by Juliet Grey
The only bright spot was the death the previous August of “the Devil”—Frederick the Great, who had been succeeded by his spectacularly corpulent, but considerably more affable son, Frederick William II. If only Maman had lived to see it.
My husband had gained a significant amount of weight in the last year or so; his already full face was showing the beginnings of a treble chin. His myopic eyes had grown tired and yellow from so much reading, but it was not comme il faut for the king of France to be seen wearing spectacles. Because he reeled a bit on occasion as his heavy body endeavored to compensate for his poor vision, rumors that had begun in the palace, and then pervaded the pamplets, intimated that Louis had taken to drink. They were of course untrue, as he had no taste for wine or spirits, but facts never frustrated the aims of the propagandists.
My husband visited me nearly every day of late; always to commiserate, and often to weep. I endeavored to bolster his confidence. “You are the rudder, mon cher. You are the captain, not any of your ministers. It is up to you to steer the ship and set its course.”
“Yes, but what course?” he groaned. “You must help me, Toinette. Help me know what to do.”
Finally, after so many years, the moment I had waited for had come, the moment Maman and Mercy and the abbé Vermond had long wished for. The king had solicited my advice and counsel as a full partner in the monarchy. But my husband had deliberately left me unschooled in the governance of France. I knew even less about politics than he. Yet to admit as much to him would only have made Louis more miserable. So I caressed his cheek, and tried to coax him to smile. “You know I will help you in every way I can,” I assured him.
In February, the Finance Minister, Charles Alexandre Calonne, addressed the Assembly of Notables, a convocation of 144 literally notable men, from princes to bishops to mayors, to discuss the unsavory issue of taxes. As Louis’s adjustments called for both the nobility and the clergy to be taxed for the first time in history, in order to mitigate the burden on the bourgeois and the poor—the untitled persons collectively known as the Third Estate—the news met with resounding ire from the Notables.
That spring we found ourselves saddled with the nation’s ills as well as our own domestic woes. Princesse Sophie was not growing properly, like her older sister and our second son, Louis Charles. Her health and that of our older son, the poor little dauphin, weighed heavily upon us. But while Louis saw to the affairs of state, my mind remained predominantly occupied with the children of France.
To honor them, and to remind our subjects that I was a mother above all else, I commissioned Madame Vigée-Lebrun to paint a portrait of the five of us and she set to work, depicting me in my gown of garnet-colored velvet and matching plumed hat. “A Madonna and children?” she replied when I first suggested the composition.
“Well … oui,” said I.
Regardless of the comte de Mercy’s admonishment about playing with my children in the salons, rather than in the privacy of a nursery, after waiting so long to produce my cherished offspring nothing gave me greater pleasure now than to revel in their companionship and watch them grow. Gone were my gaming tables, replaced with wooden hoops, cups and balls, and dolls with painted faces and mohair tresses. Nonetheless, I must have been the only woman in France vilified for loving her children.
The other bright light in my life was Axel von Fersen. “I have a gift for you,” I informed him one day that spring, as I led him through my warren of private apartments. After the death of my daughter’s namesake, her great-aunt Sophie—Mesdames tantes had long since removed themselves to the Château de Bellevue—I had appropriated the late Sophie’s rooms for my private apartments, as they were larger and brighter than the warren of chambers that lay behind the State Rooms.
Having recently had a small suite sectioned off from the rest of the apartment, I led Axel to a closed door decorated with gilded boiserie moldings, still pungent from the fresh coat of white paint. “S’il vous plaît.” With a secret smile I motioned for him to turn the heavy brass handle.
“I thought … Why should the Colonel Proprietor of the Royal Suédois be compelled to sleep in a cramped and drafty room under the eaves?” In truth, it would bring me both joy and comfort to know that he was near me during these trying times. Louis and I had not discussed this unusual démenage, although it was not a secret. But the king had greater concerns than the renovation of the queen’s private apartments.
Axel regarded the walls, newly papered with a subtle pattern of blue and silver, taking in the furnishings of the room, corner to corner. “Is that a Swedish stove?” he exclaimed incredulously.
I nodded, slipping my hand into his with a lover’s ease. “And its installation came at quite a cost.” I touched my finger to my lips. “Please don’t tell the new Finance Minister.” For many reasons, Loménie de Brienne, the sixty-year-old Archbishop of Toulouse who had recently succeeded Calonne, would most certainly have not approved. The previous year, Monsieur Calonne had informed me that during the dozen years of my husband’s reign, 1,250 million livres had been borrowed and that the blame for such extravagance fell squarely upon my shoulders. “How can that be?” I had asked him. “How was I expected to know this? When I requested fifty thousand livres, I was given one hundred thousand!”
“I cannot tell anyone,” Axel whispered, “Not even Sophie,” he added, referring to his sister, “about the reasons my heart is so full.” He strode to the stove, the better to inspect and admire it. “And so empty.” He drew me to him and stroked my cheek, looking into my eyes as if they held the answer to some inscrutable question. “I was not destined to be happy like other men,” he murmured, gently kissing my brow.
His lips were cool and soft against my skin. I closed my eyes and inhaled. He was wearing the scent I had asked Fargeon to create for him six years earlier. “Don’t speak like that,” I whispered.
“Mais, c’est vrai,” Axel insisted, enfolding me in his arms. I rested my cheek against the facings on his coat. “I’m afraid that life will always deny me both luck and happiness.” With the tip of his finger he tilted my chin to meet his gaze. “I am indebted to you more than you can ever know,” he said softly. “And this gift, this room, what you risked to arrange everything—” He broke off, clasping my hands and kissing them. “You know that people will talk,” he cautioned gently.
I nodded. “But I have heard so many insults, I don’t think it’s possible to wound me any more deeply. Mon cher coeur …” I reached for him, twining my fingers through his soft brown hair and drew him toward me, claiming his mouth.
“She might have grown up to be a friend,” I murmured.
“I am so sorry.” Louis held me tightly as our tears commingled. “I fear she never had a chance in this harsh world,” he breathed into my hair. I had no words. My mouth could not find them, could not form them. The death of a child is the most searing pain imaginable and all the suffering one endures in giving them life cannot begin to compare to the torment of losing them. The Almighty had given our innocent angel, princesse Sophie Hélène Béatrix, only 345 days on His earth. Barely beginning to cut her tiny teeth she went into convulsions after her lungs began to fail her on the fifteenth of June, and was taken four days later, little more than a week after we had suffered another blow. The woman who had plotted the diamond necklace scheme by claiming me as her intimate, Jeanne de Lamotte-Valois, had escaped from the Salpêtrière, a feat that could never have been achieved without the connivance of highly placed or influential persons.
It was nothing less than a direct insult aimed at the Crown. In the crucible of France a scoundrel had been transformed into a scapegoat; and with the same alchemy had transmogrified her target from an unwitting victim into a villainess.
Count Cagliostro could not have been more successful.
TWENTY-NINE
We Attempt Mitigation
The late summer of 1787 had brought another bad harvest. Thousands could starve by the time the ground turned hard
and cold that autumn. Determined to present an example to all three Estates—the clergy, nobility, and the common people—the king endeavored to reduce the treasury’s deficit by eliminating several positions in the royal household. In my retinue alone 173 disgruntled souls were given their congé. Renovations to Saint-Cloud were halted as well; and the comte de Vaudreuil was asked to relinquish his sinecure as royal falconer. Baron de Besenval was permitted to maintain his regiment of Swiss Guards, but was visibly provoked by all the reductions. “It is a terrible thing to dwell in a country where one is not assured of possessing one day what one had the day before,” he lamented.
The king and I were hard-pressed to conceal the strain. My body, already much thickened by numerous pregnancies, had never fully recovered from Sophie’s birth even as I mourned her death. Louis hunted and rode with a near-desperate intensity, and daily gorged himself as if each meal were his last. Madame Vigeé-Lebrun’s portrait created a permanent record of our grief when, at my request, she altered the composition, painting out the image of baby Sophie in her cradle, and re-posing the dauphin, who now pointed to the empty berceau.
One October afternoon Louis came to my rooms wearing the expression of a drowning man. Wordlessly, he sank into an armchair, completely filling it with his bulk. And without even meeting my gaze, he began to sob. The weight of his grave responsibilities, of his anguish over the loss of our daughter, of the insurmountable deficit, of his enemies’ médisance, had become far too much for him to bear.
I let him weep, unburdening his heart. And there was no one else in France to whom the king might turn but his queen. Finally, I came around behind him and clasped my arms about his shoulders, resting my cheek against the powdered crown of his head.
“You are the only constant in my life, Toinette,” he said, choking back more tears and clasping my hands to his breast. “Have you any idea how much I rely upon you? My ministers … the regional Parlements … everyone wants what it does not always seem in the interests of France to give.” Tightly clutching my hands, he added, “They think I am a weak sovereign who can accomplish nothing but devouring a cold roast chicken in fifteen minutes. And yet they are bent on blocking every remedy I propose. With the Parlements’ ability to deny ratification to my edicts, which they do at every turn, how can the country move forward? How will she survive?”
He lowered his head into his hands. Now thirty-three years old, Louis was as lost as he had been at twenty.
Kneeling at his feet, my velvet skirts enveloping me in an indigo pool on the carpet, I vowed to be strong for us both. “Speak to the ministers, ma chère,” he implored. “Perhaps they will see reason when it comes from the mouth of a mother, as well as their monarch.”
I dared not remind him then, in his distracted state, that I had already proposed a number of pragmatic reforms, but his officials never took me seriously. They persisted in viewing me either as an empty-headed spendthrift or, tainted by their own prejudices, as the perennial outsider—l’Autrichienne—not a true Frenchwoman, but one who remained a secret ambassador for Austria despite renouncing my native land to become their future queen some eighteen years earlier.
In November, Louis summoned the Parlement de Paris—the same corrupted magistrates who in my view had all but exonerated Cardinal de Rohan—to a “royal sitting” where the Minister of Finance, Loménie de Brienne, requested their consent to an edict allowing the treasury to borrow 440 million livres over the next five years, a sum that would permit the government to continue functioning. The debate lasted a tense seven hours while the king presided from an armchair, rather than the chaise longue from which he would hold the more autocratic lits de justice. Back in July, the Assembly of Notables had refused to ratify Louis’s proposed land tax of 2½ to 5 percent of income, payable in kind, depending on the richness of the soil; pressured by ties of family, only his brothers, each presiding over one of the seven sections of the Assembly, had been persuaded to vote for the stamp tax, a tariff levied on contracts and patents. By their very nature, these revenue streams would primarily have affected the upper echelons of society—the clergy and nobility. These two Estates, as they were known, had traditionally been exempt from taxation, and despite their vociferous criticism of the government’s vast expenditures, were loath to contribute so much as a sou to the Treasury.
As November’s royal séance was drawing to a close and the Keeper of the Seals rose to his feet and prepared to announce the formal registration of the new edict increasing the treasury loan, a lone man dared to stand. An imposing figure though his face was pitted with pox scars and his nose ruddy from the enjoyment of too much brandy and fine wine, Philippe d’Orléans, a Prince of the Blood, dared to challenge his cousin. We had always known he bore the temperament of a dissenter. The duc was one of the wealthiest in France, his embroidered pockets as deep as the Seine, the better to finance untold numbers of presses churning antimonarchical propaganda. A leader of the secret Society of Freemasons, the duc d’Orléans was viewed even by the Church as a man to be reckoned with.
Offering the king a nod of his head, the minimal deference required of his rank, he declared loudly, “I consider this registration illegal, Sire.”
The room grew uncomfortably silent.
“It is legal, because I wish it,” Louis replied evenly.
With a flourish, Philippe d’Orléans withdrew a paper from his pocket. Written in his own bold hand this formal protest, clearly premeditated, was designed to sway the opinion of his fellow justices by persuading them that the registration of the king’s edict was unlawful because it had not been presented to the Parlement through a formal lit de justice. To Louis’s dismay, the duc’s demagoguery was in large measure successful, for they did vote to declare the registration illegal.
Louis’s only semblance of anger was the manner in which he clutched the padded arms of his chair. “My cousin believes he is king,” said Louis. “Or perhaps he thinks this is America, where democracy is the order of the day. But we are in France, monsieur le duc, where in case you have forgotten, I rule by divine right and my word is law.” He cleared his throat. “From this moment I banish you to your estate at Villers-Cotterets, to be deprived of all society, save that of your nearest relations and servants.”
The duc’s face grew redder than usual. But he maintained his equanimity even as the king exiled two more councillors of the Parlement, one of them an abbé, for openly supporting the duc’s protest.
In banishing these dissenters Louis had exercised an ancient privilege permitted to all kings of France. But the tenor of the times had grown so disrespectful that no one, from the loftiest men in the kingdom to the lowliest poissardes in the fish market, thought twice about insulting the person of the sovereign and the very monarchy itself. No longer were the diatribes directed solely against me; nor could they be attributed to the lingering hatred of my Austrian heritage.
And just as I had been vilified by the diamond necklace verdict rather than vindicated by it, Louis was derided for exiling his cousin, whom the people transformed through the alchemy of seditious propaganda from a drunken debaucher into the victim of an arbitrary tyrant.
My husband became sick from the strain, falling ill with erysipelas, an ailment that turned his skin crimson and left him with a raging fever. The Finance Minister Loménie de Brienne suffered from the stress as well, losing his voice.
The spring of 1788 brought more devastating news. In April, the Parlement de Paris rescinded its promise to collect income tax from the clergy and nobility, hardly a surprise as the justices themselves came from those two Estates. But how could reform ever be affected and how could the burdens of the common people ever be eased unless the Parlement was willing to ratify the king’s edicts? Livid with their recalcitrance, on May 8, Louis summoned the magistrates to a lit de justice, at which he suspended not only the Paris Parlement for their insubordination, but the Parlements of the twelve other regions of France. To take their place in judicial matters, he s
et up plenary courts.
The Parlements declared their suspension illegal and harnessed the power of the pen to proclaim that the king was endeavoring to circumvent the will of the people of France. It was the worst demagoguery imaginable, for it had been the Parlements that were vehemently opposed to levying taxes against those who could well afford to pay them, thus relieving the people of their already onerous burden!
Secretly encouraged by the members of the regional Parlements, violence erupted in the provinces. Anger flared in the marketplace at Grenoble, sparking a day of wanton destruction. An innocent hatter was bayoneted in the back. But Louis had given his maréchal orders not to use force against the rioters, believing it would only incite more unrest.
In my salon Mousseline and Louis Charles played with Odin, taking turns rolling a ball across the floor for the elkhound to fetch. “If I began my life again, I should spend even more time with my children,” I lamented to Léonard, as he dressed my hair one morning, liberally dusting it with powder to mask the encroaching strands of gray.
My friseur reminded me that I had used that nostalgic phrase many times recently.
“Because I have many regrets.” A Meissen figurine toppled noisily to the parquet. I turned in the direction of the sound and laughed at the mishap. So many other things were infinitely more fragile. “Every moment with one’s children is a precious one, and yet I have been accused of mourning our petite ange Sophie over-long. How,” I asked incredulously, brushing away a sudden tear, “is such a thing even possible? Et le pauvre dauphin—the médecins tell us that the curvature in his spine stems from a tubercular complaint. How many more sunrises will he see, and how dare I miss a single one of them in his company? Like my sister the Queen of Naples, I am a mother first.
