Marie Antoinette (39 page)

Comparisons to fresh young nymphs were no longer likely to arise, but the Mother of France was not supposed to be a nymph. She was supposed to inspire reverence. It is clear from Louise Vigée Le Brun that much care was taken in order to project an image not far from that of a Holy Family. Louise herself was frequently inspired by Raphael. Her fellow painter David suggested that Louise should look at the Holy Families of the High Renaissance in the Louvre, especially that by Guilio Romano. When Louise—who was being paid the high price of 18,000 francs—asked David whether she would be accused of plagiarism, David replied robustly: “Do as Molière does. Take what you want, where you want.” He believed that the use of modern clothes, fashions and furniture would protect the artist from criticism.

For all the care taken, and for all the faithfulness of the resemblance, which the Comte d’Hezecques praised as he looked from Queen to portrait when it hung at Versailles, it was not a lucky picture. The youngest member of the group, the baby Sophie, died on 19 June 1787, a few weeks short of her first birthday. Her figure had to be painted out; the Dauphin’s finger pointing in the direction of the empty cradle was a sad memorial to his sister’s short life. The Queen—“greatly afflicted”—told Princesse Louise that the baby had never really grown or developed. This was confirmed by the autopsy, which was signed by the deputy Governess Madame de Mackau in the absence of the Duchesse de Polignac in England. It made pathetic reading, down to the details of three little teeth that the baby had been about to cut and which had been responsible for the five or six days of convulsions that ended her life.

When Madame Elisabeth was invited by the Queen to view the corpse of “my little angel,” she was struck by the pink and white appearance of the baby. Elisabeth added in her pious way that baby Sophie was quite happy now, having escaped all life’s perils, while her elder sister Marie Thérèse was left desolate “with an extraordinary sensibility for her age.” Now the tiny form lay in a salon at the Grand Trianon, under a gilded coronet and a velvet pall. The Queen’s foster-brother Joseph Weber tried to cheer her by saying that the baby had not even been weaned when she died, implying that the grief for one so young could not be very great. But he struck the wrong note. “Don’t forget that she would have been my friend,” replied the Queen, a reference to her daughters, who were “mine,” unlike their brothers who belonged to France, that sentiment first expressed at the birth of Marie Thérèse. Her tears continued to fall.

The Vigée Le Brun portrait was intended to be shown at the Salon of the Royal Academy at the end of August. In fact it needed to be withdrawn, as the Queen’s unpopularity was so great that demonstrations were feared; Lenoir, the Chief of Police, had to tell her not to appear in Paris. The empty frame was left. Some wag, alluding to the scornful new nickname for the Queen, pinned a note to it: “Behold the Deficit!”

It was yet another affliction for the Queen in this troubled time that Jeanne de Lamotte had managed to escape from the Salpêtrière prison a few days before the death of Sophie, probably with connivance. She reached England where she proceeded to pour forth ghosted publications which, however, she autographed personally in true celebrity-bestseller fashion. The worst of these concerned her “Sapphic” relationship with the Queen—“Ye Gods, what delights I experienced in that charming night!”—because the allegations chimed so happily with the popular notion of the Queen as viciously perverted, not simply immoral. The “affair” with Artois was one thing, but the sexual bouts with the Lamballe and the Polignac, all gleefully narrated with much circumstantial detail, were unnatural. Another aspect of these denigrations was the comparison of the Queen—“the monster escaped from Germany”—to the other notoriously evil or lascivious women in history. She was worse than Cleopatra, prouder than Agrippina, more lubricious than Messalina, more cruel than Catherine de’ Medici . . . This was the vicious misogynistical chant that would continue to Marie Antoinette’s death and beyond it.

In the meantime the “monster” struggled to support Brienne, to cope with the depression of the King and to come to terms with the death of one child, while the health of her elder son was ever present in her mind. Since the endorsement of Parlement could not be secured for the reforms, these were forcibly registered at the King’s
lit de justice
on 6 August, at which point Parlement itself was ordered by Brienne to go into exile at Troyes. At the end of August, Brienne was made Chief of the Council. When Castries and Ségur resigned over the decision not to intervene in the Dutch Republic, the Archbishop’s brother replaced Ségur as War Minister. Still the angry disputes continued. Parlement, discontented with its situation, did eventually vote a twentieth part of the money wanted. On 19 November another edict was issued by the King at a meeting termed a
séance
(session)
royale
in order to receive loans.

This led to further trouble. As Marie Antoinette confided to Joseph II, the King pronounced the simple words: “I ordain registration,” which had always sufficed to give the force of law to an edict at a
lit de justice
, when his cousin Philippe, now Duc d’Orléans, dared to issue a strong protest. The registration, he said, was illegal, since the votes had not been counted during the session; if, on the other hand, it was not a proper session but a
lit de justice
, they should all remain silent. The King was furious at this challenge and departed with his brothers, leaving the Duc d’Orléans to read out a protest that he had evidently written in advance.

The result was that the Duc was exiled to his château at Villars Cotterets, and two other colleagues, who had spoken “insultingly” in front of the King, were sent to prison. Marie Antoinette’s reporting of the whole matter to her brother was resigned: “I am upset that these repressive measures have had to be taken; but unhappily they have become necessary here.” She added perhaps the most significant phrase in her letter: that the King had also indicated that he would call a meeting of the Estates General in five years’ time, as a way of calming the whole situation down.

The turbulence in France was by no means ended by the King’s emollient words. During the next months, the battles over the registration of the edicts continued to rage, with provincial disturbances adding to the furore. A few months earlier, Arthur Young, the English agriculturalist who had returned for another tour of France in May 1788, got the impression from dinner parties in Paris that France was on the verge of “some great revolution.” But it was not at all clear what meaning was to be attached to that dangerous term. After all, it was easy—and rather enjoyable—for foreign nationals to predict insurrection in countries that they did not precisely understand. Marie Antoinette had told her English friend Lady Clermont in January 1784 that England was surely on the verge of a revolution and that “[Charles James] Fox will be King”; she had been inveigled into this belief by the nature of the English parliamentary system, with its vociferous opposition. In France at this time, such a theoretical revolution would envisage no more than a limitation on the King’s powers, especially his unpopular use of the
lit de justice
to register edicts. Along with the cries for an Estates General, demands for reform at this point were essentially coming from the nobility rather than the people.

Throughout the first half of 1788, the wrangles continued. Various expedients were considered—“great changes” in the words of Marie Antoinette on 24 April. These included a new body, a plenary court, which would register edicts, and the use of forty-seven provincial organizations, largely replacing the Parlements, which would allow the King to disseminate his commands throughout the country more easily. On 8 May members of the Parlement were summoned to Versailles to hear fresh edicts registered by the King at a
lit de justice
, and they were then told that they were suspended until this new order of administration had been brought into being. These so-called May Edicts, however, simply aroused further fierce disturbances while Brienne’s new measures were seen as despotic.

There was a melancholy subtext to all this political uproar in the physical agonies of the Dauphin Louis Joseph. By early 1788 it was accepted by those around him, other than his parents, that he could not live very long, and in certain realistic circles the prospect even came as a relief, given that the Duc de Normandie was so much healthier and livelier, in short, fitter to be King. Marie Antoinette gave her own description of Louis Joseph’s sufferings in a letter to Joseph II, now fully involved in a Balkan campaign against Turkey.

“My elder son has given me a great deal of anxiety,” she told her “dear brother” on 22 February in a letter whose frequent crossings-out bore witness to her agitation (her letters had generally much improved since her youth). “His body is twisted with one shoulder higher than the other and a back whose vertebrae are slightly out of line, and protruding. For some time he has had constant fevers and as a result is very thin and weak.” The Queen tried to comfort herself with the notion that the arrival of his second teeth was responsible; but since remedies were being sought to start the Dauphin growing again, it was obvious that the situation was far more serious than some natural childhood process. The symptoms that the Queen described to her brother were in fact those of tuberculosis of the spine, not only the constant fevers and weakness by the angular curvature produced by the gradual crumbling of the vertebrae, the deformity worsening as the pressure on the spinal column increased.

Nevertheless, hopes were now pinned to a period of convalescence by Louis Joseph at the château of Meudon, the official residence of the Dauphin of France but hardly used as such since the death of Louis XIV’s son, the Grand Dauphin. Not too far from Versailles, or the other royal residences such as Fontainebleau and Compiègne, Meudon was on a high plateau and said to have the most beautiful view in Europe. Its air was considered to be specially therapeutic ever since Louis XVI had convalesced there as a child. Contemplating the robust physical specimen that the King had turned out to be made everyone feel better about the prospects of his infinitely fragile son. Meudon’s park had been virtually abandoned, but its neglected state ensured some privacy for the little boy, which he would not have had at Versailles or Saint Cloud. Instant refurbishment was now carried out, including tapestries to make his bedroom more “comfortable,” a large yellow damask bed for his tutor, the Duc d’Harcourt, and a crimson damask one for the Duchesse.

So, on 2 March, the Dauphin, still feverish, made the journey to Meudon. For a while he did feel slightly better and more cheerful too. But by June the Marquis de Bombelles found him a pitiable sight, with his horribly curved spine and his emaciated body; he would have wept in his presence if he had dared. The wretched boy was beginning to be ashamed of being seen, while the various doctors disagreed about his treatment. In June, the Queen—“Mrs. B”—was described as “amazingly out of spirits” by the Duke of Dorset. In July she gave another bulletin to the Emperor: her son had “alternating bouts of being better and being worse.” This meant that she could never quite give up hope, nor ever quite count on Louis Joseph’s recovery.

It was an analysis that also fitted the political situation in France. In some ways the outward life of the court went on seemingly unchanged. Old rituals died hard. On the eve of Lent there was a
bal d’enfants
, that charming juvenile counterpoint to the
bal des vieux
. A fine banquet was given for Mesdames Tantes at the Petit Trianon. About the time of the May Edicts, the official baptism took place of the two teenage Princes of the house of Orléans, Louis Philippe Duc de Chartres and Antoine Duc de Montpensier. Relations with their father had never improved since his conduct at Ouessant in 1778 and subsequent political intrigues. The Duc d’Orléans had not hesitated to align himself with the Queen’s enemies over the Diamond Necklace Affair. Yet the King and Queen acted as godparents to the boys and despite the need for royal economies, gave them the traditional bejewelled gifts. In the same way the Duc d’Orléans still dreamed of marrying the Duc de Chartres to Madame Royale, and his daughter Mademoiselle d’Orléans to the Duc d’Angoulême, as though nothing had happened to interrupt the family-oriented matrimonial policy of the French royals.

Finally, on 5 July 1788, at the height of the unrest of the nobility, the King made a preliminary declaration concerning the meeting of the Estates General that had been so long sought. This declaration invited suggestions as to the composition of the body, taking into account the changes in French society since 1614. It was made clear that increased representation of the Third Estate was the issue; Brienne’s intention, in short, was to weaken the power of the nobility by strengthening that of the commoners—that is, the bourgeoisie—the Third Estate being seen as the royal ally. It was on this optimistic note that discussions concerning the Estates General were initiated. As the Queen told her brother, what with “your war that threatens Europe” and “our domestic troubles,” it had not been a good year. She concluded her letter: “God willing, the next year will be better!”