CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE FLOWERS OF THE CROWN
“She as yet knew nothing of the crown but its flowers . . .”
MARQUIS DE SÉGUR ON MARIE ANTOINETTE, 1783
“The happiest and most important event for me”: so Marie Antoinette described the birth of her son in a letter to her friend, Princess Charlotte of Hesse-Darmstadt. Such a jubilant reaction was not confined to the baby’s mother. The baptism, according to custom, was performed in the afternoon following the birth. The child was named Louis Joseph for his Bourbon forefathers and his Habsburg godfather (and uncle) with the additional names of Xavier and François. The King wept throughout the ceremony. Soon, as Madame Campan noted, he was framing his conversation so that the words “my son the Dauphin” could be introduced as frequently as possible.1
“Oh Papa!” exclaimed the little Duc d’Angoulême when shown the Dauphin. “How tiny my cousin is!”
“The day will come,” replied Artois with meaning, “when you will find him great enough.”2
It was true that Angoulême had just been dispossessed of the illustrious position of heir in the next generation, which had been his since his birth in August 1775. More importantly, the Comte de Provence, displaced in his own generation, was now one step further away from the throne.
At this baptism, however, there were no impertinent allusions as there had been in 1778. Provence held his peace. Nevertheless there was a discordant note. As with the baptism of Marie Thérèse, the ceremony had by right to be performed by the Grand Almoner. This was none other than that Prince Louis de Rohan, now Cardinal, whose appointment the Queen had tried so hard to block. Even the Cardinal’s hat, granted in 1778, had been the subject of dispute. Louis XVI, egged on by his wife, had refused to exercise his prerogative—the so-called “nomination of crowns”—to put forward Rohan’s name. But the Queen was foiled once again by the Rohan family’s skill at intrigue; as a result Prince Louis was nominated by the King of Poland.3
The presence of this bad man—as the Queen firmly believed he was, bad as in immoral, bad as in trouble-making—in such a prominent role at the baby’s christening could not dampen the happiness of the royal parents. The coral and multi-diamonded rattle donated by the Tsarina of Russia, valued at 24,000 livres, represented an alternative and splendid omen of the baby’s future happiness.4
The response of the French nation as a whole was summed up in a letter from Count Mercy to Prince Kaunitz in Vienna: “Tumultuous joy reigns here.” Some celebrations were more elegant than others. On 27 October the new Opera House—built to replace one that had burnt down—opened with a free performance of Adèle et Ponthieu by Gluck’s rival Piccinni. Eighteen hundred people were expected; in the event 6000 forced their way in, jamming the boxes. Cries of “Long live the King,” “Long live the Queen” and “Long live Monsieur le Dauphin” came from the happy audience. In the world of fashion, however, a new colour was termed caca-dauphin, as though even the royal baby’s natural functions needed somehow to be fêted. Perhaps the new and widely copied short feathery hairstyle created for the Queen by Léonard, to help with her hair-loss, named coiffure à l’enfant, struck a better note.5
In Austria, pride in the achievement of “their” princess was uncontained. Gluck reported how all Vienna rejoiced, not so much for the sake of the French, of course, as for the sake of the Queen. In the case of the Emperor, Joseph confessed that he had thought himself incapable of a young man’s enthusiasm (he was forty), yet now found that he was staggered by his own emotion. After all, “this sister, who is the woman I love best in the world” was at this very moment “the most happy” being on earth.6
About this time the eleven-year-old Henrietta Lucy, daughter of Madame Dillon, who as the Marquise de La Tour du Pin would write perceptive memoirs of the period, saw the Queen for the first time. Marie Antoinette was wearing a blue dress strewn with sapphires and diamonds, and she was opening the ball given by the royal bodyguards at Versailles with one of the guardsmen: “She was young, beautiful and adored by all; she had just given France a Dauphin . . .” This was the outwardly brilliant period of which the Comte de Ségur would later write that the French “of every class” regarded the Queen as one among the sweetest ornaments of the fêtes that embellished the court. Encouraging literature, protecting the arts, dispensing many benefits and disobliging no one, “she as yet knew nothing of the crown but its flowers.” The Queen did not foresee that she was soon to feel “the crown’s dreadful weight.”7
Of course it was not literally true that the Queen had not felt this weight. The libellistes did not ignore the birth of the Dauphin, any more than they had ignored that of Madame Fille du Roi. The official medal might bear the legend in Latin “Public Happiness.” But a malicious engraving showed Marie Antoinette cradling her baby, accompanied by Louis XVI wearing a cuckold’s horns and an angel with a trumpet who was supposed to “announce to all parts” the birth of the Dauphin: “But be careful not to open your eyes to the secret of his birth.” The Spanish chargé d’affaires passed on another scurrilous rhyme whose refrain on the subject of the Dauphin was: “Who the Devil produced him?” Suggestions included the Duc de Coigny as before, and the Comte d’Artois. One of the most notorious embroideries on this latter theme had appeared during the Queen’s pregnancy. This was Les Amours de Charlot [Artois] et Antoinette, a lewd and ludicrous romp in which a page kept appearing to interrupt the moment of climax because the Queen inadvertently pressed the bell beside her as she thrashed about in ecstasy.8
Similarly Jean Lenoir, the Chief of Police, whose business it was to see to these things, reported with horror that a pamphlet printed in English, Naissance du Dauphin, ascribed the paternity of the baby to “another royal prince.” Another scabrous pamphlet, which would go through many stages (and numerous editions), began life in December 1781 as La Vie d’Antoinette. Yet for the time being the Queen was able to continue her policy of studied indifference, enjoying the flowers of the crown while the police in France and the French ambassador in London attempted the impossible task of buying up all the editions and pulping them.9
The welfare of the baby himself was her prime concern at this time. There was no talk on this occasion of the Queen nursing him. Louis Joseph was entrusted to a woman nicknamed “Madame Poitrine” for the vast bosom that would nurture the little Prince. This strong-minded lady, the wife of a gardener, absolutely refused to have her hair powdered, according to court custom, saying that a lace cap was just as good. She also introduced a little rhyme, which she crooned over the baby’s head, beginning: “Marlbrouck s’en va à la guerre . . .” This folk-song, referring to the English general engaged in the wars of Louis XIV, had remained popular in her village down the years. It now became the fashion at a court that was enchanted by every manifestation of Madame Poitrine’s rusticity.10
Where a more recent war was concerned, it seemed a wonderful augury for France that there had been a great victory overseas on 19 October 1781, three days before the birth of its long-awaited Dauphin. At Yorktown, Virginia, George Washington’s forces, supported by the French fleet under Admiral de Grasse, defeated the English army led by General Cornwallis. As the news reached Europe, even more important than the military reverse was the sapping of the English will to continue the struggle. The way was open for peace negotiations, not only with the former colony but with her allies France and Spain. Although these negotiations themselves would be protracted, the French “heroes” of the American struggle now began to return to their own country, regaling their compatriots with stories brought back from the New World. These stories concerned a country where American rebels—with French assistance, of course—had taken charge of their own destiny and cast off the oppressive rule of a king, creating thereby a very different political system.
The Marquis de La Fayette, for example, arrived back in Paris to his wife’s family home of the Hôtel de Noailles on 21 January 1782. This happened to be the day set apart for the official celebrations of the birth of the Dauphin, now three months old. There was the ceremony of “churching” for the royal mother at the cathedral of Notre-Dame (a rite of purification after childbirth), followed by a banquet at the Hôtel de Ville, and in the end a huge display of fireworks. The Queen, taking the Marquise de La Fayette, a member of her household, into her own coach, proceeded to the Hôtel de Noailles, where she graciously received La Fayette himself at the door. It was the kind of considerate gesture at which Marie Antoinette excelled. It did not, however, stop La Fayette observing of a subsequent lavish court ball that the cost would have equipped a whole regiment in America . . . He was literally and metaphorically coming from a different place.11
There was another rite of passage a month after the Dauphin’s birth. On 21 November 1781 Louis XVI recorded in his laconic Journal: “Nothing,” meaning no hunting, then: “Death of Monsieur de Maurepas at eleven-thirty in the evening.” Joseph II was quick to point out that the disappearance of the King’s mentor, his chief servant for over seven years, presented an obvious political opportunity for the Queen in the first flush of her triumph as the mother of the Dauphin. Marie Antoinette’s advisor, the Abbé de Vermond, put forward the name of the ambitious Archbishop of Toulouse, Loménie de Brienne, as a substitute, who would act as the Queen’s man. But the King, with a new sense of his own independence, declined angrily.12
The real gainer from Maurepas’ death was not Marie Antoinette but Vergennes, who was able to slip unostentatiously into the position of confidence that his patron Maurepas had formerly occupied. By February 1782 Mercy was back with his usual litany of complaints about the Queen’s unreliable behaviour where politics were concerned; how she let the King believe she was bored with affairs of state and did not even want to know about them. Her “great credit” with her husband was used only to dispense favours.13
It might have been better for Marie Antoinette’s reputation in France if she had maintained the apolitical stance that obviously accorded with her own deepest wishes, despite family pressure from Austria. Unfortunately—for her—she continued to be an important chess piece in the predatory foreign schemes of Joseph II, as she had once been a pawn in her mother’s game of matrimonial alliances. Over the next few years, the Emperor made relentless demands on his sister. She must assure him of French support by exerting her influence with the King. Yet in most areas, the foreign policy of Austria, as interpreted by the Emperor, brought him into conflict with French interests. Nevertheless Joseph urged on Marie Antoinette what he called “the finest and greatest role that any woman ever played.”14 (He had forgotten the late Empress Maria Teresa, it seems, in his attempt to galvanize his sister.)
The previous year, the Emperor and the Tsarina Catherine of Russia had concluded a secret alliance against Turkish attack. Now Joseph gave Marie Antoinette instructions for the warm reception to be accorded to the Tsarina’s heir, the Grand Duke Paul, and his Grand Duchess, a German princess. Arriving in May as the “Comte and Comtesse du Nord,” the imperial couple were subjected to the full panoply of Versailles, including a performance of Iphigénie en Aulide. There was also a masked ball in which Marie Antoinette appeared as Gabrielle d’Estrées, mistress of Henri IV, in shining silver gauze and a black hat whose massive white plumes were fastened by diamonds including the “Pitt” jewel. The customary lavish display of fireworks was only marred by the discovery of the Cardinal de Rohan who had bribed a porter to smuggle him in, despite his marked lack of invitation. The Cardinal was unmasked because he wore his trademark red stockings beneath his coat. The unforgiving Marie Antoinette was predictably furious and had the porter in question sacked, until Madame de Campan—by her own account—successfully pleaded for him to be reinstated.15
A visit to the porcelain factory at Sèvres was part of the entertainment. Louis XVI loved the traditional royal patronage of the factory, including the annual “Sèvres week” instituted in 1758. The new season’s porcelain would be laid out in the King’s private dining room, and the courtiers were heavily encouraged to buy, the King and Queen themselves setting an example with their purchases. In 1782, for example, there was “jewelled” Sèvres for sale whose garniture made it extremely expensive.*51 Such things were, as Bombelles wrote, objects of luxury “but a luxury essential to support.” At the factory the Grand Duchess was enchanted to discover that a ravishing service of lapis lazuli and gold, including a mirror with two Cupids at its base pointing to the words “She is yet more beautiful,” was intended for her.16
In fact the stout Grand Duchess was not a beauty, whatever the Cupids might pretend, and Marie Antoinette found her rather formidable with her stiff “German demeanour” despite her tactful interest in French sculpture and opera.17 Nevertheless, the Queen was eager to display goodwill towards the Russians, given her brother’s new foreign initiative. Yet this initiative could hardly be pleasing to France. On the one hand Turkey, which was menaced by Catherine of Russia, was her natural ally; on the other hand France feared the increased influence of the meddlesome Emperor in the Balkans. In any case, the expense of the American war ruled out any military reaction. The French had to confine themselves to diplomatic manoeuvres.
Over the Emperor’s next two projects, however, he needed French cooperation rather than French passivity. Joseph II planned to reopen the mouth of the Scheldt River; this was for the sake of the city of Antwerp upstream, which had been blocked from access to the sea by the Treaties of Westphalia of 1648 that had ended the Thirty Years’ War. On this occasion it was the energetic Dutch Republic with its great commercial port of Amsterdam which could be expected to resist. Undeterred, the Emperor took the line that France was bound to approve his conduct not only by the terms of their alliance but also because he had upheld their campaign against England.
At the end of 1782 Marie Antoinette promised Mercy that she would raise the issue with Louis XVI, and throughout February she mounted a campaign on the subject. Yet by June her efforts were still not bearing the fruit that the ambassador expected, and he begged her yet again to “prove her devotion to the august house and family.” (He did not mean the Bourbons.) The following year Mercy despaired once more over Marie Antoinette’s reluctance to use her personal ascendancy over her husband in a constructive political way. She remained maddeningly content merely to implement her “persistent desire” to help people who petitioned her, springing, in the words of the Comte de La Marck, from “a rare goodness of heart.” The Emperor was less interested in his sister’s goodness of heart than in what he hopefully termed her “feminine wiles.”18 Alternately wooing and bullying Marie Antoinette, he instructed her to make use of these weapons of a pretty woman when dealing with her husband’s ministers. Nevertheless, the Scheldt Affair languished, thanks to the absolute hostility of the King and his ministers. This was guided by Vergennes, for whom no feminine wiles could make up for such an extension of the Emperor’s influence.
The second of Joseph’s projects concerned an exchange of territories: the Elector Charles Theodore of Bavaria and the Palatine would receive the Austrian Netherlands in return for his own lands. But the French were equally hostile to this scheme, which would immeasurably strengthen the Emperor in Germany. None of this was liable to lead to good relations between France and Austria. Vergennes wrote frankly to the French ambassador in Vienna: “We have stopped the progress of the Emperor three times and that’s not easily forgiven”—the first occasion having been the War of the Bavarian Succession in 1778.19
On 1 September 1784 Joseph irritably accused his “dear sister” of being “the dupe” (his italics) of the French Council of State, headed by Vergennes. In reply Marie Antoinette wrote a revealing letter to her “dear brother” about her relationship with her husband and its limitations.20 Whilst she did not contradict Joseph on the subject of French policy, having spoken to the King on the subject “more than once,” the Queen described quite forcefully “the lack of means and resources” that she had available to establish contact with him, given his character and his prejudices. Louis XVI was “by nature very taciturn” and often did not speak to her about affairs of state, without exactly planning to hide them from her. “He responds when I speak to him, but he hardly can be said to keep me informed, and when I learn about some small portion of a business, I have to be cunning in getting the ministers to tell me the rest of it, letting them believe that the King has told me everything.” When she reproached the King with not informing her about certain matters, he was not angry, but merely looked rather embarrassed; sometimes the King confessed that he had simply not thought to do so.
It was at this point that Marie Antionette made an important reference to the King’s Austrophobe upbringing. The King’s innately suspicious nature had been fortified by his tutor, the Duc de Vauguyon. Long before Louis’ marriage, Vauguyon had frightened him with tales of the dominance—empire—that his Austrian wife would wish to exert over him. Vauguyon’s “dark spirit” was pleased to frighten his pupil “by all the phantoms invented against the House of Austria.” As a result, the Queen had never been able to persuade the King of Vergennes’ various deceits and trickeries. “Would it be wise of me,” she asked pointedly, “to have scenes with his minister over matters on which it is practically certain the King would not support me?”
Of course, Marie Antoinette let the public believe that she had more influence than she actually had, “otherwise I would have still less.” This confession to her brother was not good for her self-esteem but she wanted to make it so that Joseph could understand her predicament. Was there a glimmer of realization that the proper duty of the Queen of France, the mother of the Dauphin, was not necessarily to pursue all the interests of the House of Austria? Not so far. The habit of family loyalty, encouraged by Joseph II at a distance and Mercy closer to home, was still too strong.
Domesticity—the care of her own precious family—was where Marie Antoinette’s heart lay at this point, not surprisingly when one considers her strong maternal instinct on the one hand and the difficulties she had encountered in producing this family on the other. The Queen was, for example, personally concerned with the education of her daughter, “keeping her with her all day long” and certainly not wishing to hand her over entirely to the grand court servants who believed it was their right—not the mother’s—to rear the Children of France. Such a preoccupation ran through her letters to her friends the Hesse Princesses, while Count Mercy groaned over the childish talk and games that distracted the Queen from her true political duties.21 An unexpected and horrifying bankruptcy of a noble family in the early autumn of 1782 was therefore of particular concern to the Queen because it involved the Royal Governess of her children. This was the Princesse de Guéméné who only a year previously had so happily paraded the newborn Dauphin round the ranks of applauding courtiers.
Afterwards the Prince de Rohan-Guéméné—to give him his full title—issued the following sympathetic explanation of his bankruptcy. He invoked the name of the notary Sieur Marchand who had produced all the trouble by his creative way with annuities: “I was deceived and I have deceived the whole world. To do Monsieur Marchand justice he was led on by the desire to give us a splendid lifestyle.” To provide the Prince and Princesse with income, Marchand had in fact encouraged all types of people to invest their savings in these annuities by offering enticing and therefore exorbitant rates of interest. Then he—or rather the Prince de Guéméné—could not pay. It was the latter who went bankrupt to the tune of 33 million livres although it was Marchand who went to prison, a fate preferable to facing the creditors in the outside world.22
The Rohan-Guéménés, as a couple, had been dazzling, and for a while it was difficult to believe in the collapse of their brilliant future. The Prince, aged thirty-two in 1782, was a nephew of the former Royal Governess, the Comtesse de Marsan, and the Cardinal de Rohan. His wife came from another branch of the family, Rohan-Soubise, headed by her father, a Marshal of France who had been an intimate of Louis XV. It was an eighteenth-century marriage. The handsome and courteous Prince had been the accepted lover of the beautiful Madame Dillon until her recent death, in her early thirties, from consumption. The Princesse for her part was amusing, intelligent and rather eccentric, with a love of dogs that led her to believe that through them she was in touch with the spirits.23
Much royal favour was enjoyed. At the time of the King’s coronation, seven years earlier, it was Marie Antoinette who had negotiated for the Prince to take the post of Grand Chamberlain. This had previously been occupied by the Prince’s uncle on his mother’s side, the Duc de Bouillon. The latter would have much preferred to have kept the position himself for his lifetime, allowing his nephew the “reversion”—to receive it on his death. But Guéméné had his way. The lofty standing of the Prince and Princesse was confirmed by the fact that the whole royal family signed the marriage contracts of their son the Duc de Montbazon and daughter Josephine who in the Rohan fashion had married a cousin, Prince Charles de Rohan-Rochefort.24
As for the role of the Princesse, for a while it seemed that she might weather the storm if only because a Royal Governess, in common with other similar office-holders at Versailles, could not be dismissed. Yet it was unthinkable by the standards of the time—of any time—that someone tainted with such a disgrace should occupy such a position of trust and power, even if rumours of the Princesse’s maladministration were probably not true. It was resignation or nothing, and this resignation was the subject of delicate negotiations. The Princesse finally gave up her post exactly a year after the birth of the Dauphin, the day of her greatest triumph. The King and Queen behaved as well and generously as it was in their power to do, despite the advice of Mercy and Vermond that the Queen should avoid any entanglement in this distressing affair.25 Marie Antoinette secured an enormous pension for the Princesse on the surrender of her post, while the King bought the Guéméné property at Montreuil and presented it to Madame Elisabeth. Guéméné himself was similarly rewarded on his surrender of the post of Grand Chamberlain, which was restored to his uncle the Duc de Bouillon.
Nevertheless there were elements in the whole affair that had uncomfortable repercussions for the future, despite the desperate efforts of the Rohan family, closing ranks, to pay off the debt. The Cardinal de Rohan lost a valuable contact in the departed Royal Governess, who was doubly related to him both by blood and by marriage. His sense of exclusion could only be enhanced. Naturally, the fall of the arrogant Rohans, with their high-flown pretensions to independent princedom, was greeted with sardonic glee by the rest of the court. One exchange had a member of the stricken family declaring: “Only a King or a Rohan could go bankrupt on such a scale,” and receiving the rejoinder: “I hope this is the last act of sovereignty of the House of Rohan.” On the surface the stain of the disgrace remained. When the old Duc de Bouillon finally died six years later, Louis XVI still felt strongly enough on the subject to refuse to give the post of Grand Chamberlain to Guéméné’s son.26
The filling of the vacuum created by the resignation of the Princesse also had a long-lasting effect on the reputation of Marie Antoinette. With her strong views on the education of her children, her unfashionable desire to be closely involved with it, it was certainly comprehensible that she wanted to award the post of Royal Governess to a beloved friend. On any normal level, the Duchesse de Polignac, sympathetic and sweet-natured, was a suitable choice. She shared the concerns of motherhood; her fourth child, Camille, was born three months after the Dauphin.
But Versailles was not a normal world. The danger did not lie in the vices portrayed in the pamphlets about the Polignac with titles like La Princesse de Priape or La Messaline Française. Nor did Louis XVI object to the appointment. He took the trouble to assure the Duchesse in advance that he would readily entrust his children to her. His grateful reliance on Yolande’s ability to manage the Queen and her mercurial moods did not falter. A significant report had the King entering the Queen’s apartments and asking the Duchesse: “Well, is she still in a bad temper today?” Yolande drew the King aside, and although the subsequent conversation could not be overheard, it was clear from her manner that the Duchesse was advocating patience in the face of a storm that would soon pass.27
The new appointment was added to the list of benefits enjoyed by the Polignacs, from the thirteen-roomed apartment in Versailles to the reversion of the profitable position of Director General of the Posts, given to the Duc de Polignac. It is true that by 1782 Marie Antoinette was no longer totally dominated by the Polignac set. It was her affection for Yolande herself that was constant, although even here the Queen’s mercurial nature meant that the friendship was likened by the Comte de Tilly to a beautiful day, not without clouds and changes, but always ending fair.28
As the King and Vergennes thwarted the Queen’s will over certain appointments, passing over the Queen’s candidate of Loménie de Brienne for the Archbishopric of Paris in favour of Vergennes’ cousin, so the Queen herself stood out against the Polignacs over the question of the Comte d’Adhémar. He was proposed for the important role of Minister of the Royal Household, a post that had some of the connotations of a modern Minister of the Interior or Home Secretary. Marie Antoinette thought it an unsuitable appointment, preferring the Baron de Breteuil.
These signs of a decline of royal favour towards the Polignacs were optimistically charted by Mercy. But they paled beside the evident favouritism by which the Duchesse was made Governess to the Children of France. The rank at birth of the Duchesse de Polignac, if not modest by ordinary standards, was modest enough to be used as an excuse by Mercy to criticize the Queen’s choice. What this meant was that some lady of higher birth was deprived of her perceived due. Thus the Queen created “implacable enemies” for herself, in the words of her friend Count Esterhazy.29 Where her children were concerned, Marie Antoinette preferred to let her affections dictate her choice. It is possible to admire on a human level the Queen’s instinct for real warmth in her family circle—birth apart, the Princesse de Guéméné had never been a very suitable candidate as Royal Governess—and at the same time to perceive the difficulties that such an instinct created in court terms.
The question of the Queen’s affections sprang into renewed prominence in late June 1783 when that “old acquaintance” Count Fersen returned at long last from America—he had been away for over three years. Marie Antoinette was once again pregnant, if not in such an advanced state as she had been at the time of their second meeting in August 1778. The baby seems to have been conceived in May if one is to go by the Marquis de Bombelles, with his intimate connections to the court, who thought the Queen was six months’ pregnant in early October.30 She was certainly pregnant throughout Fersen’s three-month sojourn in France.
Furthermore this pregnancy was also a matter of satisfaction to both her and the King since it was becoming painfully clear that the miraculous Dauphin lacked the robust health of his sister. Although Louis Joseph’s delicacy was at first denied by the Queen in letters to her brother, the evidence of his fragility grew cumulatively stronger as the years passed until it was tragically obvious. At any rate, the need for a second son as a safeguard was recognized early on in the life of the Dauphin Louis Joseph—apart from being an agreed principle in all royal families.
The point has some importance in reference to the marital relationship of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette since it indicates the necessity for continuing efforts at procreation on the part of the King. Whatever his initial reluctance, this dutiful monarch did not now question this need. While hardly a sexual athlete, a Duc de Lauzun, Louis XVI had already impregnated the Queen successfully twice, possibly three times (the miscarriage in between) and had now done so again.
This particular pregnancy of 1783 was to end in a bad miscarriage throughout the night of 2 November, the Queen’s twenty-eighth birthday; she had lost the child by the morning. It was ten days before Marie Antoinette even began to recover and her health caused general concern. Her foster-brother Joseph Weber, who had followed his fortune to France in 1782, testified to this. “Look, Weber, I’m not dying!” said the Queen sharply to him as he expressed his worries. Yet on 1 December her uncharacteristically solemn demeanour on a public occasion still struck an English observer. After that, although Marie Antoinette confirmed to her brother Joseph at the end of the year that she was anxious to have a second son, she believed that she should have to wait for a few months until her health was fully recovered.31 It is clear from Louis XVI’s attitude to these not infrequent pregnancies that he continued to have sexual relations with his wife in the hopes of enlarging his family.
It is against this background that the developing relationship of Marie Antoinette and Fersen must be considered. In theory, nothing precluded Marie Antoinette from sleeping with Fersen as well as with the King, and conceiving a child by her lover rather than her husband. But it is worth pointing out that birth control had been known to the aristocracy for a hundred years by this time, and although described in the confessional as “the baleful secrets” of society, it undoubtedly helped to cover up some of the extramarital goings-on at Versailles. Louis XV for example, another man with a long career as a lover, had used “preventive machines” or condoms.32
But did the Queen in fact sleep with the handsome Count? On balance of probabilities, the answer must be yes. The idea of a great pure love that is never consummated, although propagated by some sympathetic historians, does not seem to fit the facts of human nature. There was no question of his supreme attraction. Tilly said that he “was one of the best-looking men I ever saw,” even “his icy countenance” working to his advantage, since all women hoped to “give it animation.” The hairdresser Léonard, who knew the court so well, described him more romantically as being like Apollo: someone with whom all women fell in love and of whom all men felt jealous.33 Furthermore, Fersen adored women in general and in the particular, and his progress both in America and Europe was punctuated by dramatic love affairs. At the same time he prided himself on his chivalrous nature and knew how to be discreet. He understood how to appeal to a Queen who, all things considered, had had a fairly lugubrious experience of sex during the last thirteen years.
Nobody expected Fersen to offer sexual fidelity to the Queen; that was not the mode. She was, after all, not offering it to him; that was not the mode either. His affairs did not cease, with possible candidates in at least two Englishwomen, Emily Cowper and Lady Elizabeth Foster, who was mistress of the Duke of Devonshire. What he did offer was exactly what she wanted: romantic devotion, accompanied from time to time, one must believe, with physical proof of it.
Very little was known of this at the time. Contemporaries were markedly reticent, while the libellistes, with their guns fixed on incest with the Comte d’Artois and lesbianism with the Duchesse de Polignac, were facing the wrong way.*52 There were a few nineteenth-century stories depending on hearsay, which hardly constituted proof. Nevertheless the verdict of the Comtesse de Boigne—“Intimates scarcely doubted that she yielded to his passion”—is significant. For the Comtesse, although born at Versailles in 1781 and thus too young to remember these events, was old enough when she wrote her memoirs to have heard all the gossip within the bosom of the court; her uncle, who survived until 1839, was that beau Dillon, a member of the Polignac set once accused of being the Queen’s lover himself. The earlier testimony of Lady Elizabeth Foster in her private journal is even more conclusive, given her own connection to Fersen and the fact that she moved in the aristocratic Anglo-French circle among which Marie Antoinette numbered many friends. On 29 June 1791 Lady Elizabeth wrote in her journal that Fersen had been “considered as the lover and was certainly the intimate friend of the Queen for these last eight years.” She then went on to praise him for being “so unassuming in his great favour . . . so brave and loyal in his conduct that he was the only one to escape the general odium heaped upon her friends.”34
Nevertheless, documentary proof was slow to arrive. In 1877 Fersen’s great-nephew, the Baron R. M. de Klinckowström, who published Fersen’s Journal intime and his letters, censored them heavily; the Queen’s responses had long ago vanished, presumed destroyed. In 1930, however, a Swedish writer, Alma Söderjholm, had the intelligent idea of investigating Fersen’s Letter Book (which was still extant), a kind of filing system in which from 1783 onwards he noted details of his own correspondence. A correlation was discovered between a mysterious “Josephine” and the Queen, Josèphe or Josepha being one of her baptismal names. As the years passed, Josephine did not always represent Marie Antoinette; confusingly there was a maid with the same name who features in his correspondence. But the evidence of unusual intimacy was there.35
After Fersen left Paris on 20 September 1783 he wrote eight letters to “Josephine” before his return in June the following year. It is therefore perfectly possible that a reference to 15 July 1783 written in his Journal intime exactly fifteen years later (“I remember this day . . . I went chez Elle for the first time”)36 was a code for the beginning of their liaison proper. On the other hand, Fersen was also extremely anxious to secure a military appointment and the Queen was equally anxious to help him—patronage that once again would have the paradoxical effect of taking him away from her side. Since at the time the Count and the Queen had not met for well over three years, it is also quite possible that Fersen was reporting with joy on his renewed access to her Private Society.
Similarly, one can interpret in various ways his letter to his beloved sister Sophie Piper on the subject of a future wife. Fersen had continued to toy with marriage plans that were always based on money, never on love. One prospective spouse was Germaine Necker, the Swiss Protestant heiress, daughter of the former Finance Minister: “Her father has a big fortune . . . I don’t remember what she looks like,” he commented. But she preferred Fersen’s fellow Swede, the Baron de Staël. Another prospective wealthy bride, already mentioned, was the only daughter of the Baron de Breteuil, the Comtesse de Matignon, who had been widowed in 1773; one of Fersen’s Swedish friends, Baron Evert Taube, thought he was “very much in love with her”—or was it her money? In any case the “dissipated and elegant” Comtesse preferred to remain unmarried.37 “Unless marriage vastly increases my own wealth, it’s hardly worth the trouble, with all its burdens, embarrassments and deprivations,” wrote the gallant bachelor to his father, declaring himself happy in his state. Therefore when Fersen also told his sister on 31 July that he thought the married state was not for him, he may have been inspired by his own cynical philosophy—“the conjugal life is against nature”—or he may have been referring anonymously to his new relationship with the Queen: “I can’t be with the only person I want, the only person who really loves me, so I don’t want to be with anyone.”38
One cannot know for certain, then, exactly when Fersen became the Queen’s lover, although it is suggested here that he did, either in the high summer of 1783 or, if his long absence (and the Queen’s early pregnancy) was an inhibition, the following year. It is noteworthy that Lady Elizabeth Foster’s assertion that they had been lovers for “eight years” prior to June 1791 would bring the date for its inception almost exactly to that of Fersen’s return to Versailles from America. Unquestionably the Queen toiled away to help Fersen buy the colonelcy of the Royal Swedish Regiment, a French force originally founded to give Swedish prisoners the option of service or the galleys. The purchase of the colonelcy involved Fersen’s father in the enormous expenditure of 100,000 livres, something that needed delicate negotiation. This had not been fully ironed out by the time Fersen left France on 20 September 1783 although he had already become “proprietary colonel.” For a while Fersen had to endure accusations of profligacy and time-wasting from his father in Sweden, somewhat reminiscent of the reproaches of Maria Teresa to Marie Antoinette. Angrily Fersen pointed out how he had left the delights of Paris to follow General Rochambeau, spending three whole winters in America . . .39
Fersen’s claim to the regiment was backed by his own sovereign, Gustavus III, who described him to Louis XVI as “having served with general approval in your armies in America.” Marie Antoinette for her part wrote warmly to Gustavus himself along the same lines: how Fersen’s father was not forgotten while the son had “greatly distinguished himself in the American War.”40 All was set for Fersen to return to Sweden to sort out the financial details of the vast purchase price with his father when a sudden summons came from Gustavus, who was about to tour Europe. Instead of returning to Sweden, Fersen was expected to join the royal party as Captain of the Bodyguard.
His brief presence in France—July until September—could well have contributed to the glamour of the relationship from the point of view of Marie Antoinette. And then there was Fersen’s aura as a soldier in an age when soldiering was the proper, manly thing to do. (One of her early gestures of friendship was to ask to see him in his Swedish uniform.) Kings as well as counts were respected for being militaristic, as witness the general admiration enjoyed by Frederick II. Louis XVI on the other hand was that rare thing, a pacific monarch who did not relish going to war. The French King’s indifferent attitude to military matters was a subject of contemptuous astonishment to his brother-in-law the Emperor, who suffered from no such inhibitions. On one of his visits to France, Joseph could not get over the fact that Louis XVI had never even visited the École Militaire, the military training ground. In the same vein, the King closed down the military camp at Compiègne and neither held drills nor reviews of his troops.41
The King, who as a child had dutifully learnt the lesson that one should not take up arms except for a legitimate cause, knew little by temperament of that kind of soldier’s glory that it could be said the dashing Fersen incarnated. In the eyes of Marie Antoinette, Fersen—with his ardour, his celebrated discretion, his foreign birth, which distanced him from court feuds, his charm that made Louis XVI also enjoy his company—was the ideal cavalier. In fact Fersen might be termed one of the flowers of Marie Antoinette’s crown.
The pleasures of Versailles continued although with time the development of a model village (hameau) at the Petit Trianon occupied more of Marie Antoinette’s energies, and the amateur theatricals less. Despite the myth, she never actually dressed up as a shepherdess or a dairymaid, neither guarding sheep nor milking cows personally. These were, however, the roles that she regularly played on stage—in the spring of 1783 she portrayed Babet and Pierrette, both country girls—hence perhaps the evolution of the legend. Unlike Mademoiselle de Condé who at Chantilly dressed up as a farmer’s wife, or Madame Elisabeth who had herself painted for the cover of a bonbonnière in a dairymaid’s bonnet, Marie Antoinette considered her new simplified costume of white muslin topped by a straw hat quite sufficiently pastoral. Her dairy has been aptly described as a kind of “summer drawing room” where the guests could help themselves to fruit, milk and other healthy products.42
The model village was the conception of the romantic painter Hubert Robert, and the design of Richard Mique, but like Marie Antoinette’s notion of a rustic retreat, it was scarcely original. It was in fact copied from that of the Prince de Condé, while the Duc d’Orléans at Raincy and the Comtesse de Provence, a great country-lover and gardener, at Montreuil enjoyed similar projects. The Comtesse ended up with a pavilion of music, and a model village with twelve houses, dovecotes and windmills, a dairy made of marble with silver vessels, as well as allegorical temples consecrated to love and friendship, a hermitage and a belvedere. The Duc de Chartres at Mousseaux had a remarkable garden including windmills in its design. Mesdames Tantes, never to be outdone where expensive living was concerned, enjoyed a country retreat at Bellevue and then at L’Hermitage. So the Baronne d’Oberkirch, who accompanied the Comte and Comtesse du Nord on their visit, stoutly defended the French Queen against the accusations of extravagance: “All that fuss about a Swiss village!” Others spent far more on their gardens.43
Whilst that was true, what the Queen of France spent was inevitably more visible. A better defence lay in the fact that Marie Antoinette had created or commissioned things of great delight. Over 1000 white porcelain pots, with the Queen’s monogram on them in blue, were designed to be filled with flowers so as to ornament the exterior of the model village’s twelve cottages, with their lattice windows and stucco made to imitate worn, cracked brickwork and half-timbering.*53 Jasmine, roses and myrtle were rampant; the perfume of lilacs filled the air; there were butterflies in the sunlight and later the sound of nightingales. The Marlborough Water Tower, whose name came from Madame Poitrine’s song, had pots of gillyflowers and geraniums on its steps. There was a mill and a dovecote. Its animals included a bull, cows with names like Blanchette and Brunette, calves, sheep and a Swiss goat; there was an aviary and a henhouse. However, a working farm nearby provided most of the produce needed for the Queen’s visits. These expeditions, carefully noted by the King in his Journal, totalled 216 days over ten years, with 1784 accounting for thirty-nine of them, by far the largest annual amount.44
The Petit Trianon was a place where Marie Antoinette rejoiced in organizing country dances at which children were especially welcome, asking her English friend Countess Spencer for details of folk tunes like “Over the hills and far away.” Life there clearly represented some attempt at finding a lost paradise. Yet not all the inclinations of the French court were similarly nostalgic. On 19 September 1783—the eve of Fersen’s departure—Versailles saw the amazing launching of the hot-air balloon of Dr. Montgolfier in the presence of the royal family. Even the two-year-old Dauphin was brought along and the sovereigns duly inspected the balloon’s interior before it set off. Azure blue, with the King’s cipher on it in yellow, the balloon, according to one observer, looked like “an exotic new plant”; the King, with his intellectual curiosity, was full of enthusiasm for this scientific advance.45 Fashionable women sported fans with images of courtiers and balloons commemorating the event.
Among the spectators were two young Englishmen in their early twenties, William Pitt and William Wilberforce, who were visiting France with the aim of learning the language. Both were already members of the House of Commons. The official peace between France and England of the spring of 1783 had brought the English travellers, diplomats and aristocrats flooding back. They were busily prosecuting anew their complicated love affair with the French in which their yearning for the French way of life had to be accompanied by a paradoxical contempt for these frivolous people. In Rheims, Pitt and Wilberforce had somehow struck it unlucky socially; the man who was supposed to introduce them to society turned out to be a grocer who neither could nor did fulfil his promise. The story caused some royal mirth at Fontainebleau, when Pitt and Wilberforce, hoping to see “all the magnificence of France,” encountered the Queen at a stag-hunt.
Marie Antoinette, apart from jokes about the grocer—she “often rallied them on the subject”—was exceptionally gracious to the young Englishmen; she looked perhaps to enlarging her circle of foreign protégés. In return Wilberforce rated her “a monarch of the most engaging manners and appearance,” as the Englishmen continued to meet the Queen in the salons of the Polignacs and the Princesse de Lamballe, at billiards, over cards and at backgammon. Louis XVI in contrast got a less favourable verdict. The King was physically “so strange a being (of the hog kind)” that it was worth going a hundred miles for a sight of him, especially out boar hunting. It was a young outsider’s frank description of a king who at the age of twenty-nine conspicuously lacked the dignity commonly expected in a man of his position. The same comparison between husband and wife had been made a few years earlier in a slightly kinder version by Thomas Blaikie, the bluff Scottish gardener at Versailles; whilst the Queen was “a very handsome, beautiful woman,” the King was “a good rough stout man, dressed like a country farmer.”46
Of the loftier Britons arriving in France, the ambassador and ambassadress, the Duke and Duchess of Manchester, belonged to a certain diplomatic tradition of hauteur. The Duchess complained of her accommodation at Versailles: “As Duchess of Manchester I can accept this lodging, but as ambassadress of England, I cannot.” But the second ambassador, who replaced Manchester in December 1783, was on the contrary made for acceptance in the Queen’s circle. This was the Duke of Dorset, a bachelor in his thirties and a man of extraordinarily handsome appearance and superb manners who would occupy the post for the next five years. He loved the opera, he loved the ballet (the ravishing dancer Giovanna La Baccelli was his mistress and he once took her to a ball with his insignia of the Garter on her forehead). The Duke entertained lavishly and he was prepared to send to London for novelties that the Queen might desire, such as an ivoryhandled billiard cue. Although inevitably Marie Antoinette was accused of taking him as a lover, she actually found him cosy, terming him “une bonne femme.”47
On one occasion Marie Antoinette was amused to see the young Comtesse de Gouvernet (later Marquise de La Tour du Pin) shaking hands with the Duke according to the English custom. As jokes like that about Pitt’s grocer do not die easily in royal circles, the Queen made a habit of asking the Duke whenever both were present: “Have you shaken hands with Madame de Gouvernet?” Marie Antoinette also expressed her disapproval in jocular fashion of the Duke’s yellow buckskin breeches, known as Inexpressibles: “I do not like dem Irrestistibles.”48
Apart from such companions, there were other amusements to hand to assuage the tiresomeness of political endeavours that satisfied neither her brother nor her husband. It would be an exaggeration to list reading among the Queen’s pleasures; she never really recovered from that unfortunate late start. Like most European women of her time and class, Marie Antoinette enjoyed reading light novels, the so-called livres du boudoir.*54 References in her letters to more serious stuff tended to be directed at her mother or brother, with the obvious intention of impressing them. (One notes that she was still no more than “quite advanced” in her reading of the Protestant Hume four years after she boasted of beginning it.) Nevertheless Marie Antoinette seems to have enjoyed historical novels, of the sort that could relate to her own experiences, judging from the amount of them in her collection. L’Histoire de Madame Henriette d’Angleterre by Madame de La Fayette referred to another foreign princess who had married into France, Charles II’s favourite sister, who wed a seventeenth-century Duc d’Orléans. Of foreign novels, both Amelia by Fielding and Evelina by Fanny Burney were in her library in translation. The Queen’s books were generally bound in red morocco, with an occasional deviation towards green suede, and the cover was stamped in gold with her arms, those of France and Austria. The books at the Petit Trianon, however, continued the tradition of simplicity there; they were bound, or half-bound, in speckled calfskin, and marked CT, for Château de Trianon, on the spine.49
Many of the books in Marie Antoinette’s collection contained the words “Dedicated to the Queen” inscribed on the title page. These included plays such as Mustapha et Zéangir by Sébastien Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, a tragedy in five acts, in verse, performed at Fontainebleau “in front of Their Majesties” in 1776 and 1777, and later at the Comédie Française. Marie Antoinette proved a useful patron to Chamfort, helping him to become a member of the Académie Française and securing a pension for him of 1200 francs as a result of this particular play; it exalted brotherly love, something that the Queen chose to believe was also a feature of her husband’s family.50
Even if the formation of her various libraries in her various palaces—by the end there were nearly 5000 volumes—owed more to the energies of her librarian, Pierre Campan, than to her own, it is safe to assume that the music books in Marie Antoinette’s collection were in frequent use. They were certainly very extensive, ranging from sonatas for her favourite harpsichord, via Italian songs, to the operas she enjoyed. Each new opera by Gluck was duly dedicated to her, and bound in its morocco, while the Queen owned almost the whole of the works of André Grétry.51 When her brother asked her to look after Gluck’s protégé—and successor in terms of Viennese opera—Antonio Salieri, Marie Antoinette was happy to extend to him her protection.
Such protection extended to personal contact, as it had with Gluck. In February 1784 the Queen wrote to Mercy. He was to tell Salieri to copy out various pieces from Les Danaïdes, his first piece on the Paris stage and dedicated to her, including a duet. He should bring them on Saturday at noon: “She will be happy to perform (faire la musique) with him.” As this letter indicates, Marie Antoinette was an enthusiastic amateur performer. There is also a lively tradition that she composed the music for songs herself, such as Jean Pierre Florian’s Provençal ballad “C’est mon ami,” even if her various directors may have assisted or guided her. Haydn, so favoured in Austria, never came to Paris. However, of his “Paris Symphonies” performed in the Salle de Spectacle of the Société Olympique, that in B Flat (No. 85), probably composed in 1785, found particular favour with Marie Antoinette. When Imbault engraved the first edition in parts, No. 85 bore the title of La Reine de France.52
However, none of these diversions, not music, not “romantic” reading, could allay Marie Antoinette’s chief private worry. This was the “languor and ill health” of the Dauphin Louis Joseph. On 7 June 1784 the King was out hunting near Rambouillet when he received an urgent message from the Queen. It was significant that many people at court assumed that the emergency was connected to Louis Joseph and that it denoted some kind of collapse. In fact, far more pleasantly, it was connected to the unexpected arrival of King Gustavus III of Sweden.53 Among others, he brought in his train Count Fersen, who had been absent from France for the last eight and a half months.