CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CLOSE TO SHIPWRECK
“The boat is being placed in his [Necker’s] hands so close to shipwreck that even my boundless admiration is scarcely enough to inspire me with confidence.”
GERMAINE DE STAËL, 4 SEPTEMBER 1788
On 8 August 1788 it was at long last formally announced that there would be a meeting of the Estates General. That left the question of its composition—on which the King had invited comments in early July—to be hotly debated in the coming months. Brienne’s measures had demonstrably failed to restore financial credit; by mid-August the Treasury was hovering on the verge of bankruptcy, with one official calculating that there were only enough funds “for state expenditure for one or two days.”1 It was becoming apparent to the anxious Queen, still in her political role, still trying to galvanise her phlegmatic husband, that it might be necessary to recall the one man thought capable of restoring public confidence. This was Jacques Necker, widely seen as the solid incarnation of Swiss Protestant financial virtues, who had been edged out of office seven years previously and whom the Queen personally disliked. Her protégé Breteuil resigned as Minister of the Royal Household at the end of July; it hardly seemed possible that her other protégé Brienne would survive much longer.
Yet the ceremonial life of Versailles did not cease. An exotic—and expensive—state visit provided a brave public show as the politicians, including the Queen, manoeuvred behind the scenes. The three envoys of the Indian potentate Tippoo Sahib came to France to plead for assistance against the English in the East. Madame de La Tour du Pin wrote: “But we gave them only words, as we had done to the Dutch.”2 She referred to France’s inertia in 1787 when Frederick William II, the new King of Prussia, attacked Holland in order to reinstate his brother-in-law as Stadtholder. In fact the envoys were entertained lavishly even if France’s domestic troubles precluded further support.
In Paris, Gluck’s Armide was thought a suitable offering and everyone flocked to gaze at the three visitors, richly dressed, of a “fine light Hindu complexion” with white beards to their waists. Seated in special armchairs, they propped their slippered feet on the edge of the box “to the delight of the public who . . . had no fault to find with this custom.” At Versailles spectators were similarly amazed at the sight of the envoys’ special cooks sitting cross-legged in the Grand Trianon, sifting rice and meat in their hands. The strange smells of simmering peppers and pimentos flavoured with cumin drifted in the air. Marie Antoinette gamely tried to eat some of the food, before being driven back by the spices.3
There was once again a large crowd to witness the last formal audience of the envoys; they departed the day after the announcement of the Estates General. Unfortunately the envoys’ time-keeping was as exotic as their food; they were invited between five and six and arrived long after eight. Their speech to the King had to be translated by Sieur Ruffin, the King’s secretary-interpreter; he used a specially low voice since some of the sentiments expressed by the Indians were notably disobliging towards England and might have caused offence to those English present. The envoys also demanded to be seated in the King’s presence, a privilege not even allowed to his own brothers. Nevertheless for the great gathering of fascinated royals and courtiers, including “the little people” (children) who gazed at the colourful strangers, this show provided a welcome distraction from more serious affairs.4
Even the nine-year-old Madame Royale was there, seated among the distinguished ladies on a special platform draped in brocade, although the previous week she had been so ill with a fever that her mother had watched over her for two whole nights, and her father for one.5 The collapse of the normally healthy Marie Thérèse was a special strain upon parents who alternated between dealing with affairs of state and visiting the Dauphin, who was invisible to the rest of the world at Meudon. It would not have occurred to Marie Thérèse, nor to the little children of the Duchesse de Polignac and the Marquis de Bombelles who were all allowed to watch from an embrasure, that this might be the last state visit of the reign . . . But the thought must have crossed the minds of some of their elders.
Necker was summoned to see the Queen at ten o’clock on the morning on 26 August. He was made Controller of Finance, and was also admitted to the Council of State, a position that had eluded him in 1781 on the grounds of his Protestant religion. The departure of Brienne was personally “affecting” for Marie Antoinette and she made sure that he was rewarded with various emoluments including a Cardinal’s hat on the nomination of the King (that nomination he had refused to bestow on Rohan). Necker’s brilliant daughter, Germaine de Staël, who was now married to the Swedish ambassador and was ecstatic at her father’s return, noted caustically how much less well she was received by the Queen on the feast of Saint Louis than the niece of the outgoing Brienne. Germaine was able to add with satisfaction that the courtiers’ attitude was very different: “Never have so many people offered to conduct me back to my carriage.”6
Nevertheless, two things emerge clearly from Marie Antoinette’s correspondence on the subject of Necker. First, for all her aversion, she alone was responsible for his recall. The King continued to behave sullenly, merely commenting that he had been forced to recall Necker without wanting to do so: “They’ll soon regret it.” For the time being, Necker’s appointment did indeed lead to a surge of popularity for the government—cries of “Long live the King” were heard again—as well as an equally welcome rise on the Stock Exchange. It was true, as Germaine de Staël wrote to the King of Sweden on 4 September, that “the boat is being placed in his [Necker’s] hands so close to shipwreck that even my boundless admiration is scarcely enough to inspire me with confidence.” Yet for the time being shipwreck had been undeniably averted by her father’s return.7
Second, and more important in the long term, it is evident that Marie Antoinette felt some kind of dark presentiment about the outcome of the new arrangement. This was due to the role that she had personally played in it. She wrote to Count Mercy on the subject, two days before her meeting with Necker, a letter that is the key to her growing feelings of dread: “I am trembling—forgive me this weakness—at the idea that it is I who am bringing about his return. My destiny is to bring misfortune; and if vile scheming makes things go wrong for him once more, alternatively if he diminishes the authority of the King, I shall be detested still further.”8
In part, this reaction sprang from that new strain of “German melancholy,” which the hairdresser Léonard, in constant attendance upon the Queen, noticed in her character. She took to saying, “If I began my life again . . .” before breaking off and asking him to cheer her up with one of his stories.9 This melancholy coexisted with the new determination that she had developed as a result of the Diamond Necklace Affair. It sapped her spirits if not her resolution. The death of one child and the serious illness of another obviously contributed to this depression. More than that, however, Marie Antoinette was beginning to feel ill-fated, even doomed. She could no longer maintain that elegant studied indifference to the insults dealt out to her both in print and when she appeared in public. The Queen was forced to appreciate the horrible malign power of such things. The contrast between the wicked Messalina of the public imagination and the benevolent mother-figure of her own was becoming too painful to be ignored.
Under the circumstances, the friendship of Count Fersen—both romantic and supportive—was more important to the Queen than ever. Fersen played a double role. He was the Queen’s admirer but he was also the emissary of the King of Sweden in various connections. For example, it was Fersen who brought a letter to Louis XVI from Gustav III in May 1787. It was Fersen who acted as the Swedish King’s proxy at the baptism of the child of Germaine de Staël and her husband, the Swedish ambassador to France, a few months later. Although the colonel of a French regiment—the Royal Swedish garrisoned at Maubeuge—Fersen continued to be part of King Gustav’s entourage. His role as a kind of liaison officer between the French and Swedish courts made Fersen valuable to Louis XVI, quite apart from his notional position as Marie Antoinette’s lover.
In the past years, Fersen had travelled constantly between France and Sweden, his absences from the Queen’s side always marked by correspondence with “Josephine” being noted in his Letter Book. In the spring of 1788 he went to Sweden in order to take part in King Gustav’s Finnish campaign against Russia, but by 6 November he was back in Paris, twenty-two letters marking this particular six months’ absence.10 His account books reveal the extent of his visits to Versailles in the critical period that followed, since the tips he had to give to servants were also written down.
Did his sexual relationship with Marie Antoinette continue? The same common sense which suggested that the Queen and Fersen had an affair starting in 1783, now suggests that their relationship, if far from over, was nevertheless being gradually transformed into something more romantic than carnal. The Queen’s ill health, the Queen’s melancholy, the Queen’s family worries, the deteriorating political situation, even developing religious scruples: none of these would necessarily prevent her continuing a full-blown affair although any one of them might inhibit it. Yet one cannot help speculating—as with the nature of their original relationship, it can be no more than speculation—that with the passage of time Marie Antoinette and Fersen began to play rather different parts. They lived, after all, in an age of romantic role-playing, the supreme example being the relationship of Julie and Saint-Preux in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, much of whose epistolary language is strangely similar to that of Marie Antoinette and Fersen.11 The novel ended with Julie’s renunciation of carnal love.
Fersen was now her devoted cavalier, and he was also increasingly her vital political ally. According to the Comte de La Marck, Marie Antoinette liked the fact that Fersen did not let himself be drawn into the Polignac set; he was her kindred spirit, not theirs, or as the English put it, he was “Mrs. B’s special friend.”12 Marie Antoinette had originally been attracted to Fersen not only for his handsome face and gallant manners but because he was an outsider, alien to the intrigues of Versailles. This foreign status was to become even more important in the future.
There was also the critical question of how Fersen saw Marie Antoinette. It is clear from a letter to his father, written the following year, that he was one of the few people who saw her exactly as she had always wished to be seen. “You cannot fail to applaud the Queen,” he wrote, “if you do justice to her desire to do good and the goodness of her own heart.”13 Fersen, of course, as a true lover of women, had always had mistresses, in whatever country he found himself. But it is not irrelevant that the most physically passionate relationship of his life—so very different from his romantic devotion to the Queen—began in the spring of 1789.
The fascinating Eléanore Sullivan, five years older than Fersen and the Queen, had arrived in Paris in 1783. She had, to say the least of it, a colourful past. The daughter of a Tuscan tailor, she had first become a dancer and a trapeze artiste. Originally married to an actor, Eléanore had then become the mistress of the Duke of Württemberg to whom she bore a son. In Vienna, Eléanore was rumoured to have been the mistress of Joseph II; in Paris she married an Irishman, Sullivan, who swept her off to Manila; there she met a rich Scot, Quentin Craufurd, who brought her back to Paris again.14 Fersen was erotically enchained by Eléanore Sullivan and his connection to her was long-lasting. But it was to be a three-cornered relationship, that included Eléanore’s wealthy protector Craufurd.
With the Queen as the object of his devotion, Fersen also entered into another three-cornered relationship but of a political complexion. This time the King was the third party. There is no evidence that Louis XVI ever tried to oust Fersen from his wife’s life, or that he even contemplated doing so. Fersen for his part paid tribute to “the goodness, honesty, frankness and loyalty of the King,” which at this period he genuinely believed must prevail with the people, returning France to the weight and influence she had always enjoyed in Europe.15
One story that has sometimes been linked to Fersen’s name scarcely fits the known facts. A servant reported that the King had received certain letters while out hunting, and had been so upset by their contents that he had begun to weep silently; finally Louis XVI was too devastated to continue with his sport. But the servant in question had not seen the content of the letters and as a result attached the name of no particular individual to them. Bombelles recorded the incident in his journal as “a fact, a distressing fact, but I have absolutely no idea what caused it.”16 At this stage, the King’s distressing reading matter was far more likely to be some freshly obscene publications emanating from England to do with the Lamotte than Fersen’s love letters (which would in any case have been addressed to “Josephine”).*68
For some time it seemed that Marie Antoinette’s gloomy presentiments were unjustified. The popular mood was vividly described by Fersen in a letter to his father: “It’s a delirium; everyone sees himself as a legislator, and everyone talks of nothing but progress; in the antechambers the footmen are reading pamphlets, ten or twelve new ones appear every day.” Fersen also commented—a typical perspective, perhaps—that young men who wished to woo the ladies were having to tailor their conversation to their new interests: “To please them, they have to talk about Estates General and governments and constitutions.” Another foreigner, Jefferson, had a slightly different view of the situation. All this talk of politics, he grumbled, was ruining the gaiety and the insouciance of French society—“The tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion”—so that French women were miscalculating their own happiness when they wandered “from the true field of their own influence into politics.”18 In this climate, Necker did indeed manage to ride the storm, if more by pliancy than coherent policy.
As part of the holding operation in the continuing financial crisis, the Parlements were recalled. The Assembly of Notables was invited back for consultation on the composition of the Estates General. The Mémoire des Princes was also drawn up, denouncing the alteration of “institutions held sacred and by which monarchies for so long have prospered” in response to public agitation. This conservative princely protest was not, however, signed by the increasingly radical Orléans, nor by Provence (although Artois did sign). Both of these Princes accepted the principle of doublement by which the representation of the Third Estate would be increased to twice that of the past. In spite of the indecisiveness of Necker, compounded by that of Louis XVI, doublement was finally accepted on 27 December 1788, although the law that allowed nobles and clergy also to stand as deputies for the Third Estate meant that their influence was not completely diminished. The Queen, although silent on the subject in Council, was believed to approve the measure. In the case of both Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, it was the idea of the Third Estate, as the crown’s natural ally against the other two, that prevailed. “Ah, their illusions will be short lived!” wrote the Marquis de Bombelles, gloomily, after a New Year’s Eve visit to Versailles.19 Yet the popular salutations of “Long live the King” coupled with “Long live the Third Estate” could not but give rise to hope.
Concurrent with her belief in the usefulness of the Third Estate was Marie Antoinette’s realism concerning the relationship of France and Austria. On 27 January 1789, in a letter to Mercy, she pointed out the impossibility of France coming to the aid of Austria (and Russia) with troops at the present time. She wrote with full knowledge of Joseph II’s own declining health but that fact could not alter her verdict. Although the impending Estates General were not supposed to treat of peace and war, they would certainly give vent to “complaints and cries of protest” at the idea of such expense. She went on: “You know the prejudices against my brother, you know how some people here are even on the point of believing that I have sent millions to Germany [sic]. Inevitably they would attribute this new treaty to me, and so the ministers of the Estates General would excuse themselves, using the excuse of my credit and influence. Judge for yourself the odious role I would be made to play!”20
By a coincidence, Nature herself now struck a blow against the finances of France. Eighteen months earlier a bad summer had resulted in poor harvests throughout most of the country. Now the winter of 1789 was the most severe in living memory. Beginning with a heavy snowfall on New Year’s Eve, there were to be two months of freezing temperatures, so that couriers en route between Versailles and the capital froze to death, and Jefferson felt he was in Siberia rather than in Paris. The rich skated and sledged happily (as Marie Antoinette had done in her careless youth, before abandoning the practice as appearing too “Austrian”). But the sufferings of the poor were terrible as the all-important bread prices rose. In such conditions of misery, it was easy for rumours of a famine plot to spread; the great ones, including Artois and the Queen, were supposed to be conspiring to produce a shortage of flour in order to make further profits. Meanwhile Orléans made a number of very public and “very liberal” donations to alleviate the condition of the poor.21 Master of the art of propaganda, he richly enjoyed his position as the people’s champion and took every opportunity to underline it.
In the months leading up to the meeting of the Estates General, the private hell of the King and Queen continued with the illness of the Dauphin, who had a bad relapse on 1 February. Meanwhile the unhappy parents were as before ritually denounced in the libelles, he as an impotent drunkard, she as a vicious adulteress. Public scorn was one thing. But it was a remarkable demonstration of the lack of respect into which even the courtiers had slipped—without any wisdom as to where their best interests lay—that one particular set of satiric rhymes was actually sung in the salon of the Comtesse de Brionne, on 23 January, in the presence of the most elegant Parisian society; the hostess was the same ambitious woman who had previously sought so much favour from Marie Antoinette.
The verses that had been circulating everywhere for the previous two days had left no member of the royal family untouched: not the Comtesse de Provence with her growing addiction to the bottle; not the Comtesse d’Artois who had given birth to a bastard child; not Provence—“I am neither princely nor a king”—and, of course, not the King and Queen. Louis XVI was quoted as reproaching the Duc de Normandie for being a bastard. It ended with a chorus of the Three Estates together, after which Louis XVI sang merrily: “What need is there for me to think? When I can hunt and I can drink!” The priorities of French society in early 1789 were summed up by the fact that one of those present at the Comtesse’s salon criticised the men for wearing the informal frockcoat, while pardoning the libelles as being the welcome return of a little spark of “our old French gaiety.”22
The solemn High Mass that would precede the inaugural meeting of the Estates General at Versailles was to be held on 4 May. At various levels, Marie Antoinette’s gloomy presentiments were now beginning to be fulfilled. On 26 March the King himself was nearly killed taking the air on the leads of the roof at Versailles, when a ladder on which he was leaning gave way; he was only saved from plunging to his death by the prompt action of a workman.*69 The Queen herself was beginning to spend more and more time alone in her private cabinet, according to the Saxon envoy, Count Salmour, who, because his mother had been a favoured member of the Austrian imperial household, had been immediately accepted as an intimate.23
Then, in late April, a serious riot broke out in Paris, named after the wallpaper manufacturer Réveillon whose supposed decision to cut wages brought it about. Obviously such an action was as fire to tinder in a time of violently rising prices; in fact it was rumour and misunderstanding rather than Réveillon’s actions that caused the revolt. Nevertheless 300 people were killed before the riot was dispersed by troops. Apart from the loss of life, the Réveillon riot had the serious consequence of persuading the government that the people of Paris were becoming unmanageable, while the people themselves saw the government as ready to use military action against them.24
Six days later, the whole royal family were due to exhibit themselves publicly in a procession through the town of Versailles. The route between Paris and Versailles became like a boulevard on a fine day, it was so crowded with traffic. Marie Antoinette sent for Léonard—this was not an occasion for his deputy, le beau Julian—to dress her hair grandly enough for the court dress she had to wear. He attested to her sadness on that occasion: “Come, dress my hair, Léonard, I must go like an actress, exhibit myself to a public that may hiss me.” He found her physically bowed in private, her bosom sunken and her arms thin. The next day, however, an American observer new to the scene, the American Gouverneur Morris, put a different gloss on her dramatic style: “She looks with contempt on the scene in which she acts a Part and seems to say: for the present I submit but I shall have my Turn.”25
Morris—his forename Gouverneur came from his Huguenot ancestry—had arrived in Paris in February, in pursuit of a contract for imported tobacco. Trained as a lawyer (he had assisted in the final wording of the United States Constitution), he was to prove an important and a lively witness in the events that followed. A foreigner from a republican country, Morris was still able to view the Queen with humanity, in a way that it seemed many of the French had forgotten: “I see only the Woman and it seems unmanly to break a Woman with unkindness!”26 Most of the spectators, lacking Morris’s chivalry, saw a woman indeed, but a woman for whom their feelings went much further than unkindness; she was a Queen they hated, whom it was safe to scorn where public derision for the King was still a step too far.
The procession from the Church of Notre-Dame to the Church of Saint Louis was led by the whole royal family and the Princes and Princesses of the Blood—with one significant exception. The royals were to be followed by the deputies of the Estates General who had been chosen the previous month. Protocol had never been more rigid than in the orders given about the costumes that each rank should wear. The clergy were to wear their ecclesiastical dress; the nobility were to wear black silk and white breeches, lace cravats and plumed hats, and would carry swords; but the Third Estate were to wear plain black and, as an indication of their lowly status, were forbidden to carry swords. The Duc d’Orléans, as one of the nobility’s deputies, decided on a move of calculated provocation. Against the King’s express orders, he mingled with this swordless black-clad throng, leaving his son, the Duc de Chartres, to take his own place.
All the windows of the houses on the route were jammed with spectators for whom the appearance of Orléans was the signal for loud cheers. The Queen on the other hand was received with icy silence. At one point, a loud “Long live the Duc d’Orléans!” shouted more or less in her face as she passed actually caused her to stumble briefly before recovering her dignity. For Louis XVI, the acclaim for his cousin and the lack of applause for his wife was a double insult; according to Virieu, the Duke of Parma’s envoy, his anger was noticeable. Only one small spectator caused the royal mood of both King and Queen to soften. The Dauphin had been brought from Meudon to see the show. He lay on cushions in an embrasure with a window belonging to the Little Stables. When his parents caught sight of the tiny wizened figure, smiling so bravely in their direction, their tears came involuntarily. Virieu noted that Orléans too had tears in his eyes: tears of pleasure at the warmth of the salutations given to him.27
Both King and Queen wore glittering costumes and were heavily bejewelled; it is easy to understand how one observer compared the dazzling scene to the opera, lacking only lamps and chandeliers. For once, however, it was Louis XVI who literally outshone Marie Antoinette, even if he “walked with a waddle” that inevitably contrasted with the celebrated grace of the Queen. The King wore cloth of gold scattered with brilliants, and the great white diamond known as the Regent which he had worn at his coronation. (The name derived from the Regent Duc d’Orléans, under whose auspices the crown of France had acquired it in 1717.) The King also sported the diamond sword made for him five years previously, new diamond buttons, diamond shoe buckles and diamonds on his garters; all this was in addition to the ornamentations he wore, denoting the order of the Golden Fleece and the Order of the Saint Esprit.28
The Queen for her part shimmered in cloth of silver, the moon to the King’s sun. In her hair she wore another costly diamond, “perfectly flawless and brilliant,” known as the Sancy, and on her person a series of other diamonds including those called the De Guise and the Mirror of Portugal with vast drops of single gems. These were known as the Fifth and Sixth Mazarins because the English Queen Henrietta Maria, born a Princess of France, had sold them to Cardinal Mazarin in the time of her misfortunes.29 The Queen, however, did not wear a necklace.
Unfortunately once the service began in the Church of Saint Louis, the sermon given by the Bishop of Nancy recalled to the minds of the spectators, whether royalties or deputies, how much of this brave show was mere camouflage for the ugly situation. The Bishop saw his chance and took it, contrasting the luxury of the court with the sufferings of the poor in the countryside. The Queen merely drew in her lips in that disdainful expression that would become increasingly familiar in the time to come. The King on the other hand dealt with the issue in his own way by falling asleep. When he awoke, he was to find the Bishop’s audience applauding vigorously, something that had never been known to happen before in a church where the Blessed Sacrament was exposed.30
The next day the 1100-odd deputies met together in the Salon of the Menus Plaisirs within the château of Versailles. Marie Antoinette on this occasion wore white satin with a violet velvet mantle and train, and a simple diamond aigrette in her hair. She sat on a throne to the left of that of the King and below it; the Princesses were ranged beyond her, and the Princes to the right of the King’s throne. The Queen carried a huge fan. Madame de La Tour du Pin, who was sitting uncomfortably with the other ladies of the court on backless benches, noticed that she fanned herself in an “almost compulsive way” as though deeply agitated. Meanwhile Marie Antoinette scanned the faces of the Third Estate, many of whom were of course completely unfamiliar to her, as though trying to fit the faces to the names.31 One man, however, was unmistakable: Honoré Comte de Mirabeau. At the age of forty, this radical nobleman was sometimes called “the tiger,” but with his great height, and mass of shaggy hair, he more nearly resembled a bear.
Mirabeau’s scandalous private life and his debts had already caused a considerable frisson in French society; now he was present, not as a deputy of the noble Second Estate, but as a deputy of the Third, because he had failed to be elected to the Second Estate in his country district. When Mirabeau entered, there was a widespread murmur, low and sibilant. Those in front moved one bench forward and those behind moved one back. Smiling contemptuously, Mirabeau sat down.
The King spoke on the theme of the financial crisis and the state debt, which he attributed—with justice—to the expenses of “an exorbitant but honourable [American] war.” Afterwards he was thought to have done well and to have shown some strength and dignity, although critics commented on his harsh and rather grating voice. But Louis XVI did, in one felicitous phrase, term himself “the first friend of his peoples.” Necker, on the other hand, spoke at enormous length, his monotonous voice eventually giving way to hoarseness so that his speech had to be completed by another. Length alone could not mask the fact that he was proposing no effective solutions. Nor did he give any firm guidance on the voting procedure of the Estates General—whether the Estates should vote separately or as one body—although the arguments on the subject needed urgently to be resolved.32
Louis XVI personally was greeted by cries of “Long live the King” at the end of it all, and now there were again a few cries of “Long live the Queen” in contrast to the silence with which she had been greeted at the start. She responded in the gracious fashion that she had made her own, with the lowest of curtsies. According to one account, the cries were prompted by the tragic expression on Marie Antoinette’s face. Most people, however, thought that the acclamations for the Queen were simply intended to please the King.
The Queen’s deep sadness was easy to understand. When young Harry Swinburne arrived at Versailles on 10 May to be a page, a “much altered” Marie Antoinette told his mother: “You arrive at a bad moment, dear Mrs. Swinburne. You will not find me very cheerful; I have a great deal on my heart.” Her melancholy was due at least as much to the condition of the Dauphin as to her sense of her own unpopularity. The emaciated little boy, who had smiled so bravely at his parents from his cushions as the royal procession passed, was swiftly returned to Meudon. It was evident that he was being taken back to die. As the shipwreck of the state—in Germaine de Staël’s phrase—approached, the royal couple spent every possible moment at Louis Joseph’s side; the King’s visits, chronicled in his Journal, being five or six a day.33 At the same time the deputies of the Third Estate were discovering new rights and, having discovered them, were clamouring for their implementation. The rivalry between the conservative faction of the nobility and the popular party (which included some aristocrats) was beginning.
Under the circumstances, the King’s pervading silences and his chronic indecision were more unhelpful than ever, even if his personal circumstances made these signs of depression comprehensible. The public confidence in Necker, once so great, was also vanishing as it became obvious he was not in fact “the Man,” in Gouverneur Morris’s phrase, who would save them all.34 Meanwhile the Queen’s grasp of her political role was also beginning to slip.
As Count Mercy reported to Prince Kaunitz on 10 May, everyone blamed her for the King’s inactivity, but by now what she proposed was rarely followed. Provence and Artois used her as a conduit to the King, but then the Princes had their own agenda. Artois in particular was increasingly hardline, his attitude being reflected by that of his adoring sister Madame Elisabeth, who wrote in May: “If the King does not have the severity to cut off at least three heads, everything will be lost.”35 This was not the stance of Marie Antoinette. But her brief period—two years—of real political intervention, following that night when she was so “madly happy” at the appointment of Loménie de Brienne, was almost over. Her new role as a hate figure or, one might say, a scapegoat at the King’s side, was beginning to take over; it was increasingly difficult to combine it with that of an active and influential politician.
On his return to Meudon, Louis Joseph had a whim to sleep on top of the new billiard table. A bed was made up, although the ladies around him exchanged glances at the sight; it looked all too much like a lying-in-state of a corpse. Since he could no longer walk, a mechanical wheelchair upholstered in green velvet with white wool cushions was installed. The whinnying of his favourite chestnut horse from the stables was a reminder of the days of his short childhood. Afterwards many stories would be told of his sweetness: how he would not hurt the feelings of a clumsy valet by sending him away and therefore endured his painful ministrations in silence. He told one of Madame Campan’s sisters, Julie Rousseau, in his household: “I love you so much, Rousseau, that I shall still love you after I am dead.” He was anxious to do the honours to his mother at dinner although Marie Antoinette on these occasions “swallowed more tears than bread.”36
The Dauphin’s precocity was also recorded. Louis Joseph, like his father, had a taste for reading history. The Princesse de Lamballe paid a visit with her companion, the Comtesse de Laage de Volude. The latter related a conversation on the subject of the fifteenth-century King of France, Charles VII, for whom Joan of Arc had raised the standard. It was, said the Dauphin, “a very interesting period in our history; there were many heroes then.” The Princesse and her companion found his beautiful eyes, as he spoke, “the eyes of a dying child,” unbearably moving.37
Marie Antoinette was actually at Meudon, and at her son’s bedside, when the end came very early on 4 June. Louis XVI, who had visited him the previous day, was told at 6 a.m. by the Duc d’Harcourt. He wrote only in his Journal: “Death of my son at one in the morning.”38 The boy whose birth had been saluted by his father to his mother with these triumphant words, “Madame, you have fulfilled my wishes and those of France,” was dead, “a decayed old man,” covered in sores, at the age of seven and a half. After that, etiquette robbed the bereaved parents of that consolation that ritual can sometimes bring. The royal parents, by custom, could take no part in the obsequies. Marie Antoinette was left like Gluck’s Alceste, to call for “some ray of pity” to comfort her suffering, and to believe with that unhappy heroine:
No one understands my ills nor the terror that fills my breast
Who does not know . . .
The heart of a mother.
Later that morning, the King went to Mass before nine and then shut himself away. In an unhappy repetition of the scene when he himself had succeeded to his elder brother, his own second son aged four and a half was simply told that he was now the Dauphin and was given the Order of Saint Louis. Louis Charles wept and so did Marie Thérèse, the other surviving child. Meanwhile Louis Joseph lay in state at Meudon according to custom, visited as a mark of respect by those with the right to do so. This privilege was even claimed by deputies of the Third Estate. Four days after the death, they exercised their rights to sprinkle holy water on the little corpse. Others came from Paris, Versailles and nearby Ville d’Avray. Since it was early June, the powerful perfume of rampant unchecked roses, jasmine and honeysuckle came from the neglected gardens of Meudon.39
According to custom, once again, Louis Joseph’s heart, in an urn, was taken to the Benedictine convent of Val-de-Grâce. The Duc d’Orléans, as senior Prince of the Blood, was supposed to escort it, but he declined to do so, giving the ungracious reason that his role as deputy “did not leave him time to attend functions,” so his eldest son deputized for him once again. For the funeral, Louis XVI decided that elaborate arrangements would be inappropriate; the proper rites for a Dauphin of France could cost 350,000 livres. Like baby Sophie two years before, Louis Joseph was to be given a simple funeral, on the excuse that he had not yet made his First Communion. The Princesse de Lamballe, as Superintendent of the Queen’s Household, presided, with files of monks praying ceaselessly in the background. The little coffin was covered in a silver cloth, with the crown, sword and Orders of the Dauphin of France on top of it.40 After that it was taken to the crypt of Saint-Denis, to lie with the remains of Louis Joseph’s ancestors in eternal undisturbed rest—or so it seemed in June 1789.
Madame Vigée Le Brun’s unlucky portrait, showing the late Dauphin pointing to the newly empty cradle of Madame Sophie, was removed from the Salon de Mars in Versailles at the Queen’s orders; she found it too painful a reminder of the recent deaths. At the official visit of condolence of the court on 7 June, she made a touching sight, leaning against the balustrade of her chamber, trying hard to choke back her tears. The King had to endure all this, and also the determined efforts of the Third Estate, led by the celebrated astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly, to come and see him in order to discuss arrangements for the impending meeting of the Estates General. He refused to receive the Third Estate either on the day of his son’s death or on the following two days, saying that it was not possible in “my present situation.” When they insisted on visiting him on 7 June, the King commented bitterly: “So there are no fathers among the Third Estate?”41
At this same season, Arthur Young, on a visit to the Palais-Royal where political pamphlets were being sold in shops in the Duc d’Orléans’ private gardens, was struck by the fact that a new one was being issued every hour: “Nineteen twentieths of these productions are in favour of liberty and commonly violent against the clergy and nobility.” It was no coincidence that the trade flourished on the Duc d’Orléans’ property where the police could not intervene; the radical Duc had sold the sites to cover his lavish expenditure. The coffee houses were crowded; the mood was high, in spite of the terrible want of bread. The contrast between the royal mourning and the national exhilaration was something that Marie Antoinette never got over. Eighteen months later she commented to her brother Archduke Leopold on how the French had been in “a delirium” while she struggled to control her sobs. In short, “At the death of my poor little Dauphin, the nation hardly seemed to notice.”42
It was all a cruel demonstration of the clashing demands of public and private in the existence of kings and queens. At this great crisis in French national life, of what real significance was the death of a child, even a royal child? Given that he had a younger brother. But to Marie Antoinette, an emotional and deeply affectionate woman who was stricken by her loss, it represented something else: the callousness that the French could show, this people whose fundamental goodness of heart she had so often praised in the past, even if they were volatile and somewhat childish. She had largely lost the esteem of the French; it remained to be seen whether they would keep hers.
In this mood Marie Antoinette went to Marly with the King on 14 June for a week’s court mourning.