CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
UP TO THE EMPEROR
“It is up to the Emperor to put an end to the troubles of the French Revolution.”
MEMORANDUM BY MARIE ANTOINETTE, 8 SEPTEMBER 1791
As the Duc de Choiseul conducted Louis XVI back to the berlin in Varennes, he felt “an inexpressible anguish” as if he was seeing King Charles I handed over to his executioners.1 For the time being, however, that appeared to be an exaggerated prophecy of doom. On 26 June deputies came from the National Assembly and cross-examined the King. By dint of taking to her bath—or sending a message that she had done so—Marie Antoinette managed to avoid being examined until the next day, by which time she was able to coordinate her evidence with that given by her husband. The Queen was very firm that she would never have taken part in the expedition if she had not been convinced that the King intended to stay in France.
After a further two weeks, the dominant party in the Assembly, still hoping somehow to reconcile a traditional monarchy with reform, issued a statement on the matter of Varennes in which the guilt of the King was neatly fudged. Louis XVI and his family had in fact been “abducted” by the Marquis de Bouillé and his son. Fersen, Goguelat, Choiseul and Damas were, among others, nominated as guilty. It was a fiction preserved by Bouillé in the proclamation which he now issued: that he had had no orders from the King. After a while the equerries were released and allowed to emigrate, the King and Dauphin bidding farewell to them with embraces. The Marquise de Tourzel, on the other hand, was allowed to resume her duties, having been saved from incarceration by the Queen’s pleas about her ill health. As the new Constitution, so long discussed, neared completion, the King was still a necessary asset to the constitutionalist or Feuillant party;*86 his acceptance of the Constitution, leading perhaps to its acceptance by others abroad, was something to be negotiated. The “Triumvir” of the Feuillants’ leaders consisted of Alexandre de Lameth, the youngest of three brothers of noble birth but of democratic convictions; Adrien Duport, a proponent of judicial reform; and Antoine Barnave, who had recently spent two days in the Queen’s company in the berlin.
It was La Fayette whose star was waning. Widely—if unfairly—blamed for the Varennes escape, he was defeated in October in the election for the Mayor of Paris by that very Pétion whose coarseness had caused so much disgust on the journey back. On the other hand the republicanism of the Feuillants’ opponents naturally received a further impetus from the events of Varennes. These included Robespierre, the fastidious president of the Jacobins, with his daily dressed and powdered hair worthy of a courtier, and his “catlike” appearance. This was the phrase of another Jacobin, Merlin de Thionville, the type of cat changing with time from domestic animal to wild cat and finally to “the ferocious aspect of the tiger.” Why should a king alone be inviolable, he enquired pointedly: “The people, aren’t they inviolable too?” Then there was Georges Danton, with his contrastingly shaggy appearance—he described himself as having “the rough features of liberty”—who had brought into being the extremist Cordeliers (Rope-Sellers) Club the previous year. Other opponents to the Feuillants were the journalists Camille Desmoulins and Jean Paul Marat, founder of the hostile newspaper L’Ami du Peuple, to whom “Louis and Antoinette” were public enemies.2 Lastly there was Jean Pierre Brissot, the son of a Chartres caterer. Much travelled in England and America, and founder of the newspaper Le Patriote Français, Brissot led the group that was later termed the Girondins, after the geographical area of France from which most of them came.
On 17 July, two days after the King’s manufactured “acquittal,” a meeting was organized in the Champ de Mars at which republican petitions were presented at a kind of altar. Proceedings got off to a violent start when two men were discovered lurking beneath the altar. They had in fact no more political intent than to spy on the women’s legs but they were executed as spies of a very different sort. The behaviour of the National Guards under La Fayette was far more lethal. Through some kind of fatal misapprehension, there was firing on the crowds and fifty people were killed. Although the extremist leaders were for the present obliged to lie low—Danton vanishing to England—a precedent had been set for the kind of interfactional warfare that would now rage in French politics. As for the “tumult” in the capital city itself, that was well caught by an English visitor, Stephen Weston. Not only the French but every nation under the sun “from Siam to California” was represented among the crowds thronging the streets, all wearing appropriate dress, including Cossacks, Jews, Americans—a “Paul Jones” or a “nephew of Benjamin Franklin”—as well as deserters from various military forces, whether that of the Marquis de Bouillé, the émigré Princes, or just the Turkish army.3
Although royalists—and optimists—hoped that the King might be the gainer in all this, the fact was that thanks to Varennes the reputation of Louis XVI had taken a severe knock. Marie Antoinette had, after all, no reputation left to lose; her unpopularity was now so great, reported the English ambassador, that if she had been released by the National Assembly, she would have been torn to pieces by the mob. There were renewed rumours that the Queen would be removed from her husband (and children) to be shut up in that convenient convent, after being tried for crimes against the nation. Maria Carolina in Naples, hearing of these ferocious prognostications, even thought that a convent might be the most secure refuge. “I would give my life blood to save her,” wrote the Queen of Naples to their mutual brother the Emperor Leopold, “not to make her the Queen of France again, but that she may finish her sad days in a convent.” (The Archduchess Marie Christine, characteristically less compassionate, simply thought it might have been better for “my poor sister” if she had never been married.) If these assaults on the Queen were nothing new, those on the King marked a distinct, and distinctly disagreeable, development in his relationship with those “children,” his subjects. Whatever the provocation, whatever the fudging, Louis XVI had tried to deceive the nation—and had been found out.4
“The King has reached the lowest stage of vileness,” wrote Manon Roland, the pretty, spirited and intelligent wife of a Girondin deputy, who had established a salon in Paris. “He has been shown up nakedly by those around him; he inspires nothing but scorn . . . People call him Louis the False or the fat pig. It is impossible to envisage a being so totally despised on the throne.” The picture given in L’Ami du Peuple was indeed of a “Louis Capet” who was a hypocrite while being physically gross and “consoling himself with the bottle.” To the Jacobin Club, he was “perfectly contemptible.” It was a cunning intensification of the personal denigration of Louis XVI, as someone too base to occupy the dignified position he held at a time when that position itself was under attack. Meanwhile cartoonists abroad cheerfully made mock of the entire Varennes story, Gillray, for example, portraying the whole arrest as a slapstick comedy, while the King of England wondered when, if ever, the King of France would behave like a man. It was even believed—quite erroneously—that the greed of Marie Antoinette’s “beast of a husband” had been responsible for their capture because he would insist that they stop and eat at various places en route.5
It was hardly to be expected that the ordeal of Varennes would leave the Queen unaltered, mentally or physically. Her immediate emotions may be glimpsed in two letters written to Fersen at the end of June. The first is brief and begins baldly: “Be reassured about us; we are alive.” The second is full of pauses like sighs: “I exist . . . How worried I have been about you,” and “Don’t write to me, that will expose us, and above all don’t come here under any pretext . . . We are in view of our guards day and night; I’m indifferent to it . . . Be calm, nothing will happen to me . . . Adieu . . . I can’t write any more to you . . .” Using Count Esterhazy as an intermediary, the Queen sent Fersen two inexpensive rings with the fleur-de-lys on them, of the sort that were still generally on sale. One was inscribed: “Coward who abandons them,” and the other: “Many miles and many countries can never separate hearts.”6
The physical fullness of her childbearing years was rapidly disappearing; Léonard had mentioned her thin arms and sunken bust as early as 1789. In 1791 the Comte d’Hezecques called her outrightly thin, and a pastel portrait by Aleksander Kucharski that was begun this year for the Marquise de Tourzel shows a haggard middle-aged woman—one might almost say an old woman, although Marie Antoinette was not yet thirty-six.*87 Certainly the pastoral prettiness of Madame Vigée Le Brun’s images has quite vanished; there is no rose here, no straw hat, no ribbons, only a Queen with a strong nose and chin, her single remaining good feature being her large, sad, wide-apart eyes.
When Marie Antoinette greeted Madame Campan on her return to the Tuileries for the first time after Varennes, she took off her cap to reveal hair that had gone quite white through her sufferings. The Queen had another ring sent to the Princesse de Lamballe containing a lock of the altered hair with an inscription making the point that the change was due to unhappiness: “Blanchis par malheur.” The Princesse had fled in July, first to Brussels, then to Aix, finally to Spa where she resided as the Comtesse d’Amboisse. In fact Marie Antoinette’s hair had probably been turning white or at least grey for some time, with traces noted by Count Esterhazy as early as 1786.*88 Later the Queen would ascribe white hairs at her temples to “the trouble of 6 October,” although her foster-brother Joseph Weber thought that the death of the first Dauphin had whitened it.8 The colour, of course, was not visible when her hair was being dressed or when she wore a simple cap; pomade, powder and no doubt dye covered up a great deal.
Nevertheless Marie Antoinette had not lost her ability to please, even to fascinate, when it was urgent for her to do so. At the end of the year Quentin Craufurd, the protector of Fersen’s mistress and her supporter, paid the Queen a number of visits. He was impressed as so many others had been by her demeanour. “All her movements were graceful,” he wrote. As for her appearance, “The expression, so often used, ’full of charms,’ is that which suited her in all its exactitude, and best described her whole person.”9 It was a chivalrous reaction of the sort that Marie Antoinette was always able to evoke among those who had actually been in her presence. Among these was the Feuillant leader Antoine Barnave.
To reach Barnave, the Queen used an intermediary, the Chevalier François Régnier de Jarjayes, with whom she worked out a code of a fairly rudimentary nature. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s great romantic novel Paul et Virginie was to be used as a code with Fersen,*89 with both parties careful to use the same edition; with Jarjayes, however, it was a question of the alphabet and numbers, Barnave being 2:1 for the first two letters of his name, and Jarjayes 10 for J. Jarjayes, a man in his mid-forties, had like Barnave been born in Grenoble. His wife was one of the Queen’s waiting-women, an intimate who often slept in her room, and was—at least according to the Marquise de Tourzel who may have been jealous—preferred over Madame Campan. Jarjayes himself was a devoted servant of the royal cause and had already been employed on commissions to try to curb the ambitions of Artois when he was still in Turin.10
There had evidently been private conversations between the Queen and the handsome Barnave at the various stopping-places on the journey back from Varennes, in which Barnave, unlike Pétion, had shown “respectful delicacy.” Barnave had expressed his growing conviction that the Revolution as such must be brought to an end in favour of liberal reforms and conciliation. In short, constitutionalists were not at all the same animals as the republicans. In a letter of early July, the Queen expressed herself as having been “struck by his [Barnave’s] personality” during the two days they spent together and later she also referred to his “most animated and captivating eloquence” in a letter to her brother.11
Throughout the summer and autumn, the Queen was in constant communication with Barnave, although they did not in fact have any further private interviews until early October and then Alexandre de Lameth was present.*90 Naturally their association, once known, was given the usual lubricious spin. Le Bordel Patriotique, a pornographic play of 1791, had the Queen, Barnave, Bailly, La Fayette and the revolutionary known as la belle Liégoise, Théroigne de Mericourt, all involved in a chain of sexual acts. Count Fersen, more calmly, reported in his Journal intime: “They say the Queen is sleeping with Barnave.”13 The fact that these explicit charges were ludicrous did not mean that Barnave was not in some subtler way mesmerized by the Queen. And he saw himself as playing a crucial role, with her help, in persuading the King to accept the Constitution.
Barnave’s most significant letter was written on 25 July. In this he outlined a new and happier future for Marie Antoinette, still Queen of France but a far more beloved Queen than in the past. He told her that she had misunderstood the nature of the Revolution so far, not realizing that it could actually be helpful to her position. It was true that the Queen had been the object of widespread resentment, but with her courage and character she could overcome this. The candour with which the Queen had always expressed her convictions—convictions hostile to recent political developments—would now work to her advantage. If she openly supported the Constitution, she would be believed to be equally sincere.14
As August passed, Barnave, convinced that “the monarchical principle is profoundly and solidly rooted,” envisaged a new kind of constitutional court at the Tuileries. All evils would be at an end if the King and Queen managed to make themselves solidly loved—by implication leaving that tiresome incident of Varennes to be forgotten.
The King accepted the Constitution on 14 September. Publicly, he did so “according to the wish of the great majority of the nation.” Privately, like the Queen, he thought that it would prove unworkable and that he would benefit from the subsequent upheaval. As “King of the French”—with the Dauphin as the “Prince Royal”—he allowed himself to be turned into a constitutional monarch of limited powers, but not actually bereft of them. The King could choose ministers and although he could not declare war, the new Legislative Assembly, which replaced the previous Constituent Assembly on 1 October, could only go to war if the King asked them to do so. The King was also considered to have immunity for actions he might take as monarch—something that incidentally did not apply to other members of his family. An English visitor in the Tuileries gardens would witness two soldiers keeping their hats on in the presence of the Queen while singing disgusting songs, on the grounds that there was no mention of her in the Constitution: “She was owed no respect as the King’s wife.”15
At the ceremony there was no throne and a simple chair painted with fleur-de-lys was provided for the King; the deputies also kept their hats on as he spoke. It was witnessed by Marie Antoinette from a private box. Afterwards the King flung himself down in an armchair and wept at the humiliation to which he had been subjected—and to which he had subjected his wife: “Ah, Madame, why were you there? You have come into France to see—.” His words were interrupted by his sobs. The Queen put her arms round her husband as Madame Campan stood rooted to the spot. Finally the Queen ordered her: “Oh, go, go.” The fact was that it was the uncomfortable power that he did retain—that of veto over new laws—that was likely to cause real trouble in the future. The veto was voted in by a majority of 300 out of 1000 deputies. In the new Assembly, any measure personally odious to the King had either to be accepted or vetoed. So the King would face a choice of being unhappy or unpopular.
The celebrations for the new Constitution included a ballet, Psyche, in which the Furies’ torches lit up the theatre. Seeing the faces of the King and Queen in this glow of the underworld, Germaine de Staël, like the Duc de Choiseul at Varennes, was overwhelmed by presentiments of disaster. Yet the King and Queen graciously attended the fireworks in the Place Louis XV after the Constitution had been proclaimed at the Hôtel de Ville.*91 Virieu was much impressed by the “fairyland” created by the lights and there were even a few cries of “Long live the Queen.” The public reaction, however, was summed up by a slogan on a cobbler’s wall which made support for the monarch conditional: “Long live the King! If he is being honest.”17
In November, Barnave would praise the Queen for the “courage and constancy” she had shown in helping the constitutional process. He was unaware that privately his heroine regarded the new Constitution as “monstrous” and “a tissue of absurdities,” even if the King had no choice but to accept it. Since they had “no force or means of their own,” they could only temporize.18 Like the King, the Queen believed that the Constitution had only to be put in place for it to be proved unworkable. Marie Antoinette’s real desires for the future were focused in a very different direction.
It is clear from the Queen’s correspondence with Mercy that following Varennes, she pinned her hopes on her brother, the Emperor Leopold. Although reproaches have been flung at Marie Antoinette for deceiving Barnave, this is to see politics from the point of view of the politician, not the Queen. The constitutionalist Barnave was using the Queen to manoeuvre his own enemies. A captive, brought back to France like a trophy, Marie Antoinette was entitled to use any means at her disposal—and more than one—to try to secure her family’s safety. The Queen did not as yet want an armed rescue. She agreed with Louis, as she told Fersen, that “open force would bring incalculable danger for everybody, not only the King and his family but also all the French.”19 Still less did she want, with her husband, to be “in the tutelage of the King’s brothers.”
Provence’s successful escape introduced a fresh and extremely unwelcome complication into the situation since he was the next adult male in the line of succession. According to Mercy, Provence was already angling for the Regency when he passed through Brussels following his flight from Paris. There was a rumour that he had actually had himself declared Regent in August, on the grounds that the King was held under duress. This caused a frisson of horror at the Tuileries; even though the rumour was not actually true, it was a threat that would not go away. Marie Antoinette wrote explicitly of the harm it would cause. The Princes in the name of the Regent would give one set of orders and the Assembly another, so that the Princes would be seen to be in open opposition to the orders given in the name of the King. The Queen told the Russian Minister, Simolin, that the Princes would turn out to be far more demanding, far more counter-revolutionary than the King. In short, if the Princes were to be their liberators, “they would soon act as masters.”20
Coblenz in the Electorate of Trier, south of Cologne, was where the belligerent royal Princes came finally to rest, joining the Princes of the Blood. Its ruler the Elector-Archbishop Clement, being a brother of the late Dauphine Maria Josepha, was thus uncle to Provence and Artois (and Louis XVI). Coblenz became a hotbed of royalist claims, some of them wild, all of them embarrassing to the real King of France who was languishing in the Tuileries. When Marie Antoinette’s enemy Calonne arrived in Coblenz from his English exile, he too wanted the Regency claimed for Provence. In the meantime a mini-Versailles was created, with ostentatious deference to the Princes and even the royal bodyguards reinstated—this last to the intense anger of the King and Queen to whom these bodyguards, if they existed, rightfully belonged. The pleasure-loving aspect of the former court was resurrected too; there were gambling parties and dances until dawn, mainly centred around the Comte d’Artois, whom Fersen described as “always talking, never listening, sure of everything, speaking only of force, not of negotiations.”21
Of course, if Provence succeeded in his self-promotion as Regent, there was still the question of whom he was to be Regent for—Louis XVI or his son. The idea of a Regency centring on the Dauphin was also floated in France by those who felt that Louis XVI was too inadequate or too compromised to perform the task, yet who did not wish to throw away the monarchical principle altogether. Cries of “Long live our little King!” sometimes greeted Louis Charles as he took his exercise in the Tuileries gardens, an appealing figure, untainted by politics. What then of another possible candidate, the Duc d’Orléans, in the role of Regent? The flight of the Comte de Provence meant that Orléans was next in line of the adult males still inside France. But according to his son, Orléans had irrevocably decided to refuse the Regency; in any case his popularity had been much diminished by his lack of any positive action following the events of July 1789, and by 1791 it had waned still further.22
What Marie Antoinette had wanted in July was armed demonstrations of imperial power in their favour, which would, in effect, threaten the French and cause them to treat their monarch better, without incurring the hostility inevitably consequent upon an invasion. “The foreign powers,” she wrote privately in mid-August, “are the only ones that can save us.”23 What she got at the end of the month was a declaration made at Pillnitz in Saxony.
The Emperor joined with the King of Prussia to declare the fate of the French monarchy as being “of common interest” to the great powers, if their warnings about its ill treatment recently were not heeded. But for any concerted action to be taken, all the powers had to be in agreement. Although Artois, the Marquis de Bouillé and Calonne were present at Pillnitz, the declaration was in fact an extremely cautious document, intended to placate the Princes rather than spur them on further.
The Queen had a more positive scheme in mind. It was now, in her opinion, “up to the emperor to put an end to the troubles of the French Revolution,” since a French monarchy that was not under duress was needed in order to preserve the equilibrium in Europe. In order to achieve this, in an extremely long memorandum to Leopold, on 8 September, Marie Antoinette first mentioned the idea of an armed congress.24 This was essentially seen by her as a means of threatening the French into better behaviour towards their King rather than using outright force. The powers, who would gather at Aix or Cologne as part of this armed congress, would thus declare France to be a monarchy, hereditary in the male line of the reigning branch, with no regency envisaged unless declared by the King himself. The latter would have free powers of communication and among other details the tricolour, that “sign of troubles and seditions,” would be abandoned as the flag of France.
Marie Antoinette devoted her energies to the subject of the armed congress in her private correspondence in the ensuing months. She wrote prodigious quantities of letters, often in code, sometimes using lemon juice as invisible ink and sometimes other means, which went wrong when water would not resurrect the letters. She despatched these missives by any safe courier she could find. Marie Antoinette lobbied the Bourbon King of Spain and the King of Sweden; later she also tackled Queen Maria Louisa of Spain, referring hopefully to “the nobility of your character” as well as “the double link of blood” that joined them.*92 With these and many other efforts, “I hardly recognize myself,” she exclaimed at one point; was it really her speaking? To Fersen, Marie Antoinette confessed that she was “exhausted by her writings.” She also touchingly admitted how afraid she was of forgetting something or “saying something stupid.”25
The light-hearted, unintellectual, pleasure-loving young woman of yesteryear at Versailles had developed into a formidably hard worker. Maybe it is true that as the Queen wrote at one point: “It is in misfortune that you realize your true nature.” Or maybe it was “the blood that runs in my veins”—the blood of Maria Teresa, to which she made increasing reference—that was responding to pressure. A year earlier she had wept with her ladies: “How amazed my mother would be” if she could see her daughter in her present condition. Now she found inspiration in her memory. A third explanation is the most likely one: the Queen’s growing determination, alluded to earlier, to preserve the heritage of her son, in whose veins Maria Teresa’s blood also flowed: “I hope that one day he will show himself a worthy grandson.”26 Maternal ambition—or anguish—supplied the motive for the grinding work, to say nothing of the tricky diplomacy. “The only hope that remains to me is that my son can at least be happy,” said Marie Antoinette; it was her reiterated theme.
The trouble with the idea of the armed congress was that it was a fantasy; furthermore, it was a fantasy of the Queen in which no one else shared. Where the Emperor Leopold was concerned, Marie Antoinette might perhaps have recalled her own wry words to Barnave in July. “My influence over him is non-existent,” she wrote. “He has regard for the family name and that is all.” Although the Queen was commenting at the time on her inability to secure Austrian acknowledgement of the Constitution, she was in fact all too prescient. It was realpolitik that would sway the Emperor Leopold. The Queen might see the French Revolution as “an insurrection against all established governments,” but the Emperor was far more likely to take up arms in the cause of a predatory Austria against a weakened France than in an ideological cause in favour of monarchy. The Emperor did indeed raise serious objections to the idea of the congress in November, questioning which authority in France he would deal with, while Prince Kaunitz thought the whole notion was a waste of time, not so much a fantasy as “a chimera.” The Princes naturally detested a scheme that would have held them back. Even Louis XVI showed no enthusiasm for the armed congress. Marie Antoinette alone continued to term it “the only useful and advantageous course.”27
Throughout the autumn, as Marie Antoinette pleaded secretly for an armed congress, Barnave took immense trouble over the details of her new role as Queen. He predicted the return of “happy and serene” days for her if she took his advice. There was still to be panoply as befitted her royal position; for example, the Queen spent 1400 livres on a new court dress for the Feast of All Saints on the eve of her birthday, as she had always done. Louis XVI, said Barnave, was to wear the Cordon Rouge—the order of Saint-Louis—at the Assembly since it was a military order and soldiers would be pleased. One of Barnave’s preoccupations was the precise nature of the theatrical and operatic spectacles that the Queen attended. These were, after all, the traditional opportunities for public acclaim—and Barnave was enthusiastic for the Queen’s attendance, so long as no unfortunate choices were made.28
Attendance at Grétry’s Richard I in September, whose notorious song “O Richard! O mon roi!” had sparked off the riots of 6 October, was considered by Barnave to be a mistake. The Queen should send for the Director and make sure that nothing so tactless took place in the future. Far better was her appearance, with her children, at the Théâtre de la Nation (formerly the Comédie Française) in late November to see La Partie de Chasse de Henri IV, an occasion that marked the return of the celebrated actor Préville to the stage. There were further royal appearances in December. On all these occasions the Queen was regally dressed, as she would have been under the former regime, and was happy to sit in the most prominent box. Only that closet counter-revolutionary Madame Elisabeth grumbled in her private letters at the necessity of showing herself on such occasions. “My God! What fun!” she wrote sarcastically, although even the Princess had to admit, at some public applause the following year, that “the French had some charming moments.”29
The projected return of Mercy was part of Barnave’s intention that the Queen should actively encourage the émigrés to come back. Marie Antoinette, for her part, had never ceased to mourn his absence. Certainly Mercy in France would have acted as a more efficient liaison officer than the Queen’s sporadic courtiers. In late December, the Comte de Narbonne, an illegitimate son of Louis XV who had become active in attempts at diplomacy between the royal family and the Emperor, added his pleas for Mercy to come back to France. To be fair to Mercy, his health at the time was wretched. But in his refusal, he managed as ever to stress his material concerns, worrying, for example, about his property at Valenciennes (“The municipality still hasn’t sent me my four guns back”). If he did return, would his baggage be free of customs duties? That was essential. Mercy pointed out that he had just managed to extricate all his belongings from France, presumably with the exception of the guns, apart obviously from the house in Paris, which was still guarded by his Newfoundland dogs named Sultan, Castor, Castorine—and, presumably for his fierce temperament, Jacobin.*9330
Barnave had more luck in convincing the Queen to recall the Princesse de Lamballe, still titular Superintendent of her Household, who had fled after Varennes. A good deal of persuasion was needed, because for a while the Queen was deeply opposed to the idea. In September, for example, she wrote to her former favourite, who was ill near Aix, bewailing “the race of tigers” that had overwhelmed the kingdom and urging her to stay away from the country at all costs. Even though the acceptance of the Constitution, which had become necessary, would probably give some moments of relief from the tigers, the Queen still did not want the Princesse to fall into their cage: “Ah, don’t come my friend; come back as late as possible, your heart will be too disappointed, you will have too much to cry about with all our misfortunes, you who love me so tenderly.” Three days later she reiterated the prohibition: “No, once again, don’t come back, my dear heart; don’t throw yourself in the mouth of the tiger; I’ve already got too many worries with my husband and my poor little children.” Her son, her chou d’amour, was on her knees as she wrote and added his own signature: “by the hand of the little Dauphin. Louis.”32
Nevertheless, on 29 September, the Queen engaged with Barnave that the Princesse de Lamballe would return, as “a patriotic act and a pledge of her intentions.” A month later, in response to her mistress’s messages, the faithful Princesse left Aix, and was back in Paris, via a visit to the Duc de Penthièvre, by mid-November. Prudently, she made her will in advance, making provision for charity—the Hôtel Dieu—and also the care of her little dogs. The Princesse was given an apartment close to the Queen’s in the Tuileries. Although in certain quarters she was immediately accused of returning for “lesbian practices,” the Princesse de Lamballe actually resumed her ceremonial role at the Queen’s side just as Barnave wished. On a more informal level, as one dog lover to another, the Princesse brought a little red-and-white spaniel for Marie Antoinette, to cheer the Tuileries; originally called Thisbée, its name was later transmuted into the cosier Mignon.33
Much later the Marquise de Tourzel would make out that the Queen, in requesting the Princesse de Lamballe’s return, was doing her friend a favour; she enabled the Princesse to retain her position as Superintendent, which would otherwise have been terminated. It was true that the Queen dared not appoint a new household lest the old one be declared obsolete; as a result she suffered from lack of the ritual company of a court. With sublime ingratitude some of the grand ladies sulked at their perceived demotion under the new order, as, for example, the Duchesse de Duras who felt hardly used by the loss of her footstool. “Nobody comes to my card parties,” exclaimed the Queen bitterly. “The King goes solitarily to bed. No allowance is made for political necessity; we are punished for our misfortunes.”34 Nevertheless the Marquise de Tourzel’s interpretation cannot be reconciled with the total change in the Queen’s attitude; in September she gave emotional warnings and in October a summons. For better or for worse it was Marie Antoinette, following the precepts of Barnave, who was responsible for the return of the Princesse de Lamballe to France.
The visible loyalty of the Princesse de Lamballe, in the public eye, contrasted with that of the émigré Princes. Since members of the former Constitutional Assembly were debarred from the new Legislative Assembly, the latter was inevitably more radical. On 31 October, influenced by Brissot and his Girondins, the Assembly proposed a decree by which those émigrés who did not immediately quit all armed camps abroad were guilty of conspiracy. For themselves, they were sentenced to death and confiscation of their property; but the properties of members of the same family who had not left France were also to be confiscated. On the advice of Barnave, the King exercised his veto on the measure. He also vetoed a measure that criminalized those French men and women who had stayed in France, but continued to attend non-juror Masses.
In other ways, however, the King still temporized. On 1 January 1792 Louis XVI received a New Year’s deputation from the municipality of Paris; he did so with characteristic gaucheness, scarcely bothering to interrupt his game of billiards, and listening with apparent indifference to the various compliments bestowed. The Queen, on the other hand, having written her usual New Year’s letter to Princesse Louise on “the value of friends like you and yours” in misfortune, displayed herself in a new court dress of embroidered blue satin.35 She did so with a panache that Barnave would have approved, had the Feuillant triumvir not begun to be disillusioned with the Queen’s real intentions, just as the constitutionalist Feuillant party itself began to decline in power. Barnave retreated from Paris shortly after the New Year.
Nevertheless, on this day the King officially declared the émigré Princes to be traitors. And on 25 January a deputation from the Assembly brought a decree against the Emperor Leopold for Louis to sign. In another extremely long memorandum to her brother—“long for me who is not used to it”—the Queen attempted to justify the fact that he did so. It was essential, she wrote, for the King to be seen to be faithful to the Constitution, and thus link himself to the “national honour” that was being wounded by menaces and provocations from outside; only in this way could he rally the public confidence, which was gradually being stolen from him.36
Were there renewed plans for escape during this period? That would be a third strand to the Queen’s policy, added to her private playing along with Barnave and her secret promotion of the armed congress. It would seem so. Rumours of a fresh escape there certainly were, stories that the King had got out disguised as a woman, and so forth. Naturally after Varennes the Tuileries was riddled with spies doubling as servants. One guard, hearing such a rumour, gave an order on his own initiative for the royal family to be locked up for an entire day. Fersen, having visited Turin and Vienna—where he had a sentimental reunion with the Duchesse de Polignac—was back in Brussels. On 19 October 1791 the Queen had told him, “We have a project a little like that of June” for the middle of November and she promised to let him know more in about ten days’ time. Nothing further was heard of this scheme.
It was left to King Gustav of Sweden, inspired not only by Fersen but by the monarchical solidarity that the Emperor seemed to lack, to seek fresh ways to rescue the royal family in the spring of 1792. King Gustav and Fersen parted company, however, on how the escape should be achieved. The Swedish King thought his fellow monarch should go alone but Fersen pointed to the danger of leaving the Queen and Dauphin behind in France as hostages. With his family in their power, it would be only too easy for the French to work on the “feeble and irresolute” spirit of the King under such circumstances; alternatively they might well declare a Regency on behalf of the boy.37
For all the Queen’s earlier prohibitions, Fersen arrived back in France in February, wearing disguise and travelling on a false passport (he had been named among the guilty “abductors” of Varennes). The weather was so cold that Fersen could hear the wheels of the carriages crunching “as they do in Sweden.” He lurked in the attic of Eléanore Sullivan’s house, where he was discreetly passed food by his generous mistress, with Quentin Craufurd left in ignorance.38
Fersen returned to a France where “a general cry of war was being heard,” in the words of Marie Antoinette, and nobody had any doubts that war would soon take place. Brissot and the Girondins were beginning to regard a struggle against the counter-revolutionary forces abroad as a cleansing process or “a school of virtue.” It was Robespierre, the Jacobin, who made a far more cautious speech on the subject, pointing out how pleased the enemies of France would be if that country declared war, since it would provide them with a heaven-sent opportunity for their own aggression.39 The alliance of Austria and Prussia on 7 February—those hereditary enemies now joined by a common cause of territorial aggrandizement—justified the observation.
Fersen managed to get into the Tuileries, using a side door. He saw the Queen on 13 February. They had not met since that farewell in the darkness at the Bondy poste over six months earlier. Fersen spent the night there, or, in a notorious phrase, which a subsequent editor of his Journal intime tried unsuccessfully to eliminate, “Resté là.”40 Much has been made of this particular entry because the phrase was often used by Fersen to indicate spending the night with one of his numerous mistresses; this is the only occasion on which it has been found to apply to Marie Antoinette. It seems strange, however, to argue on the evidence of a solitary entry that this was the only time the Count and the Queen had sex. There may, after all, have been many other entries of “Resté là” that applied to “Elle,” as the Queen was known, which have not survived the late-nineteenth-century censor, Fersen’s great-nephew Baron Klinckowström.
Fersen and Marie Antoinette had first met nearly twenty years ago and had been close for at least twelve of them; both were approaching middle age by the standards of the time; the Tuileries, with its National Guard whose presence Fersen noted with alarm, was not the free and easy Petit Trianon. If they had not made love before, they were unlikely to start now. It has been argued here that the Queen and Fersen did have an affair starting in 1783, petering out into a purely romantic relationship. Perhaps, then, there was a nostalgic fling at the Tuileries—one rather hopes so—or perhaps the phrase for once meant just what it said: “Stayed there.”
Fersen needed primarily to see the King, which was a very different motive for his remaining within the Tuileries precincts overnight instead of risking another entry. On behalf of King Gustav he had to discuss the question of escape. But he got nowhere. It was not only the fact of continuing supervision but Louis XVI’s own scruples that stood in the way; he had by now promised to remain in France on numerous occasions and the King, wrote Fersen, is “an honourable man.” The most the King would do was agree to be guided through the forest by “smugglers” to meet light troops in the event of an invasion. It was on this occasion that Louis made the melancholy confidence to Fersen quoted earlier on the subject of 14 July 1789. He should have gone to Metz then, he said; he had his opportunity and it had never come again. (Varennes was somehow obliterated from his memory.) Fersen lingered in Paris for a while, still concealed at the house of Eléanore Sullivan, although the Queen imagined that he had already left for Spain. He finally departed on 21 February, taking with him the dog Odin of whom a sibling had in happier days been presented to the Queen of France.