by Antal Szerb
Chief amongst them was the Comte de Vaudreuil. The somewhat taciturn, occasionally demonic, pampered favourite, known to the group as the ‘magician’, was the Duchesse de Polignac’s friend. He was one of the greatest connoisseurs of art in his time, and a powerful patron of writers and painters. It can hardly be fortuitous that the authors he personally helped came also to enjoy the patronage of Marie-Antoinette, who was normally so indifferent towards literature. These were Beaumarchais and Chamfort, the brightest, most cynical and most disillusioned writers of the age—in neither of whom is there the slightest trace of a courtly style, and who would never have achieved official status even under the most liberal system. Vaudreuil must have been the same sort of person himself: he found everything amusing, except when his bad nerves racked him with pain and he was seized with fits of uncontrollable anger, when he lost even his respect for the Queen—as when he once deliberately broke her favourite billiard cue. We should add that he had a rather ugly face, scarred by smallpox, so it was clearly not for his external appearance that he was so much liked. “I know only two men,” said one of his contemporaries, a duke, “who know how to speak to a woman: the actor Lekaint, and M de Vaudreuil.”
One very popular member of the clique was a parvenu, the Comte d’Adhémar, who had dug up his romantic-sounding name from some old documents and bought permission to use it. He was a modest man, of modest means, but respected in the group because he ‘knew everything’. He played the role in the Queen’s circle that fell to the abbé elsewhere: he represented the world of books, and had a fine singing voice besides.
The group also included one of the cleverest men of the age, the Duc de Ligne. He was greatly admired by Goethe, and is one of the most notable examples of a genuinely superior man of the world in this period.
Marie-Antoinette, however, was by nature of a sarcastic and critical tendency. Like her brother Joseph II, she was never short of a malicious remark, and the superior tone of her irony and her satirical wit were simply reinforced by her upbringing. Two bad angels struggled for the soul of the young Dauphine: Mme de Marsan, the embodiment of tradition, and the demonic Abbé Vermond, iconoclasm made flesh. Vermond, in particular—a churchman without an ounce of religion in him—exemplified the political morals of the age. He was convinced that, at a time when authority and discipline were weakening, a lead should be given by the Church, an organisation that for two thousand years had preserved the secret of holding on to power. Like Thomas Mann’s Naphta, he respected its enormous accumulation of authority. “He embodied,” in Goncourt’s words, “all the ambition and arrogance of the age: the arrogance of thinking himself somebody, and the determination to do everything by himself.” Secret, all-powerful influence, without public office or form, was his dream. The role was not entirely different from the one Rohan yearned for, and Marie-Antoinette’s attachment to Vermond must certainly have encouraged his hope that one day she would attach herself in the same way to him.
At Schönbrunn Vermond’s job had been to teach the young Princess what the French were like. He almost certainly told her that they were a supercilious, hypercritical people who disliked anything that was boring. At Versailles he was constantly pointing out how very much better things were done in Vienna. The formalities, the empty traditions, everything to do with the French past, he treated with the embittered ‘philosophical’ hostility of a parvenu.
So one can imagine that the group that formed around Marie-Antoinette, of which Vermond was the leader and Vaudreuil the truest representative, was regarded by others as uniformly arrogant. Not perhaps with a strictly intellectual arrogance, nor the arrogance based on greater knowledge and a broader view of the world, but rather the easy assumption of superiority conferred by knowing oneself to be more fashionable, more articulate and more abreast of the times. It was the sort of superiority the citizen in a great metropolis feels towards someone from the country, and the self-consciously ‘modern’ person towards the people of the past. Lord Chesterfield, the greatest theorist of court life in the eighteenth century, is right when he observes in one of his letters: “It calls for a great deal of intelligence to accept the highest degree of intelligence of other people. The cleverer you are, the more goodwill and courtesy you are called on to display to be forgiven for your superiority. It is not an easy thing!” Marie-Antoinette’s entourage, it seems, failed to understand this.
To which we must add that she and her set consisted almost entirely of young men and women, while in the clique opposing them it was the older lords and ladies who dictated the tone. Young people, especially when in a group and with nothing to restrain them from being vengeful, are always mockingly supercilious towards their elders, undoubtedly encouraged to do so by their own wit and intelligence. They find the customs and habits of older people amusing, and wherever they can will exaggerate or even mimic differences between the two groups.
In her circle, the younger members of the Court found themselves ranged against the powerful women, ministers (like Maurepas) of astonishing antiquity, and the King’s aunts—all of them religious bigots, political conservatives, people who were hostile to all forms of social change and intellectually dull. It was inevitable that this clique should feel superior in themselves and have little difficulty making other people feel that superiority—and that it would be deeply resented. The feelings of inferiority they imposed on the rest of the Court must have been one of the most important sources of the hatred felt towards Marie-Antoinette.
By the time of the necklace affair, the circle of friends had largely dispersed. Marie-Antoinette now found herself most at ease with foreigners. When anyone remarked on the danger in this, she would solemnly reply:
“You are quite right, but at least they don’t ask me for anything.”
(From the Hungarian point of view, it is interesting to note that among these foreign friends was the already mentioned Count Bálint Esterházy. Born in 1740, he was the grandson of Antal Esterházy, the military general and companion in exile of Ferenc Rákóczi II. His father, József Bálint Esterházy, had left Bulgaria and returned to France, where he served as a soldier, married a Frenchwoman and died young. The present Esterházy was a follower of the Comte de Choiseul, and it was he who took the portrait of her fiancé to Marie-Antoinette at Schönbrunn. Maria Theresa had not been pleased by Esterházy’s behaviour in Vienna: he allegedly spent 100,000 forint on another man’s wife and became involved in a duel. He was much given to duelling, and continued the practice at Versailles whenever he considered that Marie-Antoinette had favoured someone else over him. Later, when the War Minister proposed downgrading his regiment of hussars, Marie-Antoinette intervened on behalf of her devotee. In 1780 he became a general. He was an intimate friend of the Comte d’Artois. In the Revolution his hussars provided cover for the flight of the royal princes. Esterházy later emigrated, settled in Volhynia, and died there.)
Rohan must have been aware of all these developments at the Court: the Queen’s need for intimate friendships and her extreme proneness to taking lively, clever, dominant women into her confidence. Women like Jeanne de la Motte.
When Rohan first became enmeshed in Jeanne’s intrigues, he was in truth showing no more credulity than ninety per cent of the population. He believed the Queen was no different from any other young, attractive woman of high birth and did not take the sanctity of marriage very seriously. By this stage a whole erotic myth had grown up around the person of Marie-Antoinette. To some extent it had sprung up independently of any basis in reality, but whether or not any such basis existed, the myth was a necessary one. Every social group has certain collective mental requirements. It needs men it can look up to as objects of hero worship (one of the major driving forces of history) and it needs women who can serve as objects of collective desire. In our time these women are the great screen actresses; in our parents’ time they were opera singers, dancers and circus performers. Erotic legends grow up around all female film stars, and publicity agents take
great care to foster and sustain them.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the heyday of the monarchy, the woman closest to the King, whether his Queen or his mistress, attracted the same level of interest that film stars do nowadays. Their situations were similar in that their lives were played out in the full glare of publicity, and their whole existence was a performance, a role they had to play. The queens of old and the great actresses: figures in the collective consciousness, people to whom everything is attributed that can be dreamt of about a woman.
This phenomenon reached its highest level of importance in the eighteenth century. It was the century, as we are frequently told, of women—the intellectual life of women in salons, women wielding unseen influence, women as members of academies, theatrical productions whose success depended on the power of actresses to charm; in the economic sphere, financiers amassing great fortunes in order to marry their daughters into the aristocracy, and women ruling over whole peoples and empires: Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Queen Elisabeth Farnese of Spain, as well as the likes of Mme de Pompadour and Mme du Barry. It was as if some residual matriarchy—the oldest culture of the Mediterranean—was struggling to emerge from the blood and the collective unconscious; as if the time would one day return when, in every tribe, it was the women who possessed wealth and power and the men who ‘married out’, moving into the wife’s extended family, where they became gentle, pampered, more or less superfluous drones. In the nineteenth century, with the age of emancipation, some sort of equilibrium was established, but the twentieth century has seen a reaction, and today we find ourselves once again living in a powerful patriarchy. Even in politics there are similarities with the male-bonded societies of old, with groups of men, to a lesser or greater extent armed, adhering to one another and exercising the power of male strength. What the reasons might be for this alternation between periods of male and female dominance is not yet something science can explain, but it is not inconceivable that they are rooted not in historical processes but in biology.
In the century of women, it was inevitable that these erotic legends should attach themselves to the outstanding female figures of the time, and not just to the likes of Mme de Pompadour and Catherine the Great, who provided plenty of suitable material, but even to the ever-virtuous Maria Theresa, who fulfilled all the duties of a self-effacing monarch, wife and mother. Even today there are countless dreadful stories circulating in this country about the Empress and her Hungarian hussars.
And all this applied even more strongly in France. It was there that women reached the greatest positions of power, and there that this erotic momentum was at its strongest, by virtue of the traditions and nature of the French people.
Nonetheless they still looked to their king to be first and foremost a loving husband, and they respected him as such. Louis XV lost his popularity not on account of his political ineptitude but because of Mme du Barry, and not so much because he had a mistress but because he failed to choose a better one, the sort of woman with whom his more respectable subjects might wish to converse. And it played a large part in Louis XVI’s loss of public esteem that people were so dissatisfied with his wife Marie-Antoinette. Besides, it was felt that he did not conduct himself like a true husband, or conform to the national ideal of manliness, in contrast to the gallant Henri IV. This is all characteristically French. With the English, for example, it was only in their most Gallicised period, the reign of Charles II, that they took any interest in their king’s mistresses. In the eighteenth century they were so indifferent to the question of whom their monarch was sleeping with that the names never feature in the historical record. This was not a question of morality. The English were at that time a thousand times more moralistic than the French, but even they were not especially perturbed by these royal liaisons: their hatred of their monarchs existed quite independently. No, this was something in the sexual nature of the French, and everything to do with their fundamentally bourgeois attitudes. The basic character of a people does not change, and most of the French were probably no less petty bourgeois under the Ancien Régime than they were later. Their petty bourgeois character is most truly seen in the insatiable delight people took in the gnawing away at the love life of the royals that finally destroyed the life of Marie-Antoinette. Those who condemned her allegedly immoral behaviour were, deep down, embittered by the fact they could not do the same themselves, and found a certain erotic compensation by colouring in the details.
To this we should add the extraordinary tendency to gossip mentioned earlier, which arose from the fact that people no longer believed in the concept of greatness, and had lost that feeling of distance—they loved to see everything in naked, intimate proximity. It was an age of flunkeys.
But all this, you remind me, gentle reader, is just a theory, smoke without fire—what is needed is some sort of basis in fact. So we can no longer avoid closer inspection of the raw material of the myth. Indeed, we are obliged to provide one, lest we give the impression that we are guilty of the same petty bourgeois prurience.
So let us dispose of the most delicate question of all.
Marie-Antoinette was married in 1770, but properly became Louis XVI’s wife only in 1777. One morning she told Mme Campan:
“At last I am Queen of France.”
The following year her first child was born, the Madame Royale, who was christened by Rohan. In 1781 came the Dauphin (who died in 1789), and in 1785 the Prince of Normandy, later Louis XVII, the luckless child inmate of the Temple prison whose fate is lost in the shadow of mystery. “If Marie-Antoinette had known the joys of motherhood earlier,” said the excellent Casimir Stryenski, “she would not have taken to seeking a remedy for her idleness and boredom in the pursuit of empty pleasures; she would have had no time to listen to flatterers and self-seeking advisers, and no time to get involved in intrigues. Perhaps then she would have avoided slander, or, at the very least, it would have had no purchase on a life filled with the laughter of children and the tearful joys and pains of child rearing.”
Today it is common knowledge what caused that seven-year delay. Stefan Zweig, in his somewhat coarse psychoanalysis, sees it as the foundation of her entire fate. Louis XVI had been born with a certain physical abnormality, which produced no symptoms but which impeded intercourse. After years of hesitation, Joseph II visited France for a heart-to-heart talk with his brother-in-law, and he at last made up his mind to have the necessary minor operation.
So for seven years Marie-Antoinette was a wife and not a wife. A less delicate nervous system than hers would have found those seven years’ uncertainty a trial. At all events, they do explain a lot: her yearning for pleasure, her capricious behaviour and the strangely erotic atmosphere that grew up around her—the ambience of a woman whom nothing could satisfy.
In seeking consolation in this way, did Marie-Antoinette behave just as any other Frenchwoman in her situation might have? At all events, her contemporaries tended to see a pattern in her many diversions.
First and foremost of those was the person closest to her, her brother-in-law, the Comte d’Artois. Of Louis XV’s three male grandsons only Charles, Comte d’Artois, bore any resemblance to the French kings of old. The future Louis XVI was shy and low-spirited, the Comte de Provence clever, cunning and duplicitous, but Artois was a good-looking, sociable, sunny character, who kept high-born mistresses and ran up appalling levels of debt. Easy-going and sensual, he was a true Bourbon. The melancholy fate in store for him was to become, as Charles X, the very last of the senior Bourbon branch to take the French throne. But the genial young man became an intransigent king. He was the one Bourbon who in his time in exile learnt nothing and forgot nothing, who would have given up the throne rather than make any concession that might diminish his royal status. When, a great many years later, his steadfast supporter Chateaubriand called on the aged ex-King in Prague, he found him just as he had always been: a man who, if he had had his time all over again, would have done exactl
y what he had done before.
The relationship between the Queen and Artois must have been one of genuine friendship from the start. While Louis XV was still alive, the younger members of the royal family ate together, went everywhere together and entertained one another. Artois even learnt how to rope dance because the Queen admired one particular master of the art. Their fun-loving, pleasure-seeking temperaments brought them close together. She would no doubt have listened eagerly to his revelations about his many amorous experiences, because she was always interested in such stories. Before very long scandal linked their names, and by 1779 an unspeakably obscene poem was going the rounds under the title: Les amours de Charlot et de Toinette.
Speculation also strongly linked Marie-Antoinette and a startlingly handsome young courtier called Édouard Dillon. According to the legend, she once said to him, during a Court ball:
“Monsieur Dillon, just put your hand here a moment, and feel how my heart is beating.”
To which the King replied, in his phlegmatic way:
“Madame … Monsieur Dillon will take your word for that.”
According to some, Marie-Antoinette bestowed her favours on the not-so-very-young Duc de Coigny (he was aged between forty and fifty). Tilly, who was not ill-disposed to the Queen, was certain of it, as was Lord Holland. According to him, Mme Campan, who presents Marie-Antoinette as a model of sexual probity in her memoirs, was less discreet in her younger days, and did not dissuade Talleyrand from acting as a go-between for the Queen and Coigny. But was Talleyrand a man whose word you would always trust?
