Becoming Marie Antoinette (7 page)

Just before the procession was to begin I hopped into my sleigh and drew the fur rug over my knees. The air, biting and brisk, smelled clean and fresh; a sharp inhalation stung my nostrils. As my team of four perfectly matched white horses drew near the balcony, I waved jubilantly to the distinguished onlookers, my passion for the gently falling snowflakes clearly written in my flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes. When Papa was alive, during the winters that were too mild for the snow to remain on the ground in Vienna for any length of time he would dispatch a small army of servants to transport it from the mountains to the Hofburg in heavy sledges, all in the name of indulging his children—and especially me, his favorite daughter—in our most beloved pastimes.

I raised my hand to my brow to shield my eyes. High above me, silhouetted in the sun, Maman stood near the balustrade as majestic as a statue. She was bundled in velvet and furs, her plump hands shoved inside an enormous ermine muff. The only indication she gave of not being impervious to the cold were the two bright spots of pink upon her cheeks. Another buried memory bubbled to the surface—the childhood certainty that my mother was the most powerful person in the world, so formidable that I genuinely believed God had given her permission to control the weather.

The poor marquis, who undoubtedly had never planned to spend the better part of the day out of doors observing a winter carnival, was shivering in his formal court costume, clutching his bright red cloak about his shoulders as though it were a flannel blanket. His thin lips had a bluish cast and he kept dabbing at his nose with his lace-edged handkerchief. His precious violet water was no match for a Vienna winter.

In my mother’s words, I was “a vision in white” that afternoon, from my fur hat to my white leather boots. My sleighing costume was not only trimmed with marten and embellished with diamonds, but the jacket and skirt were profusely embroidered with silver thread. Maman had taken every precaution; in case I failed to scintillate, my garments would sparkle for me. By now I had grown a bit more astute about the intricacies of diplomacy and was aware that she had staged the entire procession on my account.

As my swan-shaped sleigh slowly glided below the balustrade, the bells on the horses’ harnesses hushed to a faint rhythmic jingle. The four white mares tossed their heads as if to shake the snowflakes from their manes and I waved gaily to Maman and the ambassador, giving them my brightest smile. And then, in the stillness of the moment, I saw my mother gently nudge the marquis and utter (none too discreetly, as her voice carried in the nippy air), “The little wife.”

Maman had the tenacity of a terrier. Not two days later she informed Durfort that she possessed portraits of every member of the French royal family. They had been a gift from my brother Joseph’s first wife, the beauteous Isabella. My mother’s announcement hung upon the air. I stole a glance at the ambassador, whose mouth twitched as if he had trapped a bee inside it and daren’t swallow. The sun-shaped pendulum swung inexorably to and fro, the passing seconds audibly ticking by.

“I am certain that His Most Christian Majesty would enjoy the honor of owning likenesses of the entire imperial family as well,” said the marquis, finally finding his tongue. Pretending to be overwhelmed by the compliment, Maman smiled benevolently, her eyes moist with happiness. Surely no finer actress trod the boards at the Burgtheater!

“Well, then, my brother’s wish is my fondest command,” she
replied, referring to the French king as if they were siblings—the manner employed by all monarchs to address each other. “I will place a portraitist at his disposal. Or perhaps, monsieur le marquis, your sovereign would like to select the painter himself,” she added, the consummate diplomat herself. Turning to address me, she said in a manner at once formidable and maternal, “You would like to sit for your portrait for the king of France, would you not? After all, you were but seven years old the last time you were immortalized in oils.”

They might have thought I was merely a silly girl, interested in nothing but flowers, dolls, and butterflies; but now that I was twelve, I was extremely conscious of being not quite a child and not yet a woman either. And just because, as an archduchess of Austria, I had been schooled to hold my head high no matter the circumstances, I was not impervious to the barbs of the backstairs gossips. I overheard their titters and whispers. I would not amount to much after all, they said; I would not fulfill Maman’s grand ambitions. Everyone from the ministers to the chambermaids seemed to know that Générale Krottendorf had not yet paid her first visit. And there were some in Maman’s government, my brother Joseph among them, who feared that she was wasting her energy, focusing too much attention on the political alliance with France at the expense of other, more immediate concerns.

One morning, she summoned Charlotte and me to the Rosenzimmer. Many paintings of the imperial family, executed by the court painter Martin van Meytens, graced the walls of our various palaces—the massive Hofburg with its thousands of rooms, Laxenburg (which had been my late papa’s favorite because it was comparatively cozy and small), and Maman’s beloved Schönbrunn. When I was seven, Herr van Meytens had painted me in a dress of pale pink satin with a rose in my hands. I remembered him as a very jolly man who perspired a lot. He made me laugh
when he would remove his gray wig, blotting the sweat from his glistening bald head with the same smelly rag he used to clean his brushes.

But it was not our own court painter who was to render our likenesses in oils. The footmen opened the paneled doors of the Rosenzimmer to admit two gentlemen. One of them, dressed in a manner even more elaborate than that of the marquis de Durfort, was very kind looking with an open face and eyes that sparkled with intelligence. The style in which he wore his reddish hair, curled and powdered and tied with a broad black ribbon, did nothing to conceal his receding hairline. The gentleman’s companion was by comparison quite coarse looking, although I could see that his fawn-colored frock coat, or
le frac
as the garment was nicknamed, was exceptionally well tailored.

Maman introduced the visitors. The gentleman with the pleasant countenance and wide smile was the duc de Choiseul, a special envoy from Louis XV. She informed me that it was the duc, in his capacity as France’s Foreign Minister, who had conceived the plan to marry me to their dauphin. Maman greeted him with tremendous, almost giddy effusion. Gone, at least for the moment, was the melancholia that had characterized her demeanor since the death of my father and which had been exacerbated by her bout with the pox. Her glumness had been replaced with a glow that made her appear far younger than her fifty years. I’d seen that flushed expression before; it was a look of conquest.

The other man, Joseph Ducreux, was the portrait painter. He looked quite common, with a large flat nose that seemed as though it had been pressed with a great degree of force into his very red face. He bowed to us, of course, because of the difference in our stations. Maman had always taught us to be polite to people from every stratum of society; the implication of the lesson was that such gentility was reciprocated, but one could plainly see
from Monsieur Ducreux’s supercilious expression that he would have preferred not to acknowledge us with so much deference. Consequently, I saw no reason to impress him.

I was dressed in a rich shade of blue that mimicked the color of my eyes; Charlotte was in salmon pink with ivory bows at the elbows, intended to draw attention to her best feature—her pale and lovely forearms. At Maman’s request we stood like Meissen figurines in the center of the parquet and permitted Monsieur Ducreux to inspect us, which he did by circling us several times, first clockwise, then counterclockwise. Then he stepped farther away as he held up his hands to form a frame. Finally, he moved uncomfortably close, peering into our eyes through the window made by his fingers.

The duc de Choiseul stood beside Maman, looking rather grand, except when he inserted his monocle and I realized he was studying me as well. I felt like one of the fantastical animals that Papa used to have in the imperial menagerie. A sultan had once sent my father a camel! It joined the colorful, and exceedingly voluble, parrots; the tawny puma; the furry red monkeys with their hairless derrières, which it gave them great pleasure to display to anyone who would pay them the slightest mind; and the baby rhinoceros that had arrived by boat up the Danube River.

Charlotte and I were holding hands. Our long kid gloves fit so snugly that we could feel the heat emanating from each other’s palms. The portraitist glanced at Maman and she told us to separate.

“They are not twins; their individual personalities must shine through the canvas,” said Monsieur Ducreux. “I do not paint empty dresses. I paint souls.”

I winked at Charlotte and she shrugged, having less use for this man than I. When the painter turned his back to us to address Maman, I mimicked his vanity. “I do not paint empty dresses,” I
mouthed, sticking my nose in the air. Then I tugged at my bodice and made a pretense of peering down the front. Referring to the nonexistence of my bosom, I whispered to my sister, “I
am
an empty dress!”

“Which of them do you wish me to paint, Your Imperial Majesty?” the painter asked Maman.

“Why, both of them,” she replied smoothly.

The portraitist looked somewhat confused. “I was sent here to paint the future dauphine of France. Monsieur le dauphin can marry only one of them.”

What arrogance! He should have known better than to confront the Empress of Austria. “That’s none of your affair,” snapped Maman. “Antonia,” she added, gesturing toward me, “is to wed the dauphin. And since you are determined to paint their souls, that one”—she said, indicating Charlotte—“is the pragmatic one. Carolina has a good head on those pale white shoulders and will soon make an exceptional queen. The little one,” she added, meaning me, of course, “has a beautiful soul but she never settles on something for more than a moment. One could sooner teach a butterfly to fly in a straight line.” Maman did not mince words; she never did. She sank imperiously into a chair. “Antonia, monsieur, is the giddy one.”

At this, Monsieur Ducreux began to inspect me even more closely. He stepped back for a different assessment and, making a little
hmph
-ing noise, shook his head. He stepped forward and shook his head more emphatically as he muttered something to himself. Then he asked me to smile, at which point, accompanied by an insistent “
Non, non, non, non, non
,” he wagged his head to and fro so vigorously that it seemed ready to fall off his shoulders.

The painter strode briskly toward the duc de Choiseul and whispered something in his ear. The duc frowned, and in a voice too soft for me to hear, repeated it to Maman. She gestured for
him to sit beside her. With tremendous elegance, he lowered himself into a capacious armchair of gilded fruitwood upholstered with an allegorical petit point. The pair of them began to converse in low tones with their heads bent toward each other, a tableau broken only by the occasional concerned glance in my direction. I was not sure what was expected of me, other than not to fidget, so every time they regarded me, I made sure to smile, both broadly and sweetly, as though marriage with the dauphin of France was the primary reason I drew breath.

“Of course,” Maman said, after a lengthy sotto voce exchange with the diplomat, during which the only word I could make out was
dommage
—a pity. She did not look at me again. “Absolutely. We assure you we will do whatever it takes.” And then, addressing Monsieur Ducreux, she said, “You will begin with the archduchess Maria Carolina’s portrait. The archduchess Maria Antonia, it appears, is not yet fit to be immortalized.”

According to Monsieur Ducreux’s appraisal—and his opinions were (with a regretful countenance) supported wholeheartedly by the duc de Choiseul—I was not the beauty Maman thought me to be. The French had decided to delay their formal request for my hand until Austria could assure them that I was the embodiment of loveliness and fecundity. Given the immaturity of my twelve-year-old body, the latter would be difficult to express in the portrait that Louis Quinze had commissioned. Even with a fashionable ladder of plump bows adorning my stomacher, my chest would never convey the illusion of womanly pulchritude. But what had truly thrown Monsieur Ducreux into such a flurry of anxiety was my general appearance from the neck up. To keep my spirits from plummeting, I allowed myself to take comfort in the knowledge that he considered my neck itself regal and swanlike.

“But something must be done with her hair,” the duc said to my mother. “Have you not noticed that the archduchess has
patches near her hairline that are nearly as bald as a peeled onion?”

Maman appeared taken by surprise. She beckoned me to approach. “Lean over, Antonia.” She inspected my hairline and scalp, poking with her fingers as though she were looking for lice. “It’s this,” she said finally, tugging off the gray woolen band that the Countess von Brandeiss employed to keep my hair off my forehead. “This silly rag is pulling her hair out at the roots.” To me, she added, “
Liebchen
, we shall have to find a more suitable way to keep your curls tidy and presentable.”

The duc de Choiseul cleared his throat. “The hairline itself is a problem, Your Imperial Majesty. A high forehead is,
certainement
, a mark of distinction. But,” he added, touching his own brow, “if you were to draw horizontal lines across your daughter’s face, it would immediately be apparent that considerably more than a third of the child’s physiognomy is taken up by her forehead. And for the French taste, the archduchess’s
front
is somewhat
too
prominent. It is, as we say in France,
trop bombé.
”

Maman gave him a quizzical look. “And how do you propose to remedy the problem? We cannot very well change her head,” she added imperiously. And yet behind her large blue eyes I detected a look of anxious uncertainty, as if she
would
change my head if such a thing were possible and if it would mean a formal commitment from France.