CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ACQUISITIONS
“An interesting acquisition for my children and for me . . . The Duc d’Orléans is selling me Saint Cloud.”
MARIE ANTOINETTE TO THE EMPEROR JOSEPH II, 5 NOVEMBER 1784
The unexpected arrival of the King of Sweden—incognito as “the Count de Haga”—on 7 June 1784 meant the hasty organization of a suitable royal welcome. Like Joseph II, the Swedish King preferred not to lodge in a richly furnished apartment at Versailles, bearing in mind the 50,000 livres’ worth of presents that he would have to dispense afterwards. Count Fersen was put in charge of finding alternative accommodation; the Marquis de Bombelles directed him to the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs next door to his own house. Although Bombelles considered that Gustav’s instinct for simplicity lacked “noblesse royale,” one could also see it as part of his general enlightenment.1 Nearly ten years older than Louis XVI, Gustav III was a lover of French literature, an admirer of Voltaire and the philosophes; in fact, a passionate admirer of all things French. In Sweden he had instituted widespread reforms including the abolition of torture, while encouraging agriculture and science.
The next day “the Count de Haga,” dressed informally in a frockcoat, walked in the park at Versailles. Later he was found by the Queen bending affectionately over the cradle of the little Louis Joseph, as she entered holding Marie Thérèse by the hand. A certain coincidence may have been in both their minds—it was the birth of Gustav III’s own son, another Gustav, in 1778 that had convinced Louis XVI that his own imminent child would be a daughter. This meant that Marie Thérèse and the young Gustav were already a possibility in the game of royal marriage-alliances.
It was not the only one mooted for the five-year-old Madame Royale, as Marie Thérèse was now generally known. Royal daughters had been known by tradition in France as “the King’s choice,” on the grounds that their marriages provided a useful opportunity for making alliances or cementing relationships. The possibilities for Marie Thérèse included her first cousin on the Habsburg side, the son of Maria Carolina, as well as her Bourbon first cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême. This latter was the match that Marie Antoinette preferred because it would keep her daughter with her in France: “Her situation would be far preferable to that of the Queen of any other country.” Then there was the more complicated question of Louis Philippe, five years older than Marie Thérèse, who was the heir to the Orléans dukedom.*55 The King’s daughter represented a highly advantageous match for the Orléans family by which they might hope to leapfrog their way up the pecking order of the court. There seems to have been some question of the marriage being promised (or at any rate his father believed that it was promised, which was not quite the same thing).2
The girl in question was not an easy character. A portrait painted of her this year shows the wide eyes of the mother, but also a small mouth with the corners turned down; the impression given is of a certain despondency, confirmed by her nickname of “Mousseline la Sérieuse.” She was also haughty, very much a Bourbon. Although the Comte d’Hezecques as a Frenchman said that it was “the Austrian pride” of her mother in her that had to be corrected, in fact the reverse was true. It was Marie Antoinette, aware of the disastrous results of the endless deference paid to the Children of France by self-promoting courtiers, who took various measures to curb her daughter’s arrogance. Poor children were imported as playmates; Madame Vigée Le Brun, who painted Marie Thérèse several times, described how a peasant child was sat down with her at dinner, Madame Royale being instructed to do the honours; on another occasion her toys were given away to the needy by the Queen.3 The result, not surprisingly, was that Marie Thérèse much preferred the father who bestowed on her uncritical adoration.
In one notorious episode, the Abbé de Vermond was deeply shocked at Marie Thérèse’s reaction to her mother’s fall from her horse. Hearing the news, the child merely enquired whether her mother had been in danger of death, adding: “I wouldn’t have minded.”
“Madame Royale doesn’t understand,” replied Vermond; “that means the Queen might have died.”
When Marie Thérèse repeated her indifference, Vermond asked incredulously: “Surely Madame Royale doesn’t understand what death is?”
“Oh no, I know perfectly well,” came the answer. “You don’t see people any more. I would never see the Queen again.” On being taxed further, Marie Thérèse refused to budge, saying that she would be absolutely happy not to see her mother again because then she would be able to do whatever she wanted.4
In her anxiety not to let her daughter be spoilt, was Marie Antoinette too severe? She may have had in mind her own childhood with its unhappy mixture of indulgence and neglect—and tried to do the opposite in both cases. The deputy Governess Madame de Mackau displayed a more graceful technique when she handled Marie Thérèse’s rudeness towards the Baronne d’Oberkirch. The Baronne exclaimed with innocent admiration at how pretty the little girl was. “I am delighted, Madame la Baronne, that you find me so,” replied Marie Thérèse with hauteur, “but I am astonished to hear you say it aloud in my presence.” The poor Baronne was covered in confusion until Madame de Mackau remarked pointedly: “Please don’t excuse yourself. Madame Royale is a Daughter of France, and as such she would never let the demands of etiquette deprive her of the pleasure of being appreciated.” At which point Marie Thérèse hastily extended her little hand to be kissed and then swept a low curtsy.5
Louis Joseph, unlike his sister, was a beautiful child. He was, however, fragile-looking because of the frequent fevers that racked him, causing desperate anxiety to his parents and to the dedicated Royal Governess, the Duchesse de Polignac. His appearance bore a certain Habsburg stamp, resembling the Emperor Joseph when young if one allows for his delicate looks; he was sweet-natured as invalid children often are. Fortunately he had sufficiently recovered from the attack that coincided with the arrival of the Swedish King for the Duchesse de Polignac to give a supper in honour of King Gustav in her apartments. The Queen arrived very late, having been in Paris attending a performance of the latest artistic sensation at the Comédie Française, Beaumarchais’ play Le Mariage de Figaro. She had been late at the theatre too, due to the conflicting demands of the Swedish visit, and the first act was already over. Nevertheless the enthusiastic public seized the opportunity to insist that it should be given all over again.
Figaro, first performed publicly in April 1784, was a triumph despite an inauspicious start when the King banned it. By September Mrs. Thrale commented on the French mania for the piece, which struck her—ironically enough—as quaintly old-fashioned: “The Parisians are not thinking about Pictures or Poetry; they are all wild about a wretched Comedy called Figaro, full of such Wit as we were fond of in Charles the Second’s Reign; all Indecent Merriment and gross Immorality mixed however with Satire.” French women now carried fans with Beaumarchais’ verses on them as they had done with Gay’s Beggar’s Opera in London. Others wore bonnets à la Suzanne, with garlands of white flowers as worn by the actress in the role of Figaro’s betrothed. Baron Grimm described how the pressure for tickets was so great that duchesses were compelled to jostle with women of the town in the balcony.6
Louis XVI’s initial hostile reaction was not based on ignorance but on a secret reading of the play by Madame Campan, instigated by the Queen. One might interpret his hostility as prescient where this radical work (pace Mrs. Thrale) was concerned. In this he showed more awareness than his own court. As the Baronne d’Oberkirch observed of the nobility applauding the witty diatribes against their own order, the triumph of the valet and maid over the noble master, these were people “slapping their own cheeks.” The First Lady of the Bedchamber was told to arrive at 3 p.m. for a long session, having taken care to eat dinner first. In the event the reading was punctuated by involuntary cries of disgust from Louis XVI: “But that’s monstrous! How dreadful!” And again: “What bad taste! What terrible taste!”7 If Marie Antoinette’s intention had been to manipulate the King to allow a performance, it certainly backfired since he ended by swearing that it would never be allowed.
Fortunately for Beaumarchais and the history of the theatre, if not Louis XVI, it was the “bad taste” which prevailed. Private performances of “the celebrated Nuptials” became all the rage, the Comte de Vaudreuil giving one for the Polignac set at his country house at which Monsieur Campan was present. Clandestine readings became so common that soon everybody was boasting of being on the way either to or from one of them. Bazile’s cry in Beaumarchais’ Barbier de Seville came to mind: “I don’t know who’s being deceived since everyone is in the secret.”8 So the King gave way.
Marie Antoinette never flouted her husband’s wishes publicly, maintaining that womanly attitude of submission so strongly advocated for wives by the late Empress. Now she was able to attend Beaumarchais’ great hit in person. Figaro in its speckled calfskin, stamped C.T. and under its original title La Folle Journée, was placed in the Trianon library. In her enjoyment of Figaro, Marie Antoinette could not imagine the consequences to her personally of the piece’s wild popularity. This was not a question of its radicalism—the “slapping” of their own cheeks by the nobility even as they applauded. It was the plot itself that contained unsuspected seeds of danger; a story of amorous and not-so-amorous conspiracies, of cases of mistaken identity with disguised ladies making rendezvouses in dark shrubberies, had become the staple of the Parisian stage—and Parisian gossip.
King Gustav—and Count Fersen—stayed in France until 20 July. After that Fersen returned at last to Sweden, where he occupied himself among other matters with securing a dog for “Josephine,” probably of a breed similar to his own beloved Swedish dog Odin; at any rate “not a small dog” and as he ultimately admitted in order to smooth away difficulties, it was intended for the Queen of France.*56 After some discussion about the name, the new Swedish dog seems to have received the same Nordic name of Odin. Such canine presents were a proof of friendship or favouritism rather than passionate love, dogs as such being an important element in aristocratic society. Marie Antoinette, for example, gave Count Valentin Esterhazy a large, fierce-looking dog, who was named Marcassin and like Fersen’s Odin became a somewhat spoilt feature of his life.9
Yet it is clear from Fersen’s frequent communications after he left France that Marie Antoinette’s intimacy with him continued during his six weeks’ visit, punctuated as it was by prodigious entertainments. These included that given by the Queen herself on 27 June 1784 at the Trianon, with a performance of a piece by Marmontel in the theatre, music by Grétry, ballets, supper in the various pavilions of the garden, all against a background of the illuminated Jardin Anglais. Everyone had to wear white to be admitted, the result being that it was said to look like a party being held in the Elysian Fields (a reference to the celebrated Dance of the Spirits in Gluck’s Orphée). At some point during this hectic period, Marie Antoinette became pregnant again, for the fourth or fifth time, as she had been wishing to do ever since her health had recovered from the miscarriage of the previous November. It was an event tacitly linked to the declining health of little Louis Joseph and the anguish of both King and Queen on the subject; for every optimistic report of his recovery, another one would follow describing a high fever.
It was therefore with peculiar happiness that Marie Antoinette was able to report to her friend Princess Charlotte on 17 August the healthy progress of a new pregnancy. (She believed herself to be two months’ pregnant, the time-span Marie Antoinette generally let elapse before making the announcement to intimates.) Poor Charlotte, with many misgivings, was about to marry Prince Charles, future Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the widower of her eldest sister Frederica, who had died in childbirth. Marie Antoinette tried to rally her with a radiant picture of Charlotte’s future existence surrounded by the five stepchildren, who were also her nieces and nephews. But the Queen, ever conscious of the fate of foreign princesses, confided to Louise that she was apprehensive for Charlotte having to go abroad and change her life when she was nearly thirty . . .10
Could the child have been Fersen’s? Since the Count had been in France at the right date, it was at least theoretically possible, which had not been the case with the Queen’s previous pregnancies. It would obviously be from one angle a romantic solution. Nevertheless the fact that a solution is romantic does not necessarily make it the correct one. The baby’s parentage was certainly never questioned by the King, which is proof in itself that he continued from time to time to make love to his wife. The Abbé de Véri confirmed this fact in his Journal. Even the most evil-minded gossips (those who knew the scene at the court, not the scurrilous outsiders) had to admit that the dates of the Queen’s conceptions “fitted only too well with the King’s conjugal visits.”11
One more point should be made on a subject that can never be more than speculative. Fertility and sexual prowess are two very different things. It was Louis XVI, despite his deficiencies in the arts of love, who unquestionably begot at least two children. It was Fersen, the great lover, who did not. A likely explanation is provided by Fersen’s celebrated expertise in all matters to do with gallantry; part of this expertise would have been knowing very well how to avoid procreation. Many years into his long amatory career, when his current mistress, Princess “Ketty” Menchikov, announced she was pregnant, Fersen wrote: “The news came as a complete surprise and made me very unhappy.”12
The future enlargement of her family was the motivation behind Marie Antoinette’s desire to acquire a new property in the autumn of 1784. Saint Cloud, hitherto the property of the Orléans family, was the palace in question. With three children, La Muette would be too small in the summer. Saint Cloud would be “an interesting acquisition for my children and for me”; she also had to think of the younger children’s future, compared to the dazzling prospects—in the material sense—awaiting the little Dauphin. Marie Antoinette believed she could leave Saint Cloud to “whichever of my children I wish” because it was going to be her personal property. All of this appeared reasonable enough, at least from the Queen’s point of view. The price—6 million livres—was high, but could be covered by other sales such as the château of La Trompette at Bordeaux. Naturally the Emperor saluted with enthusiasm “this new mark of tenderness” on the part of the King because it would bolster his sister’s position.13
Unfortunately there were other interests at work beyond maternal preoccupation. The idea of acquiring Saint Cloud as a piece of personal property was probably the inspiration of the new Minister of the Royal Household appointed in November 1783, the Baron de Breteuil, who saw it as “a ring on the Queen’s finger.” He may have planned to be Governor of the palace but he also had a larger aim: to make the Queen rule or, put more elegantly in French, “faire régner la Reine.” The circumstances were hardly propitious for the furtherance of such an ambitious project. The Scheldt Affair had ended in frustration for the Emperor; he had not secured access to the mouth of the river for Antwerp, the French backing the Dutch Republic in its resistance, and had finally been obliged to agree to French mediation.14 As for the matter of the Bavarian exchange, that had not yet been settled satisfactorily. Joseph had, as he thought, secured the agreement of the Elector’s heir, the Duke Charles of Zweibrücken, who had been brought up in Brussels and was consequently not opposed to returning there. But the French, including Louis XVI, remained resolutely opposed to such a redrawing of territorial alignments.
In the end the scheme came to nothing because Duke Charles rejected it, but not before Marie Antoinette, six months pregnant, had denounced Vergennes furiously in the King’s presence for his deceitfulness. Vergennes offered his resignation, and the whole matter had to be smoothed over by the King himself. Vainly he tried to persuade his wife that the minister had no intention of causing trouble between Austria and France. Under the circumstances, Mercy’s simultaneous complaint that the Queen was really only interested in the education of her daughter makes rather sad reading; it is certainly an eloquent testimony to the continuing gap between her inclinations and the duties expected of “my dear and charming Queen” by Joseph II.15
If the Austrian ambassador deplored the Queen’s “frivolous” interest in her child’s education, her efforts to secure her younger children’s future by the purchase of Saint Cloud were no more popular in France. Breteuil’s own character played its part in this. Now aged fifty-one, Breteuil was a wealthy widower with a magnificent lifestyle including a permanent mistress in the Duchesse de Brancas. As a diplomat he had served in Stockholm where he had formed a friendship with the Fersen family (hence that mooted alliance between his heiress-daughter and the young Count). It was, however, his eight years of service in Vienna, where Breteuil, unlike Rohan, had earned the approval of Maria Teresa, that constituted the bond with Marie Antoinette. Breteuil was an intelligent man of liberal ideas in politics; unfortunately there were those, his opponents, to whom Breteuil appeared “tyrannical, haughty and silent.”16
For example, Breteuil greatly disliked Rohan and was disliked in return; his appointment as Minister of the Royal Household had exacerbated the latter’s feelings of social exclusion, already stirred up by the forced resignation in 1782 of his niece the Princesse de Guéméné, from the position of Governess to the Children of France. More important at the time, however, was the breach that Breteuil’s handling of the Saint Cloud sale occasioned with the Controller General of Finance, Charles Alexandre Calonne. Marie Antoinette had never liked Calonne, despite his studied deference towards the Polignac set. This resulted not only in their further enrichment by 100,000 livres a year but also in further lucrative positions, such as the English embassy for Comte d’Adhémar, who had been passed over by the Queen as Minister of the Royal Household in favour of Breteuil.17
Fifty years old, Calonne was a passionate art collector, famously witty and with a sophisticated appreciation of women. Coming from the so-called Noblesse de Robe, the administrative aristocracy, his manners were so elegant as to call down the condescending comment from the Duc de Lévis that they were quite uncharacteristic of his class. One might have supposed such a man to have appealed to Marie Antoinette, even before Calonne, a close friend of Vaudreuil and Artois, embarked on his deliberate policy of placating the Polignacs. In fact the roots of her dislike seem to stretch back into the past, as is so often the case with Marie Antoinette; Calonne had been early associated with the Duc d’Aiguillon, the unforgiven minister of Louis XV. Now Calonne struggled to right the finances of the kingdom, including the appalling yearly sum needed to service the national debt that had originally been incurred by the Seven Years’ War and which had recently been much increased by the struggle in America. His negative reaction to the acquisition of Saint Cloud was on the surface a predictable revulsion against the expense; but Calonne also resented Breteuil’s personal handling of a transaction that he considered to be his own due. Lastly, he did not care for the Queen sitting in on his meetings with the King to do with the sale.18
Given Marie Antoinette’s lament, expressed to her brother at this time, that she never really knew what was going on from the King, and had to fake knowledge in order to acquire it, one can understand her interest in being present at the negotiations. The real nub of the Saint Cloud problem—as it became, forming part of the groundswell of her unpopularity—was the unwise decision to make it her personal property. There was no tradition of such gifts to a French Queen Consort, and Saint Cloud was not a secluded “pleasure house” like the Trianon. It was, in fact, near enough to Paris for everyone to take note of the unfamiliar command “by the orders of the Queen” (de par la Reine) as well as the Queen’s special livery.*57 It was enough to start the ridiculous rumour that if the Queen died, the property would go by default to the Emperor. More seriously, there were protests when the letters patent of the King’s gift were registered with the Parlement de Paris. One member of the junior chamber cried out that it was “impolitic and immoral” to see the palace belonging to the Queen.19
Whatever the hostility incurred by its possession, Saint Cloud provided Marie Antoinette with a new opportunity to indulge her ardent love of interior decoration. There were the colours she loved, a spectrum not unlike the colours she chose for her clothes, pale blue and pale green for painted panelling, a kind of lavender-grey for the Great Bathroom at Versailles with its Neptune-like motifs of tridents, waterfalls, shells, fossils and corals; apple-green for the draperies at the Trianon. (But she hated orange according to Madame de La Tour du Pin and would not let the colour into her presence, even in the form of ribbons.) White material sprigged with blue flowers was used for summer in her private apartments; white muslin might be draped over the apple-green. Marie Antoinette, animatrix of the Petit Trianon, had a special fancy for the cotton toiles de Jouy, introduced into France in the 1770s, for chinoiserie or pastoral scenes in the style of Boucher. On the other hand the decor of the so-called Salon Doré in her private apartments, created about 1783, looked to a neo-classical future—white and gold with sphinxes prominent among the gilded decorations in the Pompeian style.20
A major part of the Queen’s enthusiasm for decoration concerned furniture. Here too there were many interesting acquisitions. Marie Antoinette was an ardent connoisseur and showed discernment in what she chose and commissioned. Indeed, the elegant spirit of Marie Antoinette is perhaps better represented by those exquisite pieces of her known furniture that survive than almost anything else.*58 Favourite pieces were made of inlaid wood or lacquer and ornamented with gilded bronze, often with flower motifs or children playing. Designers were celebrated ébénistes (cabinet-makers) such as Jean Henri Riesener who made more than 700 pieces for the Royal Collection overall.
Marie Antoinette had a weakness for furniture incorporating mechanical devices; David Roentgen of Neuwied, ébéniste mécanicien to the King and Queen, made her a writing-table surmounted by the realistic figure of a lady playing arias on a little clavichord. Riesener also collaborated with the German Merklein to produce pieces of furniture with mechanical devices to smooth away any possible difficulties in the Queen’s luxurious routine. For example, a special mechanical table was constructed for her to eat in bed following her accouchement; it was so cunningly constructed that “even the weakest hand” could lower it without making any noise. A dressing-table revealed little compartments for pomades, pins and furbelows, as well as producing a mirror at the touch of a button; another button transformed it into a desk or a music stand, which could be adapted for use either sitting or standing.21
This pretty but practical object, its wood edged with gilded bronze, was so popular with the Queen that she often took it with her on her travels. In general Marie Antoinette tended to move her furniture about, having a range of residences in which to arrange it within a comparatively small geographic compass,*59 including the Tuileries Palace in which she had a small pied-à-terre. Certain types of chairs—bergères or fauteuils often made by Georges Jacob—or the large chests of drawers known as commodes, were in effect reordered in exactly the same models, She also had a passion for little tables, and especially for the lightly built writing-desks called secrétaires. The name indicated their origin as places where writings could be kept secret. Also, from the psychological angle, one might point out that the hiding of her correspondence had been one of the Queen’s prime concerns ever since her arrival in France. Sometimes furniture was specially adapted in order to be upholstered with the embroideries for which the Queen, surrounded by her ladies, had such enthusiasm, making her the ideal customer of Madame Éloffe, the fashionable purveyor of wools and silks as well as lingerie.22
None of this came particularly cheap and it was not helpful that the prices of objets d’art in general rose sharply after 1750. It would, however, be quite wrong to give the impression of an economical King married to a free-spending Queen, to say nothing once again of the extravagant habits of the rest of the royal family, including the aunts. All of them paid top prices for their own interesting acquisitions—up to 5000 francs each for commodes and secrétaires. Louis XVI, ordering from Adam Weisweiler, Jacob and others as well as Riesener, suffered from his familiar indecision as he tried out an ornate commode at Saint Cloud or ordered two beds in 1785 and then changed his mind. More sympathetically, he asked for furniture without sharp corners to avoid those painful encounters that threaten short-sighted people. Marie Antoinette, on the other hand, liked carvings of all sorts: rams’ heads, fruit, flowers, of course—and the heads of her dogs.23
At the great sale of the belongings of the Duc d’Aumale in 1782, the King as well as the Queen bid lavishly, the latter acquiring two wonderful jasper tables as well as yet more commodes, which were then altered at yet further expense.24 Nor did their expenditure on their apartments lighten with the years, despite the kingdom’s worsening finances. One can point to the custom of the society in which they lived; that is what royalties did, in the process patronizing great artist-designers and furniture-makers. A more effective defence, as with the Petit Trianon, is to do with the creation of beauty. One might cite Marie Antoinette’s boudoir at Fontainebleau as the supreme example of this. Of all the surviving rooms associated with her, this is the one that still ravishes the eye. Created on the theme of the pearl by Barthélémy, the Rousseau brothers and Roland in 1786, delicate flowers, cherubs and ribbons decorate the pale iridescent silk of its walls and furnishings; Riesener’s glimmering mother-of-pearl secrétaire with its diamond-shaped paillettes evokes the graceful ghost of its royal owner.*60
Oddly enough in one who had such a vivid interest in her personal setting, the Queen was not particularly interested in painting. She was unimpressed by the great classical and biblical compositions hanging in the Louvre on which her husband, for example, expended a lot of money. Marie Antoinette preferred the romantic seascapes, sunsets and storms of Claude Joseph Vernet, a follower of Claude Lorraine. Sending for Vernet after she had admired his works in the Salon of the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture, Marie Antoinette made royal small talk: “Ah, Monsieur Vernet, I see that it is you who are responsible for our rain and fine weather.” She also liked animal pictures—the painter Anne Vallayer Coster was given lodging in the Louvre and helped to become a member of the Royal Academy and there were of course cosy little pictures of her favourite dogs, to complement the little black lacquer dogs, of Japanese work decorated in gold, sent to her by Maria Teresa. Still lifes were also popular; like Louis XV she admired Chardin, whose clear vision of the beauty of everyday things was so sympathetic to her own spirit. A picture of a pineapple in a pot by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, the famous painter of nature who designed for the Beauvais tapestry factory, was hung in an inner cabinet.26
Although Marie Antoinette enjoyed having family likenesses around her, and took the trouble to visit Habsburg family portraits executed in tapestry at the Louvre, she regarded pictures of herself with indifference, much as modern royalties must view official photographs. According to Madame Campan, she was only interested in resemblance.27 The tremendous public fuss made about the group portrait painted by Adolf Ulrik von Wertmüller for King Gustav, showing Marie Antoinette with her first two children in the grounds of the Petit Trianon, seems to have left her personally unaffected. It was denounced on the one hand as too casual for a queen, on the other hand as unflattering.*61 Certainly King Gustav thought the picture did not do her justice, whilst to the modern eye the children are wooden and Marie Antoinette’s face, beneath a dominating Rose Bertin pouf of feathers and ribbons, verges on the caricature. Yet Wertmüller was allowed to paint the Queen again in 1788 when the results were even plainer.
The main result of the unfortunate Wertmüller portrait was to advance the career of the charming young Frenchwoman, Louise Vigée Le Brun who was commissioned by the Minister of the King’s Works to do something both more stately and more beguiling. One of her earlier portraits, a study of the Queen in one of her ruffled and sashed dresses, wearing a straw hat, had also courted trouble for an informality thought unsuitable in a Queen of France. Yet, as the new commission demonstrated, Madame Vigée Le Brun, a true Frenchwoman in contrast to the interloping Swede, was a natural image-maker for the Queen.
The same age as Marie Antoinette, Elisabeth Louise Vigée was the daughter of a minor artist and had married a fellow painter, Jean Baptiste Le Brun. She was the protégée of Vernet, whose portrait she painted. But it was in fact the direct intervention of Marie Antoinette that secured membership of the Académie Royale for her in May 1783. Extremely pretty, Louise’s delightful appearance led to rumours that she was the mistress of various of her subjects including Calonne (possibly correctly) and Vaudreuil. She also shared the Queen’s taste for simplicity, dressing in the kind of muslins and lawns that Marie Antoinette loved. She wore little powder in her hair at a time when the Queen herself was increasingly sparing with it, just as the latter’s rouge was by now barely perceptible.28
In 1788 Louise would give a celebrated “Greek” dinner in honour of Vaudreuil, with the guests wearing unadorned classical white. When the guest of honour arrived, he discovered the whole party singing Gluck. It was hardly surprising that a creature of such gratifying tastes, conveyed in the simple but sensuous beauty of her work, should have received the Queen’s patronage. In her Souvenirs, Louise summed up the essence of her most famous subject: “I do not believe that Queen Marie Antoinette ever allowed an occasion to pass by without saying an agreeable thing to those who had the honour of approaching her.”29 That innate charm, based on a wish to please, which had characterized Marie Antoinette since childhood, was something the portraitist’s talent made her ideally qualified to convey.
The birth of the Queen’s third child took place at seven-thirty in the morning on Easter Sunday, 27 March 1785. The Queen had been so large that Calonne, as the appropriate minister, was said to have prepared two blue ribbons of the Order of the Saint Esprit for twin princes.30 But it was in fact a single healthy boy, who was named Louis Charles at his instant baptism half an hour later and was equally immediately created Duc de Normandie. Since the godmother was to be Queen Maria Carolina, the name Charles, the French version of Carolus, was a tribute to Marie Antoinette’s favourite sister, and to the shared childhood of Charlotte and Antoine.
This was the first child borne by the Queen since the Duchesse de Polignac had taken over the position of Royal Governess, and it was therefore into her waiting arms that the desired second male baby was placed; the emotion felt by this sensitive creature was so great that Madame de Mackau, as deputy Governess, had to stand and assist. Already, however, the Duchesse had done Marie Antoinette a favour by making sure that she endured the inevitable ordeal in circumstances less traumatic and less frankly humiliating than had attended the births of her previous children, not forgetting the Queen’s life-threatening convulsions in 1778, when she was stifled by lack of air amid the press of spectators.
Royal women in Europe were beginning to revolt against this archaic ritual. It will be remembered that in Austria, Maria Teresa had done away with the custom of courtiers actually being present in the delivery room, banishing them to the next room; similarly in England, the German-born Queen Charlotte, who gave birth to fifteen children from 1762 onwards, permitted members of the Cabinet and the Archbishop of Canterbury only in the room next door—although the door was left open.31 Now the Queen of France managed to give birth without the usual debilitating crowds.
In this case, it was helpful in the interests of the Queen’s privacy that her douleurs were short-lived, and even more helpful that the Duchesse de Polignac, as Governess, was in a position to suppress the news that labour had actually started. The fact that this time labour took place on the morning of so great a feast of the Church as Easter Sunday was no disadvantage either, in terms of distracting attention. Marie Antoinette was well enough to sup with the Princesse de Lamballe that evening.
Like his sister Marie Thérèse, the baby Louis Charles impressed everybody with his strong constitution, as the Queen happily reported to Joseph II. In May, Marie Antoinette referred to his health again; he was definitely stronger than usual for a baby of that age. In time his sweetness, his lively winning ways and, above all, robust physique which gave such promise for the future, would make Louis Charles the chief source of pleasure in Marie Antoinette’s life. His very presence would later remind her of the days when Yolande had been his Governess and they had all been happy together. She used the same tender endearment, chou d’amour, that the pious Dauphine Maria Josepha had applied to her beloved Duc de Bourgogne, Louis XVI’s eldest brother.*6232
The Queen had need of comfort at home. The Scheldt Affair had still not been settled, despite French mediation, and despite the fervent wish of the Queen for an end to “this Dutch nuisance.” Her discomfort was also due to the fact that the war of attrition that had been fought by the satirists over a number of years was beginning to succeed. The birth of the Duc de Normandie was accompanied, naturally, by the usual accusations, although the name of Fersen, incidentally, did not figure in them. One sacrilegious parody of the Christmas Story had Marie Antoinette, like her patroness, the Virgin Mary, bearing a baby who was not conceived by her husband. Louis XVI was seen as a complaisant St. Joseph figure, whose chief interest was stuffing himself with food and drink while the Queen gave birth to an heir to the throne “engendered by love.”33
A picture was being painted, for the benefit of those who had never met Marie Antoinette, of an extravagant, foolish woman, without a thought in her head (except lecherous ones towards sundry unsuitable love objects, female and male), presiding over a dissipated court where Dionysian feasts were a regular occurrence in order to pursue these lusts. Her waning popularity with the French as a whole was noted by Count Fersen, who returned to France on 10 May 1785 and stayed until June before joining his regiment in Flanders. He noted how coldly Marie Antoinette was received when she entered Paris, as was customary for a queen following an accouchement: “not a single acclamation” broke “the perfect silence,” although that night at the opera she was applauded for a quarter of an hour.34
At the same time, completely contradictorily—but when did that bother a satirist?—this frivolous creature was credited with Machiavellian wiles where the manipulation of her gross and apathetic husband was concerned, mainly in the interests of Austria. But that was not the whole of it. Marie Antoinette was also being made the useful female (and, of course, foreign) scapegoat for the general political troubles of the King, troubles that had at their root the impossible financial situation of the crown. In this way rumours of grandiose feasting, against the background of a Petit Trianon pasted with diamonds and glittering with gold, became symbolic of resentment with the governing power as a whole—but focused on the Queen.
It was in this climate of public suspicion that, on 12 July 1785, Marie Antoinette received a strange letter at the hand of the leading jeweller, Charles Auguste Boehmer. She had received Boehmer briefly after Mass on behalf of the King, as Louis XVI had commissioned the usual bejewelled presents for the official baptism of his ten-year-old nephew, the Duc d’Angoulême. Like most of the celebrated international jewellers of the time, Boehmer was Jewish; he was regarded in the courts of Europe, where he was much at home, as “a most amiable man.” With his partner Paul Bassenge, who acted as designer to his salesman, Boehmer ran a shop in Paris; but when their customers were the Queen of France or other great ladies, including the Comtesse Du Barry in the previous reign, Boehmer naturally brought his wares to them. In the past he had had many dealings with Marie Antoinette.35 But this was before a passion for her children had taken over, coupled with an enthusiasm for decoration that went better with domesticity than diamonds.
In particular Marie Antoinette had rejected on several occasions an elaborate, many-looped diamond necklace, which Boehmer and Bassenge had probably produced with the Du Barry in mind. It consisted of a total of 647 diamonds, gemstones from the mines of South Africa; its weight was 2800 carats. Taste surely played a part in her decision—it was certainly not the sort of thing that appealed to her personally—but also her change in lifestyle. The answer that the Queen gave was polite but firm: “She found her jewel cases rich enough.” The jewellers, becoming slightly desperate over their investment, at one point asked her Librarian, Campan, to intercede, but he refused, as did several others. France not being the only option, a paste copy of the necklace toured other European courts—but without takers.
Boehmer and Bassenge also substantially reduced the price and suggested various easy methods of payment, which made the necklace, if an object worth nearly two million francs can ever be so described, something of a bargain. Since Boehmer had purchased the position of Crown Jeweller, he could not, for all his unwelcome pestering on the subject, be banned from the court. Nevertheless Marie Antoinette was resolute; she believed that the money would be better spent on the navy: “We have more need of ships than diamonds.” If the necklace was such a bargain, the King might buy it in trust for his young family and in fact he did toy with the idea before deciding that the money would be locked up for too long. In short, the Queen of France did not want the necklace and never had. In her own opinion she had made this amply clear to the ambitious jewellers.
The letter that Boehmer handed to the Queen ran as follows:
Madame,
We are at the summit of happiness to dare to think that the latest arrangements which have been proposed to us and to which we have submitted with zeal and respect, are a new proof of our submission and devotion to the orders of Your Majesty. We have real satisfaction in the thought that the most beautiful set of diamonds in the world will be at the service of the greatest and best of Queens.36
Marie Antoinette’s first instinct was to interpret this letter as a new solicitation for her custom. Nevertheless, even in that context the letter remained slightly baffling. The Queen read it aloud to her First Lady of the Bedchamber with the casual aside that, since Madame Campan was so good at solving the riddles printed in the newspaper the Mercure de France, perhaps she could cast light on this one.
But Madame Campan could not. So the Queen twisted this odd little missive into a spill and lit it at the candle kept burning on her desk to melt the sealing wax for her correspondence. The Queen remarked, most inappropriately as it turned out: “This letter is hardly worth keeping.” As for Boehmer, she was determined never to use him again. She instructed Madame Campan to make it clear that she no longer liked diamonds: “If I have money to spend I prefer to add to my properties at Saint Cloud.” After thinking it over, she was sure that Boehmer must have created some new piece of jewellery to sell to her.
What Marie Antoinette did not know, and had indeed absolutely no way of knowing, was that she was wrong on both counts. Boehmer had not created a new piece of jewellery and he was not trying to sell her anything. It was the magnificent if flashy diamond necklace of previous history to which he referred. And Boehmer was under the impression that he had already sold it to the Queen of France.