CHAPTER SEVEN
STRANGE BEHAVIOUR
“If a young girl as charming as the Dauphine cannot fire up the Dauphin . . . it would be better to do nothing and wait for time to remedy such strange behaviour.”
MARIA TERESA’S DOCTOR, VAN SWIETEN, QUOTED 6 JUNE 1771
During the Carnival celebrations of 1771, which traditionally preceded the dour Catholic Lent, the Comtesse de Noailles gave a weekly series of dances in her apartments. As Mistress of the Household, that was not only her right but her duty; an argument for the steep emoluments attached to the position was the necessity for such expensive entertainments. One of these dances was the setting for the beginning of a sentimental relationship between the fifteen-year-old Marie Antoinette and the twenty-one-year-old Princesse de Lamballe.1
Although it was in one sense ironic that Madame Etiquette—the Dauphine’s mischievous nickname for the Comtesse de Noailles—should have been the catalyst for a relationship that diminished her own influence, in another sense this was an inevitable development. Every Dauphine—every princess at Versailles, every young woman in this society—needed her friends not only for intimacy but for support. In particular Marie Antoinette sought to reproduce the close ties she had enjoyed with her sister Maria Carolina (in whose welfare in faraway Naples she continued to take the keenest interest).
This kind of friendship, common among young women of the time, was heavily influenced in its expression by the style of Rousseau’s epistolary novel La Nouvelle Héloïse.*25 It was a thing of hearts and flowers, not bodily embraces, and in 1771 about as far as could be imagined from the outright lesbian practices of which both Marie Antoinette and the Princesse de Lamballe were later accused. When Marie Antoinette addressed the Princesse de Lamballe (and many others, including her sister-in-law Madame Elisabeth) as “my dear heart” and addressed her as “angel” or signed herself with “a heart entirely yours,” she was in the tradition of Rousseau’s heroine Julie d’étanges writing to her confidante and cousin Claire: palpitatingly sensitive rather than passionately sensual.
As it happened, the Princesse de Lamballe was for many reasons a suitable candidate for such a friendship at this juncture. Her status as the widow of the Duc de Penthièvre’s heir, a (legitimated) descendant of Louis XIV, meant, for example, that Louis Auguste, before his marriage, paid his single recorded visit to a private house to console the Princesse on the death of her husband.3 According to the usage of Versailles, the Princesse was entitled to be addressed by both Dauphin and Dauphine as “Cousine.”
But there was trouble when the egregious Comtesse de Brionne, with her Lorrainer connections, mooted a marriage between her son the Prince de Lambesc and the Princesse de Lamballe. Count Mercy was quick to point out the damage that would be done if the Dauphine threw her influence behind this plan. Not only would Marie Antoinette have to compensate the Princesse de Lamballe for her loss of rank in some appropriate material manner, but she would also be landed yet again with the uncomfortable burden of the Comtesse’s pretensions. The ambassador suggested handing over the whole matter of the Prince de Lambesc’s marriage to the King—as a result of which the Comtesse abandoned the project and the Princesse remained unmarried.
In general, however, Mercy approved of the Princesse de Lamballe, as an excellent corrective to the undue pressures of Mesdames Tantes. He believed that they had recently created trouble for the Dauphine by influencing her against the Prince de Condé, although Condé himself had always supported Marie Antoinette. Mercy told the Dauphine that she must simply avoid expressing political opinions, despite her protests that it was impossible to be the only one who did not speak in the family circle. As she put it, she was never “the first.”4
These tensions stemmed from a royal edict confirming the dissolution of one Parlement and the formation of another, promulgated at a lit de justice, so called because historically the King had dispensed this justice from the royal bedchamber and still sat on cushions for the occasion. The finality of such an edict, the imposition of the King’s will against the general wishes, was, however, beginning to be questioned. On this occasion the Princes of the Blood protested against a curtailment of some of their privileges and wrote what Marie Antoinette described to her mother as “a very impertinent letter” to the King on the subject.5 The result was that the Princes, and those Ducs who had supported them, were exiled from the court. Even if the influence of the aunts was generally harmful, on this particular issue they simply encouraged the Dauphine to follow the King’s own line, which was, after all, what everyone wanted her to do in theory.
Fortunately Marie Antoinette’s new friend the Princesse de Lamballe was not an intriguer. This was what Marie Antoinette indicated to the Empress when she wrote proudly that her new friend “didn’t have the Italian character.”6 She was, on the contrary, thanks to her mother’s blood, that desirable commodity, a good German. Furthermore she was famously pure and unsullied (in revulsion perhaps from her early experiences of being married to a debauchee). Everyone, rich and poor, admired her father-in-law, the Duc de Penthièvre, for his decency and charity; he in turn admired the dignified young widow of his son.
This respectability of the Princesse de Lamballe, even at Versailles, was maintained. Several years later when other royal friendships had developed, the Abbé de Vermond reproached the Dauphine with the quality of her women friends. Marie Antoinette ignored the generalization and concentrated on defending the Princesse alone as being “pure.” Vermond responded by wondering grouchily how long that purity would survive, before pointing to the Princesse de Lamballe’s stupidity.7 Here he was on safer ground. The Princesse de Lamballe was not clever. She was, rather, the sort of young woman whose sensitivity was so excessive that she was said to have fainted in public at the sight of a bunch of violets; she was not particularly amusing either. Neither the Princesse’s lack of intelligence nor her lack of sparkle was at this stage a disadvantage where Marie Antoinette was concerned. On the one hand the Dauphine disliked clever women; on the other hand she had not yet discovered the entertaining possibilities of life at Versailles. It was more important that the Princesse’s big sad eyes, her gentle melancholy regard, spoke of devotion not criticism. There was also something that the two women had in common: although their experiences of the male sex were the exact opposite, neither of them had found much happiness there.
In the spring of 1771, Marie Antoinette certainly had need of a sympathetic friend. Nearly a year after their marriage, the Dauphin was apparently no closer to “making her his wife.” In the meantime arrangements for a second marriage—that of the Comte de Provence to Josephine of Savoy—were far advanced. This was seen by the apprehensive Maria Teresa as a threat on two fronts. First of all, she feared that a pliant new granddaughter-in-law would win the French King’s affections and advance the influence of Savoy—a traditional rival due to its geographical position in northern Italy—over that of Austria. Second, and still more menacing to Marie Antoinette’s fortunes, was the prospect—at last—of an heir to the throne in the next generation. But this heir would be begotten by “Monsieur” and borne by “Madame”—that is, by Provence and his Savoyard wife. (These plain appellations, vastly more honorific than more grandiose titles, were generally given to the second son and his wife.)
The stream of nagging letters from Vienna continued. Some of the criticism was on a petty domestic level. For example, the Empress heard that her daughter was not wearing her corsets, which would certainly ruin her figure. When Marie Antoinette contended that such corsets were not worn in France, her mother offered to send her Viennese corsets. Increasingly, however, the Empress picked on her daughter’s inadequate character, her preference for pleasure over duty, her lack of application and so forth and so on, to the extent that even Count Mercy respectfully suggested that the leaven of a little sweetness might get better results.8
When Maria Teresa denounced her daughter for laughing with her younger ladies and making fun of others at the court, she was certainly drawing attention to unwise behaviour. Sins that would be venial in any other girl were far more consequential in the future Queen of France. It was a question of how the passage of the Dauphine from adolescence into maturity was to be handled. With the Comtesse de Noailles over-strict and stuffy, with the critical Empress apparently all-knowing of the slightest trifle at the French court, there seemed to be no one to bolster Marie Antoinette’s confidence on the one hand, and supervise her intelligently on the other.
Certainly the letter that the Empress wrote to the Dauphine on 8 May 1771 was more like a collection of skilfully directed blows with a dagger than a helpful maternal missive. Maria Teresa began by bemoaning the fact that her daughter’s looks were deteriorating; a recent miniature no longer showed that look of youth Marie Antoinette had had when she left Austria. She added the surely unnecessary reminder that a change in the Dauphine’s condition (that is, pregnancy) was not the cause.*26 On that subject, there followed the usual admonition—“I can’t repeat it to you often enough”—about employing patience and charm, never ill humour, to remedy the unfortunate situation, for it was the Empress’s strongly held view that everything in this respect depended on the wife. After that Marie Antoinette was criticized on “an essential point.” She should for reasons of public prestige be inducing Louis XV to pay her daily social visits in her apartments, just as he had paid to the late Dauphine, Maria Josepha.10
It was, however, on the subject of Count Mercy and the reception of the “Germans” generally that Maria Teresa waxed most eloquent. Why did Marie Antoinette receive her own ambassador so rarely, a man of such qualities, so much esteemed at court? Why did she not show more favour towards what the Empress called “your nation?” “Believe me,” wrote the Empress, “the French will respect you much more and hold you in much greater account if they find in you the seriousness and straightforwardness of the Germans. Don’t be ashamed of being German even to the point of awkwardness.” Thus Marie Antoinette was to make a point of singling out distinguished Germans with her attentions, and to extend her patronage towards the lesser ones who did not have the right to appear at court. This was her royal destiny: to make herself loved. And how well she had done so far! After this apparent tribute, the Empress proceeded to wield the dagger again. Marie Antoinette must be quite clear about what had helped her to do this. Otherwise disaster would follow.
“It’s not your beauty, which frankly is not very great,” wrote the mother to the daughter. “Nor your talents nor your brilliance (you know perfectly well that you have neither).” It was solely her good nature and her pretty ways, so well deployed, that had enabled Marie Antoinette to please. Without these, she was nothing. For a fifteen-year-old girl accused of losing her youthful freshness, who was conspicuously failing to please the most important man in her life, and was yet expected to cement the “German” fortunes at court, it was not an encouraging report.
In one potentially disastrous area of the Dauphine’s life, at least, there was a reprieve. It quickly became clear that no offspring was to be expected from the Provence marriage—not now, and probably not ever. Josephine, who at eighteen was over three years older than her husband, was small, plain, with a sallow skin and with what Louis XV unkindly described in a letter to his grandson in Parma as “a villainous nose.” She was certainly no match for the Dauphine, being timid, gauche and ill educated in all those graces considered so important at Versailles. Nor was she a quick learner. A subsequent ambassador to France from Savoy had to ask Josephine’s father, Victor Amadeus III, to drop a hint about the necessity for a careful toilette, in particular with regard to her teeth and hair: “It is embarrassing for me to discuss such things,” admitted the ambassador, “but these mere details to us are vital matters in this country.”11
Nevertheless the new Comtesse de Provence was anxious to do the right thing. When her Mistress of the Household, the Duchesse de Valentinois, advanced on her with the mandatory pot of rouge, Josephine flinched. Coming from the very different court of Savoy, she found rouge repugnant. But on learning that this was the custom of France and she must adhere to it in order to please her husband, Josephine gamely requested a great deal of rouge “so as to please him the more.”12
It would take more than a couple of bright red circles on the cheeks to excite the Comte de Provence. Josephine duly received 300,000 livres’ worth of jewels from Louis XV (scaled down to three-quarters of the Dauphine’s casket) and from Provence his portrait as “a pledge of the sentiments that are engraved in my heart for you.”13 But he showed no sign of bestowing upon his wife anything more than that. At fifteen he was already so fat as to be almost obese. Due to a deformity of the hips he waddled rather than walked, could not ride and took no other exercise. He also ate a great deal. It was probably Provence’s corpulence that made him impotent although there may have been other physical causes as well.
But Provence was quick-witted. If he had a problem all his life with the fact that “he was not born master,” as Marie Antoinette once noted, he was certainly far more adept than Louis Auguste at handling the question of marital consummation. Instead of obstinacy and silence, he met the situation with lewd boasts of four-times-nightly sex. The cognoscenti—a great many people in the inquisitive society that was Versailles—knew perfectly well that nothing had taken place. Marie Antoinette, making it her business through her household to be well informed on this subject, soon assured her mother that Provence’s boasts were baseless: “It would need a miracle.” An interested gossip like Bachaumont quickly dismissed such tales. A couple of years later the incoming Savoyard ambassador reported that there had never been any question of a physical union. Josephine herself confirmed this in February 1772; she was quite sure she was not pregnant “and it’s not my fault.”14
None of this stopped the wily Provence from dropping hints about his wife’s condition whenever he could most conveniently bait his brother and his Austrian wife with their own failure. It remained a fact that the birth of a son to the Comte and Comtesse de Provence would considerably undermine the position of the senior couple, the Dauphin and Dauphine—especially that of the Dauphine. It was undeniable that a marriage that was not consummated could be safely annulled by the laws of the Catholic Church—and the failure-bride sent packing. The Dauphin’s boyhood Governor, the Duc de Vauguyon, was said to be angling for this and Count Mercy was well aware of the possibility. Something of Marie Antoinette’s suffering on the subject can be gauged from a sad little aside in a letter to her mother. When the Duchesse de Chartres gave birth to a dead child, Marie Antoinette wrote that for her part, she would be happy to give birth to any child—even a dead one.15
Despite the innate family rivalry of the two Princesses, one Austrian, the other Savoyard, Marie Antoinette seemed to be handling her relationship with Josephine well. “My sister,” as the Dauphine called her, was on the surface made into a friend. It was the ambassadors of their respective countries who maintained an open rivalry. The presence of four young married people at Versailles, whose ages ranged between eighteen and fifteen, led to the formation of an informal society that was perfectly in accord with the rules of etiquette. The unvarying precedence of “Monsieur” and “Madame,” in other words the Comte and Comtesse de Provence, was immediately after that of Dauphin and Dauphine. Musical parties (Marie Antoinette had resumed her music and singing lessons), games of billiards (a sport to which the French royal family was devoted), games of cards (equally popular), hunting parties: all these pleasures led to an existence that was certainly not unpleasant, if hollow in one respect.
On that subject, however, Maria Teresa’s doctor, the great Van Swieten, advised patience in the following practical terms: “If a young girl as charming as the Dauphine cannot fire up the Dauphin . . . it would be better to do nothing and wait for time to remedy such strange behaviour.”16 In the meantime it certainly added to Marie Antoinette’s contentment that by the autumn the French King showed no sign of preferring the Comtesse de Provence’s company to her own, as had been feared.
Unfortunately he was not paying those daily visits to the Dauphine either. The problem of the Du Barry and her acknowledgement would not go away, more especially because Choiseul’s replacement, the Duc d’Aiguillon, was part of the Du Barry’s set. Politics as well as prudence thus dictated a realistic approach to the situation at the French court on the part of “the Archduchess,” as Mercy significantly described Marie Antoinette in his letters to Maria Teresa.
It was the aunts, whose influence over their niece by marriage was now well established, who bedevilled the situation. Mercy in France and Maria Teresa in Austria urged on Marie Antoinette the absolute necessity of seeking the King’s favour. This merely involved a simple greeting to the Du Barry, who by the rules of Versailles was entitled to be in the presence of the Dauphine. As Maria Teresa pointed out, anything else begged the question of exactly why the Dauphine would not receive a lady who was part of the royal circle, making her by implication most inappropriately and publicly critical of the King’s behaviour.17 But the aunts managed to scupper the first occasion when this brief greeting had been set up to take place, by sending for their beloved niece to join them at the last minute. This gave Marie Antoinette the excuse she needed to duck out of the encounter.
On 31 October 1771—to mark Marie Antoinette’s sixteenth birthday three days later—the Empress sent another of her lethal missives. This one related, with a joy verging on the sadistic, how well Marie Antoinette’s brothers and sisters were doing in their marriages—and their marriage beds. Maria Carolina was at last pregnant after three years of marriage, and her first child would be born the following June. The Archduke Ferdinand, who had married the heiress of Modena, Beatrice d’Este, was “enchanted” with her and had “made her his wife” at once. “All this news,” wrote the Empress, “which should fill me with contentment, is diminished by reflections on your dangerous situation, all the worse because you either don’t understand the danger, or don’t wish to. You simply will not employ the necessary means to get yourself out of it.” The French King—“such a good father, such a good prince”—was the clue to it all. Seeking out the King’s company had to be her daily occupation, not just when she wanted something.18 Whatever the moral implication, the worldly implication was clear: she must placate the monarch if she was to survive at Versailles.
It was under these circumstances that on New Year’s Day 1772 at Versailles, the Dauphine surrendered at last. There was a big crowd of courtiers paying their respects. In their midst Marie Antoinette made a remark of superb royal banality in the general direction of the Du Barry: “There are a lot of people here today at Versailles.” After that she allowed herself to explode to Louis Auguste, vowing that she would never address another word to the dreadful creature. Writing to her mother Marie Antoinette took a less explosive line but she made it clear that she had sacrificed “all her prejudices and repugnances” on being assured that there was nothing dishonourable about doing so. After all, it would be the greatest unhappiness of her life if she were to be the cause of trouble between the two families, Habsburgs and Bourbons. However, “my heart will always be with my own,” she added to the Empress. Marie Antoinette meant of course the Habsburg family. “My duties here are sometimes hard to fulfil.”19
For all these complaints, Marie Antoinette’s behaviour towards the Du Barry became more circumspect. In the summer at Compiègne, where the atmosphere was not so ostentatiously formal, Count Mercy, who as a diplomat saw it as his business to pay visits to the favourite, brokered another public acknowledgement. First of all the Dauphine made conversation with the Duchesse d’Aiguillon and then, since the favourite had just arrived with the King, turned her body in the Du Barry’s direction. She proceeded to chat on easily about the weather and the hunts without making it clear to whom her remarks were being specifically addressed. Louis XV, ignoring the ambiguity, was delighted, and that night at the royal supper, showered his granddaughter-in-law with attentions.20 It marked the beginning of Marie Antoinette’s realization that Mesdames Tantes had been wrong in the rigorous stance they had preached to her.
The Dauphine’s Habtx1urg “heart”—if that was what it was—became relevant in the summer of 1772, when she was sixteen and a half. Poland and its partial dismemberment was the issue. The reforms in that country by King Stanislaus Poniatowski (who followed the Saxon ruler, part of the late Dauphine’s family, on the throne) had led, in effect, to civil war. This in turn was a cynical opportunity for the great powers—Russia, Austria and Prussia—to help themselves to large chunks of Poland, provided they could agree with each other to do so without going to war. The problem was France, traditionally a friend and ally of Poland. How would she react to the forcible removal of over one-third of Polish territory? Would the Franco-Austrian alliance stand the strain? Prolonged negotiations between the three aggressors were finally concluded in the summer of 1772 by the Conventions of St. Petertx1urg. As Frederick II observed, unpleasantly but accurately, of his old enemy Maria Teresa, now his collaborator in robbery: “She wept and she wept but she took and she took.”21
The Empress’s anxiety about Louis XV, expressed privately to Mercy in June, was a great deal more sincere: “I know very well that the line we have just taken with regard to Poland will have created a sensation in France.” Nevertheless the French alliance was still the cornerstone of Austrian policy; nothing that had happened to Poland changed that, although Maria Teresa admitted that France might feel a certain grievance, if only because there had been no warning. Who would smooth over this family crisis? “There is only my daughter, the Dauphine, to do so, assisted by your counsels and local knowledge,” she told Mercy in a long memorandum of 2 July. This way the Dauphine could do a real service to “her family and her homeland” (patrie).*27 The Empress demanded nothing that could be held demeaning, only due consideration and attention to her “grandfather and master.” Her last words were the most menacing: “Perhaps the alliance depends on it.”22
As it happened, the alliance proved to be impregnable simply because Louis XV had no intention of breaking it. He had little means to rescue Poland in the face of a united and powerful force on the other side. Choiseul’s replacement, the Duc d’Aiguillon, was much disliked by Marie Antoinette for his loose life and his connection to the Du Barry; he also had a malicious tongue, which she suspected mocked her amusingly behind her back. But whatever his dislike of the Austrian connection, Aiguillon too was helpless. Mercy was able to reassure Maria Teresa that since Aiguillon perceived the Austrian alliance was “in the heart of his master,” he would make no attempt to dissolve it. The following year Louis XV stated categorically: “I have made that alliance and it will continue as long as the Empress lives and the Emperor as well . . . I do not want a war.”23
The interesting aspect of the Polish affair from the point of view of Marie Antoinette is the real fear with which she greeted her diplomatic instructions from her mother. (She was somewhat in the position of a modern spy, left in a foreign country for several years as a “sleeper” and now ordered to spring into action.) She ended a letter to the Empress of 17 July 1772, after she had received these instructions from Mercy, simply enough: “I shall certainly not forget what Mercy has said to me; this is very important and I’m very anxious about it; but I shall be only too happy to contribute to the union [of the two families] and to prove to my dear mother the deference and loving respect which I shall accord to her all her life . . .” But the next day, in one of his long private communications to the Empress, Mercy revealed a more agonized reaction. “Where will I be if there is a rupture between our two families?” the Dauphine had asked desperately. “I hope that God will preserve me from this misfortune, and guide me as to what to do. I have prayed fervently to Him.”24
The truth was that for better or worse Marie Antoinette showed none of the instincts of a political intriguer, that sheer zest for the art of manipulation shown by her sister Amalia, who was no longer on speaking terms with her mother due to her machinations and general bad behaviour. At least the Dauphine was developing physically; the childishness of appearance that Louis XV had marked on her arrival at Versailles was vanishing. In the autumn of 1772 Marie Antoinette boasted to Maria Teresa that she had grown a lot and put on some weight, through drinking milk, although unfortunately that started ill-founded rumours of pregnancy. When it came to her character at seventeen, that was developing too. Her reading habits were improving and in June she reported proudly that she had been reading some history with Vermond. This was obviously a ploy intended to appeal to Louis Auguste, noted since early youth as a lover of historical works. The following January, Marie Antoinette dutifully recorded her own impression of her husband’s favourite book, Hume’s History of England: “It seems very interesting to me, although one must remember it was written by a Protestant.”25
With her experience of family life, Marie Antoinette began to act as peace-maker between the sparring royal brothers, Louis Auguste and Provence. On one occasion when the clumsy Louis Auguste broke a piece of porcelain belonging to Provence and the younger brother flew at him, Marie Antoinette actually interrupted the fight; the two of them were roughly the same age as her own brothers. But the natural instinct of Marie Antoinette was for giving affection, not for taking control, although she was guiltily aware that she was supposed to be in some way “controlling” the Dauphin, as references in her letters show. In the absence of any real corroborative evidence for the Dauphine’s growing ascendancy over her husband, we must assume that these little boasts were what her mother wanted to hear (and Mercy wanted to convey) rather than anything more serious.
Her love of other people’s children, on whom she lavished “her tenderest caresses” according to Madame Campan, maddened Mercy because he thought it distracted her from more serious things. If she spotted a child in the crowd, she might send to ask its name. One little English “Miss” in the company of Dr. Johnson turned out by a happy coincidence to be called “Queeny.” Touchingly, under the circumstances, the Dauphine even tried to choose her ladies for the sake of their children—Madame Thierry, for example, who had a four-year-old son. The offspring of her household were always welcome in her apartments where they might break the furniture and tear the clothes with impunity.26 Her dogs were just as undisciplined, which irritated Mercy equally, although in this case Marie Antoinette was merely following the custom of Versailles.
For the great palace was a pets’ paradise, if not a very clean paradise; foreigners commented on the dirt. Cats were everywhere. Louis XV adored them, having one particular spoilt Persian white which he refused to allow his courtiers to tease; perhaps significantly the Dauphin disliked cats. A celebrated race of grey angora cats were to be found on the lotto tables, patting the pieces with their furry paws. For the Du Barry it was a parakeet and white monkeys as well as a dog that received a propitiatory diamond necklace from the visiting Prince of Sweden. The Princesse de Chimay also favoured monkeys, despite the celebrated occasion when her monkey ran wild in her boudoir, plastering himself with rouge and powder in imitation of his mistress before bounding into the supper room and terrifying all those present.27
The Dauphin’s sister Elisabeth favoured greyhounds. Mesdames Tantes loved spaniels. Comte d’Hezecques, from his days as a page at Versailles, remembered a chaotic scene when the royal family emerged into the great gallery, each with their attendant familiar. Suddenly something frightened the animals and they all began to panic, barking and fleeing through the vast, dimly lit salons “like shadows.” The Princesses added their cries to the tumult as they shouted, then yelled after the departing dogs, and finally went in pursuit.28
Such pleasures could certainly palliate the central unhappiness of Marie Antoinette’s existence. When the Comtesse de Noailles reported in the summer of 1772 that the Dauphine had “moments of sadness” over the “incomprehensible behaviour” of her husband towards her, she added that they did not last long. Yet caresses for dogs and other people’s children, or even the round of formal and informal entertainments that constituted court life, could not forever mask the inexorable question: what on earth was going on with the Dauphin and Dauphine? Or rather, since nothing was going on, why was that? And what was the cure? In the autumn of 1772 it was suggested that the problem might lie in a physical impediment, a condition known as phimosis.*28 The radical cure for phimosis was circumcision. The trouble with such an intimate operation, performed on an adult in an age before anaesthetics or effective painkillers, was that it might put off a nervous patient from the sexual act altogether, as one royal doctor sensibly pointed out later: “It was just as bad to have it done as not.”29 Proper instruction might be the answer.
In the spring of 1773, when the young couple had been married nearly three years, the King ordered Doctor Jean-Marie Lassonne to examine the Dauphin and, after that, to talk very frankly to both husband and wife. Lassonne had been physician to the late Queen and was now in Marie Antoinette’s household. Lassonne found the Dauphin “well made” and, as Marie Antoinette told her mother on 15 March, gave the opinion that “clumsiness and ignorance” were what were preventing this vital event from taking place. Marie Antoinette also reported to Maria Teresa that the Dauphin handled the occasion well, speaking without embarrassment and with a lot of common sense. Dr. Lassonne expressed himself as “very satisfied and full of hope.”30
And hope suddenly became the order of the day. Marie Antoinette declared herself happily confident that she would soon be at last the Dauphin’s real wife. The “strange” and “incomprehensible” behaviour would soon be at an end. She could view the imminent announcement of the marriage of Artois to another Savoyard Princess, Josephine’s younger sister Thérèse, with far more equanimity than she had greeted that of Provence two years earlier.
No one was happier at the prospect of the consummation than Count Mercy. He too was giving instructions—political in his case. Mercy told the Empress that Marie Antoinette was beginning to ask intelligent questions on subjects such as Poland and Sweden and would benefit from more instruction in the future. It was true that her apprehensions about the alliance and her own responsibility in maintaining it remained strong. Letting everyone down in this respect would be “the greatest unhappiness” for her. She also boasted once again of her ascendancy over her husband. She could guarantee that if the Dauphin had “more authority,” relations between the two courts would be extremely warm.31 (Time would show whether this was a fantasy, intended to impress her mother, or the truth.) Yet as Mercy admitted, all his plans for Marie Antoinette to influence the King as well as the Dauphin really needed a pregnancy to clinch them.