intimacy with a mere musician – and Madame Campan was only a few years older than her queen.
The Prince de Montbarrey, Louis XVI’s Secretary of State for War (who was in his late thirties when Marie-Antoinette arrived at court) summed up the new atmosphere as: ‘Familiarity which, confusing everything … destroyed the respect and veneration with which Louis XIV had deemed it necessary to surround himself, based on his knowledge of the character of his people.’
In short, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were putting the final, shocking, touches to the process that had begun with Louis XV’s flagrant immorality. And the royal family’s reputation was about to sink to a new and fatal low.
One might think that the French monarchy could have survived a shake-up at Versailles. After all, would ordinary people really care if a few powdered old aristocrats were no longer allowed to handle the King and Queen’s undershirts? Would they object if the King shortened parades by self-congratulating knights? Or if Marie-Antoinette actually started to use a publicly available hairdresser?fn5
But this shake-up had disastrous consequences: first, by allowing Marie-Antoinette to snub and alienate large sections of the aristocracy, Louis XVI was losing potential political allies. Secondly, Marie-Antoinette’s young in-crowd encouraged her worst instincts: soon she was staying out half the night at Parisian parties while her husband waited back in Versailles, and spending fortunes on clothes, jewellery, wigs and similar frivolities.
She also began doling out vast pensions to her friends and allies. In a letter to Vienna in 1776, the Austrian ambassador Mercy listed some of them: Marie-Antoinette’s closest confidante, Marie-Thérèse-Louise de Lamballe, was given 150,000 livres, while her brother received 40,000 plus a salary of 14,000 as a colonel (when a normal colonel’s pay was only 4,000 livres a year). Mercy warned that people were criticizing Marie-Antoinette for this, and even blaming her for abuses that weren’t her fault, such as the 40,000-livre pension given to a certain Chevalier de Luxembourg. The most serious allegation against her, he wrote, concerned the 6,000 livres given to Madame d’Andlau, a lady-in-waiting who had been dismissed for lending a livre infâme (vile book) to Adélaïde, one of Louis XV’s spinster daughters. ‘People were revolted that this lady should have been rewarded,’ Mercy said. ‘The Queen may not have granted this pension, but how can we make people believe it?’
It was a question that would have dire consequences later on.
As early as 1776, then, in the public eye, the young girl who had refused her ‘queen’s belt’ had become a wanton spendthrift who was emptying the royal purse (which was, of course, filled by the people’s taxes) into the hands of cronies and purveyors of luxury accessories. It was Louis XV all over again, but this time from an Autrichienne interloper, and a woman at that.
Everyone could see the effects of Marie-Antoinette’s over-spending on her physical appearance. Until about 1775, hairstyles at court were rather elegant, usually involving lifting hair off the face or curling it down the shoulders – one of these was the hérisson, or hedgehog, in which hair was pinned up and curled into a sort of frizzy bonnet. But by 1777, the star coiffeur Léonard and his growing band of disciples were encouraging all the women under their spell to adopt increasingly ridiculous, and costly, hairstyles.
Women would wear ribbons, flags, feathers, stuffed birds, fresh flowers, and fruit and vegetables on or in their hair. A courtier, the Baronne d’Oberkirch, remembered fondly wearing ‘small flat bottles of water on my head, into which real flowers were dipped so that they stayed fresh … Springtime amidst the snow of powder created a marvellous effect.’
Hairstyles were so complicated that women needed a sort of metal scaffolding – called a pouf – to hold their locks aloft. The most notorious of these creations was the Coiffure à la Belle Poule, launched in 1778 to commemorate the ship of the same name, whose captain, Jean de la Clochetière, died fighting an English fleet during a sea battle in the Channel on 17 June 1778. Led by Marie-Antoinette, fashionable women had their hair modelled in the shape of a three-or four-masted frigate in full sail, complete with jewelled portholes and tasselled rigging. In truth, these creations were a cross between hats and hairstyles, with boats apparently floating on waves of hair that had been mounted on a pouf and supplemented with hairpieces.
Madame Campan admitted in her memoirs that the fortunes spent by women on their hair often caused ‘angry family scenes’ that were blamed on Marie-Antoinette: ‘The general opinion was that the Queen would bankrupt every woman in France.’ Though of course not all Frenchwomen could afford hairpins, let alone model frigates.
As well as provoking neckache and scornful glances from poor Parisians and older aristocrats, these absurd hairdos meant that young élégantes had to face the humiliation of manoeuvring themselves into carriages rather like giraffes entering a dog kennel. They often had to kneel on the floor for the long journey from Paris to Versailles and vice versa. A soldier and courtier, the Comte de Vaublanc, remembered that he once ‘saw a woman who was not only kneeling in her carriage, she also held her head out of the door’.
Some enterprising hairdressers devised collapsible frames that could be let down at a moment’s notice when entering a carriage or to hide their follies from disapproving oldsters. But the general opinion was that buildings would soon have to adapt – ceilings and doorways would need to be heightened, and theatres rebuilt with higher ceilings for their boxes.
There were even greater dangers attached to the monstrous hairdos. The Comte de Vaublanc recalled that: ‘When a woman with such a topping danced at a ball, she had to be especially careful to duck if she passed under a chandelier.’ The coiffures were serious fire hazards because the hair was liberally doused in grease to make it stay in place. A magazine called Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique asked a question in the scientific spirit of the age, with tongue firmly in cheek: ‘All this ironwork – on stormy days, won’t it attract lightning?’
Typically, Louis XVI, the King of Moderation, disapproved of this fashion, but did little to discourage it. Fortunately for him – although sadly for Marie-Antoinette – in 1781, during her second pregnancy, she began to suffer from hair loss, and her coiffures became much more restrained, often involving just a small bun on top of her head. She tried to encouraged fashionable Versailles and Paris to follow suit, but with mixed success. In 1784, the Baronne d’Oberkirch was still boasting of wearing her hair ‘as high as possible, according to the fashion, with my diamonds and a bouquet of feathers’. As revolution loomed, a whole class of rich women still thought of nothing but decorating themselves.
Aside from the enforced moderation of Marie-Antoinette’s hairstyles, excess coloured every aspect of her life. As she explained to her mother in a letter: ‘I have to entertain myself, and the only way I have found is by multiplying my amusements.’ The problem was that the public knew all about these ‘amusements’, and embellished them in an ever-increasing number of rumours.
There was plenty of gossip about what went on at the many bals masqués she attended in Paris. These had always been notorious pick-up parties – Louis XV first got together with Madame de Pompadour while he was disguised as a yew tree. Marie-Antoinette usually attended dances in more conventional dress, but with elaborate masks that supposedly hid the wearer’s identity. Inevitably, though, she was often recognized,fn6 and tongues wagged.
The most notorious of these Paris balls were soirées at the Opéra during the carnival season around New Year. Revellers would stream into the city from Versailles and every château in the region, and dancing would begin at around midnight, going on till dawn. Louis XVI rarely, if ever, attended these balls – he came a few times when they were first married, but got bored. After that, he often decided to sleep alone when Marie-Antoinette went out late, so as not to be woken when she came home in the small hours. Predictably, this only added fuel to the fire of gossip about the Queen’s secret private life.
Surrounded by handsome young ‘rascals’, it was inevitable that salacious rumours sprang up. Marie-Antoinette’s defenders are adamant that nothing untoward ever happened. Félix d’Hézecques assured his readers that: ‘She knew how to conserve the affection of her husband, a favour that an unfaithful wife loses very fast,’ and wrote that he refused to repeat the ‘scandalous anecdotes … about this unfortunate princess’, which were ‘too much the fruit of the vilest bad intent to sully my memoirs with them’.
Madame Campan, meanwhile, stressed that despite all the rumours about wantonness, Marie-Antoinette was so decent that she took baths wearing an undershirt buttoned to the neck, and when she got out, she always asked for a towel to be held up so no one else could see her. But this didn’t stop the Abbé de Soulavie claiming that Marie-Antoinette bathed in the nude and had even received a clergyman while in the bath.fn7
A clergyman’s fantasies might not be the most reliable source of information, but it was partly to check up on similar gossip that Marie-Antoinette’s brother Joseph was sent to Versailles in 1776. As well as giving sex-therapy sessions to Louis XVI, he attended Marie-Antoinette’s parties, and came away decidedly anxious. She was, he said, an ‘airhead’ (‘tête de vent’) who only listened to ‘those who procure her the greatest pleasures’. His consolation was that, ‘for the present, at least’, she had not given in to the temptation to stray.
Some say that she didn’t hold out forever. It was at one of the Paris balls that Marie-Antoinette met Axel von Fersen, the handsome Swedish count who, according to popular legend and Sofia Coppola’s film, was to become her lover. He first spoke to her when she was ‘incognito’ at the bal de l’Opéra on 30 January 1774. Both of them were 19. He was away on his grand tour of Europe, while she was deeply frustrated by her sexless marriage – so they were the perfect match. Four years later, when Fersen was received at Versailles, she recognized him from their one encounter and exclaimed: ‘An old acquaintance!’ They became inseparable, and, it is often alleged, more than just good friends. It was Fersen who later organized the royal family’s (disastrous) escape attempt in 1791 (of which more later), and who, in January 1792, received a letter from Marie-Antoinette saying that: ‘I love you madly and never, never can I spend a moment without adoring you.’
It is not clear, though, that such declarations of love implied a sexual relationship. At the time, letter writers very often ‘loved’ each other, in much the same way as text message-writers now ‘laugh out loud’ at every joke and Facebookers assail their friends with hearts. Also, while at Versailles in Marie-Antoinette’s circle of friends, Fersen was bedding any French lady who would have him. Would a queen have put up with being just another notch on his bedpost? Perhaps, if she felt so unloved that the occasional encounter with a Swedish Apollo eased her frustrations.
But whether or not Marie-Antoinette actually engaged in illicit Austro-Swedish relations is unimportant. What counted was that people believed it. A king could sleep around (and in some minds was under obligation to do so); a queen had to stay pure, ensuring that any babies she produced were of true royal blood. Rumours of female infidelity in the royal family undermined the monarchy itself.
In fact, there were few if any accusations about Fersen at the time. Most of these arose later, when revolutionaries began to dig for dirt about the man who had tried to help the King escape from France. On the other hand, as we saw earlier, there were plenty of rumours that she had slept with Louis XVI’s youngest brother, Charles.
Strangely, in the openly adulterous climate of eighteenth-century France, most sexual tittle-tattle about Marie-Antoinette centred on the idea that she had lesbian lovers. Perhaps some part of the public consciousness found it hard to conceive the notion that a queen might sleep with any man less royal than a prince. Conveniently for Marie-Antoinette’s enemies, at the time lesbianism was nicknamed ‘the German vice’, and was therefore a logical occupation for a Viennese woman. Male homosexuality was known as ‘the Italian vice’, because neither of these sexual ‘deviations’ was French, bien sûr.
Semi-pornographic engravings were sold depicting Marie-Antoinette and her beautiful confidante Yolande de Polignac in a passionate embrace. There was also a 16-page play called L’Autrichienne en goguettes, ou L’Orgie royale (The Carousing Austrian Woman, or The Royal Orgy) in which Marie-Antoinette enjoys the favours of both the above-mentioned Charles and Yolande de Polignac. In one of the first scenes, the three participants in the orgy are just getting ready for action when Louis XVI wanders in, apparently under the impression that this is an ordinary social get-together. He apologizes for being late – ‘I was busy finishing a lock, which I’m very happy with’ – then drinks some champagne and falls asleep, at which point Charles immediately shoves his hand up Marie-Antoinette’s dress. It’s a double insult – not only is the King’s wife having extra-marital romps with lovers of both sexes, she is doing it while he snores in the same room. Wittily, the anonymous author claims that ‘musical accompaniment’ to the soirée is provided by the Queen. Indeed, the whole play is so professionally written that it has been suggested that it was the work of Beaumarchais, the spurned courtier out for revenge on the royal family.
Marie-Antoinette’s best friend when she first arrived at Versailles, Madame de Lamballe, was also the subject of lesbian rumours. A compendium called Les Pamphlets libertins contre Marie-Antoinette (Sexual Pamphlets against Marie-Antoinette), published in Paris in 1908, devotes a whole chapter to her, coyly headed ‘Madame de Lamballe, or Embarking for Lesbos’. The revolutionaries nicknamed Lamballe the ‘Sapho de Trianon’ (after Marie-Antoinette’s private house in the gardens of Versailles), and she was under interrogation about her supposed affair with Marie-Antoinette when she was stripped naked and decapitated by a mob in September 1792.
Marie-Antoinette’s mother was worried enough about all these sex-related rumours to insult her daughter in a letter. Receiving a portrait of Marie-Antoinette in her Versailles finery, Maria Teresa wrote: ‘I didn’t see the image of a Queen of France. I saw an actress’ (a thinly disguised, or completely undisguised, euphemism for a prostitute).
An increasing number of French people would have agreed. In their eyes, the Queen had fallen from the pinnacle of French society, virtual sainthood even, to the gutter. And by 1789, any remaining reverence for Marie-Antoinette would be gone.
Louis XVI does not seem to have taken the rumours about his wife’s infidelities seriously. Or maybe he was just too passionless to care. The proof of this is that he actually provided the venue for her most intimate parties – le Petit Trianon.
As we saw earlier, this ‘small’ château, a kilometre or so away from the main palace of Versailles, had been built by Louis XV for one of his official mistresses, so when Louis XVI gifted it to his wife in 1775, he was actually giving it a stamp of respectability. He graciously told Marie-Antoinette: ‘This beautiful place has always been the refuge of the King’s favourites. It must therefore be yours.’ And for a French king to call his wife his ‘favourite’ was a very rare compliment.
When Louis referred to le Petit Trianon as a ‘refuge’, he used the French word ‘séjour’, meaning a temporary place to stay (nowadays it also means living room). He was overtly offering Marie-Antoinette the chance to escape the stifling etiquette at court, as well as the critical gaze of the courtiers who were constantly scanning her for proof that she had managed to tempt her husband into bed. It was a noble gesture, but one that quickly went awry.
When he made the gift, a year after he had come to the throne, Marie-Antoinette was already on the slippery slope downhill from respectability. So it delighted the gossips when she blacked out some of the windows at le Petit Trianon to shield herself and her in-crowd from prying eyes. And when she spent a fortune redesigning its gardens, shaping them into the fake ‘English’ hamlet that visitors can still see today.
Jardins anglais were all the rage in France at the time. This did not imply decking over the lawn and dotting gnomes around an electric fountain, as it might today. It meant a less formal space than the classical French garden with its gravelled walk-ways and rigidly shaped flowerbeds. Landscaping a garden as an idealized version of the English countryside, a perfect place for genteel strolling and picnics, was a habit of the British nobility, but it was also very much in the French ‘back to nature’ ideal inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, even though a French jardin anglais was every bit as artificial – and costly – as geometric lawns or flowerbeds shaped like fleurs-de-lys.
Marie-Antoinette hired a French painter, Hubert Robert, who specialized in picturesque ruins, to design her romantic garden. Along with an architect, he was made to produce 14 plans before the Queen was satisfied. In the end, her ‘refuge’ in the grounds of Versailles included a rural hamlet (with cracks painted into the plaster to make it look old), a fake ruin, a romantic grotto, a bell tower on a hillock, an alpine garden to remind her of her homeland and a ‘love temple’ in front of her bedroom windows – not to forget the famous ‘sheep park’ where she kept her small collection of neatly groomed sheep, cows and chickens. It also had ‘lakes’ and a meandering ‘river’, the only water features in the whole vast grounds of Versailles that weren’t either angular or part of a perfect circle.
It was a unique, truly idyllic setting where Marie-Antoinette could combine living on the real-life set of a Romantic painting with the Rousseauian fantasy of a peasant life free of crop disease and back-breaking labour. And all at a cost of some 300,000 livres, or about 3,000 years’ rent on a real farm of similar size.
Marie-Antoinette later admitted while under arrest that she had ‘spent more than I would have wished’ on the Petit Trianon.fn8 Her extravagance, as well as the almost insulting gesture of pretending to be a peasant when real farmers had to eke out a living under the yoke of frequent famine and crippling taxation, was so deeply etched on the French national consciousness that even today everyone pictures Marie-Antoinette in her meadow playing the shepherdess. Public distaste for her fantasy world was so strong at the time that it has lasted down the centuries.
However, this, like her supposed ‘let them eat cake’ remark, is a piece of eighteenth-century fake news. Marie-Antoinette didn’t actually pretend to be a shepherdess, cowherd or chicken farmer. Or rather, she didn’t act out the role in her hamlet – what she did was play the part in the theatre she had built near the Petit Trianon, at a further cost of 200,000 livres, at the end of the 1770s. Here, she and her friends could put on amateur dramatics – and Marie-Antoinette herself would usually play peasant girls or servants, roles that must have tested her acting skills to the full.
Louis XVI was delighted, not only by her performances (for which she took acting and singing lessons), but because the dramatics distracted her from all-night Paris soirées and gambling. She was a notoriously bad card player and had once been forced to beg Mercy, the Austrian ambassador, to pay off gambling debts of 487,000 livres. Nevertheless, Marie-Antoinette’s more innocent activities on the stage in no way compensated for the bad publicity surrounding the cost of the Petit Trianon, or the rumours about what else she was getting up to in her splendid isolation.
In 1779 Marie-Antoinette suffered a bout of measles and went to stay at le Petit Trianon for three weeks, accompanied by friends who had had the disease before, including four of her young ‘rascals’ (two dukes, a count and a baron). Gossips asked whether Louis XVI would go into quarantine with four buxom wenches if he fell ill – the obvious answer being no, he would take a locksmith, a clockmaker and a couple of hunting buddies so that he could shoot birds from his windows.
The rumours weren’t quashed when Louis visited his ailing wife during her quarantine and had a long and ‘tender’ conversation with her while he stood in the garden and she leant out of an upstairs window.
It was also rumoured that the grotto in her garden led to a secret passage, allowing her male guests to exit in secret before the arrival of a visitor – her husband, for example, who was only allowed into the Petit Trianon if invited, and never once slept there.
Madame Campan deals very frankly with Marie-Antoinette’s unwise attempts to shut herself away from the world. At one point, she says that: ‘I don’t mean to defend the type of entertainment that the Queen enjoyed … The consequences were so dire that the fault must have been serious.’ She gives a long description of a soirée in the English garden, lit with torches in ‘earthenware pots hidden behind green-painted boards’. Meanwhile, ‘several hundred bundles of firewood, burning in a ditch behind the temple of love, gave off a great light that made it the most brilliant part of the garden.’ So far so tasteful, but Madame Campan goes on:
It was talked about a lot. The venue made it impossible to invite a large proportion of the court; those who were not invited were unhappy, and the people, who only forgive parties to which they are invited, also contributed a great deal to the malevolent exaggeration of the cost of this small party, quoting such a ridiculous price that it was as if a whole forest had been cut down for the bundles of firewood.
When it came to Marie-Antoinette’s parties, people would believe anything.
And it wasn’t only her parties that attracted gossip.
The winter of 1776 was very harsh, with snow lying on ground for six weeks. Marie-Antoinette and her friends had carriages turned into ornamental horse-drawn sleighs, so that they could glide around the grounds of Versailles. Some courtiers used these to ride into Paris, and they were seen sledging along the Champs-Elysées wrapped in furs. Rumours sprang up that Marie-Antoinette was among them, frolicking in the snow while the rest of Paris suffered from the icy cold – some families lacking firewood because the Queen had been burning so much during her garden parties. The public outrage was so vehement that Marie-Antoinette stopped sledging and never did it again, even during snowy winters. Meanwhile, Louis had firewood delivered to the poor of Versailles – one day he showed these wood deliveries to courtiers and told them: ‘Messieurs, these are my sleighs.’ But the damage limitation does not seem to have worked.
The scandal sheets, known as libelles – a word originally meaning a small booklet, but which came to mean a satirical, libellous pamphlet – did not even spare Marie-Antoinette when she was pregnant. While she was carrying her first baby – nominally a cause for national celebration – there were rumours of orgies in the gardens of Versailles. In the hot summer of 1778, she spent most days shut away in her apartments, and would only go out-doors after dark, when she liked to stroll on the terrace outside her apartment, the raised area with two octagonal ponds above the garden that, in the daytime, overlooks the Grand Canal. Here she would chat with just a few members of her family – minus her husband, who liked to go to bed early.
During these nocturnal outings, a small group of string players would play on a small, specially constructed stage set up in the grounds. Madame Campan assures her readers that:
There was nothing more innocent than these evenings, but soon the whole of Paris, France, even Europe was using them to talk in the most offensive terms about Marie-Antoinette’s character. It is true that everyone in Versailles wanted to attend these serenades, and soon there were crowds from eleven in the evening until two or three in the morning … I don’t know if some unwise women dared to go out into the depths of the park; perhaps, but the Queen, Madame and the Countess d’Artois [Marie-Antoinette’s two sisters-in-law] were arm in arm and never left the terrace.
They weren’t on their own, of course. This was the problem with Versailles – even a sisterly chat on a terrace would attract a small horde of courtiers, including gatecrashers who could wander up the steps from the immense park beyond. On two occasions, when men approached the Queen to talk to her, there were innocent conversations, but Madame Campan complains that: ‘The most scandalous stories were invented and printed in the libelles.’ When the family tried to keep out strangers by issuing handwritten invitations to the night performances, ‘the most revolting lies were circulated about this private concert’.
One must not forget that Madame Campan was a friend and lady-in-waiting of Marie-Antoinette, so she was bound to defend the Queen. Even so, it is hard to imagine Marie-Antoinette, uncomfortably pregnant with her first child, enjoying semi-public assignations with lovers just outside the galerie des Glaces at the palace of Versailles while a thousand curious courtiers and jealous townies milled about.
Nevertheless, Madame Campan says that the malicious rumours ‘were avidly received by the public’. One night, an anonymous messenger left a ‘whole volume of songs about her and other women who were known because of their rank or their position’ in the royal apartments. Louis was horrified. The verses he saw raked muck over Marie-Antoinette and a whole collection of noble ladies, and he commented wryly that ‘such songs would damage the union of twenty couples at court or in the town’. But it must have worried Louis that even while pregnant Marie-Antoinette could not attract favourable publicity.
The time was ripe for one, huge scandal, namely ‘l’affaire du collier’, or ‘necklace affair’, a massive fraud scandal involving Marie-Antoinette that rocked the throne in 1785. And probably the worst thing about it was that for once it was true.
Marie-Antoinette was an innocent party, but the sad irony was that the scam only worked because of her bad reputation. The chief trickster was a young woman called the Comtesse de la Motte, an illegitimate descendant of King Henri II via one of his mistresses, who had used a favourable marriage to raise herself from the rank of impoverished minor aristocrat to that of impoverished countess.
In about 1783, la Motte (whose name meant clod of earth) became the lover of the Bishop of Strasbourg, a man called Louis-René de Rohan, a member of one of France’s most ancient noble families. Rohan was in disgrace at the time. Ten years earlier, he had been ambassador to Vienna, but his irreligious sexual mores and excessive spending had caused Marie-Antoinette’s mother, the Empress of Austria, to demand his repatriation to France. Rohan had then written an insulting letter about the Empress that had been read out at court by Louis XV’s lover, Madame du Barry, humiliating Marie-Antoinette and causing her to bear a deep grudge against Rohan. Several years on, with Marie-Antoinette now Queen of France, he was serving at Versailles, and was desperate to get into her good books. This, unfortunately for him, was where his new lover, the beguiling Comtesse de la Motte, came in.
La Motte knew that one of Paris’s most exclusive jewellers, Auguste Böhmer, was struggling to offload a fabulously expensive diamond necklace. It was an enormous piece, consisting of long, woven strands of diamonds, two gigantic pendants and four tassels of smaller stones. It had originally been commissioned by Louis XV for Madame du Barry, but the old King had fallen ill with smallpox before the deal could be completed. Böhmer had tried to sell it to the new man on the throne, and Louis XVI had been willing to buy, but Marie-Antoinette had refused the gift, saying (depending on which version one believes) either that the money would be better spent on a new ship for the navy, or that she didn’t want any of Madame du Barry’s hand-me-downs. In any case, Böhmer was stuck with his unsaleable treasure.
This situation gave the devious la Motte her idea. She began by persuading Rohan that she was an intimate friend of Marie-Antoinette, and then gave him a letter, purportedly from Marie-Antoinette, saying that he could redeem himself if he gave her dear friend la Motte 60,000 livres. Later, it would be proved that the letter was a forgery because it was signed ‘Marie-Antoinette de France’, a signature that the Queen never used. But it certainly fooled Rohan, who handed over the cash.
La Motte then made the most of Marie-Antoinette’s bad reputation by setting up a private meeting between Rohan and the Queen at 11 p.m. in the gardens of Versailles. Sadly for Marie-Antoinette, it was perfectly credible to an experienced nobleman and diplomat like Rohan that she would meet a man, alone, late at night and in secret.
Rohan turned up and was greeted by a lightly veiled figure who handed him a rose and murmured: ‘You know what this means. You can rest assured that the past will be forgotten.’ A servant in Marie-Antoinette’s livery then arrived and told them that someone was coming – the Queen had to leave immediately.
Rohan was in raptures that his disgrace was over, blissfully ignorant that the ‘Queen’ he had just met was a prostitute in disguise, and the ‘servant’ la Motte’s lover, a forger of letters.
A few months later, la Motte upped the stakes and produced another letter asking Rohan to advance 1.6 million livres (an immense fortune) to buy a jewel on Marie-Antoinette’s behalf. To convince him that this breathtaking request was genuine, la Motte paid a fashionable healer and spiritualist, an Italian crook called Balsamo, to conjure up a spirit who predicted that Rohan would very soon be made Chief Minister by Marie-Antoinette out of gratitude for this personal favour.
Again, Marie-Antoinette’s bad reputation was exploited to her cost. Everyone knew her history of extravagant spending. During her reign, she ordered an average of some 150 dresses per year at an annual cost of 200,000 livres. In the space of a few months in 1775 she had bought earrings for 300,000 livres, diamond-encrusted candlesticks for 200,000 and bracelets for 250,000. On one occasion she had bought some earrings for 450,000 livres, and been obliged to ask Louis to cover the debt. All this spending had earned Marie-Antoinette a broadside in a letter from her mother: ‘The news from Paris is that you … have misspent your budget and are loaded down with debt. People assume that you are dragging the King into useless extravagances, which are on the increase and are plunging the State into poverty.’ Ever the insightful critic, Marie-Antoinette’s mother concluded that: ‘Such anecdotes break my heart, especially with regard to the future.’
So, a necklace worth 1.6 million? Everyone knew that it would tempt Marie-Antoinette, but it was such an immense sum that she might well have to act in secret. The scheme was all too credible.
On 1 February 1785, at la Belle Image, a notorious Versailles inn and tricksters’ hangout, Rohan signed the credit notes, and received the necklace from Böhmer. A messenger, supposedly from the Queen, arrived and took possession of the jewels. A few days later, the necklace was in pieces and the 540 diamonds were being sold in Brussels and London. Most of the jewellers involved were highly suspicious that diamonds of such quality were being hawked by French sellers at relatively low prices, but when they made enquiries in Paris, no jewel thefts had been reported, so they paid up in good faith.
Meanwhile, Rohan held his breath for news of his redemption, and Böhmer waited for his money. As we saw in an earlier chapter, aristocrats were notoriously slow at settling their bills, but this was such an enormous sum that the jeweller finally lost patience, and went to Versailles to present his invoice to Madame Campan. She knew nothing of the deal, and asked Marie-Antoinette, who rushed to her husband and demanded that Rohan, her old arch-enemy, be arrested for extortion.
By now it was 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption, and Rohan was in his bishop’s robes, about to celebrate mass in the palace chapel at Versailles when guards marched in and escorted him away. At Marie-Antoinette’s insistence, Rohan was locked up in the Bastille and then sent to trial before the judges of the Paris parliament – who found him innocent.
This was a terrible slap in the face for Marie-Antoinette. As well as fraud, Rohan had been accused of lèse-majesté – lack of respect for the Crown – on the grounds that he had believed that the Queen would actually agree to meet him alone in the gardens of Versailles at night, and that she would buy immensely expensive jewellery behind her husband’s back. When Rohan was acquitted of this charge, it meant that in the eyes of the Paris parliament and the French state, he was entirely justified in believing Marie-Antoinette capable of such scandalous, unregal behaviour.
La Motte, Balsamo the spiritualist and the prostitute who had pretended to be Marie-Antoinette were arrested, and all found guilty. La Motte was sentenced to life imprisonment, and to be branded as a thief. Two letter Vs were to be burned into the skin of her shoulder blades, but she struggled so much that the second red-hot iron was brutally thrust against her breast. Balsamo was briefly imprisoned before being deported. The prostitute, now nursing a baby, was released. La Motte’s forger lover managed to flee to London.
In the public’s eyes, the other guilty party who escaped punishment was of course Marie-Antoinette. Her crime: being so disreputable that massive fraud in her name had become feasible.
Incredibly, even worse was to come. La Motte escaped from prison, fled to London and published her story in a book called Les Mémoires justificatifs de la comtesse de Valois de la Motte. There she alleged that she had had an affair with Marie-Antoinette (whose lesbian tendencies were ‘common knowledge’, as we have seen), and that the Queen had even helped her to escape from prison. La Motte insisted that, in the bid to buy the necklace for Marie-Antoinette and cover up the subsequent scandal, she was merely the ‘accomplice of people who were too powerful for my weakness’ (namely Marie-Antoinette and Rohan). She had been seduced by them both, she claimed, and described midnight trysts with Marie-Antoinette at le Petit Trianon – ‘moments of rapture that I hardly dare recall’ – while alleging that she was just ‘a feeble bird in the hands of a cruel child who, after amusing herself for a few moments, plucks its feathers one by one and then throws it to the cats’.
La Motte accepted that her story sounded incredible, but concluded: ‘If the Queen of France was what she was meant to be, or rather was not what she is, these memoirs would not exist.’ And this, to the French public, was the clincher. Everyone ‘knew’ that Marie-Antoinette was an extravagant spender, a wife with a hideaway where her husband never went, and both a lesbian and the type of woman who met up with strange men after dark. The necklace story simply confirmed all the rumours at once.
Yet again, though, Louis XVI was partly at fault. He made the key error that turned the affair from a Versailles con trick into a full-blown national scandal. It was Louis who offered Rohan the choice between a private hearing in camera, judged by Louis himself, or a public trial. Rohan, furious that he had been wrongly accused, and no doubt desperate to have his 1.6 million livres’ debt cleared, chose the trial.
Louis XVI should have known that the Parisian judges would side with Rohan. These were the men whom his predecessor Louis XV had stripped of their generous salaries, their private income from corruption, and the right to pass on their noble titles to their sons, when he had abolished the regional parliaments. They had been reinstated by Louis XVI almost as soon as he came to the throne, hoping to heal the rift between the noblesse de robe (the appointed judges) and the monarchy. But this attempt at reconciliation had been a double failure. Not only had it sent out a message to ordinary people that the justice system was going to remain biased in favour of the aristocrats, it also did nothing to make the judges loyal to the Crown, because they saw that the new King was so weak that he didn’t dare uphold his grandfather’s policy.
The Rohan trial was the perfect opportunity for these nobles to make a show of their disrespect for the monarchy. Rohan was clearly innocent of fraud, even if he was absurdly foolish, so acquitting him was a foregone conclusion. But by clearing him of lèse-majesté, the noble judges had flexed their muscles, and Louis XVI could do nothing about it, even though it humiliated his wife, and therefore the Crown.
In short, when that double non-guilty verdict was announced, it lit the fuse that four years later would explode into revolution.