Marie Antoinette

by Antonia Fraser

  Fersen’s claim to the regiment was backed by his own sovereign, Gustavus III, who described him to Louis XVI as “having served with general approval in your armies in America.” Marie Antoinette for her part wrote warmly to Gustavus himself along the same lines: how Fersen’s father was not forgotten while the son had “greatly distinguished himself in the American War.”40 All was set for Fersen to return to Sweden to sort out the financial details of the vast purchase price with his father when a sudden summons came from Gustavus, who was about to tour Europe. Instead of returning to Sweden, Fersen was expected to join the royal party as Captain of the Bodyguard.

  His brief presence in France—July until September—could well have contributed to the glamour of the relationship from the point of view of Marie Antoinette. And then there was Fersen’s aura as a soldier in an age when soldiering was the proper, manly thing to do. (One of her early gestures of friendship was to ask to see him in his Swedish uniform.) Kings as well as counts were respected for being militaristic, as witness the general admiration enjoyed by Frederick II. Louis XVI on the other hand was that rare thing, a pacific monarch who did not relish going to war. The French King’s indifferent attitude to military matters was a subject of contemptuous astonishment to his brother-in-law the Emperor, who suffered from no such inhibitions. On one of his visits to France, Joseph could not get over the fact that Louis XVI had never even visited the École Militaire, the military training ground. In the same vein, the King closed down the military camp at Compiègne and neither held drills nor reviews of his troops.41

  The King, who as a child had dutifully learnt the lesson that one should not take up arms except for a legitimate cause, knew little by temperament of that kind of soldier’s glory that it could be said the dashing Fersen incarnated. In the eyes of Marie Antoinette, Fersen—with his ardour, his celebrated discretion, his foreign birth, which distanced him from court feuds, his charm that made Louis XVI also enjoy his company—was the ideal cavalier. In fact Fersen might be termed one of the flowers of Marie Antoinette’s crown.

  The pleasures of Versailles continued although with time the development of a model village (hameau) at the Petit Trianon occupied more of Marie Antoinette’s energies, and the amateur theatricals less. Despite the myth, she never actually dressed up as a shepherdess or a dairymaid, neither guarding sheep nor milking cows personally. These were, however, the roles that she regularly played on stage—in the spring of 1783 she portrayed Babet and Pierrette, both country girls—hence perhaps the evolution of the legend. Unlike Mademoiselle de Condé who at Chantilly dressed up as a farmer’s wife, or Madame Elisabeth who had herself painted for the cover of a bonbonnière in a dairymaid’s bonnet, Marie Antoinette considered her new simplified costume of white muslin topped by a straw hat quite sufficiently pastoral. Her dairy has been aptly described as a kind of “summer drawing room” where the guests could help themselves to fruit, milk and other healthy products.42

  The model village was the conception of the romantic painter Hubert Robert, and the design of Richard Mique, but like Marie Antoinette’s notion of a rustic retreat, it was scarcely original. It was in fact copied from that of the Prince de Condé, while the Duc d’Orléans at Raincy and the Comtesse de Provence, a great country-lover and gardener, at Montreuil enjoyed similar projects. The Comtesse ended up with a pavilion of music, and a model village with twelve houses, dovecotes and windmills, a dairy made of marble with silver vessels, as well as allegorical temples consecrated to love and friendship, a hermitage and a belvedere. The Duc de Chartres at Mousseaux had a remarkable garden including windmills in its design. Mesdames Tantes, never to be outdone where expensive living was concerned, enjoyed a country retreat at Bellevue and then at L’Hermitage. So the Baronne d’Oberkirch, who accompanied the Comte and Comtesse du Nord on their visit, stoutly defended the French Queen against the accusations of extravagance: “All that fuss about a Swiss village!” Others spent far more on their gardens.43

  Whilst that was true, what the Queen of France spent was inevitably more visible. A better defence lay in the fact that Marie Antoinette had created or commissioned things of great delight. Over 1000 white porcelain pots, with the Queen’s monogram on them in blue, were designed to be filled with flowers so as to ornament the exterior of the model village’s twelve cottages, with their lattice windows and stucco made to imitate worn, cracked brickwork and half-timbering.*53 Jasmine, roses and myrtle were rampant; the perfume of lilacs filled the air; there were butterflies in the sunlight and later the sound of nightingales. The Marlborough Water Tower, whose name came from Madame Poitrine’s song, had pots of gillyflowers and geraniums on its steps. There was a mill and a dovecote. Its animals included a bull, cows with names like Blanchette and Brunette, calves, sheep and a Swiss goat; there was an aviary and a henhouse. However, a working farm nearby provided most of the produce needed for the Queen’s visits. These expeditions, carefully noted by the King in his Journal, totalled 216 days over ten years, with 1784 accounting for thirty-nine of them, by far the largest annual amount.44

  The Petit Trianon was a place where Marie Antoinette rejoiced in organizing country dances at which children were especially welcome, asking her English friend Countess Spencer for details of folk tunes like “Over the hills and far away.” Life there clearly represented some attempt at finding a lost paradise. Yet not all the inclinations of the French court were similarly nostalgic. On 19 September 1783—the eve of Fersen’s departure—Versailles saw the amazing launching of the hot-air balloon of Dr. Montgolfier in the presence of the royal family. Even the two-year-old Dauphin was brought along and the sovereigns duly inspected the balloon’s interior before it set off. Azure blue, with the King’s cipher on it in yellow, the balloon, according to one observer, looked like “an exotic new plant”; the King, with his intellectual curiosity, was full of enthusiasm for this scientific advance.45 Fashionable women sported fans with images of courtiers and balloons commemorating the event.

  Among the spectators were two young Englishmen in their early twenties, William Pitt and William Wilberforce, who were visiting France with the aim of learning the language. Both were already members of the House of Commons. The official peace between France and England of the spring of 1783 had brought the English travellers, diplomats and aristocrats flooding back. They were busily prosecuting anew their complicated love affair with the French in which their yearning for the French way of life had to be accompanied by a paradoxical contempt for these frivolous people. In Rheims, Pitt and Wilberforce had somehow struck it unlucky socially; the man who was supposed to introduce them to society turned out to be a grocer who neither could nor did fulfil his promise. The story caused some royal mirth at Fontainebleau, when Pitt and Wilberforce, hoping to see “all the magnificence of France,” encountered the Queen at a stag-hunt.

  Marie Antoinette, apart from jokes about the grocer—she “often rallied them on the subject”—was exceptionally gracious to the young Englishmen; she looked perhaps to enlarging her circle of foreign protégés. In return Wilberforce rated her “a monarch of the most engaging manners and appearance,” as the Englishmen continued to meet the Queen in the salons of the Polignacs and the Princesse de Lamballe, at billiards, over cards and at backgammon. Louis XVI in contrast got a less favourable verdict. The King was physically “so strange a being (of the hog kind)” that it was worth going a hundred miles for a sight of him, especially out boar hunting. It was a young outsider’s frank description of a king who at the age of twenty-nine conspicuously lacked the dignity commonly expected in a man of his position. The same comparison between husband and wife had been made a few years earlier in a slightly kinder version by Thomas Blaikie, the bluff Scottish gardener at Versailles; whilst the Queen was “a very handsome, beautiful woman,” the King was “a good rough stout man, dressed like a country farmer.”46

  Of the loftier Britons arriving in France, the ambassador and ambassadress, the Duke and Duchess of Manchester, belonged
to a certain diplomatic tradition of hauteur. The Duchess complained of her accommodation at Versailles: “As Duchess of Manchester I can accept this lodging, but as ambassadress of England, I cannot.” But the second ambassador, who replaced Manchester in December 1783, was on the contrary made for acceptance in the Queen’s circle. This was the Duke of Dorset, a bachelor in his thirties and a man of extraordinarily handsome appearance and superb manners who would occupy the post for the next five years. He loved the opera, he loved the ballet (the ravishing dancer Giovanna La Baccelli was his mistress and he once took her to a ball with his insignia of the Garter on her forehead). The Duke entertained lavishly and he was prepared to send to London for novelties that the Queen might desire, such as an ivoryhandled billiard cue. Although inevitably Marie Antoinette was accused of taking him as a lover, she actually found him cosy, terming him “une bonne femme.”47

  On one occasion Marie Antoinette was amused to see the young Comtesse de Gouvernet (later Marquise de La Tour du Pin) shaking hands with the Duke according to the English custom. As jokes like that about Pitt’s grocer do not die easily in royal circles, the Queen made a habit of asking the Duke whenever both were present: “Have you shaken hands with Madame de Gouvernet?” Marie Antoinette also expressed her disapproval in jocular fashion of the Duke’s yellow buckskin breeches, known as Inexpressibles: “I do not like dem Irrestistibles.”48

  Apart from such companions, there were other amusements to hand to assuage the tiresomeness of political endeavours that satisfied neither her brother nor her husband. It would be an exaggeration to list reading among the Queen’s pleasures; she never really recovered from that unfortunate late start. Like most European women of her time and class, Marie Antoinette enjoyed reading light novels, the so-called livres du boudoir.*54 References in her letters to more serious stuff tended to be directed at her mother or brother, with the obvious intention of impressing them. (One notes that she was still no more than “quite advanced” in her reading of the Protestant Hume four years after she boasted of beginning it.) Nevertheless Marie Antoinette seems to have enjoyed historical novels, of the sort that could relate to her own experiences, judging from the amount of them in her collection. L’Histoire de Madame Henriette d’Angleterre by Madame de La Fayette referred to another foreign princess who had married into France, Charles II’s favourite sister, who wed a seventeenth-century Duc d’Orléans. Of foreign novels, both Amelia by Fielding and Evelina by Fanny Burney were in her library in translation. The Queen’s books were generally bound in red morocco, with an occasional deviation towards green suede, and the cover was stamped in gold with her arms, those of France and Austria. The books at the Petit Trianon, however, continued the tradition of simplicity there; they were bound, or half-bound, in speckled calfskin, and marked CT, for Château de Trianon, on the spine.49

  Many of the books in Marie Antoinette’s collection contained the words “Dedicated to the Queen” inscribed on the title page. These included plays such as Mustapha et Zéangir by Sébastien Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, a tragedy in five acts, in verse, performed at Fontainebleau “in front of Their Majesties” in 1776 and 1777, and later at the Comédie Française. Marie Antoinette proved a useful patron to Chamfort, helping him to become a member of the Académie Française and securing a pension for him of 1200 francs as a result of this particular play; it exalted brotherly love, something that the Queen chose to believe was also a feature of her husband’s family.50

  Even if the formation of her various libraries in her various palaces—by the end there were nearly 5000 volumes—owed more to the energies of her librarian, Pierre Campan, than to her own, it is safe to assume that the music books in Marie Antoinette’s collection were in frequent use. They were certainly very extensive, ranging from sonatas for her favourite harpsichord, via Italian songs, to the operas she enjoyed. Each new opera by Gluck was duly dedicated to her, and bound in its morocco, while the Queen owned almost the whole of the works of André Grétry.51 When her brother asked her to look after Gluck’s protégé—and successor in terms of Viennese opera—Antonio Salieri, Marie Antoinette was happy to extend to him her protection.

  Such protection extended to personal contact, as it had with Gluck. In February 1784 the Queen wrote to Mercy. He was to tell Salieri to copy out various pieces from Les Danaïdes, his first piece on the Paris stage and dedicated to her, including a duet. He should bring them on Saturday at noon: “She will be happy to perform (faire la musique) with him.” As this letter indicates, Marie Antoinette was an enthusiastic amateur performer. There is also a lively tradition that she composed the music for songs herself, such as Jean Pierre Florian’s Provençal ballad “C’est mon ami,” even if her various directors may have assisted or guided her. Haydn, so favoured in Austria, never came to Paris. However, of his “Paris Symphonies” performed in the Salle de Spectacle of the Société Olympique, that in B Flat (No. 85), probably composed in 1785, found particular favour with Marie Antoinette. When Imbault engraved the first edition in parts, No. 85 bore the title of La Reine de France.52

  However, none of these diversions, not music, not “romantic” reading, could allay Marie Antoinette’s chief private worry. This was the “languor and ill health” of the Dauphin Louis Joseph. On 7 June 1784 the King was out hunting near Rambouillet when he received an urgent message from the Queen. It was significant that many people at court assumed that the emergency was connected to Louis Joseph and that it denoted some kind of collapse. In fact, far more pleasantly, it was connected to the unexpected arrival of King Gustavus III of Sweden.53 Among others, he brought in his train Count Fersen, who had been absent from France for the last eight and a half months.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ACQUISITIONS

  “An interesting acquisition for my children and for me . . . The Duc d’Orléans is selling me Saint Cloud.”

  MARIE ANTOINETTE TO THE EMPEROR JOSEPH II, 5 NOVEMBER 1784

  The unexpected arrival of the King of Sweden—incognito as “the Count de Haga”—on 7 June 1784 meant the hasty organization of a suitable royal welcome. Like Joseph II, the Swedish King preferred not to lodge in a richly furnished apartment at Versailles, bearing in mind the 50,000 livres’ worth of presents that he would have to dispense afterwards. Count Fersen was put in charge of finding alternative accommodation; the Marquis de Bombelles directed him to the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs next door to his own house. Although Bombelles considered that Gustav’s instinct for simplicity lacked “noblesse royale,” one could also see it as part of his general enlightenment.1 Nearly ten years older than Louis XVI, Gustav III was a lover of French literature, an admirer of Voltaire and the philosophes; in fact, a passionate admirer of all things French. In Sweden he had instituted widespread reforms including the abolition of torture, while encouraging agriculture and science.

  The next day “the Count de Haga,” dressed informally in a frockcoat, walked in the park at Versailles. Later he was found by the Queen bending affectionately over the cradle of the little Louis Joseph, as she entered holding Marie Thérèse by the hand. A certain coincidence may have been in both their minds—it was the birth of Gustav III’s own son, another Gustav, in 1778 that had convinced Louis XVI that his own imminent child would be a daughter. This meant that Marie Thérèse and the young Gustav were already a possibility in the game of royal marriage-alliances.

  It was not the only one mooted for the five-year-old Madame Royale, as Marie Thérèse was now generally known. Royal daughters had been known by tradition in France as “the King’s choice,” on the grounds that their marriages provided a useful opportunity for making alliances or cementing relationships. The possibilities for Marie Thérèse included her first cousin on the Habsburg side, the son of Maria Carolina, as well as her Bourbon first cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême. This latter was the match that Marie Antoinette preferred because it would keep her daughter with her in France: “Her situation would be far preferable to that of the Queen of any other country.” The
n there was the more complicated question of Louis Philippe, five years older than Marie Thérèse, who was the heir to the Orléans dukedom.*55 The King’s daughter represented a highly advantageous match for the Orléans family by which they might hope to leapfrog their way up the pecking order of the court. There seems to have been some question of the marriage being promised (or at any rate his father believed that it was promised, which was not quite the same thing).2

  The girl in question was not an easy character. A portrait painted of her this year shows the wide eyes of the mother, but also a small mouth with the corners turned down; the impression given is of a certain despondency, confirmed by her nickname of “Mousseline la Sérieuse.” She was also haughty, very much a Bourbon. Although the Comte d’Hezecques as a Frenchman said that it was “the Austrian pride” of her mother in her that had to be corrected, in fact the reverse was true. It was Marie Antoinette, aware of the disastrous results of the endless deference paid to the Children of France by self-promoting courtiers, who took various measures to curb her daughter’s arrogance. Poor children were imported as playmates; Madame Vigée Le Brun, who painted Marie Thérèse several times, described how a peasant child was sat down with her at dinner, Madame Royale being instructed to do the honours; on another occasion her toys were given away to the needy by the Queen.3 The result, not surprisingly, was that Marie Thérèse much preferred the father who bestowed on her uncritical adoration.