To the scaffold (11 page)

The state chamber too, with its huge bed, bore the marks of the dogs, but their depredations were greatest in the private rooms> where Antoinette let them romp freely on the damask-upholstered furniture and chew at the gilded chair legs. They relieved themselves wherever and whenever they liked, as Antoinette did not bother to prevent them and none of the servants was assigned the specific duty of looking after the royal pets. Adding to the chaos were two little children, one four years old and the other five. One was the son of the dauphin's chief valet, Thierry, and the other belonged to Antoinette's first bedchamber

woman. The children were always underfoot, running and chasing each other, playing with the dogs and creating a cheerful mayhem, especially when Antoinette was supposed to be receiving instruction from Vermond or having a singing lesson or embroidering the King's vest.

Madame de Noailles, "Madame Etiquette" as Antoinette called her, was dismayed at the chaos. She had been deeply offended when her mistress, in an attempt to cut through the time-consuming procedures required to make an appointment to her household, sent Madame Thierry to her to say that the dauphine wanted her in her service. Injured and furious, Madame de Noailles had gone to Antoinette in a huff and announced that she had no intention of taking orders from a chambermaid—especially one who had not yet been formally appointed to her position. It had taken all of Mercy's diplomacy to soothe the injured pride of Madame de Noailles—who was on the point of resigning—and restore some semblance of harmony. Mercy discovered that, as usual, Adelaide was the chief troublemaker; she had told Antoinette to circumvent protocol by sending Madame Thierry directly to Madame de Noailles—knowing full well what the issue would be. Mercy could not reprimand Adelaide, he could only try to warn Antoinette about the perils of listening to her advice.^

Madame Etiquette was dismayed by Antoinette's dirty apartments, and by the "very noisy, dirty and plaguy" children who "spoiled her clothes, tore and broke the furniture, and put the whole of her apartments into the utmost disorder." The dauphine, it appeared, could not manage to keep clean or tidy. She was forever coming in wet and bedraggled from following the hunt in her coach, she neglected her coiffure, she paid so little attention to her grooming and her clothes that a visiting Austrian noblewoman was shocked, and made a severe report to Maria Theresa. "She told me," the Empress complained to Antoinette afterwards, "that you take poor care of yourself, even when it comes to cleaning your teeth; this is a key point, as is your figure, which she found worsened. . . . she added that you were badly dressed and that she dared tell your ladies so."^

The rigid whalebone corset then in fashion was a particular cause of grief to Madame de Noailles. Antoinette refused point blank to wear it; Madame de Noailles complained; Mercy heard of the problem and informed Maria Theresa, who wrote at once to

her daughter offering to have some corsets made for her in Vienna, adding tactfully that "the ones they make in Paris are too stiff. ""^ In truth any corset would have been too stiff for the sort of free-wheeling, rough-and-tumble life Antoinette preferred to lead, but after a few months of resistance she gave up and let her ladies strap her into the whalebone once again.

With her cheerful disregard for the exacting usages of the court Antoinette was bound to clash with her punctilious, scrupulous dame iThonneur. Of the Comtesse de Noailles Madame Campan wrote, "She had no outward attraction. Her deportment was stiff, her look severe; she knew her etiquette backwards." Madame Campan had occasion to evoke that severity one day when she was in Antoinette's apartments and a visitor newly presented at court was being received. "Everything was in order, or so, at least, I supposed," she recalled. "Suddenly I noticed the eyes of the Comtesse de Noailles fixed upon mine. She made a little sign with her head. Her eyebrows were raised, lowered and raised again. Then she began to make little gestures with her hand. I had no doubt from this dumb show that something was not comme il faut,''

Puzzled, Madame Campan looked around to see if she could tell what was wrong. Meanwhile the dame d'honneur was gesturing more pointedly. Then Antoinette noticed what was going on and smiled at Madame Campan, who worked her way to her side. It seems the latter had neglected to loosen the hanging flaps, or pinners, of her headdress. "Undo your pinners," Antoinette whispered, "or the Countess will die of it!" The flaps were loosened, and the Countess's agitation subsided.^

In this instance Antoinette handled Madame de Noailles's irritating scrupulosity with grace and good humor, but at times the exigencies of the Countess must have been very hard to bear. The dauphine was "perpetually tormented" by her dame d'honneur, who dogged her steps and corrected her a thousand times a day, telling her how she ought to have greeted one person one way, and another in another way, criticizing her speech, giving her disapproving looks and shaking her head in despair.^

It was no wonder Antoinette broke the tension by making fun of the sober, unsmiling people around her. Even when dining with the dauphin, in a room full of courtiers and spectators, she burst out laughing, disconcerting those who were watching her.

Mercy often saw her "whispering in the ears of the young ladies" and then "laughing with them." "She sometimes jokes about the people who appear to her ridiculous," he wrote, adding, "she knows how to use wit and sarcasm so as to make her comments very biting." It made no difference that she was "of a cheerful nature and without any bad intention"; the remarks stung just the same.^ And when she made "satirical and hateful" remarks about Madame Du Barry, the King was annoyed—though he never told her so directly, always through intermediaries.^

The King was preoccupied just then by far weightier matters than the dauphine's satirical tongue. The country faced a fiscal crisis. The treasury was bankrupt, more revenues needed to be raised. In fact the entire system of taxation cried out for reform. Yet reform was impossible as long as the King's authority was blocked by the local parlements, law courts where the nobility claimed to have, in effect, a veto power over royal edicts. In the political turmoil of December 1770, Choiseul had lost his offices because he supported the parlements, while the Controller-General, the Abb6 Terray, opposed them.

The French parlements were not, like the English Parliament, representative bodies with weighty political power; they were archaic institutions where the nobility asserted its claims to be independent of royal authority. Not every French province had a parlement. There were thirteen parlements, of which the parle-ment of Paris was the largest and most dominant. But every parlement claimed to be the supreme court of appeal for its own region, with the power to resist the imposition of royal law. In the area of taxation the parlements were stubborn and intransigent: whenever the King's ministers attempted to remove the nobles' tax exemptions the parlements refused to function. Legal proceedings came to a halt, and the King, though he took punitive measures, could not enforce his edicts.

The ambiguous role of the parlements in the French political system was a measure of its inherent internal strains. On the one hand, the parlements were self-serving bodies, jealously guarding the prerogatives of their noble members. On the other hand, in the rising climate of eighteenth-century liberal thought, the noble opposition to the King could and did take on the character of opposition to despotism, opposition rooted in a tradition of liberty which, its proponents insisted, stretched back to the time of

Charlemagne and beyond. Thus the struggle of the parlements and the crown was often presented as the struggle of the French people against their tyrannical ruler, with the nobles as the people's champions. Without such bodies as the parlements to check him, Montesquieu wrote, the King would be an autocrat; the parlements were a bastion of popular rights.

Ideology aside, the monarchy and the nobility, through the parlements, were simply engaged in a power struggle, with the nobles seeking an ever greater share of royal authority. The parlements were indeed a bastion—but a bastion of noble privilege, and one that, in the circumstances of the early 1770's, stood in the way of greatly needed financial reform.

With Choiseul gone, the Abbe Terray and the Chancellor Maupeou, a ruthless and able lawyer, persuaded the King that the parlements had to be suppressed if reform was to proceed. At a stroke the old legal system was swept away and new law courts were set up. Terray began to attack the problem of debt and arranged forced loans. Slowly there was improvement—but at the cost of an enormous outcry from the noble establishment, men of letters and the Parisian middle class.

The appointment of D'Aiguillon to replace Choiseul was an added insult to the parlementaries, for he had fallen afoul of the parlements of Brittany and Paris and in the resultant political clash had become a symbol of the monarchy's determination to crush the independence of the nobles. There were repercussions within the royal family itself, where the Princes of Cond6 and Conti and the Due d'Orleans went into exile from court over the suppression of the parlement of Paris. (King Louis referred to the Prince de Conti as "my cousin, the wrangling attorney.")

But if the King roused himself to take vigorous action against the nobles who opposed him, his general health was visibly weakening, and the question of the succession loomed.

Provence was married in May of 1771, and he boasted pointedly to the dauphin that he was "four times happy" on his wedding night. His bride, Marie Josephine of Savoy, also enjoyed herself "marvelously," Provence said, and the courtiers settled back to watch for signs that she was pregnant. The new Comtesse de Provence could not have attracted attention for any other reason; she was squat and swarthy, with heavy black eyebrows and an unfeminine thicket of hair on her upper lip that unkind people

called a mustache. Her coarse red complexion was not admired, and she very often neglected to bathe. King Louis, disgusted with his new granddaughter's personal habits, wrote to her parents asking them to tell their daughter to wash her neck.

Josephine was no more pleasant in personality than she was in appearance. "Her countenance is cold and embarrassed," Mercy thought. "She speaks little and awkwardly." She may have been abashed by the grandeur of Versailles and its formidable inhabitants; once Antoinette befriended her, she found Josephine to be "very sweet, very agreeable and very cheerful in private, though she does not appear so in public." "She likes me very much," Antoinette told her mother, "and has much confidence in me. She is not at all on the side of Madame Du Barry."^ This was to change, but in the summer of 1771 at least Antoinette had a companion of her own age.

There was another companion too—the Princesse de Lam-balle, a rather melancholy young widow who was the daughter-in-law of the Due de Penthi^vre. The Princess had been married briefly to the dissolute Prince de Lamballe, who had expired very young, the victim of his excesses; she was six years older than Antoinette, but paler in personality, her obliging gentleness and good nature a flattering foil for the dauphine's vivacity. The Princess was delicate, her features irregular but not unpleasing. Her hands were her worst liability, a court memoirist thought, her candor and lack of intrigue her greatest asset. ^^ In the winter of 1770-71 she and Antoinette became friends. Her "infantine air" endeared her to the dauphine who loved children, and the fact that she too was a foreigner, a Piedmontese, bound her to the Austrian Princess.

Antoinette was beginning to make a life of her own, by choosing her own friends, setting her disorderly stamp on her apartments, expressing her will, within limits, on matters great and small. She was even beginning, in litde ways, to dare to defy her mother's orders, though she confided to Mercy that she was very much afraid of Maria Theresa. * *

The Empress's long, forceful letters arrived every month, written with the concision and immediacy that were second nature to her but that were intimidating to her sensitive young daughter. The letters were full of criticisms and corrections, a written counterpart to Madame de Noailles's verbal chidings. An-

toinette's handwriting was bad, the Empress complained. Her "look of youth" was gone—it was clear from her portraits. She ought to pay more attention to the Austrians at court. She mustn't ride horses. She ought to read more. She ought not to be so intimate with Adelaide, Victoire and Sophie. She must speak to Madame Du Barry, no matter how disagreeable it might be. She must watch herself carefully and protect herself from attack. Above all, she must make people like her.

"Making people like us," the Empress wrote, "is the only amusement and happiness of our [royal] condition. It is a talent which you have mastered so perfectly! Do not lose it by neglecting that which gave it to you: you owe it neither to your beauty (which in fact is not so great), nor to your talents or culture (you know very well you have neither); it is your kind heart, your frankness, your amiability, all exerted with your good judg-ment."i2

There were injunctions about food, exercise, dress and deportment—and marriage. Maria Theresa was very opinionated on how to coax a shy husband into boldness. (Always assuming that shyness, and not incurable impotence, was the dauphin's problem.) "Be prodigal with your caresses," she told Antoinette. The letters were fiill of chastisements, and even expressions of despair ("I see you striding with a nonchalant calm toward ruin," the Empress wrote in October of 1771), but as the months passed they were gradually becoming softer and on occasion even plangent. For Maria Theresa was aging, and was feeling her age.

"I have been so fiill of hindrances," she confessed in August of 1771, "and I am starting to age at a furious pace; even when I work it takes me twice as long as it did."^^ She was only fifty-four when she wrote this, but she felt closer to seventy. Two years later she admitted, this time to her son and co-regent Joseph, that her deterioration was rapidly advancing. "My capabilities, my looks, my hearing, my skill are swiftly declining." Her faculties were dimming, and she no longer felt at home in a changing world. "The irreligion, the deterioration of morals, the jargon which everybody uses and which I do not understand, all these are enough to overwhelm me," she complained. She was lonely for her children, most of whom lived far from her, and for the husband whose loss she never ceased to mourn. ^"^

Joseph was a constant source of aggravation, rude and

To the Scaffold jg

brusque, "an intellectual cocotte/' as she called him, as radical as she was conservative. He irked her, and when she was feeling her age, he wearied her with his demands and his constant threats to resign from the co-regency. Joseph was a present worry, Amalia a more distant one. Her marriage to the spineless Don Ferdinand of Parma had turned into a nightmare. Amalia ran the court, or tried to run it. Maria Theresa all but disowned her wayward daughter, and caused a family rift.

Of all her daughters, Caroline and Antoinette pleased the Empress most, but Antoinette did not realize this. Indeed she confided to Mercy that she "always imagined she was not loved, and that she would always be treated sharply."*^ She was constantly apprehensive, constantly on guard lest she offend her fearsome mother. "I love the Empress, but I fear her," she told the ambassador, "even from far away; even in writing I am not at my ease with her." It was worse when she had to write bad news. With tears in her eyes Antoinette confided to Mercy that she was afraid to tell her mother "things that go wrong." "My heart is always with my family [in Austria]," she told Mercy on another occasion, "and, if I quarrel with them I feel that my duties here would be too heavy for me to bear."*^

Antoinette was bonded to Maria Theresa by strong ties of fear and love. Much as she dreaded the letters from Vienna, she dreaded even more the thought that one day they would cease forever. In late February of 1772 word came that the Empress had been very ill, and that her doctors had bled her twice. Antoinette burst into tears and shut herself in the inner recesses of her apartments, canceling a previously arranged audience. Taking up the chaplet of beads Maria Theresa had given her, she knelt to pray, as fervent in her distress as she was ebullient in her lighter moods. The dauphin prayed at her side, sympathetic and loyal to his wife despite his dislike of Austria and Austrians and his indifference to the mother-in-law he had never met.^^