Marie Antoinette

by Antonia Fraser

  Attendance at Grétry’s Richard I in September, whose notorious song “O Richard! O mon roi!” had sparked off the riots of 6 October, was considered by Barnave to be a mistake. The Queen should send for the Director and make sure that nothing so tactless took place in the future. Far better was her appearance, with her children, at the Théâtre de la Nation (formerly the Comédie Française) in late November to see La Partie de Chasse de Henri IV, an occasion that marked the return of the celebrated actor Préville to the stage. There were further royal appearances in December. On all these occasions the Queen was regally dressed, as she would have been under the former regime, and was happy to sit in the most prominent box. Only that closet counter-revolutionary Madame Elisabeth grumbled in her private letters at the necessity of showing herself on such occasions. “My God! What fun!” she wrote sarcastically, although even the Princess had to admit, at some public applause the following year, that “the French had some charming moments.”29

  The projected return of Mercy was part of Barnave’s intention that the Queen should actively encourage the émigrés to come back. Marie Antoinette, for her part, had never ceased to mourn his absence. Certainly Mercy in France would have acted as a more efficient liaison officer than the Queen’s sporadic courtiers. In late December, the Comte de Narbonne, an illegitimate son of Louis XV who had become active in attempts at diplomacy between the royal family and the Emperor, added his pleas for Mercy to come back to France. To be fair to Mercy, his health at the time was wretched. But in his refusal, he managed as ever to stress his material concerns, worrying, for example, about his property at Valenciennes (“The municipality still hasn’t sent me my four guns back”). If he did return, would his baggage be free of customs duties? That was essential. Mercy pointed out that he had just managed to extricate all his belongings from France, presumably with the exception of the guns, apart obviously from the house in Paris, which was still guarded by his Newfoundland dogs named Sultan, Castor, Castorine—and, presumably for his fierce temperament, Jacobin.*9330

  Barnave had more luck in convincing the Queen to recall the Princesse de Lamballe, still titular Superintendent of her Household, who had fled after Varennes. A good deal of persuasion was needed, because for a while the Queen was deeply opposed to the idea. In September, for example, she wrote to her former favourite, who was ill near Aix, bewailing “the race of tigers” that had overwhelmed the kingdom and urging her to stay away from the country at all costs. Even though the acceptance of the Constitution, which had become necessary, would probably give some moments of relief from the tigers, the Queen still did not want the Princesse to fall into their cage: “Ah, don’t come my friend; come back as late as possible, your heart will be too disappointed, you will have too much to cry about with all our misfortunes, you who love me so tenderly.” Three days later she reiterated the prohibition: “No, once again, don’t come back, my dear heart; don’t throw yourself in the mouth of the tiger; I’ve already got too many worries with my husband and my poor little children.” Her son, her chou d’amour, was on her knees as she wrote and added his own signature: “by the hand of the little Dauphin. Louis.”32

  Nevertheless, on 29 September, the Queen engaged with Barnave that the Princesse de Lamballe would return, as “a patriotic act and a pledge of her intentions.” A month later, in response to her mistress’s messages, the faithful Princesse left Aix, and was back in Paris, via a visit to the Duc de Penthièvre, by mid-November. Prudently, she made her will in advance, making provision for charity—the Hôtel Dieu—and also the care of her little dogs. The Princesse was given an apartment close to the Queen’s in the Tuileries. Although in certain quarters she was immediately accused of returning for “lesbian practices,” the Princesse de Lamballe actually resumed her ceremonial role at the Queen’s side just as Barnave wished. On a more informal level, as one dog lover to another, the Princesse brought a little red-and-white spaniel for Marie Antoinette, to cheer the Tuileries; originally called Thisbée, its name was later transmuted into the cosier Mignon.33

  Much later the Marquise de Tourzel would make out that the Queen, in requesting the Princesse de Lamballe’s return, was doing her friend a favour; she enabled the Princesse to retain her position as Superintendent, which would otherwise have been terminated. It was true that the Queen dared not appoint a new household lest the old one be declared obsolete; as a result she suffered from lack of the ritual company of a court. With sublime ingratitude some of the grand ladies sulked at their perceived demotion under the new order, as, for example, the Duchesse de Duras who felt hardly used by the loss of her footstool. “Nobody comes to my card parties,” exclaimed the Queen bitterly. “The King goes solitarily to bed. No allowance is made for political necessity; we are punished for our misfortunes.”34 Nevertheless the Marquise de Tourzel’s interpretation cannot be reconciled with the total change in the Queen’s attitude; in September she gave emotional warnings and in October a summons. For better or for worse it was Marie Antoinette, following the precepts of Barnave, who was responsible for the return of the Princesse de Lamballe to France.

  The visible loyalty of the Princesse de Lamballe, in the public eye, contrasted with that of the émigré Princes. Since members of the former Constitutional Assembly were debarred from the new Legislative Assembly, the latter was inevitably more radical. On 31 October, influenced by Brissot and his Girondins, the Assembly proposed a decree by which those émigrés who did not immediately quit all armed camps abroad were guilty of conspiracy. For themselves, they were sentenced to death and confiscation of their property; but the properties of members of the same family who had not left France were also to be confiscated. On the advice of Barnave, the King exercised his veto on the measure. He also vetoed a measure that criminalized those French men and women who had stayed in France, but continued to attend non-juror Masses.

  In other ways, however, the King still temporized. On 1 January 1792 Louis XVI received a New Year’s deputation from the municipality of Paris; he did so with characteristic gaucheness, scarcely bothering to interrupt his game of billiards, and listening with apparent indifference to the various compliments bestowed. The Queen, on the other hand, having written her usual New Year’s letter to Princesse Louise on “the value of friends like you and yours” in misfortune, displayed herself in a new court dress of embroidered blue satin.35 She did so with a panache that Barnave would have approved, had the Feuillant triumvir not begun to be disillusioned with the Queen’s real intentions, just as the constitutionalist Feuillant party itself began to decline in power. Barnave retreated from Paris shortly after the New Year.

  Nevertheless, on this day the King officially declared the émigré Princes to be traitors. And on 25 January a deputation from the Assembly brought a decree against the Emperor Leopold for Louis to sign. In another extremely long memorandum to her brother—“long for me who is not used to it”—the Queen attempted to justify the fact that he did so. It was essential, she wrote, for the King to be seen to be faithful to the Constitution, and thus link himself to the “national honour” that was being wounded by menaces and provocations from outside; only in this way could he rally the public confidence, which was gradually being stolen from him.36

  Were there renewed plans for escape during this period? That would be a third strand to the Queen’s policy, added to her private playing along with Barnave and her secret promotion of the armed congress. It would seem so. Rumours of a fresh escape there certainly were, stories that the King had got out disguised as a woman, and so forth. Naturally after Varennes the Tuileries was riddled with spies doubling as servants. One guard, hearing such a rumour, gave an order on his own initiative for the royal family to be locked up for an entire day. Fersen, having visited Turin and Vienna—where he had a sentimental reunion with the Duchesse de Polignac—was back in Brussels. On 19 October 1791 the Queen had told him, “We have a project a little like that of June” for the middle of November and she promised to let him know mo
re in about ten days’ time. Nothing further was heard of this scheme.

  It was left to King Gustav of Sweden, inspired not only by Fersen but by the monarchical solidarity that the Emperor seemed to lack, to seek fresh ways to rescue the royal family in the spring of 1792. King Gustav and Fersen parted company, however, on how the escape should be achieved. The Swedish King thought his fellow monarch should go alone but Fersen pointed to the danger of leaving the Queen and Dauphin behind in France as hostages. With his family in their power, it would be only too easy for the French to work on the “feeble and irresolute” spirit of the King under such circumstances; alternatively they might well declare a Regency on behalf of the boy.37

  For all the Queen’s earlier prohibitions, Fersen arrived back in France in February, wearing disguise and travelling on a false passport (he had been named among the guilty “abductors” of Varennes). The weather was so cold that Fersen could hear the wheels of the carriages crunching “as they do in Sweden.” He lurked in the attic of Eléanore Sullivan’s house, where he was discreetly passed food by his generous mistress, with Quentin Craufurd left in ignorance.38

  Fersen returned to a France where “a general cry of war was being heard,” in the words of Marie Antoinette, and nobody had any doubts that war would soon take place. Brissot and the Girondins were beginning to regard a struggle against the counter-revolutionary forces abroad as a cleansing process or “a school of virtue.” It was Robespierre, the Jacobin, who made a far more cautious speech on the subject, pointing out how pleased the enemies of France would be if that country declared war, since it would provide them with a heaven-sent opportunity for their own aggression.39 The alliance of Austria and Prussia on 7 February—those hereditary enemies now joined by a common cause of territorial aggrandizement—justified the observation.

  Fersen managed to get into the Tuileries, using a side door. He saw the Queen on 13 February. They had not met since that farewell in the darkness at the Bondy poste over six months earlier. Fersen spent the night there, or, in a notorious phrase, which a subsequent editor of his Journal intime tried unsuccessfully to eliminate, “Resté là.”40 Much has been made of this particular entry because the phrase was often used by Fersen to indicate spending the night with one of his numerous mistresses; this is the only occasion on which it has been found to apply to Marie Antoinette. It seems strange, however, to argue on the evidence of a solitary entry that this was the only time the Count and the Queen had sex. There may, after all, have been many other entries of “Resté là” that applied to “Elle,” as the Queen was known, which have not survived the late-nineteenth-century censor, Fersen’s great-nephew Baron Klinckowström.

  Fersen and Marie Antoinette had first met nearly twenty years ago and had been close for at least twelve of them; both were approaching middle age by the standards of the time; the Tuileries, with its National Guard whose presence Fersen noted with alarm, was not the free and easy Petit Trianon. If they had not made love before, they were unlikely to start now. It has been argued here that the Queen and Fersen did have an affair starting in 1783, petering out into a purely romantic relationship. Perhaps, then, there was a nostalgic fling at the Tuileries—one rather hopes so—or perhaps the phrase for once meant just what it said: “Stayed there.”

  Fersen needed primarily to see the King, which was a very different motive for his remaining within the Tuileries precincts overnight instead of risking another entry. On behalf of King Gustav he had to discuss the question of escape. But he got nowhere. It was not only the fact of continuing supervision but Louis XVI’s own scruples that stood in the way; he had by now promised to remain in France on numerous occasions and the King, wrote Fersen, is “an honourable man.” The most the King would do was agree to be guided through the forest by “smugglers” to meet light troops in the event of an invasion. It was on this occasion that Louis made the melancholy confidence to Fersen quoted earlier on the subject of 14 July 1789. He should have gone to Metz then, he said; he had his opportunity and it had never come again. (Varennes was somehow obliterated from his memory.) Fersen lingered in Paris for a while, still concealed at the house of Eléanore Sullivan, although the Queen imagined that he had already left for Spain. He finally departed on 21 February, taking with him the dog Odin of whom a sibling had in happier days been presented to the Queen of France.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  VIOLENCE AND RAGE

  “It was a case of violence and rage on one side, feebleness and inertia on the other.”

  MARIE ANTOINETTE TO COUNT MERCY D’ARGENTEAU CONCERNING 20 JUNE 1792

  On 20 April 1792, Louis XVI declared war upon what Marie Antoinette significantly described as “the House of Austria.” The Marquise de Tourzel remembered how the King left the Tuileries for the Legislative Assembly with sadness painted on his face. Less compassionately, Madame de Staël described how Louis XVI looked left and right with the vacant curiosity of the short-sighted, and proposed war in the same flat voice as he would have proposed the least important measure in the world.1 For the time being, Prussia was not mentioned although there were many denunciations of the Austro-Prussian defensive treaty of February. The Declaration of War followed an ultimatum of 5 April, calling for the removal of the émigré forces from their bases along the Rhine, which was ignored by Austria. The Feuillants, unwilling war-makers, gave way to a ministry of Girondins who had been pressing for a cleansing war since October.

  Above all, Austria must avoid the appearance of meddling in the internal affairs of France, wrote Marie Antoinette to Mercy on 30 April. In another letter she emphasized the point again: “The French will always repulse all political intervention by foreigners in their affairs.” In fact Marie Antoinette understood Austria to be embarking on a mission to rescue the French royal family, not as a war of aggression to add territory to the Austrian Empire at France’s expense. The latter project was unacceptable: she told the Dauphin’s valet Hüe firmly, for her “the interests of France” came first—“before everything.”2

  Unfortunately there was a new Emperor in Austria. Leopold II died at the beginning of March, and was succeeded by his son, a man of a far more zealous and militaristic turn of mind. Francis II, Leopold’s son, that boy whose birth had been greeted with such enthusiasm by Maria Teresa with her public announcement at the theatre, was now twenty-four. If his young wife, Maria Carolina’s daughter, was said to resemble Marie Antoinette, more positive signs of family closeness hardly existed. Whatever the lack of an emotional bond between Marie Antoinette and Leopold, they had at least grown up in the same environment and shared the same august parentage. Francis II had never even met his aunt.

  The Queen needed to bear in mind the trenchant warnings of Count Mercy. In February, Mercy had written in sharp terms to the French Queen about “the lack of consideration by which in the Tuileries they allowed themselves to believe that all the conveniences of the Austrian monarchy should yield to those of France.” The previous summer there had even been a suggestion that the French King should be prepared to cede the border fortresses, such as Cambrai’s Donai and Valenciennes, in exchange for imperial support as a kind of advance on expenses.3

  If the Queen was hoping for rescue as a result of military action, the King’s new Girondin ministry under General Dumouriez had a very different agenda. This was to be a national campaign in support of revolutionary ideals, or rather—a double negative—in opposition to counter-revolutionary ones. Hostility to “the Austrian woman” was inevitably intensified by the war; she was now, in crude modern terms, an enemy alien. The Queen’s anger at the idea of Austrian territorial claims on France would have been scarcely credible to those who demonized her. Instead, the Girondin orator Pierre Vergniaud pointed dramatically to the Tuileries itself: “From here I can see the windows of a palace where counter-revolution is being plotted, where they are working out ways to plunge us once more into the horrors of slavery.” These were sentiments that found a more vulgar expression in the beha
viour of the guards at the Tuileries, who, not content with insults, indulged with roars of laughter in a practice now called mooning.4

  The beginning of a war that he had himself reluctantly declared provoked in Louis XVI one of those fits of silent gloom that were his customary reaction to an intolerable situation. Ten days in May passed without his speaking at all to his family, except for the terse words necessary to play backgammon with Madame Elisabeth. Marie Antoinette for her part saw it as her duty to provide Count Mercy and also Fersen, both in Brussels, with any details that she could glean about the conduct of the war. (However, the assassination of Gustav III and the coming to power of his brother as Regent, a man of very different political sympathies, meant that a Swedish rescue was no longer an option; as Fersen told the Queen, “this loss is a cruel one.”)5

  The Queen’s new obsession was to avoid the dismemberment of France at the hands of Austria, particularly in the German-speaking east, that she imagined might take place if Austria lost Belgium in the west. This theme of distrust of Austria—the country that she nevertheless hoped would save them—was hammered home in her correspondence throughout the summer.

  It is a nice point as to whether the Queen was a traitor for writing in her letters to Mercy such things as “the plan is to attack by the Savoy and Liège”—even before the declaration of war. A coded letter of 5 June to Fersen reported that the army of General Luckner had been ordered by the Girondin ministry to attack without cease, although Luckner was against it and the troops were both ill supplied and disordered. Eighteen days later the Queen reported, also to Fersen, that Dumouriez was leaving for the army of Luckner the next day, with the intention of causing an insurrection in Brabant.6 “The Austrian woman” was, of course, ritually accused of treachery—by those who did not know of this correspondence—simply on the grounds of her birth. By her own lights, however, she was certainly not.