Becoming Marie Antoinette (4 page)

Fortunately I was not immediately packed off to Paris, or wherever Versailles was, to marry the grandson of Louis the Fifteenth. I had believed that the French ambassador, the marquis de Durfort, had come to take me away that very day, but as the days turned to weeks and the weeks became months I discovered that he had only come to
talk
to Maman. Talking, evidently, was what ambassadors did. They ate prodigiously, too. And received a lot of gifts. At least the marquis did so, because he never turned down Maman’s invitations to dine nor declined a single present from her. There were so many I lost count: a lapdog that shed its silky hair all over Monsieur’s velvet breeches; a trained monkey who had evidently learned how to relieve himself in a gentleman’s chapeau; a gilt snuffbox bearing my portrait in enamel; an ebony walking stick with the head of a lion carved in solid gold; and a pair of shoe buckles with a matching stickpin studded with diamonds.

The French ambassador was still at court when we celebrated my eleventh birthday on November 2, 1766, and—on behalf of the dauphin, he said—he gave me a brooch in the shape of a butterfly. “
Un papillon bleu
,” he added with condescension, as if I couldn’t tell. It was covered with tiny coruscating sapphires, which he very diplomatically said reminded him of my twinkling, indigo blue eyes. The butterfly’s eyes had been fashioned from a pair of diamonds.
Les diamants
. More words to learn. I thought it would please the marquis if I improved my acquaintance with the French language. French was the formal language of our court, too, but because so many people from all over the world lived in Vienna, it was not unusual to hear both French and German, and even something else, spoken within the same conversation. It wasn’t quite so difficult to master when I was speaking, but to write in French without mixing anything was absolutely beastly, for I had never learned the rudiments of grammar in any language.

Meanwhile, Maman treated the marquis as though he were a prince. In the middle of the winter she offered him a pineapple. This was considerably more than a mere gesture of hospitality, as the fruit had to come from a place called the Indies, all the way on the other side of the globe. My little brother Maxl had worried that on their return the sailors might have had to do battle with fearsome, scaly sea monsters, but I chided him for thinking so. Hadn’t Maman taught us that there was no such thing as ghosts or goblins or demons? There was no room for superstitious silliness among the Hapsburgs; we were not dwellers in the Dark Ages, but children of the eighteenth century—the Age of Reason.

I had been too naïve to realize that Maman’s flattery of the French ambassador, the gifts and the grand gestures, were on my account. It was not until the spring of 1767 that I received my first lessons in the art of diplomacy from two of my older sisters, Charlotte and Maria Josepha. The three of us were enjoying a
fête
champêtre
on one of the manicured grass
tapis
, or carpets, in the gardens of Schönbrunn. Madame von Brandeiss had insisted that we take as much healthful air as possible because a smallpox epidemic had infected the palace. Maman had fallen ill, which utterly terrified us—we had all thought her invincible and, being fatherless now, could not imagine ourselves without her. It had been painful enough to lose Papa so suddenly when I was only nine; my grief then had been so profound that I thought I should never smile again. But in her illness Maman would not countenance any tears, and demanded rather adamantly that none of us dwell on the state of her health, insisting that it would please her more if we went about our days with dry eyes and our thoughts fixed firmly on the future. The fate of the empire, she reminded us, rested on the shoulders of her children.

At present, Josepha and I bore a significant portion of this burden in the shape of her upcoming wedding to the king of Naples and my impending nuptials with the dauphin of France. Every day at Mass we prayed for Maman’s swift recuperation while our eldest brother, Joseph, who had ruled alongside Maman ever since Papa died, saw to the business of empire. With what little I understood of politics at the time, I surmised that if it were up to her and not to God, Maman would recover from smallpox if only to forestall Joseph’s progressive reforms from coming to fruition.

“Maman must maintain good relations with the French,” Josepha told me, plucking the stem from a strawberry. Mindful of my youth as well as my general ignorance of world affairs, she explained that we’d recently concluded a lengthy military conflict called the Seven Years’ War, and that France had not been entirely happy with Austria after the fighting ended.

“Why?” I asked. “Did we lose?”

Thoughtfully sucking on the sweet red berry, Josepha admitted
that she wasn’t exactly sure. Charlotte nibbled on her bread and cheese as if she were a little mouse. “Everything is about politics,” she announced, more interested in the conversation than the repast. I would have laughed at her, but she displayed an innate aptitude for governing that belied her years. “Even our lives are about politics. Especially
our
lives,” she added, flicking her hand to chase away a hovering horsefly. Then she batted away an equally pesky footman and availed herself of a slice of cold ham. “Think about the family motto: Others wage wars to succeed, but you, fortunate Hapsburg, marry!” Having altered it slightly to reflect our situation, Charlotte chuckled to herself. “Sometimes I think Maman had so many daughters because she has so many enemies! Austrian archduchesses are meant to marry well and create alliances with other kingdoms so that our borders can be safe.” She mentioned two rulers who were Austria’s biggest threats: Frederick of Prussia (whom Maman referred to as “the Devil”) and Catherine of Russia. According to Charlotte, these “Greats” were intent on pecking away at our empire the way chickens gobble feed.

“Do you think I will ever become ‘Antonia the Great’?” I asked, sticking my nose in the air with mock grandeur.

“Not if you marry the dauphin of France,” Charlotte replied.

Josepha agreed. “Unlike Austria, the kingdom of France is bound by Salic law—which means that only a male heir can rule. The duty of a French queen is to make heirs by becoming
enceinte
as many times as possible. The more boys you produce, the more your subjects will love you. You’ll be lucky enough to be known as ‘Antonia the Great with Child.’ ” She began to laugh so hard at her own witticism that she gave herself the hiccups. Her lemonade trickled down the cascading bows that adorned her violet satin bodice like a mountain spring tumbling over a rill.

Unamused by any joke made at my expense—Josepha’s
ruined stomacher served her right—I tugged off a crust of bread and tossed it to a little bird who had been eyeing our meal, insisting that I was very glad not to have been sent off to Versailles yet; although I admitted some confusion as to the delay. It beggared belief that the marquis de Durfort was lingering in Austria simply to partake of all the lavish banquets Maman invited him to. Surely there was good food in France. Didn’t they get pineapples from the Indies, too? Did they have no lemon ice? My naïve questions only sent my sisters into renewed gales of laughter.

“You know how much I despise it when you and Josepha speak to each other in riddles I can’t solve,” I announced petulantly. I rose to my feet and flounced away, pretending to be more interested in one of the rose trellises than in anything my sisters had to say. The buds were just coming into bloom. I used my fingernails to remove a pale pink one, snipped off the thorns in the same manner, and worked the short stem into my hair.

“Come back here!” Charlotte shouted. “Please don’t be snappish, Toinette!” I turned on my heels and slowly sashayed toward them, enjoying the heft of my swaying skirts, my hips made manifest only by the grace of a pair of panniers. My sisters shared a significant glance. “All right, we’ll explain it to you. You can’t get married until you are half a woman,” Charlotte said sagely, brushing a crumb from the corner of her mouth. It landed on her lap; with her thumb and forefinger she deftly flicked it off her striped silk skirt. “Maman and the French ambassador are stalling for time because Générale Krottendorf has not arrived.”

I was dumbfounded. Générale Krottendorf—the wife of Général Krottendorf, of course—was a friend of Maman’s who used to visit us regularly. “But why would she have anything to do with my marriage plans?” I asked.

Charlotte and Josepha exchanged another conspiratorial look.

“What?” It irked me when they knew something I didn’t and
then lorded it over me with the peculiar brand of superiority they assumed as an elder sister’s prerogative. I picked at a strawberry stem and fixed a resolute gaze on the yellow damask tablecloth that served as our picnic blanket. A tiny red ladybird with five black spots on her back crawled across my skirts, like a living cabochon ruby. I tried to remember whether it was good luck or ill to see one.
Fly away home! Your house is on fire and your children are all gone
. What a terrible thing to recite to such a small defenseless creature.

Josepha daintily wiped her fingers on a linen cloth, staining it crimson. Unlike me, or Charlotte, Josepha never soiled her gowns or scuffed her slippers. Her lightly powdered ash blond hair never came undone from her coiffure. She never scrabbled in the dirt to bury a butterfly or romped with a mud-spattered pug-dog. The tension in her embroidery stitches was always perfectly even. And she was invariably the first to take pity on my ignorance. “Générale Krottendorf,” she informed me with all the sagacity of the royal physician, “is the nickname Maman gives to our monthly flow—which should arrive with as much punctuality as the real générale!”

“When the générale makes her first visit, you are half a woman. And you become
fully
a woman on your wedding night!” Charlotte added.

“I wouldn’t even know what to do on my wedding night,” I replied. The liveried footmen, maintaining a discreet distance from the three of us, pretended not to hear, but one of them smiled and then quickly covered his mouth with his gloved hand. The musicians began to play a little louder. Even in our pastoral repose, privacy was merely an illusion.

Josepha blushed delicately. “They say it just comes naturally. But I wonder if
I’ll
know. I wonder if Ferdinand will like me,” she added reflectively, referring to King Ferdinand of the Two
Sicilies, one of the sons of the king of Spain. She and Ferdinand were to be married in Naples at the end of the year.

It was a cruel fate. Charlotte and I had overheard the most unpleasant descriptions of Ferdinand’s character; and Maman herself had said terrible things about him. The king was only sixteen, the same age as Josepha, but according to the Austrian ambassador to Naples, he was little more than an uncouth boy with brown hair, beady eyes, and a bulbous nose—a youth who liked to play horrid tricks on people and who invited ambassadors to keep him company while he sat on the commode. I can’t explain it, but what fascinated me most about this behavior was that his palace had a commode! We considered ourselves a far more elegant and sophisticated court, superior in every way to the boisterous Neapolitans, and yet we didn’t have a commode at any of our palaces. Maman’s attitude was that if porcelain chamber pots were adequate for her ancestors, they would do just as nicely for us. And with 2,500 servants in the Hofburg alone, there was no shortage of people to empty them.

It would only have made Josepha feel worse about leaving us to wed this loutish king if we told her all the awful things we knew about him. Charlotte was quite sure that if Ferdinand had been a peasant instead of being born into the Spanish branch of the Bourbons, our mother would not have considered him good enough to be a stable groom, let alone a bridegroom for Josepha, with her delicate features, pale complexion, and complaisant demeanor.

I concluded that our eldest brother, Joseph, must have known what to do on his wedding night with Maria Josepha of Bavaria, because he was already a widower with two little girls. Joseph had adored their mother, his first wife, Isabella of Parma. Isabella was a granddaughter of Louis XV of France (which, I realized, would have made her a cousin to my future husband, the
dauphin). She was the prettiest woman I had ever seen; and like our mother, Joseph had been lucky enough to have married for love.

If Isabella had lived long enough, I would have asked her about Louis Auguste and whether we would please each other. Would I like him? Perhaps even more important, would he like me? But Isabella had died of smallpox in 1763, four years before I found myself desperately needing such answers.

Joseph had remarried only because Maman insisted that it was his dynastic responsibility to do so—which is how it came to pass that he wedded a woman named Maria Josepha. At first I found it terribly disconcerting that two people in our enormous family now had the same name. But in truth most of Europe’s royalty were in some way interrelated and most of us likewise bore a combination of family and saints’ names. After Joseph’s second marriage, we Hapsburgs privately called my sister “Pretty Josepha” while our new sister-in-law, from the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach, was “Homely Josepha.”

I felt sorry for Homely Josepha because my brother never loved her. She was rather short and plump and had ugly teeth. I could not say whether that was the reason she rarely smiled, or if it was because she was miserable in Vienna. I heard the servants gossiping soon after they were married that Joseph had refused to share her bed despite Maman’s philosophy that it was healthy for the marriage when a man and wife slept in the same chamber every night. Even
I
knew that he had ordered a partition to be constructed on their shared balcony at Schönbrunn so that he didn’t have to see her.

Two years ago, after our father’s death, Maman had asked Joseph to formally share the imperial duties with her—which of course meant that, as his wife, Homely Josepha would officially be known as the Empress consort of Austria. Yet no one ever
thought of her that way. Maman was still the empress and no woman could rival her power or her formidability. In fact, no one ever thought of Homely Josepha at all.