The Queen`s Confession (2 page)

Isabella was constantly talking about death and how she longed for it.

That seemed strange to me. Death was something which happened to old people—or little babies whom one did not really know. It had little to do with us.

Caroline and I, hiding ourselves behind a clipped hedge in the gardens, once heard Isabella and Maria Christina talking together.

“What right have I in this world?” Isabella was saying.

“I am no good.

If it were not sinful I would kill myself. I should already have done so. “

Maria Christina laughed at her. Maria Christina was not the kindest of our sisters and on the rare occasions when she did notice us she would say something spiteful, so we avoided her.

“You suffer from a desire to seem heroic,” she retorted.

“It’s utter selfishness.”

Then she walked away and left Isabella looking after her, stricken.

I thought about that scene tor five whole minutes, which was a long rime for me.

And Isabella did die just as she had said she wanted to. She was in Vienna for only two years in all. Poor Joseph was heartbroken. He was constantly writing letters to Isa bella’s father in Parma and they were all about Isabella, how wonderful she had been, how there was no one like her.

I have lost everything,” he told my brother Leopold.

“My beloved wife my love … has gone. How can I survive this terrible separation?”

One day I saw Joseph with Maria Christina. Her eyes were Sashing with hatred and she was saying: “It’s true. I will show you her letters.

They will tell you all you want to know. You will see that I not you was the one she loved. “

It falls into place now. Poor Joseph 1 Poor Isabella! I understand why Isabella was so sad and wished for death, ashamed of her love and yet unable to suppress it; and Maria Christina, who would always want her revenge, had betrayed her to poor Joseph.

Immersed as I was then in my own affairs I saw this tragedy as through a misted glass, but because my own suffering has now made of me a different person from the careless creature I was in my youth, I understand so much and I have sympathy to give to others who suffer. I brood on their sufferings perhaps because I cannot bear to contemplate my own.

Joseph was very unhappy for a long time, but because he was the eldest and more important than any of us he must have a wife. He was so angry when a new wife was selected for him by our mother and Prince Wenzel Anton Kaunitz that when she arrived in Vienna he scarcely spoke to her. She was very different from Isabella, being small and fat, with brown uneven teeth and red spots on her face. Joseph told Leopold, in whom he used to confide more than in anyone else at our mother’s court, that he was wretched and he was not going to pretend to be anything else for it was not in his nature to pretend. Her name was Josepha and she must have been unhappy too, for he had a barrier built across the balcony on to which their separate rooms opened so that he would never meet her if

she i3 stepped from her room at the same time as he stepped from his.

Maria Christina said: “If I were Joseph’s wife, I’d go and hang myself on a tree in the Schonbrunn gardens.”

When I was ten years old I was aware of tragedy, which was real even to me because it concerned me deeply.

Leopold was going to be married. There was nothing very exciting to Caroline and me about this, because with so many brothers and sisters there were other weddings; and it was only one which was held in Vienna which would have interested us; but Leopold was being married in Innsbruck. < Father was going to the wedding, but Mother could not leave Vienna as her state duties kept her there, i I was in the schoolroom tracing a picture when one of my father’s pages came to say that my father wanted to say goodbye to me at once.

I was surprised because I had said goodbye to him half an hour earlier and I had seen him ride off with his attendants.

Aja was in a fluster.

“Something has happened,” she said.

“Go at once.”

So I went with the servants. My father was on his horse looking back at the Palace, and when he saw me coming his eyes lit up and he seemed very pleased. He did not dismount but I was lifted up and he held me against him so tightly that it was painful. I felt he was trying to say something and did not know how to, but he hated to let me go. I thought he was going to take me to Innsbruck with him, but this could not be, for my mother would have arranged that if it were so.

His hold loosened and he looked at me tenderly. I threw my arms about his neck and cried: “Dear, dear Papa.” There were tears in his eyes and he gripped me with his right arm while he touched my hair with his left. He had always liked to touch my hair, which was thick and light in colour—auburn, some called it, though my brothers Ferdinand and Max called me “Carrots.” His servants were watching, and abruptly he signed to one of them to take me from him.

He turned to the friends who were beside him and said in a voice shaken with emotion: “Gentlemen, God knows how much I desired to kiss that child.”

That was all. Father smiled goodbye and I went back to the schoolroom, puzzled for a few minutes, and then characteristically forgot the incident.

That was the last I saw of him. In Innsbruck, he felt rather ill and his friends begged him to be bled, but he had arranged to go to the opera with Leopold that afternoon and he knew that if he were bled he would have to rest and cancel the opera, which would worry Leopold, who, like all his children, loved him dearly. It was better, he said, to go to the opera and be quietly bled afterwards without disturbing his son.

So he went to the opera and was taken ill there. He had a stroke and died in Leopold’s arms.

It was naturally said afterwards that he, being near death, had had a terrible premonition of my future and that was why he had sent for me in that unusual manner.

We were all desolate because we had lost our father. I was sad for several weeks and then it began to seem as though I had never known him. But my mother was heartbroken. She embraced my father’s dead body when it was brought home and she was only removed from it by force.

Then she shut herself into her apartments and gave herself up to grief which was so violent that the doctors were forced to open one of her veins in order to give her relief from her terrible emotion. She cut off her hair—of which she had been so proud—and she wore a widow’s sombre costume, which made her look more severe than ever. In the years which followed I never saw her differently dressed.

After my father’s death, my mother seemed to become more aware of me.

Before, I had been just one of the children, now I would often find her attention focused on me during those occasions when we all had to wait on her. This was alarming, but I soon discovered that if I smiled I could soften her, just as I could dear old Aja, though not so easily

and not always; and of course I tried to cover up my shortcomings by using this gift of mine for making people ;

indulgent towards me.

It was soon after Father’s death that I began to hear talk of “The French Marriage.” Couriers were constantly going j back and forth with letters between Kaunitz and my mother and my mother’s ambassador in France. ;

Kaunitz was the most important man in Austria. A dandy, The was nevertheless one of the shrewdest politicians in ;

Europe and my mother thought very highly of him and trusted him more than she trusted anyone else. Before he became her j chief adviser he had been her ambassador at Versailles, where he had become a great friend of Madame de Porn1 pa dour which had meant that he was well received by 2 the King of France, and it was while he was in Paris that 1 he had conceived the idea of an alliance between Austria and France which would be through a marriage between a the houses of Hapsburg and Bourbon. Living in France had given him the manners of a Frenchman, and as he also dressed like one, in Austria he was considered rather eccentric. But he was very much a German in some ways-calm, disciplined and precise. Ferdinand told us that he osed egg yolks for his complexion, smearing them over his face to keep his skin fresh; and to preserve his teeth he used to clean them with a sponge and a scraper after every meal—at the table. He was so determined that his wig should be powdered all over that he ordered his valets to form two rows between which he walked while they used their bellows. He was enveloped in a cloud of powder, but this ensured that his wig was evenly powdered.

We used to laugh at him. I did not realise then that while we were laughing together about his odd habits, he was deciding -my future, and but for him I should not be where I am at this moment. Caroline discovered that there was a possibility that either I she or I might marry the King of France, which set us I giggling at the incongruity of this, for he was an old man nearly sixty and we thought it would be funny to have a husband who was older than our mother. But when the

Dauphin of France—the son of that King who might have 16 been a husband to one of us died and his son became Dauphin, there was great excitement because the new Dauphin was only a boy, about a year older than I was.

Sometimes Caroline and I talked about “The French Marriage and then we would forget about it for weeks; but all the time we were growing farther and farther away from childhood. Ferdinand tried seriously to discuss it with us how good it would be for Austria if there was an alliance between Hapsburg and Bourbon.

The widow of the recently dead Dauphin, who had great influence with the King, was against it and wanted a princess from her own House to marry her son; but she died suddenly of consumption, which she had probably caught when nursing her husband, and my mother was very pleased.

My brother Joseph’s poor unhappy wife died of the small pox, and my sister Maria Josepha, who was four years older than I, caught it and died. She was on the point of going to Naples to marry the King and our mother decided that an alliance with Naples was necessary so Caroline should be the bride instead.

This was the biggest tragedy of all so far. I had loved my father and had been sad, in my way, when he had died, but Caroline had been my constant companion and I could not imagine what it would be like without her. Caroline, who felt everything more deeply than I, was heartbroken.

I was twelve; Caroline was fifteen; and as Caroline had been selected for Naples, my mother at this time decided to train me to be ready to go to France. She announced that I should no longer be called Antonia.

I should be Antoinette or Marie Antoinette. That in itself made me seem like a different person. I was now brought into my mother’s salon and made to answer the questions important men put to me; I had to have the right answers and was primed beforehand, but it was so easy for me to forget.

The comfortable life was over. I was watched; I was talked about; and I fancied that my mother and her ministers were trying to represent me as a very different person from the one I was rather the person they wanted me to be, or the French would like me to be. I was always hearing stories i7 about my goodness, my charm and cleverness which astonished I me. When I was younger, Mozart the musician had come to the Court; be was only a child then, but brilliant, and my mother was encouraging him. When he came into the great salon to play to the company he was so overawed that he slipped. and fell and everyone laughed. But I ran out to see if he was hurt and to tell him that it did not matter, and after ;

that we became friends and he played for me specially. He said once that he would like to marry me, and as I thought that would be pleasant, I agreed to his proposal. This was I remembered and told about me. It was supposed to be one of the ‘charming’ stories. On one occasion my mother told me that the French Ambassador would probably talk to me when I visited her salon and if he were to ask me which nation I should most I like to rule I must say “The French’;

and if he were to ask why, I was to reply: “Because they had Henri Quatre the Good and Louis Quatorze the Great.” I learned it off by heart and was afraid I should get it wrong because I was not very sure who these people were; but I managed it and that was another story which was told about me. I was supposed to learn about the French; I was to practise speaking French; everything was changing.

As for Caroline, she was always weeping and was no longer the pleasant companion she had been. She was very frightened of marriage and knew she was going to hate the King of Naples.

Our mother came to the schoolroom and talked to her very severely.

You are no longer a child she said, ‘and I have heard ( that you have been very bad-tempered. ” :

I wanted to explain that Caroline was only bad-tempered because she was frightened; but it was impossible to explain to my mother.

Then she looked at me and went on: “I am going to separate you from Antoinette. You spend your time in stupid chattering and there is to be no more of this useless gossip. It will stop at once. I warn you

that you will be watched, 18 and you, Caroline, as the elder, will be held responsible.”

Then my mother dismissed me and kept Caroline there to lecture her further on how she should behave.

I went away with a heavy heart. I should miss Caroline so much.

Strangely enough I did not think of my own fate. France was too far off to be real, and I had perfected my natural inclination to forget what it was not pleasant to remember.

Caroline left at last pale-faced, silent and not in the least like my gay little sister. Joseph accompanied her and I believe he was quite sorry for her; there was something good about Joseph although he was so haughty and pompous.

There was trouble with another of my sisters, but this seemed more remote, for Maria Amalia was nine years older than I was. Caroline and I had known for a long time that she was in love with a young man of the Court, Prince Zweibriicken, and hoped that she would be able to marry him, which was perhaps foolish of her, for she should have known that we had to marry Heads of States for the good of Austria. But Maria Amalia was like me in that she was apt to believe what she wanted to, so she went on believing that she would be allowed to marry Prince Zweibriicken.