CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MADAME DEFICIT

“Behold the Deficit!”

NOTE PINNED TO AN EMPTY FRAME, INTENDED FOR THE QUEEN’S PORTRAIT, AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY, 1787

As Marie Antoinette continued to feel anguish at the acquittal of the Cardinal, and Louis XVI grappled with financial problems so acute that they threatened national bankruptcy, there was a second Habsburg family visit. On 26 July 1786, the Archduchess Marie Christine and the Archduke Albert arrived from the Netherlands where they had been made joint Governors in succession to Prince Charles of Lorraine. They stayed for a month, incognito, as “the Comte and Comtesse de Belz.”

The timing was not good. The baby Sophie was only three weeks old. The Queen was slow to recover her health; she suffered throughout the autumn—and beyond—from problems that were probably gynaecological in origin: that “terrible accident” in her first accouchement, which Maria Teresa had thought might be malicious. She was also frequently breathless and began to have problems with her leg. Joseph II thought it quite extraordinary that the two sisters had not met, given their proximity, but the omission had a perfectly good explanation. In the past Marie Antoinette had disliked Marie Christine for trouble-making with their mother. In the Empress’s lifetime, the Queen had combated her plan to arrange such a visit with convenient invocations of the problems of etiquette, given Albert’s comparatively minor status as a mere Prince of Saxony; it was the same point made by the French ambassador at the time of her wedding. With sisterly sweetness, Marie Antoinette had protested that she would not wish “la Marie” to experience any difficulties at the French court.1 Currently, the Queen resented the fact that Marie Christine sent scurrilous publications about her to Joseph.

Now “the old ideas of the Queen,” according to Mercy, made her fearful that Marie Christine would seek to dominate her once more as she had done in their childhood. All the same, Mercy trusted that the visit would result in warmth between them. Afterwards he had to admit that this was not the case. Put diplomatically, “The renewal of acquaintance between the two august sisters had not been without its clouds.” Marie Christine wished to spend a great deal of time at Versailles, while Marie Antoinette was determined to curtail their meetings. Nor was the Archduchess invited to the Trianon. Consequently she did not receive the special souvenir album of this private retreat, which Marie Antoinette usually had made for bestowal upon her favourites, including Joseph II, the Comtesse du Nord, King Gustav of Sweden and the Archduke Ferdinand.2 Perhaps the sisters might have been more genuinely sympathetic to each other, had they had some prevision of the storms that lay ahead not only for Marie Antoinette but also for the superior and critical Marie Christine.

A week before the Governors returned to the Netherlands, on 20 August, the Controller General of Finance, Calonne, presented an important memorandum to the King. It was entitled Précis d’un plan pour l’amélioration des finances and he had been working on it throughout the summer with a young assistant named Talleyrand. Calonne’s bold attempt to combat the rising chaos in France, which was not only financial but administrative, suggested ways in which taxation would be far more uniformly and fairly spread. For example, a land tax was to be payable by all landowners without exception—even the Church—only the poor being protected against yet further burdens. Calonne also believed in the use of provincial assemblies in order to remedy a country-wide administration that was becoming unmanageable.3

Obviously the legal enactment of these reforms—quite apart from their implementation—was something that needed careful handling. Trouble could be expected from the Parlement de Paris, which was already in an obstreperous mood as the acquittal of Rohan had shown, as well as from the various provincial Parlements. The expedient chosen, an Assembly of Notables, was one that had not been used for 160 years, when Cardinal Richelieu employed it in an effort to outwit the Parlements in the reign of Louis XIII. This Assembly was now supposed to express its formal approval for the reforms, which would only then be passed on to the Parlements for their endorsement. They would then be officially registered by edicts of the King in that special process, the lit de justice (which could also be used to enforce edicts that the Parlement resisted). The point about the Assembly was that its members were nominated by the King from various categories; in this it was in sharp contrast to another body, the Estates General, which had been in abeyance for even longer—since 1614. In that body, the Three Estates of nobility, clergy and commons chose their own representatives.

The opening of the Assembly of Notables was on 22 February 1787; there were 144 members, few of them commoners. The Queen did not attend the opening, at which the King appeared with as much majesty as it was possible for him to muster, in purple velvet, flanked by his two brothers. According to Besenval, Marie Antoinette’s absence was a deliberate indication of her disapproval for Calonne and his policies; she sided with those Notables—and there were many of them—who constituted an informed opposition and who would not be managed by Calonne. Afterwards Marie Antoinette herself denied this angrily: “Me!” she cried. “Not at all. I was absolutely neutral.” Besenval, a member of the Polignac set and a supporter of Calonne, replied smoothly: “Madame, that was already too much.” He told her that it was a great mistake to be neutral in such circumstances, since it gave exactly the opposite impression of partiality; thus she was open to the charge of overriding the will of the King.4

In fact the Assembly of Notables was destined to fail for a more fundamental reason than the “neutrality” of the Queen: it simply did not provide the obedient endorsement that was its raison d’être. What it did provide was a plethora of debates, arguments and discussions, with demands that fiscal and administrative reforms should receive proper acceptance from the Parlements—or even for the summoning of that dread spectre, an Estates General. La Fayette asked his friend Thomas Jefferson whether the Notables should really be called the “Not Ables.” At all events Calonne could not secure any form of closure. By Easter Week, the King was refusing to receive Calonne, and on Easter Sunday, 8 April, it was indicated that he was dismissed. At the same time Miromesnil lost his position as Keeper of the Seals, for exactly the opposite crime of having connections to the Notables who were in opposition.5

In other ways this period marked a time of change. Vergennes’ health had begun to give way; he died on 13 February 1787, having served the King since his accession thirteen years earlier. On the one hand Vergennes’ management had created an enormous dependency in Louis XVI, who was an irresolute character as even his admirers agreed; on the other hand Vergennes had held out successfully against the influence of the Queen in foreign affairs. It remained to be seen what his main legacy would be: an emotional void that needed to be filled, or an ineradicable distrust of Marie Antoinette on the part of her husband.

Naturally Count Mercy did not allow the death of Vergennes to pass without badgering the Queen over the appointment of a new Foreign Minister. Bracingly he told her that she must perform “a service to the two courts” of Austria and France. The preferred Austrian candidate was the Comte de Saint-Priest who had had a varied diplomatic career over twenty-five years. An enemy of Vergennes, he was known to have favoured Austrian interests; he was also incidentally a close friend of Count Fersen, despite the fact that his wife was one of the Swedish Count’s numerous mistresses. Privately, however, Mercy confided to the Austrian Foreign Minister Prince Kaunitz that although the Queen continued to have a leaning towards her homeland, an attachment to her own blood and feelings of friendship for her brother, she was “incapable of acting positively in any of these interests.”6 Marie Antoinette passively accepted that it was the Comte de Montmorin, a boyhood friend of the King, a former ambassador to Spain and a man personally unfavourable to Austria, who would actually replace Vergennes as Foreign Minister. Insofar as she promoted Saint-Priest, she did so with a conspicuous lack of energy.

There was, however, one small but significant alteration in the sentiments of the Queen. She now had a “scruple.” Mercy himself seems not to have realized the importance of this change, dismissing it as part of Marie Antoinette’s lack of interest in “serious things.” Her scruple—her principles as she termed them to Mercy—struck him as merely annoying. Yet what the Queen was saying was in fact nothing if not serious. She felt that it was not right “that the Court of Vienna should nominate the ministers of the Court of France.”7 For the first time, over matters of Austrian interest, here was a Queen of France speaking.

Whatever Marie Antoinette’s tentative new direction, Prince Kaunitz’s attitude to her, expressed to Mercy on 18 March 1787, was shockingly cynical, given the years the Queen had spent struggling to represent the Austrian alliance, however unsuccessfully. “If she were Queen anywhere but in France,” wrote the Austrian Foreign Minister, “in another place with another government, frankly she would not be allowed any meddling in affairs neither interior nor exterior, and she would be a nonentity as a result in every sense of the term. Let us suppose for a moment that it is the same in France, and in that case, let us count on her for nothing, and let us just be content, as with a bad payer [of debts] with anything we can get out of her.” Even Mercy demurred at this crudeness, arguing that he preferred to continue to nurse the Queen along towards “doing great things” as he had done for so long.8

The fact was that Mercy’s own influence was beginning imperceptibly to decline. It was noticeable that the Queen evaded Joseph’s invitation to visit him in Brussels where he projected a visit, on the grounds of her own health, her children’s health (meaning that of the Dauphin) and then finally because such an expedition would be extremely expensive, and the Queen must set an example of economy. All of these excuses were undoubtedly true. But the impression is left nevertheless that the Queen was at last feeling her political way; there was plenty to occupy her in France, without visiting Belgium for an admonitory lecture on their shared interests from her eldest brother.

In early 1787 the Emperor’s restless energies were darting in new directions. A radical reform programme drove the Habsburg-dominated Netherlands into revolt. When the Governors—Marie Christine and Albert—were obliged to negotiate certain concessions, Joseph was furiously angry. In the meantime his alliance with Russia meant that Austria was almost certainly on the verge of a new Turkish war, which the Tsarina was eagerly contemplating. As in 1783, there was a conflict of interests here between Austria’s treaty with France and her understanding with the predatory Russia, which was made still more acute when the latter seized the Crimea.9 Although Marie Antoinette continued to pay lip-service to the needs of the Austro-French alliance, it is clear that events in France were driving home—at last—the message that she might have to decide which came first, the needs of the Habsburgs or the Bourbons.

         

What caused this shift, in a woman uninterested at heart in politics, as many close to her attested, to someone with a very different agenda? Seventeen years is a long time at a court with such a powerful atmosphere as that of Versailles; in this case, it represented over half the lifetime of Marie Antoinette. It would be surprising if the character of the thirty-year-old Queen had not altered in some way from that of the childish if charming Dauphine who arrived in 1770. But Marie Antoinette’s shift was comparatively recent. It is therefore plausible to argue that it had causes other than this natural development, which culminated in the famously “serious” thirtieth birthday of 2 November 1785.

One obvious cause was the enlargement and growing-up of her family—not her Habsburg family but the Children of France, that little clutch of Bourbon Princes and Princesses to whom she had given birth, one of whom would inherit the throne. A deeper reason lay in the frightful adversity that Marie Antoinette had endured over the Diamond Necklace Affair, and the vicious, unfair libels surrounding it. This evidently brought new steel to a fundamentally pliant character. Increasingly, Marie Antoinette would find herself rising to challenges and, in doing so, transcending any previous expectations of a gentle, rather lightweight nature.

Of course she was hardly unique in being strengthened by adversity; but this neither is, nor was, the case with everyone. Louis XVI, for example, was by no means transformed by the purgations he was currently enduring. His apathy, his indecision, his tendency, surely psychological, to fall asleep in Council meetings—he even snored on occasion—all those characteristics so long bewailed by the courtiers, were only intensifying. There was a direct connection between the positive approach of the Queen—for better or worse—and the negative state of the King. Since she had been trained since youth to respect the male figure of her husband and her sovereign, it was as though she could only spring properly into political life when the natural order was reversed; then residual memories of the true power wielded by the dominant female in her life, the Empress Maria Teresa, might come into play. Nevertheless, this womanly sense of reverence for the King’s immutably superior position was deeply ingrained and would linger to compete with her new activism. The following year Marie Antoinette would write: “I am never more than the second person” in the state “and despite the confidence that the first person [Louis XVI] has in me, he often makes me feel it.”10

In May 1787, however, the King was coming to the Queen’s apartments daily and weeping. By August, Louis XVI was exhibiting all the signs of a major depression, in his own terms, brought on by the failure of his recent policies. Count Mercy described only too vividly the low state of the King’s morale, which had led to actual physical degeneration. He hunted “to excess”—as though to escape, where previously he had hunted to enjoy—and then indulged in “immoderate meals.” Worst of all there were “occasional lapses of reason and a kind of brusque thoughtlessness which is very painful to those who have to endure it.”11

The outside world interpreted this behaviour as ordinary drunkenness; Jefferson heard that the King hunted half the day and was drunk the other half. It is difficult to disentangle the question of the King’s drinking from that of his physical awkwardness (including his short sight) since both could lead to stumbling. His enormous corpulence did not help either. The King’s defenders promoted the idea that he was often taken to be collapsing with drink when it was actually with sheer physical exhaustion after the hunt.12 It is only fair to point out that the Queen—who drank no alcohol out of choice, only mineral water from Ville d’Avray—was also accused of drunkenness and drunken orgies. Nevertheless there seems to have been a connection between the King’s depression and his desperate seeking of escape in alcohol.

There was something gallant about the Queen’s attempts to make good this situation. Her health continued to give trouble, not only in breathlessness but in headaches, which may have been at least partly psychological. Unfortunately her new seriousness did not transform her at a glance into a successful politician. Her lack of concentration, which can be traced back to an inadequate education, continued to undermine her own efforts. She loved to tell the story of one of her Lorrainer ancestors who, when he wanted to levy a tax, went to church and stood up after the sermon. He waved his hat and mentioned the sum he needed. If she yearned for this kind of feudal paradise, she was not alone in eighteenth-century France. It was nevertheless an illusion of paradise rather than a policy. As the Prussian envoy, Baron Goltz, reported in November 1787, the Queen has “quitted her frivolous [Private] Society and occupies herself with affairs, but as she doesn’t have a systematic brain, she goes from caprice to caprice . . .”13 However, the Queen, unlike the King, was also decisive and she had great courage. There were circumstances in which these qualities might be more important than the more sustained deviousness necessary in a natural politician.

The fall of Calonne, applauded by the Queen but also desired by the King, represented melancholy news for the Polignac set on whom he had deliberately lavished ingratiatory benefits. Ministers were never allowed much grace in the manner of their departure in eighteenth-century France, but Calonne was particularly bitter at the manner in which he was stripped not only of office but also of his Order of the Saint Esprit. Subsequently he went to Holland and then to England.

In the meantime the increasing coldness of Marie Antoinette towards the Duchesse de Polignac was the subject of general comment. It also produced a desire in Yolande to absent herself from court. Following his fifth birthday, the Dauphin had been handed over by the Governess to a Governor, the ageing Duc d’Harcourt, a decent if slightly dull man. Despite the continuing presence of the two smallest children in the royal nursery, the Duchesse de Polignac now set off for England in early May. There she was welcomed by her smart friends, to whom she was known as “Little Po,” and where she expected to form “a female treaty of opposition” with Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire.14

It is possible to see this declining favour of Yolande de Polignac as part of the same alteration in the nature of the Queen’s priorities. For all Yolande’s charms and the hold that her delightful personality had had over the Queen for so long, she had never shown any real allegiance to the Queen’s interests. Marie Antoinette took to sending a page to find out who was at the Polignac salon—for which she was, after all, paying. When she made some critical comment about the company, the Duchesse replied, with that exquisite effrontery so characteristic of her time and type, that just as she would not dream of commenting on the Queen’s company, she could not tailor her own to the Queen’s desires. The implication was quite clear. Yolande de Polignac was willing to provide entertainment and, above all, intimacy for a Queen who had been searching for all these things, but at a price. She needed to receive in return not only tremendous material and social advancement for herself and her family but also recognition of her power. The affection that Louis XVI felt for the Duchesse was a bonus. In spite of all his financial difficulties in July he would pay the debts of her unmarried sister-in-law, Comtesse Diane de Polignac, to the tune of 400,000 francs, on the grounds that this spirited and diverting woman had incurred them entertaining the Queen.15

On 1 May 1787, the man who was to be the Queen’s political partner for the following vital months was put in control of finance, following the dismissal of Calonne. This was Étienne de Loménie de Brienne, who was sixty years old and had been Archbishop of Toulouse for the last thirty-four years. His appointment was proof enough of the King’s depression since Louis XVI disliked Brienne personally for his unorthodox religious views. Clashing with the Queen, who had wanted to promote Brienne in 1783, the King was said to have exclaimed angrily: “An Archbishop of Paris must at least believe in God!”16

The Queen’s preference for Brienne was well established and she was said by Castries, the Navy Minister, to be “madly happy” on the night of his appointment. Like so many of her likes and dislikes, this preference was rooted in the past, for her confidential advisor, the Abbé de Vermond, had been in Brienne’s service before he joined her own twenty years earlier. Although Germaine de Staël would dismiss Brienne as “neither enlightened enough to be a philosophe nor firm enough to be a despot,” that was by virtue of hindsight and besides, hers was the point of view of Necker’s daughter. Brienne’s health was not generally good: among other things, he suffered from a disfiguring eczema, which repelled the King. He was seen by some as arrogant and taciturn, by others as “a sly, artful fellow.”17 But then reflection and cunning might be necessary to achieve results.

The worst thing that could be said about him, given the extreme unpopularity of the Queen a year after Rohan’s acquittal, was that he was clearly her man. Marie Antoinette was now being hissed at the Opéra by the people of Paris. Once Gluck’s line, “Let us sing, let us celebrate our Queen” had been interrupted by popular enthusiasm; it was now the terrible invocation in Racine’s Athalie—“Confound this cruel Queen . . .”—that received the wild applause. Nevertheless it was still possible that Brienne, as a former member of the opposition party in the Assembly, could deliver where Calonne had failed.

That was not the case. Cutbacks at court had already been instituted under Calonne. When the Assembly proved no more malleable than before under Brienne’s management, the latter fell back on this policy of retrenchment. The Assembly of Notables was sent away on 25 May 1787 and 173 posts were eliminated in the Queen’s household alone. In terms of public opinion, this curtailment of court extravagance was a useful exercise, although it is noticeable that much of the heavy private royal expenditure on furniture and so forth continued as before. In these years, the King (who greeted reduction in the numbers of horses sulkily) bought the château of Rambouillet to improve his hunting prospects still further, and there were redecorations both at Rambouillet and at Fontainebleau.

The blame was generally attached to a single individual, the Queen, who in the summer of 1787 was derisively called Madame Deficit. But it was in fact the sheer number of French royals with the current or future right to their own households that was the real problem: the King’s two brothers and their wives, who did not share households; the King’s two nephews; the King’s sister; the King’s surviving aunts; and, of course, his own growing family.

The trouble was that this retrenchment was fiercely resented by the nobles who had come to see such positions as their inalienable right. Even Louis XVI’s apathy was shaken when the Duc de Coigny seemed to be about to strike his sovereign at the news of his disbandment. The Duc de Polignac was generally admired for having taken the abolition of his charge as Postmaster General so “tamely” yet he could surely expect to make some sacrifice for the monarch who had so singularly advanced him. Besenval for his part thought it quite disgusting how someone could lose one of their “possessions” from one day to the next: “That sort of thing,” he wrote, “used only to happen in Turkey.” At the same time these economies did nothing to tackle the real problem at the heart of it all. By 1788, court expenditure accounted for between 6 and 7 per cent of the total national spend, while over 41 per cent went on servicing the national debt.18 With the disappearance of La Fayette’s “Not Ables,” the need for proper taxation, falling on the aristocracy (hitherto exempt), and a proper administrative system to carry it out, was as acute as ever.

         

The Queen, with Brienne at the helm, was beginning to attend ordinary committees of the King and his ministers, not just those that concerned her directly. She was also mounting her own propaganda exercise in a wider sphere, promoting her image as the fecund Mother of the Children of France. Not only was this an historic role but it also went happily with the Zeitgeist influenced by Rousseau who praised women in proportion to their enthusiastic adoption of family values. It was no coincidence that allegations of bastardy were made against Marie Antoinette’s children from Marie Thérèse onwards; these were pre-emptive strikes against the Queen’s area of greatest strength, her royal motherhood.

The group portrait commissioned from Madame Vigée Le Brun, to replace that of the Swedish Wertmüller with a proper French work, was intended to disseminate just this image. Gone were the white muslins, the sashes, the roses and the straw hats. Dressed probably by Rose Bertin, the Queen looked conspicuously and consummately regal in red velvet edged in black fur, with white plumes in her matching red velvet pouf, red, white and black being the ancient royal colours. Enormous care was taken to get the details right; accessories were borrowed from the Queen’s Wardrobe in July 1786 and returned a year later. The Queen wore earrings—but significantly no necklace. A large jewel box was intended as a reference to that Roman paragon of virtue Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, who had famously designated her own children when asked to display her greatest treasures.19 The arrangement of the Queen’s “jewels” was carefully orchestrated. Madame Royale leant tenderly towards her mother—unfortunately not a flattering angle; the Dauphin pointed to Madame Sophie’s cradle, while the plump little Duc de Normandie, in a white baby dress displaying the Order of the Saint Esprit, which was granted to the King’s sons at birth, perched on his mother’s lap.

The royal mother at the centre of it all was by now a substantial figure. Her comportment had not altered, that “way of walking all her own” so that you could not see her steps as she glided with “incomparable grace.” This was attested to by three Lorrainers, who spied on her unobserved in the grounds of the Trianon, noting that she carried her head even more proudly when she believed herself to be alone. Her hair had once again been cut short before the birth of Sophie. As the Queen ran her fingers through it in a nervous gesture that became characteristic, Count Esterhazy, Marie Antoinette’s devoted admirer, even detected the first grey hairs . . .20 None of this mattered when a queenly coiffeur could be constructed with the aid of powder and false hair.

The weight increase, begun the previous year, was now so considerable as to inspire rumours of further pregnancies on a regular basis; the Queen told the Emperor crossly, reacting to one of these stories, that if she had been pregnant as often as people pronounced, she would have sixteen children like her sister-in-law, Archduke Leopold’s wife. Although her waist was still neat, the ample proportions of her bosom, well over forty inches when she herself was only of medium height, are confirmed by the records of the couturiers. Then there are the measurements of surviving corsages, supple structures made of taffeta embroidered with the royal arms (not stiff, like the modern corset), on which her bodices were built, and the records of couturiers. Even the superbly flattering brush of Louise Vigée Le Brun did not seek to conceal altogether a fullness below the chin, which would be further visible in the “blue velvet” portrait of 1788. With a lack of gallantry, King Gustav of Sweden said in public that the Queen of France had grown too fat to be any longer counted as a beauty, while Joseph II took patriotism to its limits when he told Marie Christine that their sister had “the fine face of a good fat German.”21

Comparisons to fresh young nymphs were no longer likely to arise, but the Mother of France was not supposed to be a nymph. She was supposed to inspire reverence. It is clear from Louise Vigée Le Brun that much care was taken in order to project an image not far from that of a Holy Family. Louise herself was frequently inspired by Raphael. Her fellow painter David suggested that Louise should look at the Holy Families of the High Renaissance in the Louvre, especially that by Guilio Romano. When Louise—who was being paid the high price of 18,000 francs—asked David whether she would be accused of plagiarism, David replied robustly: “Do as Molière does. Take what you want, where you want.” He believed that the use of modern clothes, fashions and furniture would protect the artist from criticism.22

For all the care taken, and for all the faithfulness of the resemblance, which the Comte d’Hezecques praised as he looked from Queen to portrait when it hung at Versailles, it was not a lucky picture. The youngest member of the group, the baby Sophie, died on 19 June 1787, a few weeks short of her first birthday. Her figure had to be painted out; the Dauphin’s finger pointing in the direction of the empty cradle was a sad memorial to his sister’s short life. The Queen—“greatly afflicted”—told Princesse Louise that the baby had never really grown or developed. This was confirmed by the autopsy, which was signed by the deputy Governess Madame de Mackau in the absence of the Duchesse de Polignac in England. It made pathetic reading, down to the details of three little teeth that the baby had been about to cut and which had been responsible for the five or six days of convulsions that ended her life.23

When Madame Elisabeth was invited by the Queen to view the corpse of “my little angel,” she was struck by the pink and white appearance of the baby. Elisabeth added in her pious way that baby Sophie was quite happy now, having escaped all life’s perils, while her elder sister Marie Thérèse was left desolate “with an extraordinary sensibility for her age.” Now the tiny form lay in a salon at the Grand Trianon, under a gilded coronet and a velvet pall. The Queen’s foster-brother Joseph Weber tried to cheer her by saying that the baby had not even been weaned when she died, implying that the grief for one so young could not be very great. But he struck the wrong note. “Don’t forget that she would have been my friend,” replied the Queen, a reference to her daughters, who were “mine,” unlike their brothers who belonged to France, that sentiment first expressed at the birth of Marie Thérèse.24 Her tears continued to fall.

The Vigée Le Brun portrait was intended to be shown at the Salon of the Royal Academy at the end of August. In fact it needed to be withdrawn, as the Queen’s unpopularity was so great that demonstrations were feared; Lenoir, the Chief of Police, had to tell her not to appear in Paris. The empty frame was left. Some wag, alluding to the scornful new nickname for the Queen, pinned a note to it: “Behold the Deficit!”

It was yet another affliction for the Queen in this troubled time that Jeanne de Lamotte had managed to escape from the Salpêtrière prison a few days before the death of Sophie, probably with connivance. She reached England where she proceeded to pour forth ghosted publications which, however, she autographed personally in true celebrity-bestseller fashion.25 The worst of these concerned her “Sapphic” relationship with the Queen—“Ye Gods, what delights I experienced in that charming night!”—because the allegations chimed so happily with the popular notion of the Queen as viciously perverted, not simply immoral. The “affair” with Artois was one thing, but the sexual bouts with the Lamballe and the Polignac, all gleefully narrated with much circumstantial detail, were unnatural. Another aspect of these denigrations was the comparison of the Queen—“the monster escaped from Germany”—to the other notoriously evil or lascivious women in history. She was worse than Cleopatra, prouder than Agrippina, more lubricious than Messalina, more cruel than Catherine de’ Medici . . . This was the vicious misogynistical chant that would continue to Marie Antoinette’s death and beyond it.

In the meantime the “monster” struggled to support Brienne, to cope with the depression of the King and to come to terms with the death of one child, while the health of her elder son was ever present in her mind. Since the endorsement of Parlement could not be secured for the reforms, these were forcibly registered at the King’s lit de justice on 6 August, at which point Parlement itself was ordered by Brienne to go into exile at Troyes. At the end of August, Brienne was made Chief of the Council. When Castries and Ségur resigned over the decision not to intervene in the Dutch Republic, the Archbishop’s brother replaced Ségur as War Minister. Still the angry disputes continued. Parlement, discontented with its situation, did eventually vote a twentieth part of the money wanted. On 19 November another edict was issued by the King at a meeting termed a séance (session) royale in order to receive loans.

This led to further trouble. As Marie Antoinette confided to Joseph II, the King pronounced the simple words: “I ordain registration,” which had always sufficed to give the force of law to an edict at a lit de justice, when his cousin Philippe, now Duc d’Orléans, dared to issue a strong protest. The registration, he said, was illegal, since the votes had not been counted during the session; if, on the other hand, it was not a proper session but a lit de justice, they should all remain silent. The King was furious at this challenge and departed with his brothers, leaving the Duc d’Orléans to read out a protest that he had evidently written in advance.26

The result was that the Duc was exiled to his château at Villars Cotterets, and two other colleagues, who had spoken “insultingly” in front of the King, were sent to prison. Marie Antoinette’s reporting of the whole matter to her brother was resigned: “I am upset that these repressive measures have had to be taken; but unhappily they have become necessary here.” She added perhaps the most significant phrase in her letter: that the King had also indicated that he would call a meeting of the Estates General in five years’ time, as a way of calming the whole situation down.

         

The turbulence in France was by no means ended by the King’s emollient words. During the next months, the battles over the registration of the edicts continued to rage, with provincial disturbances adding to the furore. A few months earlier, Arthur Young, the English agriculturalist who had returned for another tour of France in May 1788, got the impression from dinner parties in Paris that France was on the verge of “some great revolution.” But it was not at all clear what meaning was to be attached to that dangerous term. After all, it was easy—and rather enjoyable—for foreign nationals to predict insurrection in countries that they did not precisely understand. Marie Antoinette had told her English friend Lady Clermont in January 1784 that England was surely on the verge of a revolution and that “[Charles James] Fox will be King”; she had been inveigled into this belief by the nature of the English parliamentary system, with its vociferous opposition.27 In France at this time, such a theoretical revolution would envisage no more than a limitation on the King’s powers, especially his unpopular use of the lit de justice to register edicts. Along with the cries for an Estates General, demands for reform at this point were essentially coming from the nobility rather than the people.

Throughout the first half of 1788, the wrangles continued. Various expedients were considered—“great changes” in the words of Marie Antoinette on 24 April.28 These included a new body, a plenary court, which would register edicts, and the use of forty-seven provincial organizations, largely replacing the Parlements, which would allow the King to disseminate his commands throughout the country more easily. On 8 May members of the Parlement were summoned to Versailles to hear fresh edicts registered by the King at a lit de justice, and they were then told that they were suspended until this new order of administration had been brought into being. These so-called May Edicts, however, simply aroused further fierce disturbances while Brienne’s new measures were seen as despotic.

There was a melancholy subtext to all this political uproar in the physical agonies of the Dauphin Louis Joseph. By early 1788 it was accepted by those around him, other than his parents, that he could not live very long, and in certain realistic circles the prospect even came as a relief, given that the Duc de Normandie was so much healthier and livelier, in short, fitter to be King. Marie Antoinette gave her own description of Louis Joseph’s sufferings in a letter to Joseph II, now fully involved in a Balkan campaign against Turkey.

“My elder son has given me a great deal of anxiety,” she told her “dear brother” on 22 February in a letter whose frequent crossings-out bore witness to her agitation (her letters had generally much improved since her youth).29 “His body is twisted with one shoulder higher than the other and a back whose vertebrae are slightly out of line, and protruding. For some time he has had constant fevers and as a result is very thin and weak.” The Queen tried to comfort herself with the notion that the arrival of his second teeth was responsible; but since remedies were being sought to start the Dauphin growing again, it was obvious that the situation was far more serious than some natural childhood process. The symptoms that the Queen described to her brother were in fact those of tuberculosis of the spine, not only the constant fevers and weakness by the angular curvature produced by the gradual crumbling of the vertebrae, the deformity worsening as the pressure on the spinal column increased.

Nevertheless, hopes were now pinned to a period of convalescence by Louis Joseph at the château of Meudon, the official residence of the Dauphin of France but hardly used as such since the death of Louis XIV’s son, the Grand Dauphin. Not too far from Versailles, or the other royal residences such as Fontainebleau and Compiègne, Meudon was on a high plateau and said to have the most beautiful view in Europe. Its air was considered to be specially therapeutic ever since Louis XVI had convalesced there as a child. Contemplating the robust physical specimen that the King had turned out to be made everyone feel better about the prospects of his infinitely fragile son. Meudon’s park had been virtually abandoned, but its neglected state ensured some privacy for the little boy, which he would not have had at Versailles or Saint Cloud. Instant refurbishment was now carried out, including tapestries to make his bedroom more “comfortable,” a large yellow damask bed for his tutor, the Duc d’Harcourt, and a crimson damask one for the Duchesse.30

So, on 2 March, the Dauphin, still feverish, made the journey to Meudon. For a while he did feel slightly better and more cheerful too. But by June the Marquis de Bombelles found him a pitiable sight, with his horribly curved spine and his emaciated body; he would have wept in his presence if he had dared. The wretched boy was beginning to be ashamed of being seen, while the various doctors disagreed about his treatment. In June, the Queen—“Mrs. B”—was described as “amazingly out of spirits” by the Duke of Dorset. In July she gave another bulletin to the Emperor: her son had “alternating bouts of being better and being worse.”31 This meant that she could never quite give up hope, nor ever quite count on Louis Joseph’s recovery.

It was an analysis that also fitted the political situation in France. In some ways the outward life of the court went on seemingly unchanged. Old rituals died hard. On the eve of Lent there was a bal d’enfants, that charming juvenile counterpoint to the bal des vieux. A fine banquet was given for Mesdames Tantes at the Petit Trianon. About the time of the May Edicts, the official baptism took place of the two teenage Princes of the house of Orléans, Louis Philippe Duc de Chartres and Antoine Duc de Montpensier. Relations with their father had never improved since his conduct at Ouessant in 1778 and subsequent political intrigues. The Duc d’Orléans had not hesitated to align himself with the Queen’s enemies over the Diamond Necklace Affair. Yet the King and Queen acted as godparents to the boys and despite the need for royal economies, gave them the traditional bejewelled gifts. In the same way the Duc d’Orléans still dreamed of marrying the Duc de Chartres to Madame Royale, and his daughter Mademoiselle d’Orléans to the Duc d’Angoulême, as though nothing had happened to interrupt the family-oriented matrimonial policy of the French royals.32

Finally, on 5 July 1788, at the height of the unrest of the nobility, the King made a preliminary declaration concerning the meeting of the Estates General that had been so long sought. This declaration invited suggestions as to the composition of the body, taking into account the changes in French society since 1614. It was made clear that increased representation of the Third Estate was the issue; Brienne’s intention, in short, was to weaken the power of the nobility by strengthening that of the commoners—that is, the bourgeoisie—the Third Estate being seen as the royal ally. It was on this optimistic note that discussions concerning the Estates General were initiated. As the Queen told her brother, what with “your war that threatens Europe” and “our domestic troubles,” it had not been a good year. She concluded her letter: “God willing, the next year will be better!”33