Marie Antoinette (38 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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