Marie Antoinette (95 page)

^*34
But a peculiarly symbolic one, given that the staple food of the French peasantry and the working class was bread, absorbing 50 per cent of their income, as opposed to 5 per cent spent on fuel; the whole topic of bread was therefore the result of obsessional national interest.
³²
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^*35
She did in fact give birth to a daughter on 5 August 1776, one year after the birth of the Duc d’Angoulême.
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^*36
Lauzun’s own memoirs were written many years later, probably by others using his own manuscript; they were generally regarded as untruthful by contemporaries. He has Marie Antoinette (among many other eager women) throwing herself at him in a novelettish scene in which he breathes, “You are my Queen . . .” and “her eyes seemed to be asking me to give her yet another title; I was tempted to enjoy the good fortune which appeared to be offered to me.” However, even Lauzun admits that he then drew back.
⁸
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^*37
Subsequently Marquis of Huntly, this spirited Scottish nobleman was still able to dance the quadrille when he was seventy and he died in 1853 at the age of ninety-one. As a result of his prowess, he could boast of dancing with Marie Antoinette, Princess Charlotte, the daughter of George IV, and Queen Victoria.
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^*38
“This country” was how Marie Antoinette always referred to France in her correspondence with her family.
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^*39
Earrings were chosen to draw attention to the much-praised long neck, and bracelets for the beautiful hands; according to her portraits and accounts, the Queen did not care particularly for necklaces.
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^*40
Many of the trees whose planting was inspired by the Queen were felled in the terrible gale of December 1999 when Versailles lost 2000 trees. They are being replaced in an ambitious restorative scheme.
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^*41
A fact confirmed in a negative sense by the detailed record of the King’s unremitting hunting activities in his
Journal.
A painful operation of this sort (anaesthetics not being available) would have involved several weeks’ convalescence out of the saddle at the very least; but there is no such cessation.
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^*42
This was the occasion when the services of Gluck, returning to Vienna, were used to break the annoying news.
⁹
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^*43
It would seem that the baby had been conceived on roughly the date when Benjamin Franklin was officially received at Versailles, as one of the accredited envoys of the United States. In contrast to the French custom, Franklin wore neither sword nor powdered wig. Perhaps the King found this first contact with the virile New World inspirational.
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^*44
This meant that there would in the end be a grand total of six princesses in various countries named Maria Teresa.
¹⁷
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^*45
It has been suggested (yet again as in 1774) that there was a
coup de foudre
between the pair on this occasion, ignoring the fact that the Queen was going on six months pregnant.
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^*46
It was not actually Louis XVI who performed this Herculean act, as is sometimes suggested, although he certainly possessed the physical strength. His own
Journal
does not relate the incident, making it clear, as Mercy confirmed to the Empress, that he had already left the chamber of the birth, accompanying his infant daughter.
²⁹
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^*47
But her periods were so troublesome at the end of her short (three-weekly) cycle that this may not actually have been the case.
⁴¹
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^*48
In the Wardrobe Book, in the Archives Nationales, Paris, the actual pin-pricks that the Queen made can still be seen; in recent years some of the long pins she used were recovered from the floor of her room at Versailles.
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^*49
The theatre where Marie Antoinette blithely trod the boards can still be seen, an exquisite souvenir.
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^*50
Nobody was particularly concerned over the sudden claims of the Comtesse de Provence that she too was pregnant; there was a general suspicion that these would fade away when the Queen gave birth, as indeed happened.
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^*51
But there is no truth in the legend that Sèvres cups were modelled on Marie Antoinette’s breasts, which would have been a quite uncharacteristic activity for this “modest” and “prudish” woman, conscious of her dignity as Queen of France.
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^*52
Madame Campan is discreetly silent on the subject in her memoirs, presumably anxious to recover favour with the Bourbons after her Napoleonic connection.
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^*53
Nine of them are still standing.
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^*54
Clumsy attempts by her detractors much later to pretend that her library was full of pornography, illustrating her general depravity, ignored the fact that such books, which were romances rather than pornography, were read by the most respectable women of her time.
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^*55
His father Philippe Duc de Chartres (much later known as Philippe Égalité) succeeded his own father as Duc d’Orléans in November 1785. Louis Philippe then moved up to become Duc de Chartres.
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^*56
This is a clear identification of the Josephine in question with Marie Antoinette, although as has been noted, it was not universally the case.
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^*57
A large pass-key to Saint Cloud, which still exists, firmly marked “La Reine” in large letters, makes the point.
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^*58
Apart from the French palaces, these can also be appreciated nowadays in many collections abroad, including the Wallace Collection, London; Waddesdon, Bucks; the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
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^*59
Apart from her formal bridal journey through north-eastern France fourteen years ago, and the expedition to Rheims for the King’s coronation, Marie Antoinette knew nothing of France; she had never, for example, seen the sea—neither on the French coast nor for that matter during her childhood in land-locked Austria.
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^*60
The visitor to Fontainebleau, passing from the ornate nineteenth-century taste of King Louis Philippe to that of Queen Marie Antoinette, is likely to feel refreshed. The mother-of-pearl furniture was thought to have vanished for ever in the time of the Revolution, but was miraculously rediscovered in 1961 and replaced in its original position.
²⁵
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^*61
Now in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.
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^*62
Meaning literally “cabbage of love” although
chou
has moved to have a secondary meaning of “darling” or “sweetheart.” It is unconvincing to cite Marie Antoinette’s use of this endearment as a proof that Louis Charles was Fersen’s son as has been suggested; leaving aside the unlikelihood of Marie Antoinette making an allusion to her child’s bastardy in this manner, Maria Josepha’s reference makes it clear that this was simply a pet name given to a beloved child.
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^*63
The respective points of view of Queen and Cardinal were put later by their acolytes, Madame Campan, and the Cardinal’s Vicar General, the Abbé Georgel; both writers, although not necessarily present at the crucial scenes in the affair, received the confidences of their employers at first hand immediately afterwards.
²
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^*64
The contemporary equivalent would be a signature by Queen Elizabeth II of “Elizabeth of Great Britain.” People remote from royal circles might not realize that her usual signature is “Elizabeth R” (for Regina); but someone in public life, let alone a courtier, would react at once.
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^*65
It was well put by a modern historian, Sarah Maza, in “The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited” (1991), that although the total innocence of Marie Antoinette was obvious, standard accounts of the affair viewed her as guilty “because large numbers of people wanted to believe in her guilt.”
¹¹
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^*66
The fullest and most impartial study remains
The Queen’s Necklace
by Frances Mossiker, first published in 1961, where the various contemporary accounts are compared side by side.
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^*67
It cannot be known for certain what happened to the stones. Some of them may have been acquired by the Duke of Dorset and remained in his family, according to tradition, in the form of a tasselled diadem. It used to be claimed that twenty-two of the most fabulous brilliants were made into a simple chain, worn by the Duchess of Sutherland; this chain was exhibited in the Versailles Exhibition of 1955. But it was pointed out by Bernard Morel in a study of the French Crown Jewels that the diamonds of the so-called Sutherland Necklace were for the most part “irregular in shape,” which did not accord with a contemporary drawing of the “Cardinal’s Necklace,” including annotations about the weights. Boehmer and Bassenge eventually went bankrupt. The case that their legal heirs brought against Princesse Charlotte de Rohan-Rochefort, heir to the Cardinal de Rohan, dragged on until 1867. The Rohan family finally paid off this “debt of honour” towards the end of the nineteenth century.
¹⁶
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^*68
Saint-Priest, whose memoirs were written in old age (he died in 1821 aged eighty-six) and were not published until 1929, told a story of the Queen deliberately manipulating her husband. She offered to send Fersen away, confident that Louis XVI would refuse.
¹⁷
There is no confirmation of this. If this scene had really taken place in private between husband and wife, Saint-Priest could only have heard about it third-hand from Fersen, passed on by the Queen; but Fersen, as all his contemporaries including Saint-Priest agreed, was legendarily discreet; such a tasteless confidence would be quite uncharacteristic.
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^*69
For connoisseurs of the “What-might-have-been” (or Counterfactual) school of history, it is interesting to speculate on the possible results of Louis XVI’s death in March 1789. He would have left a young child as his heir, and at this stage Marie Antoinette’s strong claim to act as Regent, according to precedent, might have been allowed. It is at least possible that things would have gone better.
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