by Antal Szerb
The instant Marie-Antoinette met Jeanne she took her to her heart and gave her ten thousand livres, as friendship is strengthened by such little gifts. Out of pure kindness Jeanne mediated between them on Rohan’s behalf, but he had another, far more powerful, patron, the Emperor Joseph II, who thought it in the Austrian interest to demand that his friend Rohan should be made Prime Minister of France. (Here she neatly worked in the greatest of all the accusations levelled at Marie-Antoinette, that she served the interests of a foreign power.) Marie-Antoinette did not really like Rohan, but she blindly obeyed her brother and so made her peace with him, and their passion flared up again. The expression is of course colourful rather than precise, since both were merely feigning, Marie-Antoinette for political reasons (the Austrian cause) and Rohan from ambition. Rohan was at the time both morally and physically a broken man, who needed to take Cagliostro’s magic pills with him to the assignations; and on the way—oh masterstroke of the parlour maid’s imagination!—he would call in on his young mistress at Passy to “get his head up …”
Then she comes to the letters. She had not kept all two hundred of them, only some thirty or so—copies—supposedly made at the time. They are indeed love letters, but not very entertaining. Here, all the same, is a brief example—a graphic illustration of just what the French were capable of believing about their royalty:
16th August 1784
Yesterday someone made a rather nosy and suspicious remark, and that has prevented my coming to T… [Trianon] today, but it will not make me deprive myself of the sight of my darling slave. The minister (the King) is going at eleven to hunt at R … [Rambouillet]; he may be home later, but more probably only in the morning; I hope to compensate myself for his absence by taking revenge for the boredom I have endured these past two days …
… Since you will play the leading role in my plan, it is essential that there should be perfect understanding between us à propos this subject, as there was last Friday on the s … [sofa]. You will smile at the comparison, but since it is appropriate, and since I want to give you proof that it is this evening while we are talking about serious things, you must dress as a messenger, with a parcel in your hand, and walk up and down between the columns of the chapel at eleven; I will send the Comtesse who will lead you up a hidden staircase to a room where you will find the object of your heart’s desire.
The time has come for us to say a few words about Marie-Antoinette’s dire and ever-increasing unpopularity, that shift in sentiment which played such a significant part in the outbreak of the Revolution.
When she arrived in Paris with her new husband in 1773 she was given a rapturous reception by the people. As she stood on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, that fine old cavalier Maréchal Brissac said to her:
“Voila, Madame—two thousand admirers stand before you.”
And it was no exaggeration. The French passionately admired the beautiful little princess who had brought a touch of youth to the ageing Bourbon Court. She sensed this, and was happy in the knowledge of it. At around this time she wrote to her mother:
“As we withdrew, we waved to the people and they were so delighted. How happy is our situation when we can win the friendship of an entire people so cheaply!” This did not mean that she would not have been prepared to pay a great deal for it.
But as the years passed and the impatiently-awaited Dauphin failed to appear, her popularity began to wane. When a son was born to the Duc d’Artois, the fishwives pouring into Versailles demanded to know why she was not following the example. But when the Dauphin did finally arrive, the enthusiasm was not what it would once have been, at the start of the reign. Without ever noticing it, Marie-Antoinette had lost the people’s love.
By degrees she came to be held responsible for everything the public disliked. Even the King’s refusal to be vaccinated was laid at her door. People knew that the Queen was all-powerful—so she must have been to blame for whatever happened or failed to happen. But seen from this distance, Marie-Antoinette was not all-powerful. Her greatest wish in the field of politics, that Choiseul should be recalled from exile, was never fulfilled. Instead, despite her every protest, Calonne was made Contrôleur Général (Finance Minister), and it was as a result of his profligacy, his ineffective and doomed financial policies, that people turned against Marie-Antoinette and ridiculed her as Madame Déficit.
When, in March 1785, Marie-Antoinette attended the thanksgiving service held in Notre Dame for the birth of her second son, the Duc de Normandie, she was received by the crowd in icy silence. She returned to Versailles in tears.
“Mais que leur ai-je donc fait?”—But what have I done to them?—she asked her companions, in bewilderment.
For a year now, ever since the affair of the necklace, she had been so passionately hated by all sections of society that the kindly old Duc de Penthièvre advised the King to lock her up in the nunnery at Val-de-Grace in the interests of public order.
Mais que leur ai-je donc fait? What had given rise to such bottomless hatred?
According to the brothers Goncourt, it originated in the Court, from where it was skilfully fostered, and made its way out into an ever-widening sphere. We have already discussed why the majority of courtiers so disliked her: the more elderly, because she was young and so much at ease with younger people; the zealots, for the general gaiety of her life; the ‘old French’ party, because she stood for the Austrian connection; those who did not belong to the Polignac circle, because they felt themselves slighted; and everyone else, because the witty superiority of her entourage diminished their self-esteem.
History provides many examples of courtiers taking to a new queen with less than total enthusiasm, but it is unusual for them to foment such powerful and far-reaching intrigues against one; and it is quite without parallel for them to involve the common people. This itself was a sign of the times. But it is more than that. Not only does it suggest that public opinion had become a factor in a purely internal palace revolution; it also shows the extent to which the Court had lost its political instinct. Its chief source of strength was now to make common cause against the authority of the King with his greatest enemy, the mob. That alone would have been enough to bring down judgement on the leading section in society. Had the power of the aristocracy not been ended by the Revolution, it would have collapsed of its own accord, precisely because it had lost its most fundamental instinct, its whole raison d’être, which derived from the same instinct that brought it to leadership in the first place: its capacity to survive.
If we were to ask a sober-minded French citizen of the time what his complaint against the Queen was, he would no doubt have summarised it under three headings: her extravagance, her immoral life and her lack of patriotism. The first charge—whether founded or not—we have explored elsewhere. The second we touched on in the discussion of the vast number of lovers she was imagined to have. And of course, after the necklace trial, this particular accusation was greatly reinforced by the influence of the literary productions of Jeanne de la Motte and the pamphleteers.
By this stage there was nothing the Queen could do to stop those Parisians with filthy minds and the souls of concierges instantly ‘seeing through’ her schemes for debauchery. If the Queen was so fond of spending her summer evenings out on the terraces overlooking the park at Versailles, it was perfectly clear what she got up to in the dark … Thus it rapidly got abroad that she and her intimate circle—Coigny, Vaudreuil, Besenval and the rest—had ordered costumes representing wild animals, and “after dressing up as harts and hinds, had strayed through the park, giving themselves up to the pleasures of harts and hinds”. That could only speak for itself. According to others, Marie-Antoinette would wander through the Versailles gardens dressed as an Amazon, offering herself to anyone—man or woman—she came upon. One young man in particular, an official from the War Ministry, a real Adonis, had caught her eye, but Artois became jealous, the young man vanished without trace shortly afterwards, and his
family never saw him again. And so on, and on, and on …
Popular opinion demeaned and besmirched her gaiety of spirit, her love of a beautiful and freer-flowing life, her desire for friendship, and the innocent flirtatiousness by which she sought to please everyone: in short, les plus belles vertus de sa jeunesse—the loveliest qualities of her youth—as the brothers Goncourt put it. But even if the Queen were not a Vestal Virgin, did that really deserve such moral outrage from the not-so-puritanical French? “It was a strange kind of censoriousness,” the brothers exclaim, and they are right to do so, “that even in the so-called century of women the Queen was to be forgiven nothing that expressed real femininity.” French historians of this most frivolous of periods seem to tolerate everyone else’s peccadilloes as something to be expected, and find them perfectly natural—so why not those of their queens?
The answer to this question becomes clear when we confront the third of these accusations. The French did not dislike Marie-Antoinette because she was immoral. On the contrary, they found her immoral, and piled the decaying products of their basest fantasies on her, because they did not like her … And the chief reason why they disliked her, it seems to us, can only have been that she wasn’t French.
The Queen, it cannot be denied, was bound by a thousand ties, emotional and political, to the house of her birth and the powerful family from which she had come. Sanguine by nature, it never occurred to her for a moment that the interests of the two allies, Austria and France, might not always exactly coincide. Public opinion, which had never felt much enthusiasm for the Austrians (the French had always passionately hated any alliance with them) exaggerated her links with that country, spoke of the millions of livres she sent back to her brother, and took great delight in passing on stories by word of mouth, such as the following:
When Joseph II of Austria ordered the closure of the Schelde corridor, Marie-Antoinette defended him with all her might before the French Court, and told the Foreign Minister Vergennes:
“All you ever think about the Emperor is that he is my brother.”
To which he replied:
“I do always bear it in mind. But before all else I have to consider that Monsieur the Dauphin is your son.”
France was a closed society, in which outsiders had no place. There has never been a European country in which foreigners were shown less sympathy. A foreign-born queen, tainted with foreign interests, could never be popular, and when the hostility towards her reached its peak, the very worst term of abuse they could find for her was L’Autrichienne: ‘that Austrian woman’.
This fact can perhaps only be fully understood, and felt on the skin, by people from outside the country. If someone in Hungary remarks that “You’re not Hungarian”, it is of course not exactly flattery, but nor is it necessarily an insult. It could be a simple statement of fact. If an Englishman happens not to be pure English, and has Scots or Welsh blood in his veins, he will be openly proud of it. But if someone in France tells you, “You are not French!” it denotes something lacking, some fundamental moral deficiency. You probably go around at night with a false beard stealing small change from the caps of blind beggars, are furthermore physically deformed, and carry Lord knows what weapons concealed beneath your garments; in short, you are a subhuman creature, though rather less likeable than an animal.
As can be imagined, this powerful French xenophobia may well have been the basis of Marie-Antoinette’s unpopularity.
However, as we have said, Marie-Antoinette was neither a demon, as the Revolution painted her, nor the angel portrayed by the counter-revolution. Perhaps Stefan Zweig is right: the real problem was that she was simply mediocre. Her final martyrdom is very touching, but there really is nothing in her life to make us think of her with particular veneration or emotion. As we take our leave of her, we should quote, in their original beauty, the words of Lamartine, in which he characterises her as follows:
Favorite charmante et dangereuse d’une monarchie vieillie, plutôt que d’une monarchie nouvelle, elle n’eut le prestige de l’ancienne royauté, le respect; ni le prestige du nouveau règne: la popularité. Elle ne sut que charmer, égarer, et mourir.
The charming and dangerous favourite of an ageing monarchy, rather than the queen of a new one, she lacked the prestige of old royalty, the respect due to it; and she also lacked the prestige accorded to a new reign—popularity. All she knew was how to charm, to lose her way, and to die.
Epilogue
COMING TO THE END OF OUR STORY and reading through what we have written, we are somewhat alarmed to find that however much we have tried to paint a full and many-sided picture of the age, we have still not really succeeded in placing sufficient emphasis on what Talleyrand called ‘the sweetness of life’. The reader might well be left with the impression that the final hours of the Ancien Régime were careworn and oppressive, a ‘moral wasteland’, a time of drought before the storm, and he would perhaps be glad not to have lived then. Which would be quite wrong. To have been alive then must have been to experience one of the most delightful of European centuries.
Huizinga notes in another connection that ‘chronicles’, that is, works of history written as literature, almost always paint a rather dark picture of our period, because they find its grievances so vivid. Anyone who wants to learn about the brightness, beauty and happiness of a particular age has to turn to the record left by artists. And if we follow the great Dutchman’s advice and compare the painters of various centuries from the ‘eudaemonic’ point of view, would we find any other age whose canvases reflect the sweetness of life with the same intensity as that marvellous line of artists from Watteau to Fragonard?
The painters of eighteenth-century France are not much in fashion nowadays—indeed it is almost in bad taste to mention Boucher, the great master of the mid-century, in the presence of those in the know. And this is perfectly natural. They marked the end of one great period, and after them something quite different began. Far be it from us to argue with those who are better qualified, but all the same we cannot help feeling that the time will come when these painters will once again be of interest. Our concern is not with their relative greatness, but with that sense of the sweetness of life reflected in their pictures.
Watteau and Fragonard … according to the Goncourts they are the only poets of the eighteenth century. The verse writers suffer from the dry rationalism of the period, while these two great artists proclaim what in other ages is the subject matter of poets: the world of dream, fable, intoxication and nostalgia.
Watteau lived at the very start of the century. The great representative of our own period is Fragonard, the delegate from the flower fields of Grasse in perennially happy Provence. With a kind of dreamlike intensity, his works conjure up in our souls the eternal myth of the great woodlands: mighty trees, tiny human and animal figures; the trees bent in sorrow, the men and women depicted beneath them existing in a kind of superhuman joy that almost succeeds in making their baby faces seem serious—a joy that, like music, is almost painful. What makes the paintings of Watteau and Fragonard so special is that they seem to depict scenes from an old novel—very beautiful, subtly erotic, and tinged with melancholy—scenes from some wonderful mythological story such as Psyche and Eros. The viewer is seized by a rich, complex yearning, an intense longing to know their secret, their unspoken mystery, a desire to return to the woodland world that is sweeter than anything in this life, and, finally, the desire for something—one knows not what—that great and inexpressible nostalgia which truly creative art awakens in the soul.
And then it begins to dawn on one: this age was as beautiful as the most finely-worked lace, as a piece of Sèvres porcelain with its timeless charm and fragile delicacy; as the noble oozings of the Tokai grape, full and rich with sweetness; as the autumn air in Hungary, when the reddening leaves are scented with the inexpressible sweetness of death.
Only poetry can express this—nothing else. Verlaine’s lines, from the Fêtes galantes.
/>
Clair de lune
Votre âme est un pays choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leur déguisements fantastiques.
Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L’amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,
Ils n’ont pas l’air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,
Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau,
Les grand jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres.
Your soul is a landscape set apart
For charming masques and rustic dances,
Where lovers step and strum their lutes, but seem
Melancholy beneath their fanciful disguises—
Where, even as they sing, in minor key,
Of love victorious and life’s sweet moments,
They seem not to believe in their own happiness,
And their song drifts away in the moonlight—
The calm moonlight, here so sad and beautiful,
That makes the birds dream among the branches,
And jets of water sob with ecstasy
In the tall, slim fountains between the statues.
The necklace trial took place in 1786. Three years later the Revolution broke out.
