But even too little, too late turned out to be just enough. Marie Antoinette’s pregnancy was officially made known to the court on August 4, 1778. The queen derived the greatest joy from announcing the blessed event to her husband. Affecting a glum countenance, she entered his presence and declared, “I have come, Sire, to complain of one of your subjects who has been so audacious as to kick me in the belly.” Louis could not have been more proud or delighted, enveloping Marie Antoinette in a spontaneous hug. Now, his succession would be secure.
On December 18, Marie Antoinette went into labor. It was the custom in France for the queen to give birth in the presence of several royal witnesses, with the room shut tight so that no harmful drafts could penetrate. Marie Antoinette lost consciousness immediately after the delivery, perhaps due to the claustrophobic atmosphere, combined with the pain of childbirth and the stress of endeavoring to suppress her cries and act queenly in the most un-regal of circumstances. She was bled, and when she recovered, she was told she had a daughter. The queen named the baby Marie-Thérèse, after her mother, and throughout her life the girl was formally known as “Madame Royale.”
Despite the honor of her grandchild’s name, Maria Teresa was still unsatisfied; Marie Antoinette had not given Louis an heir.
The queen had told Louis that the immediate aftermath of their daughter’s birth had left her with a frightening and painful memory and that she didn’t wish to become pregnant again for several months; so the French royal couple didn’t sleep together for a year after Marie-Thérèse was born. But after courtiers launched plots to find the king a mistress, Marie Antoinette, fearing she might lose her influence over Louis, changed her mind. She went to her husband and did a bit of coaxing, after which, according to the Austrian ambassador, Count Mercy, “he told her that he loved her with all his heart and that he could swear to her that he never had sensations or feelings for any other woman besides her.”
Marie Antoinette told her mother, “I am too aware of the necessity of having children to neglect anything on that score,” adding, “If I was wrong in the past, it was due to childishness and irresponsibility, but now I am much more levelheaded.” After suffering a miscarriage in 1780, on October 22, 1781, Marie Antoinette gave birth to a boy, Louis-Joseph. The king himself broke the news to her, announcing proudly, “Madame, you have fulfilled our wishes and those of France, you are the mother of a dauphin.” Marie Antoinette described the birth as “The happiest and most important event to me,” and Louis wept profusely during his son’s baptism.
After another miscarriage in 1783, the queen bore a second son, Louis-Charles, on March 27, 1785. “He has in strength and health everything that his brother is lacking. He is a real peasant’s child, big, fresh-faced, and fat,” Marie Antoinette wrote to her brother. And the following year, on July 9, several weeks premature, she bore another daughter, Sophie Hélène Béatrix, the child of an unwanted pregnancy. But the infant died on June 14, 1787, before reaching her first birthday.
Motherhood had been metamorphosing Marie Antoinette into a more grounded and responsible woman. Her pregnancies had necessitated several months’ absence from her usual round of gay amusements and she discovered that it was more fun to spend time with her children than it had been to play faro deep into the wee hours of the morning.
But her reputation as a frivolous, extravagant ninny and the marital issues in the royal bed had already demonized her in the eyes of the people at all levels of society. Harvests had been bad, and bread was scarce. The royals and their favorites had indeed been profligate spendthrifts, but France’s foreign policy during the reign of Louis XV had also eaten up an enormous chunk of cash. The country had never quite recouped its expenditures on the costly Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) fought on the European continent as well as on American soil (where the conflict is known as the French and Indian War). Then Louis XVI had been persuaded by the leaders of the American colonists to aid them financially and materially in their revolution against France’s age-old enemy, England. The French stock market had dropped precipitously as well, further tanking the economy.
Yet even as Louis was funding the American Revolutionary War, he and his wife were utterly unaware of the changing mood in their own kingdom. A burgeoning middle class, inspired by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, averred that they, too, had rights. From the earliest intellectual voices of reform within the nobility to the Parisian fishwives, the French subjects knew their sovereign was an indecisive man and blamed all failed policies and bad decisions on the malevolent influence of his foreign-born wife.
The Swedish military man Count Axel von Fersen, who would become Marie Antoinette’s lover, observed that “the queen is universally detested. Every evil is attributed to her and she is given no credit for anything good,” including her generosity to the poor and her philanthropy. “The King is weak and suspicious; the only person he trusts is the Queen and they say she does everything.” Even the paternity of her younger son was up for public lampoon and debate, although Louis never raised any doubts about it. To make sure that the monarchs knew what the people thought of them, unseen hands slipped mean-spirited pornographic cartoons, leaflets, and pamphlets, such as the popular “List of all the Persons with Whom the Queen Has Had Debauched Relations,” into the folds of their dinner napkins, among a sheaf of Louis’s state documents, or affixed to the inside of their box at the opera. Louis was portrayed as a hapless cuckold, an impotent lout who was the utter puppet of his wife, the monstrously dissipated Austrian whore. By the time they were brought before the revolutionary tribunals they were already as good as executed, the “proof” of their “guilt,” of Marie Antoinette’s obscene excesses and heinous crimes (adultery, lesbianism, nymphomania) having previously been supplied not by a hungry, angry, and illiterate mob, but by the bejeweled hands of a disgruntled aristocracy who had found an avenue for revenge following their ostracism from the queen’s inner circle.
After the people nicknamed Marie Antoinette “Madame Deficit,” she finally began to economize. But it was too little, too late.
In early June 1789, the representatives from the three Estates General—the clergy, the nobility, and the bourgeoisie—met to demand more self-determination in government, and to limit the powers of the sovereign. But at the time, the monarchs were faced with a sorrow of a more domestic nature. The frail, seven-year-old dauphin died of tuberculosis of the spine on June 4. The king and queen took the luxury of grieving for an entire day in seclusion. But any extended mourning was cut short when, on June 17, the representatives from the third estate—the bourgeoisie—declared themselves to be a National Assembly.
The dichotomy between the national mood and the royal one was not lost on Marie Antoinette. While the French were in “a delirium” of anti-monarchical, power-to-the-people fervor, she could not control her tears. “At the death of my poor little Dauphin, the nation hardly seemed to notice,” she wrote to her brother Leopold in Austria.
On July 14, 1789, falsely believing that the king was sending a foreign army to crush them, a mob of Parisians stormed the Bastille in search of weapons with which to defend themselves. A horrid scene ensued during which the prison’s governor was beheaded with a knife. But in Louis’s diary (which as previously indicated was primarily a hunting journal, with scant references to other quotidian events), he wrote rien—and some historians have interpreted the comment as a cynical assessment that nothing of moment happened that day. Nevertheless, the king did believe that the fall of the Bastille was merely another petty insurrection. It fell to the duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who brought the ugly news to Versailles, to correct the royal misconception: “No, Sire. It is a revolution.”
Husband and wife did not see eye to eye when it came to dealing with the rebellious mob. Louis had studied England’s Charles I and believed the way to avoid his fate was to negotiate with the revolutionaries. But Marie Antoinette insisted mon métier est d’être royaliste—“royalty is my career,” and harb
ored nothing but hatred for the great unwashed masses that had traduced her for years.
On October 5, 1789, an angry army of women marched from Paris to the palace of Versailles demanding bread, and although Louis acceded to their request, the instigators amid the rabble spread the propaganda that he was lying. The following day, the mob stormed the palace. When they failed to locate the queen—whom they intended to murder—they destroyed her rooms and assassinated several of the royal guards, whose heads they stuck on pikes. The following day the rabble insisted on conveying the royal family back to Paris, where the new National Assembly could keep an eye on them. Marie Antoinette bravely insisted that as long as she was not separated from her husband, she could endure anything.
In Paris, they were placed under what can best be characterized as a dignified house arrest in the Tuileries, a palace that had fallen into disuse and disrepair since it had been forsaken more than a century earlier for Versailles. The monarchs behaved more like a close-knit, “normal” couple when they were most in adversity, taking meals together, playing with and educating their children, and enjoying games of billiards, although the queen lamented, “We have seen too much horror and too much bloodshed ever to be happy again.”
Marie Antoinette, now thirty-four years old, finally began to realize her potential—and rose to meet it. In effect, she became the king. Everyone shunted aside her ineffectual husband. So she grabbed hold of the royal defense. It was Marie Antoinette who held council with the ambassadors and ministers, who learned to read and write in cipher, and who developed the secret diplomatic channels necessary to maintain the reins of government. She had no assistance, no clerks or secretaries. Spies abounded, even in the Tuileries.
Meanwhile, anti-royal fever continued to mount, but the monarchs held out hope that either the winds of revolution would blow over or that some sort of compromise with the rebels could be reached. Mirabeau, one of the original revolutionary leaders, asserted, “The King has but one man to support him—his wife . . . the only safeguard for her lies in the reestablishment of the royal authority . . . of this much I am certain, that she will not be able to save her life unless she saves her crown.”
Behind the scenes, Marie Antoinette and her lover Axel Fersen, along with a few trusted confidants, worked to plan the family’s escape. But the June 20, 1791, flight to safety in eastern France ended in disaster at Varennes when the royal party was unmasked, and unceremoniously escorted back to Paris. From then on, they were kept under heavier guard and enjoyed fewer privileges.
The political climate in France had shifted once again, which was very bad news for Marie Antoinette and Louis. “There exists within this realm no power to restrain the armed populace. . . . The very chiefs of the Revolution are no longer listened to when they try to talk to each other about order,” the queen told Count Mercy, the Austrian ambassador to France. Her husband was useless. “You know the person with whom I have to deal. When one believes him persuaded into accepting any course, a single word, a trifling argument, may make him change his mind and his purpose without warning. That is why a thousand things I should like to do can never be undertaken.” But, for all their distress, she had found her spine, even as Louis had lost his. “Tribulation first makes one realize what one is,” she told Mercy.
On August 10, 1792, the Tuileries palace was stormed for the second time that summer—a day that was referred to as “the Second French Revolution.” The king’s Swiss Guard were brutally massacred and the royal family was taken to the Temple, the former Parisian castle of the Knights Templar. There they were placed “under the safeguard of the nation.” That night, the guillotine was erected in the Place du Carrousel.
As of that day, Louis XVI was no longer in charge of France. The bloody period known as the Terror had begun. Louis was accused of being a “tyrant” and an “oppressor” and separated from his family. After more than twenty-two years of marriage, when he and Marie Antoinette finally came to realize that they might actually love and respect each other, all contact was forbidden.
But on January 20, 1793, Marie Antoinette was told by an official of the Commune, the new government, that by an exceptional indulgence, she and the children would be allowed to visit the king. She knew that it meant his execution was imminent. They spent a few final, tearful hours together and then, at about ten p.m., Louis said farewell with dignity, assuring his wife that he would visit her again in the morning. They both knew he was lying. Hours before his death, Louis lamented to Cléry, his valet, “Unfortunate Princess! My marriage promised her a throne; now what prospect does it offer her?” He handed Cléry his wedding ring and asked him to give it to Marie Antoinette. “Please tell her that I leave her with sorrow.”
The following morning, Marie Antoinette was forbidden to go downstairs. But she heard the distant drumbeats and the rumble of carriage wheels and—at 10:22—the cheerful shouts that meant she was now a widow.
She was taken away from her children, confined as “prisoner 280” within the walls of La Conciergerie, the Paris prison where only the most dangerous of criminals were housed and from which very few people were freed. On October 16, 1793, after a mockery of a trial, frail, white-haired from grief and stress, and suffering from severe gynecological hemorrhaging, Marie Antoinette followed her husband to Madame la Guillotine. She had left the Conciergerie with her hands bound behind her, the cord held by the executioner Henri Sanson, as if she were on a leash. Forbidden to mount the scaffold in traditional black mourning, she was attired instead in white (the color of mourning worn by France’s medieval and Renaissance-era queens), with black satin shoes. At 12:15 p.m., the blade fell. Marie Antoinette was only thirty-eight years old, the same age as Louis had been upon his execution. Her remains were taken to the Cimitière Madeleine, but the cost of digging a single grave was considered too high, so not until sixty corpses—all victims of the revolution—were accumulated, was her coffin smothered with quicklime and buried amid the others. After Napoleon’s exile to Elba and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, an effort was made to accord a proper burial to the executed monarchs. On January 15, 1815, Marie Antoinette’s bones were located, identified by scraps of her black filoselle stockings and the garters she customarily wore. Louis’s XVI’s remains were found the following day. On January 21 (which was not-so-ironically the twenty-second anniversary of Louis’s execution), the royals’ remains were placed in the crypt at Saint-Denis, the traditional final resting place of France’s monarchs.
Marie-Thérèse, the daughter of Louis and Marie Antoinette, remained incarcerated for another three years, after which she was released by officials within the new government (the Directoire, or Directory), in exchange for imprisoned commissaries of the revolution, and permitted to join her mother’s family in Vienna. She eventually married her first cousin the duc d’Angoulême, the eldest son of Louis’s youngest brother, the comte d’Artois, and died in 1851.
The dauphin, Louis-Charles, died in the Temple on June 8, 1795, at the age of ten. For many years, it was suggested that he had been replaced with a hapless changeling and smuggled out of the Temple. Several young men came forth during the beginning of the nineteenth century to claim that they were the Dauphin of France. Marie-Thérèse refused to meet any of them.
However, the boy’s heart was taken away by the doctor who performed the autopsy on his body, and it ended up in a crystal urn in the Cathedral Saint-Denis. Mitochondrial DNA testing on the organ in the year 2000 proved conclusively that the DNA sequences were “identical with those of Marie Antoinette, two of her sisters, and two living relatives on the maternal side.”
The more one comes to know and understand Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as human beings, however flawed, the easier it becomes to summon up sympathy for them. From his youth, Louis was controlled by forces more powerful than his own lethargy—his grandfather, his ministers and ambassadors, his wife, and finally, by the radical elements of the government that deposed him. History has been no less unkin
d to Marie Antoinette. And yet her demonization by the forces of revolution in some respects made her a heroine, if not perhaps a martyr, more admired today than despised. Although theirs was a dynastic match from day one, both Marie Antoinette and Louis came of age within the context of their royal marriage. Beginning as frightened and indifferent teens who got in their own way as much as they got in each other’s, time and adversity turned them into a loving, if still dysfunctional, unit. Goethe’s fears that day on the Ile des Epis were only partially requited. Intrinsic differences of character aside, during the final days of their marriage Louis and Marie Antoinette were finally able to appreciate each other’s worth and how deeply their bonds of affection held—which is significantly more than one can say for Jason and Medea.
GEORGE IV 1762-1830
REGENT: 1811-1820
RULED ENGLAND: 1820-1830
and
MARIA FITZHERBERT
1756-1837
married 1785-1830
“. . . All I can say is that since it is to be I shall make it the Study of my life to make him happy.”
—Mrs. Fitzherbert, writing to Lady Anne Barnard, November 1785
ON JULY 27, 1784, THE DAY AFTER MARIA FITZHERBERT’S twenty-eighth birthday, the Morning Herald proclaimed: “A new Constellation has lately made an appearance in the fashionable hemisphere that engages the attention of those whose hearts are susceptible to the power of beauty. The widow of the late Mr. Fitzherbert has in her train half our young nobility. As the Lady has not, as yet, discovered a partiality for any of her admirers, they are all animated with hopes of success.”
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 30
