CHAPTER EIGHT
LOVE OF A PEOPLE
“How fortunate we are, given our rank, to have gained the love of a whole people with such ease.”
MARIE ANTOINETTE ON VISITING PARIS, 14 JUNE 1773
On 14 June 1773 Marie Antoinette was at last able to report a triumph to her mother. This was the official visit of the Dauphin and Dauphine to Paris—their first—which had taken place six days previously. This expedition had been strongly advocated by the Empress over a long period. She envisaged the public display of her daughter’s charms as doing wonders for her prestige or what would now be called her image. Making a graceful appearance before crowds was exactly what the Dauphine was capable of doing.
Royal women in general, such as the late Queen, the late Dauphine and Mesdames Tantes, usually led a life confined to Versailles and the other palaces. This was Maria Teresa’s point. There must be no timidity. She wanted the Dauphine to shine in comparison to the rest of the French royal family, with what the Empress identified as their lack of geniality and their unpolished manners.1
In the summer of 1772 there had been a suggestion that, curious to see the fabled city, the Dauphine would ride through the boulevards, with only one lady in attendance so as not to arouse suspicions about her identity. It foundered, however, like many other plans, on the question of etiquette. Madame Adélaïde announced her intention of coming too, which meant that her lady-in-waiting would attend both, and this slighted the Dauphine’s lady-in-waiting who had the right to attend her mistress when on horseback. But since this particular lady happened to be the daughter of the Comtesse de Noailles, of course she could not be slighted . . . In short the Comtesse de Noailles made so many difficulties that the project had to be abandoned. Mercy was left to lecture Marie Antoinette in the abstract on the essential duty of a great princess: to draw the hearts of the people to her.
A year later, the lesson had been well learnt. Marie Antoinette had also discovered for herself the sheer delight of the people’s acclaim. Her letter was ecstatic. When the Dauphin and Dauphine tried to promenade in the gardens of the Tuileries Palace, they were stuck for three-quarters of an hour, unable to move forwards or backwards due to the enthusiasm of the crowds. Furthermore, the royal couple had jointly given orders to their bodyguards that no force was to be used to ease their passage—which had the gratifying effect, unusual for such occasions, that no one was injured.
“I can’t tell you, my dear mother,” she wrote, “the transports of joy, of affection, that were shown to us despite all the burdens of these poor people,” by which she meant taxes. Before finally retiring, the royal couple, again unusually, acknowledged the crowd by waving to them, “which gave great pleasure.” Marie Antoinette reflected: “How fortunate we are, given our rank, to have gained the love of a whole people with such ease.” At seventeen, it was easy for Marie Antoinette to believe that it would be a lifelong love affair.
A week later Marie Antoinette and Louis Auguste made a state visit to the opera, which for the Dauphine at least, with her passion for music and singing, was sheer pleasure. There was such a full house that the balcony boxes on either side of the stage had to be restored for the court officials and the royal attendants. The programme of separate pieces (of the sort that perennially make up galas) included performances by the ballerina Anne Heinel, fresh from a London triumph, with the equally famous Gaëtan Vestris. Marie Antoinette showed her natural enthusiasm when it came to the applause. Theoretically, this was forbidden at court performances, so that the few claps in the pit were usually quickly stopped by the guards. But when Marie Antoinette asked the lady beside her to applaud, there was a general ovation.2 The Dauphine could do nothing wrong.
Another welcome development of the Paris visit, reported by Marie Antoinette, was the increased social grace of the Dauphin who received the addresses of the crowd with aplomb. The stress that Marie Antoinette placed on her husband’s new ease of manner contrasted, however, with the rather different emphasis in Mercy’s secret report. The ambassador was concerned to praise the Dauphine’s triumph and the enthusiastic exclamations of the crowd—50,000 of them “without exaggeration”—who cried out over and over again: “How beautiful she is! How charming she is!” But he also indicated that the Dauphin had been generally regarded as a mere “accessory” to the occasion, compared to the radiantly smiling young woman who was the centre of everybody’s attention.
That was not all. Many of the acclamations that Mercy heard had by a strange coincidence linked Marie Antoinette to her mother. People had apparently cried out that in the Dauphine’s charms and her air of benevolence they recognized “the daughter of the august Maria Teresa.”*29 In the same way, Marie Antoinette was careful to lace her letters of rejoicing with the usual protestations of gratitude to the mother who had made her great position possible. “I was the last of all [the daughters] and I have been treated as the eldest.”3 The shadow of the dominant mother still crept across the new sunshine that warmed her happy daughter.
The Dauphin’s departure from the awkward behaviour to which the French court was wearily accustomed also signalled a new kind of ease in his relationship with his wife. During the summer of 1773, the wise counsels of Dr. Lassonne took their effect. Louis Auguste managed to achieve some kind of physical union with Marie Antoinette. Naturally the momentous news was conveyed as soon as possible to Maria Teresa: “I think I can confide to you, my dear Mama, and only to you,” wrote Marie Antoinette on 17 July, “that my affairs have taken a very good turn since we arrived here [Versailles] and that I consider my marriage to be consummated; even if not to the degree that I am pregnant. This is the only reason why the Dauphin does not want it to be known. What happiness it would be if I gave birth to a child in the month of May!”4 She went on to give details of her “indisposition” (her period) and to assure the Empress that she did not go riding during that time.
Two days after this letter was written, the Dauphin agreed that the two of them should break the exciting news to the King. Louis XV kissed Marie Antoinette with great tenderness and called her “his daughter.” It was then thought that the time was ripe to spread “our secret.” As Marie Antoinette told her mother: “Everybody is very pleased with it.” Although the annoying period or “Générale” had arrived, “as usual a few days in advance,” she still did not give up hope for a Maytime birth. The Empress was naturally exultant. This did not stop her remonstrating with the Dauphine yet again on the subject of her riding now that she was “a woman”; it was a pastime that notoriously caused miscarriages, and which she would not permit if she was the French King. Nevertheless: “The joy is incredibly great everywhere,” wrote the Empress. “What delight!”5
Time would, however, reveal the precise nature of the act that had taken place and its possible limitations. Marie Antoinette’s faith in her future pregnancy was not, for example, shared by the Spanish ambassador, Count d’Aranda. The Count made it his business to be extremely well informed on this tricky subject, probably through contacts among the royal doctors, supplemented by gossip from the royal valets. It was not a prurient interest but a worldly one; the Spanish Bourbons, despite having resigned their rights to the French throne some half a century earlier, were not necessarily content to see the lesser Orléans branch succeed to the French throne if the main line failed to produce male heirs. In 1773, this was a possible development. Supposing Artois’ marriage, projected for November, ran the same unfortunate course as those of his elder brothers, then Louis Philippe, grandson of the Duc d’Orléans, born on 6 October of this year, was the closest heir in the next generation.
Aranda’s reports were detailed. In August he noted that both Louis Auguste and Provence had a certain impediment, which prevented them being husbands. On 23 November he reported with regard to the Dauphin there was certain physical evidence (“stains”) that emissions were taking place outside the proper place because of the pain of introducing the member. In other quarters, expectations of pregnancy began to fade. “Three grandchildren this year and a fourth expected,” but nothing from the Dauphine, moaned the Empress in November. Count Mercy had to admit to her that “this happy event” was not quite as imminent as might be wished. By January of the following year, Maria Teresa was back on her familiar line of complaint; the coldness of the Dauphin, a young husband of twenty (he was actually nineteen and a half), towards a pretty woman was inconceivable to her. And she began to meditate some more serious action from Marie Antoinette’s family; in short, to get her son the Emperor Joseph “to stir up this indolent spouse.”6
Nevertheless, from the point of view of Marie Antoinette herself, something had been achieved in the shape of an increased intimacy with her husband, which boded well for the future. Even as he admitted that the situation was not going to be remedied overnight, Mercy reported a significant dialogue confided to him by the Dauphine. Marie Antoinette told Louis Auguste that she would be humiliated both before the court and the public if the new Comtesse d’Artois became pregnant before she did. At this, Louis Auguste enquired rather touchingly: “But do you love me?” Marie Antoinette replied that he could hardly doubt it. She loved him sincerely and respected him still more. Tender caresses followed, with the Dauphin promising, on return to Versailles, to “resume his regime,” at which point he hoped everything would go well.7
That was for the future. As for the present, in November 1773 the young royal circle at court was increased by the addition of Thérèse Comtesse d’Artois. However, this new princess provided—with one exception—no threat to the position of the Dauphine. Mercy, who never erred on the side of generosity where Savoyards were concerned, described her as being silent and interested in absolutely nothing. Furthermore her posture was hopeless, her bearing without grace and she was a clumsy dancer. Certainly Thérèse, seventeen at the time of her marriage to the sixteen-year-old Artois, was no beauty. She was extremely small and burdened, like her sister Josephine, with an exceptionally long nose; a cruel English observer would later describe her as looking like “a starved witch.” At least the French King was pleased to note that Thérèse had a good complexion, and, his favourite area of contemplation, a good bosom.8
The exception—which did constitute a threat to the Dauphine—was Thérèse’s ability to “please her husband,” in the words of Louis XV. Here was a royal bridegroom who did not fall at the fence but performed his duties manfully from the wedding night onwards. Quite apart from marital satisfaction, there was no doubt that in terms of looks and beguiling manners, the Comtesse d’Artois had got the best of the bargain where the three princely husbands were concerned. Tall and slim in youth, with the bright black eyes of his grandfather, Artois had the precious gift, so lacking in his two elder brothers, of high spirits; he was affable with a “free and open air” that endeared him to the people. Court ladies would think back with misty eyes to his charms: “The graces, goodness and spirit of Henri IV” was one—perhaps hyperbolic—description. He was also extravagant and fond of display, although in business matters he would show some acumen. Of course it was hardly to be expected that a vigorous royal prince would confine his attentions to his wife. Nor were these extramarital attentions themselves unwelcome: “Few beauties were cruel to him, if one believes the legend,” wrote the Comte d’Hezecques.9 Yet for all Artois’ mistresses, it was Artois’ wife who had the possibility of a pregnancy just as Marie Antoinette had feared in her exchange on the subject with the Dauphin shortly before the wedding.
For the time being, however, it did not happen. Marie Antoinette began to alleviate the desperate homesickness of her early years in France, and the continued frustration of her marriage, with a lifestyle that was to say the least of it agreeable. She had been accustomed to dream of Vienna and her friends there in her first year abroad, reading about Vienna in the newspapers to catch up on their news. Her beloved former governess Countess Brandeis also kept her in touch with chatty weekly letters on the doings of her mother, brothers and sisters. When Marie Antoinette wanted to send presents home to her old friends, she was reproved for the unnecessary gesture. Nevertheless she insisted for once on having her own way; these gifts were acts of charity. It is obvious from later references in her letters to two women in her Austrian household and to their personal troubles, in which she advocated resignation as being the greatest grace God could grant, that she had kept in touch with them.10
Thoughts of Schönbrunn or Laxenburg permeated Marie Antoinette’s letters to Maria Teresa. How fine the waterfall at Schönbrunn must be! “If only I could transport myself there . . .” She particularly liked her mother telling her details of summer fêtes at Laxenburg so that she could imagine herself being present. The arrival of two miniatures of her “little” brothers, Ferdinand and Max, set in a ring, aroused sentimental recollections; the Dauphine would be able to keep them with her “always.” In a similar vein, Marie Antoinette showed the great Austrian general, Count Lacy, who was visiting France for his health, porcelain vases decorated with views of the Austrian palaces. And when Countess Brandeis’ stream of letters unaccountably dried up in April 1773, Marie Antoinette was distraught. She burst into tears on learning from Mercy that the Countess had been stopped by order of the Empress and pleaded with the ambassador to get the edict reversed, on the grounds that she depended on Brandeis more than anyone else to give her news of her mother. Mercy agreed to assist, on condition that Brandeis wrote less often and more circumspectly. Helping Brandeis and her relations—such as a young cousin destined for the Church—was something that Marie Antoinette continued to do, whatever the imperial disapproval.11
Nevertheless the pleasures of France—above all, the pleasures of Paris where she seemed to receive the love of a whole people—began to weigh in the balance against memories of her home. As the Abbé de Vermond pointed out contentedly, the Dauphine’s spoken French, once bedevilled by German phrases and constructions, had improved immeasurably with her actual sojourn in the country. She now used the language “with ease and vivacity.” In June 1770 Marie Antoinette had greeted the sight of her mother’s letter with the involuntary exclamation of a polyglot childhood: “Thank God!” (Gott sei dank). A few years later, Maria Teresa found it necessary to throw into her letters “a little German so you do not forget it.” Despite this motherly precaution, less than five years after her arrival in France, Marie Antoinette had achieved that ambition to which she had referred at Strasbourg on her wedding journey. Even Mercy had to admit to the Empress that “the Archduchess,” although she had not forgotten the German language, was unable to speak it properly, still less read it or write it.12 In short, outwardly, in her speech at least, Marie Antoinette was well on her way to becoming an ideal and idealized French princess.
The opera and the theatre began to necessitate frequent visits. After all, at the age of eighteen, she was young and she was pretty. She had endured three and a half years of an unsatisfactory marriage, one that she could fairly claim she had tried hard to implement—for even her mother now blamed the Dauphin as not being a man like others. But she could no longer make the mourning of her condition her main preoccupation. Those “moments of sadness” mentioned by the Comtesse de Noailles in the summer of 1772 had unfortunately not been banished by the renewed marital offensive—as one might term it—of 1773, despite the high hopes of all concerned, including, perhaps, those of the Dauphin. In between these sad moments, however, there were a great many distractions to be enjoyed.
It was not yet a question of gallantry or even courtly flirtation. With the awkward business of the marriage bed still unresolved, Marie Antoinette had every incentive to dislike the morals of Versailles, as incarnated by the ever-triumphant Du Barry. The combination of these two factors made her, as her brother the Emperor Joseph would point out a few years later, rather “prudish” in sexual matters than otherwise.13 Admiration, the love of a people, rather than that of a particular man, given that the man was not her husband, was the intoxicant at this point.
On New Year’s Day 1774 a young Swedish nobleman, Count Axel Fersen, made his first appearance at Versailles. Born on 4 September 1755, he was two months older than Marie Antoinette; he had been making the Grand Tour of Europe for several years, in the course of which he had met her brother, the Archduke Leopold, in Florence. Fersen spoke fluent French, in which language he wrote, as well as Italian, German and English. He was the son of an aristocratic mother and the Marshal of the Armies, “the richest man in Sweden,” supposedly with £5000 a year, to the £3000 of the next-richest man. Apart from this material advantage, Fersen was dazzlingly good-looking. He was tall and slim, with a narrow face, intense dark eyes beneath strongly marked eyebrows and a slightly melancholy air. These were romantic looks, which caused the Duc de Lévis to write that he looked like the hero of a novel—but not a French novel since Fersen was too serious. Another part of his attraction was what Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire called “the most gentleman-like air”; the Count was always extremely concerned to present an elegant appearance.14
This particular New Year’s Day was extremely cold and snowy; the Dauphine was looking forward to going sledging the next day. In such weather, according to his Journal intime, Fersen was preoccupied with the delivery of a new fur cloak ordered for the occasion from his tailor. When it failed to arrive, Fersen had to delay his planned early departure for Versailles until nearly nine o’clock in the morning. After that his diary recorded the delights of being a young and personable man abroad. A few days later he was received by the Comtesse de Brionne who was at her toilette being coiffed. Fersen watched with amusement as she scraped off spare powder with a special little silver knife, and then selected various types of rouge, so dark it looked almost black, from six separate pots. As for her daughter, he found Mademoiselle de Lorraine, she of the minuet, not as pretty as had been claimed, but vivacious and good company.15
On 30 January, Fersen went to the opera ball in Paris, arriving at one o’clock in the morning. There was a huge crowd, and those present included the Dauphin and the Comte de Provence as well as the Dauphine. According to custom, the royal party and others were masked in order to preserve their incognito. It was in this way that the eighteen-year-old Fersen fell into conversation with a young and unknown masked woman. As he recorded in his Journal intime: “The Dauphine talked to me for a long time without me knowing who she was; at last when she was recognized, everybody pressed round her and she retired into a box at three o’clock: I left the ball.”16 Thus the myth of the instant love affair, a coup de foudre (perhaps literally so) in the opera box, so beloved of novelists and film-makers, remains just that. What did happen was the conventional establishment of Fersen’s social credentials. He was subsequently asked to a few bals à la Dauphine before departing for England.
It is significant that Fersen’s Journal intime, which frequently passes comment on the attractiveness or otherwise of the various women he met, does not at this date mention the charms of the Dauphine. Fersen’s real agenda in 1774 was marriage to the English heiress Catherine Lyell, hence his departure from France. Leaving aside her “moments of sadness,” Marie Antoinette herself was more interested in her patronage of her former teacher Gluck who had recently arrived from Vienna.
“The Chevalier Gluck,” in his seventieth year, had chosen to make this second journey—he had already been to Paris in 1762—at a moment when his Austrian career, successful for so long, was beginning to decline. The presence of his imperial pupil near to the throne of France, and in a position to help him, was a strong element in his decision. Nor was he disappointed. Soon after Gluck arrived, he was admitted to Marie Antoinette’s formal toilette. The Dauphine’s excitement was so great that she never stopped talking to the composer so long as he remained; in every way, including musically, the Chevalier was a link with home. Marie Antoinette was soon receiving Gluck “at all times” and he could certainly be confident of her attendance if and when he presented his new opera Iphigénie en Aulide in Paris.17
Gluck certainly had need of the Dauphine’s support since the new, simple, emotionally restrained yet fervent style of the opera that Gluck hoped to introduce met with little favour in advance from the French artistic world. He had anticipated this. “There will be considerable opposition,” Gluck wrote on the eve of his departure for Paris, “because it will run counter to national prejudices against which reason is no defence.” The composer’s methods of rehearsal did not help to smooth things over. “Blunt and quick-tempered,” he did not care for the star-system. He told Sophie Arnould, who wanted great arias instead of perpetual recitative in her role of Iphigénie: “To sing great arias, you have to know how to sing.” For where national prejudices were concerned, Gluck himself was no mean exponent; he was once overheard saying at a banquet that the French could not sing, and that the only point of being in France was to make money. He quarrelled with the dancer Gaëtan Vestris who wanted to end the opera with a ballet, as was customary. “A Chaconne! A Chaconne!” cried Gluck. “We must recreate the Greeks; and had the Greeks Chaconnes?” Vestris, learning to his surprise that they did not, retorted with some spirit: “So much the worse for them.”18
As predicted by Gluck, patriotism was partly responsible for this hostile reaction. “Their French vanity was sorely wounded to be taught all these things by a Teutonic master,” wrote Mannlich, who as court painter to the German Duke of Zweibrücken had his own axe to grind. The French had a natural partiality for their own earlier composers such as Lully, opera director to Louis XIV, and Rameau, ennobled by Louis XV; they also had a liking for the contemporary Italian composer Niccolò Piccinni since it was easier to bend to “the yoke of an Italian.” The matter was also mixed up with court faction.19
Relations between the Du Barry and Marie Antoinette existed at this point in a state of barbed neutrality. From the Dauphine’s point of view she had to put up with the situation, since “the lady” could not be dislodged. This did not mean, for example, that she had to accept the Du Barry’s gracious offer of some diamonds. The Dauphine replied that she had diamonds enough. Now the Du Barry was persuaded that espousing the cause of Piccinni would enable her to inflict a further defeat on the Dauphine and so she duly took it up. It was said that she carried her investigations in pursuit of the vendetta to the degree of attending a rehearsal of Iphigénie concealed behind a grille.
For a while, it appeared as if musical matters were going the way of the Du Barry. There were philistines who continued to detest the alien sounds of Gluck, although not everyone went as far as the English Lord Herbert, visiting Paris, who would describe his music as “worse than ten thousand Cats and Dogs howling.” But as it happened, the conversion of Rousseau, who also attended a rehearsal a week after the Du Barry’s secret visit, was a more significant portent. He congratulated the composer for achieving what he had hitherto thought impossible. In the words of Baron Grimm, Rousseau became convinced that the French language could be as apt as any other for ’strong, passionate and expressive music;20 later he would leave Orphée with tears running down his face, quoting the celebrated lament of its hero: “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice.” Yet at the opening night, on 19 April 1774, victory was still in doubt.
The Dauphine attended, together with her husband, the Comte and Comtesse de Provence and various Princesses of the Blood including the Duchesse de Chartres, the Duchesse de Bourbon and the Princesse de Lamballe. The performance took place, as was customary, at 5:30 p.m. and lasted for five and a half hours. It did not take that long to establish the success of the piece. Spontaneous applause—or was it to please the Dauphine?—broke out after the overture. Agamemnon makes an opening plea to the implacable moon goddess Diana, who is demanding the propitiatory death of his daughter:
Shining author of light
Could you witness without turning pale
The most dreadful of all sacrifices?
That was when Marie Antoinette led the applause herself. The clapping lasted for several minutes.21 Hereafter, although the row between Gluckistes and Piccinnistes rumbled on, Gluck’s own position as Marie Antoinette’s protégé was assured.*30
A real-life drama was about to unfold, which would have the consequence—minor except to Gluck—of putting to an end the run of Iphigénie en Aulide in a Paris where, as a result of its success, “they are thinking and dreaming of nothing but music.”22 Its major consequence was a change in Marie Antoinette’s life for ever and, no less radically, in the life of the Comtesse Du Barry too. Iphigénie was the story of a girl who was to be sacrificed by her father in the flower of her youth, whereas this real-life drama concerned an older man, with a younger mistress who was desperate to avoid being sacrificed.
The physical collapse of Louis XV at the end of April 1774 took the court by surprise and for a while frantic efforts were made to pretend that he was capable of recovery. The Baron de Besenval analysed the phenomenon: “When illness comes to princes, flattery follows them to the grave and no one dares admit to them being ill.” Yet at sixty-four the French King had long outlived his father and grandfather. He had also outlived the extraordinary popularity that he enjoyed as a young man. As the Comte de Ségur wrote in his memoirs, he was “in his youth, the object of an enthusiasm which was too little deserved; and in his old age, of severe reproaches which were equally exaggerated.” When a large statue of Louis XV was erected in the square to the west of the Tuileries gardens bearing his name, it showed the King magnificently aloft on his steed with the various Virtues grouped below. The subject was too good for the satirists to ignore:
Grotesque monument! Infamous pedestal!
Virtues on foot, vice on horseback.23
On 27 April 1774, the King, who was staying at the Grand Trianon, went out hunting, but felt sufficiently weak to stay in his carriage. Fever and nausea the next day caused his doctor La Martinière to recommend a return to Versailles. It was at this point that the drama began. When kings were dying—or conceivably dying—a delicate balance had to be maintained by those around them between their physical needs in this world and their spiritual needs in the next. That is to say, even a king could not expect absolution for his sins unless he sent away his current mistress and made a full act of repentance. If the fateful act of exclusion was not performed in time, he risked dying in a state of mortal sin, with the prospect of eternal damnation. Unfortunately from the King’s point of view the decision could not be reversed; to repent totally of a particular relationship and then cheerfully renew it with the return of health was against the rules of spiritual etiquette, which, however lax and casuistical, still existed.
No one was more aware of this dilemma than Louis XV himself as his health deteriorated, since he had already experienced it once. Thirty years earlier the King had fallen seriously ill, and after a period of agitated conjecture, his then mistress the Duchesse de Châteauroux was sent away. The King duly received absolution. But he did not die. Regrettably, this meant that the Duchesse could not return; her reign was over, if that of the King was not. Other mistresses followed, principal among them the Pompadour, last among them the Du Barry.
It was not until 3 May that the King, looking at the pustules on his body, said aloud the dreaded words that no one else had dared to pronounce to him: “It is smallpox.” Hitherto he had been buoyed up by believing that he had already suffered smallpox as a young man and was therefore immune. The diagnosis meant that his confession became a matter of urgency. It also meant that his spiritual advisors, including the Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon and the Archbishop of Paris, had a duty to see that it was made; otherwise criticism within the Church of their pusillanimous conduct would have been severe. As for his devout daughters, they were understandably determined that his spiritual welfare should now take precedence and that the favourite should be banished. The Duc d’Aiguillon, on the other hand, as the favourite’s protégé, had a more complicated hand to play. In all of this, the one person nobody thought of consulting was the Dauphin. It seemed to occur to nobody that in a few days’ time “he might be master.”24
On the evening of 4 May the King finally ordered the Du Barry to leave for Ruel (Aiguillon’s own château, not far away from Versailles). His words were dignified: “Madame, I am sick, and I know what I have to do . . . Rest assured that I shall always have the most tender feelings of friendship for you.” But perhaps he did not even then give up all hope because a few hours later he sent for his mistress again, only to be told that she had already departed. Two large tears rolled down the King’s cheeks. It was then that he finally confronted the truth of his own mortality. Yet in spite of increasing sickness, which gradually swelled up his whole face and turned it dark “like a Moor’s head,” the King did not die.
Was the drama of thirty years ago to be re-enacted? Fifteen carriages containing various courtiers were noted by Mesdames Tantes as going to call at Ruel just in case . . . This insurance policy would be held against the courtiers concerned for many years to come. Meanwhile the King’s daughters, defying the possibilities of infection, nursed him devotedly.
It was not until three o’clock on the afternoon of 10 May 1774 that the candle that stood in the window of Louis XV during his ordeal was extinguished. Suddenly the young couple, Louis Auguste and Marie Antoinette, waiting anxiously together in the Dauphine’s apartments and still ignorant of what happened, heard “a terrible noise, exactly like thunder.”25 It was the sound of rushing feet. The crowd of courtiers hanging around the antechambers of the royal deathbed had instantly deserted them when the news of the King’s decease was broken. All ran towards the rising sun, every man and woman intent on being the first to pay compliments to the new monarch and his wife.
The King and Queen of France, as they had thus become, fell on their knees and, in a scene that touched everyone who witnessed it, prayed together: “Dear God, guide us and protect us. We are too young to reign.” After that Marie Antoinette leant on her husband’s arm and touched her eyes with her handkerchief as she received the compliments of the courtiers. The first person to present herself, as of right, was the Mistress of the Household, the Comtesse de Noailles, just as she had proudly greeted the Dauphine on her arrival on French soil, four years earlier.
No one, however, lingered at Versailles. The danger of contagion was extreme for everyone but especially for Louis Auguste who had never had smallpox, nor even been inoculated. By four o’clock the royal party was organized to depart for the palace of Choisy, five miles from Paris on the banks of the Seine, famous for its freshness and its flower gardens. One carriage took the aunts, following their heroic stints of nursing, and the younger Princesses, Clothilde and Elisabeth, with their Governess, the Comtesse de Marsan. The other carriage conveyed the new King and Queen, and his two brothers with their wives. A little while later some English visitors were able to ramble freely through Versailles due to that indifference to security already remarked. Having enjoyed the loud sound of birdsong in the gardens, they inspected the state apartments and found them dirty and neglected. The rooms of Mesdames Tantes, with their books, were more appealing. Here a majestic cat was wandering. The name on the silver collar was that of Madame Victoire, once daughter to the King, now aunt to Louis XVI—for the new King quickly indicated he was ridding himself of the name Auguste.26
As for the corpse of Louis XV, that was hastily sealed up in its coffin and driven at breakneck speed to the cathedral of Saint-Denis, so that the infection would not be spread. The spanking pace caused much merriment among the waiting crowds of his erstwhile subjects. Lady Mary Coke described how “so far from showing the least concern, they whooped and hallooed as if they had been at a horse-race instead of a funeral procession.” The once familiar cry of Louis XV out hunting was heard again in mockery: “Tally ho! Tally ho!”
Nor was the atmosphere in the new King’s carriage on its way to Choisy any more sombre. For a while the solemnity of what had just happened meant that the six young people—the Comtesse de Provence at twenty-one was the oldest, Artois at seventeen the youngest—were plunged in sadness. But then that peculiar mixture of mirth and mourning that often attends deaths took a hold. A word inadvertently pronounced wrongly by the Comtesse d’Artois sent everyone in the carriage into fits of hysterical laughter.27 The tears were dried. A new life was beginning.