Marie Antoinette (72 page)

For Marie Antoinette arrived in France at the age of fourteen a highly dependent character, marked by a happy childhood association with her sister Maria Carolina. She looked round for repositories for her tender feelings, finding them first in the Princesse de Lamballe, more importantly in Yolande de Polignac and her family and circle. Although Marie Antoinette replied to the question of the Polignacs being “gorged with gold” at her trial, by pointing out that they had become wealthy as a result of their
charges
or positions at court, that was to avoid the issue. It was she who had been instrumental in seeing that these
charges
and other emoluments were received. Whatever Yolande de Polignac’s devotion, her appointment as Governess to the Children of France must be included among the Queen’s mistakes. Pampered friends, whether King’s mistresses or Queen’s friends, never help the image of those who pamper them; Marie Antoinette, in the folly of her excessive patronage of the Polignacs, was no exception to this rule.

There was a further consequence to Louis XVI’s publicly known impotence, about which satirists happily made up their crude rhymes. It provided ammunition against the Queen for allegations of lovers—if not her husband, then someone must be gratifying her—although the Queen was thought by those who knew her to have a fundamentally chaste nature. Her predisposition for chivalrous older men, or flirtatious foreigners, or some combination of the two, when she first arrived in France gave way to a romantic passion for Fersen, the man of action so unlike her husband. Otherwise there are no plausible linkings with the name of Marie Antoinette, who was in the meantime pilloried as the pattern of wicked, lubricious women in history. As Marie Antoinette wrote with truth to Yolande de Polignac, she did not fear poison: “That does not belong to this century, it’s calumny which they use, a much surer means of killing your unhappy friend.” She was not the only one traduced in the eighteenth century, that age of
libellistes
and pornographic bestsellers; there were calumnies before and after her. But she was the one destroyed by the poison. A frequent charge made against “Antoinette” was that she bathed in the blood of the French people; the truth of it was, of course, exactly the other way round.

Once the marriage of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was consummated, it can hardly be described as a bad marriage, as royal marriages go. Maria Teresa, for example, would have been happy to have had a husband who pointedly refused the mistresses that the court thoughtfully provided for him—although she might have missed the sexual performance of her own husband, the womanizing Francis Stephen. Yet there was an awkward side effect to this abstinence, so unfashionable in a monarch, which in the case of Louis XVI was a reproach to the morals of his grandfather: “I do not wish to see the scenes of the previous reign renewed,” he once said. It meant not only that the post of royal mistress was vacant, with many concomitant job opportunities thus missed, but also that the perceived political influence of the Queen was undiluted. For the King’s distaste at the idea of a mistress, Marie Antoinette can hardly be blamed; yet somehow she was turned into the scapegoat of this upsetting of the natural order of things—as the French court saw it.

A scapegoat was in fact what Marie Antoinette became. Among other things, she would be blamed for the whole French Revolution, by those who optimistically looked to one “guilty” individual as a way of explaining the complex horrors of the past. This view is epitomized by Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in his autobiography that if the Queen had been shut up in a convent, the whole Revolution would never have happened, an astonishingly draconian way of brushing aside the desperate need for reform in French society and government. The use of an animal or bird, who has the ills of the community heaped upon it before being driven out, has a long history in civilizations around the world. The name derived from the goat of the early Jews, described in Leviticus, presented alive before the Lord “to make an atonement with Him” and then “let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.” But there were many similar procedures in other societies, some of them involving women or children, or disabled people, nearly all of them ending in some unpleasant ritual death for the “scapegoats,” who were stoned or hurled from a cliff, as a result of which the community was supposed to be purged of sins, or otherwise plague and pestilence.

Marie Antoinette was not driven out into the wilderness, stoned or hurled from a cliff; yet in a subtler way she was treated as a scapegoat, while her eventual fate, if less barbaric, was not much less cruel. Given that it is evidently a deep primitive urge to blame one individual when things go wrong, what better scapegoat to discover in a monarchy in crisis than a foreign princess? There she is, a subversive alien, in the bed of the head of state, her blood corrupting the dynasty . . . One only has to think of Henrietta Maria, French Catholic wife of Charles I in the years leading up to the English Civil War, or going forward to the nineteenth century the daughter of Queen Victoria, married to the Crown Prince of Germany, who was pilloried as “the Englishwoman.” In France, hatred that focused on Marie Antoinette, the Austrian woman, left many of the population free to continue to reverence the King himself. Gouverneur Morris, a visitor from the republican United States, observed how many Parisians felt a kind of grief when the King was executed, “such as for the untimely death of a beloved parent.”

Compared to this lurid picture of an evil, manipulative, foreign wife, the real substance of Marie Antoinette became as a mere shadow. Having looked without passion at the extraordinary journey that was her life, one is drawn to the conclusion that her weaknesses, although manifest, were of trivial worth in the balance of her misfortune. Ill-luck dogged her from her first moment in France, the unwanted and inadequate ambassadress from a great power, the rejected girl-wife, until the end, when she was the scapegoat for the monarchy’s failure. Let the Queen herself have the last word. “Oh my God,” she wrote in October 1790, “if we have committed faults, we have certainly expiated them.”

NOTES

Full bibliographical details of the works cited in short form will be found in the list of Sources.

AUTHOR’S NOTE
pp. xix–xxii

 1
    
Elon, p. 17.

CHAPTER 1: A SMALL ARCHDUCHESS
pp. 3–13

 1
    
Boutry, p. 19; Khevenhüller, III, p. 266. Marie Antoinette’s natal horoscope shows at first sight a strong and helpful influence in Venus, the planet of love; she was born with Cancer rising, and the Sun in Scorpio; Venus was joined to the Sun and Mercury, and the Moon was in the Venusian house of Libra. However, the position of Mars, close to her Ascendant in Cancer, was extremely badly aspected by Saturn and squared by the Moon. Information supplied by Julia Parker.

 2    Khevenhüller, III, p. 266.

 3
    
Amiguet, pp. 157–8; Arneth & Geffroy, III, p. 270; Hamann, p. 52.

 4
    
Weber, I, p. 2.

 5
    
Campan, I, p. 32; Grimm, III, p. 46.

 6
    
Khevenhüller, V, p. 108; IV, p. 49.

 7
    Gluck
, p. 10.

 8
    
Khevenhüller, III, p. 266.

 9
    
Wheatcroft, p. 201.

10
    
Crankshaw, p. 16.

11
    
Beales, p. 23.

12
    
Moffat, p. 190.

13
    
Crankshaw, p. 10.

14
    
Wangermann, p. 283.

15
    
Khevenhüller, IV, p. 7.

16
    
MacDonogh,
Frederick
, p. 156.

17
    
Bernier,
Louis
, pp. x, 181 & note; Younghusband, p. 7.

18
    
Gooch, p. 165.

CHAPTER 2: BORN TO OBEY
pp. 14–25

 1
    
Vuaflart I, p. xviii.

 2
    
Wormser, pp. 46, 52, 61, 154; Lever,
Marie-Antoinette
, p. 11.

 3
    
Dutens, II, p. 214.

 4
    
Klingensmith, p. 116; Armaille, p. 32.

 5
    
Arneth & Geffroy, I, p. 356.

 6
    
Beales, p. 34.

 7
    
Wangermann, p. 302.

 8
    
Beales, p. 34.

 9
    
Ribeiro,
Dress
, p. 133.

10
    
Bruce, p. 455.

11
    
Wraxall, I, p. 317.

12
    
Crankshaw, p. 164.

13
    
Beales,
Mozart
, p. 4; Khevenhüller, V, p. 108.

14
    
Khevenhüller, V, p. 131.

15
    
Deutsch, p. 17.

16
    
Deutsch, p. 19; Solomon, p. 41.

17
    
Anderson, I, p. 198 note 1; Campan, I, p. 38; Arneth & Geffroy, I, p. 433.

18
    
Guest, p. 67.

19
    
Vocelka, p. 113; Crankshaw, p. 250.

20
    
Campan, I, pp. 32–3; Arneth & Geffroy, I, p. 404; Girard, p. 35.

21
    
Khevenhüller, VII, p. 113.

22
    
Wachter, pp. 75–6.

23
    
MacDonogh,
Frederick
, p. 273; Khevenhüller, V, p. 6.

24
    
Corti, p. 25; Vigée Le Brun, p. 115.

25
    
Beales, pp. 80, 84; Wraxall, II, p. 389.

26
    
Khevenhüller,
Theater
, pp. 223–4; Landon, I, p. 406.

27
    Tourzel
, p. 81; Hamann, p. 72.

28
    
Wraxall, II, p. 36; Ribeiro,
Dress
, p. 72.

CHAPTER 3: GREATNESS
pp. 26–39

 1
    
Bearne, p. 43;
Lettres
, I, p. 27.

 2
    
Dutens, I, p. 201.

 3
    
Amiguet, pp. 90–2.

 4
    
Deutsch, p. 457; Chalon, p. 24.

 5
    
Khevenhüller, V, p. 6; Lamorlière, p. 243.

 6
    
Moffat, p. 277.

 7
    
Corti, p. 30.

 8
    
Amiguet, pp. 90–1; Boutry, p. 12 note 5.

 9
    
Boutry, p. 39; Roger King,
History of Dentistry
, Cambridge, UK, 1997, p. 12; Hamann, p. 25.

10
    
Oberkirch, p. 165.

11
    
Vuaflart I, p. 35; Lafont d’Aussonne, II, p. 164.

12
    
Younghusband, p. 198.

13
    
Campan, I, p. 79; Rand, “Love, Domesticity,” pp. 8–9; Younghusband, p. 129.

14
    
Campan, I, p. 79.

15
    
Acton, p. 128.

16
    Lettres
, I, p. 1.

17
    
Boutry, p. 21.

18
    
Younghusband, p. 131.

19
    
Arneth,
Marie Antoinette
, p. 13; Kenyon, p. 50; Stryiénski, p. 306.

20
    
Besenval, p. 461; Campan, I, p. 35 & note.

21
    
Weber, III, p. 247.

22
    
Stryiénski, p. 244; Girault de Coursac, pp. 45, 64; Nicolardot, p. 9.

23
    
Hezecques, p. 216; Girault de Coursac, pp. 105, 186; Nicolardot, pp. 15
et seq
.

24
    
Girault de Coursac, p. 109.

25
    
Stryiénski, p. 364; Lever,
Louis XVI
, p. 52.

26
    
Nolhac,
Versailles
, p. 225; AN, K, 1015 no. 53.

27
    
Boutry, p. 16.

28
    
Vuaflart I, pp. 18–19.

29
    
Boutry, p. 34.

30
    
Vuaflart I, p. 36.

31
    
Vuaflart I, pp. 35
et seq
.

32
    
Boutry, p. 37; Campan, I, p. 36.