To the scaffold (15 page)

The rest of the morning was taken up by visits from Abb6 Vermond, Provence or Artois, the Princesse de Lamballe or oth-

lOO CAROLLY ERICKSON

ers of the Queen's young friends. A few minutes with Louis were squeezed in, but family and friends and those possessing the coveted privilege of the petites entrees (the chief physician, chief surgeon, physician in ordinary, reader, closet secretary, the King's four first valets de chambre and the King's chief physicians and surgeons) took up most of the morning. Then came the time to begin the Queen's grand toilette, the chief ceremony of the day attended by the Princes of the blood, high court officials and all others possessing the grande entree.

At noon the huge, ornate toilet table was brought into the middle of the room and folding chairs and sofas placed in a circle around it. The dignitaries entered, and each received an acknowledgment from Antoinette appropriate to his rank, from the slight nod due to a captain of the guard to the larger gesture (the Queen leaned upon the toilet table as if about to get up) required by the Princes. Also present were the ladies of honor and tirewomen. (The bedchamber ladies, whose duties did not include dressing the Queen, waited in the nearby "great closet" until the grand toilet was complete, then entered to accompany Antoinette to Mass.) After the coiffure was complete, the dressing began: the lady of honor put on the chemise, and poured water into the basin in which the Queen washed her hands, then the tirewoman attached the wide hooped skirt of the gown, adjusted the neckerchief, and tied on the necklace. The long court train was put on last of all.

While all this was going on, the serious business of the grand toilet took place. Petitions were presented for the Queen to sign. Departing military officers made their formal leavetakings. Ladies were presented, ambassadors introduced, foreigners brought in to meet Her Majesty. An usher stood at the entrance chamber, guarding the high folding doors to ensure against unauthorized entry, and to announce the names of the important visitors. (In keeping with etiquette, he announced them to the lady of honor, who in turn announced them to the Queen.) Finally, when the last presentation had been made and the last ornament added to the royal toilette, the Queen returned to her bedchamber and stood in the center of the room while her entire entourage assembled—the Princesse de Lamballe, superintendent of her household, the ladies of honor and tirewomen, the bedchamber ladies, the first gentleman usher, the chief equerry, the clergy

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whose duty it was to attend her to Mass that day, and the Princesses of the royal family (with all their ladies, tirewomen and attendants). The entire group then went together to the chapel for Mass.

An English visitor, Sir Samuel Romilly, wrote his impressions of a Mass he attended at Versailles where Louis and Antoinette were present in all their splendor. "The moment his majesty appeared," Romilly recalled, "the drums beat and shook the temple, as if it had been intended to announce the approach of a conqueror. During the whole time of saying Mass, the choristers sang, sometimes single parts, sometimes in chorus. In the front seats of the galleries were ranged the ladies of the court, glowing with rouge, and gorgeously apparelled, to enjoy and form a part of the showy spectacle. The King laughed and spied at the ladies; every eye was fixed on the personages of the court, every ear was attentive to the notes of the singers, while the priest, who in the mean time went on in the exercise of his office, was unheeded by all present." Even at the elevation of the host, Romilly noted, the most solemn moment of the Mass, the crowd in the chapel paid attention to nothing but the King, everyone "endeavoring to get a glimpse" of him.

Following Mass came the ritual of the midday dinner, which was at its most splendid on Sundays. Louis and Antoinette dined together, with Antoinette's ladies in attendance, some sitting on sofas and some standing around the table. The table was laid with a damask cloth, the dishes were silver, the cutlery gilt. Behind the King's chair the Captain of the Guards and the first gentleman of the chamber stood guard; behind the Queen were her first maitre d'hotel, her first gentleman usher and the chief equerry. When the maitre d'hotel entered the room, holding his seven-foot staff surmounted by a fleur-de-lis crown, the dishes were brought in and the meal began. The Queen was presented with a menu card, and the servants laid the platters of meat and fowl and pudding in front of their majesties. It was a very ceremonious meal, but not necessarily a somber one. An Englishman who watched the King and Queen dine at Versailles in 1775 wrote that "their Majesties talked and laughed much at dinner. The Queen is young and very handsome. She appears to be extremely lively and gay, without the forms and attentions that might be expected from her high rank." (By contrast, the same visitor was struck by the "mighty

silence" at the dinner table of Provence and his wife, who "sat like two people stuffed with straw.")

When they had dined, the King and Queen went their separate ways. Antoinette, still surrounded by her entourage, returned to her apartments, where she was divested of the bulky formal court gown, with its hoop and train, and put on a simpler afternoon dress. Conversation with her relatives filled the earlier part of the afternoon, and harp music, audiences with visitors, walks and drives the latter part. Gambling, supper, and a return to the family circle occupied the evenitig, but shortly after eleven every night, when Louis went to bed, Antoinette went to join her young friends in the apartments of the Princesse de Lamballe or the Prin-cesse de Guemenee—rendezvous that gave rise to gossip and criticism. There, in the relative privacy and informality of her confidantes' rooms, Antoinette could let herself go, forget the constant alertness that the day's rituals called for, unbend and laugh to her heart's content. In those apartments, and in her own retreat of the Petit Trianon, the small pavilion Louis had given her in the gardens of Versailles, she could be herself.

The Petit Trianon, though only a mile from the palace of Versailles, was infinitely more distant in atmosphere. A delicate neoclassical structure, simple and perfectly proportioned, it seemed as if sculpted from honey-colored stone. Inside there were only seven rooms—albeit exquisite rooms, which Antoinette made warmly elegant with flowery silk and velvet curtains and wall coverings and small, spindly-legged writing desks and tables and cabinets, many of them unique works of art in rare woods with ornamental inlaid porcelain. There were flowers everywhere, fresh flowers from the gardens, woven flowers in soft pastel shades in the counterpanes and hangings, lilies and roses in the carved plasterwork of the wall panels and in the marbles of the fireplace. Though she had never seen it, Maria Theresa called the Petit Trianon "the most adorable of houses," and it was to be Antoinette's adored obsession. She acquired it from her indulgent husband in the first month of their reign, and began at once to order alterations to its gardens.

In keeping with the current vogue for things Ejiglish—English hats, boots, gowns, horse races—she ordered the creation of an English garden, and before long the small plot of land surrounding the house had been transformed. A lake was dug, small hills created, a grotto formed. Groves of trees, many of them exotic

species brought from all over the world, adorned the smooth lawns, and a small river wound through the groves. On an island fragrant with lilac and laburnum was a Temple of Love, with a statue of Cupid inside. When complete, the gardens were a perfect miniature Utopia, a magical place of great beauty, tranquillity and repose where nightingales sang and the strident voices of grasping courtiers could not be heard. "One could fancy oneself three hundred miles from court," wrote the Prince de Ligne, a favored guest of the Queen at Trianon.

Antoinette's private, fanciful enclave, her own small palace, represented to her the simpler existence she had known as a girl, and which she longed to know again. Her mother had created a similar oasis of privacy at Schonbrunn, and had taken pains to insulate her family from the stiff formalities of court ceremony. Now Antoinette had a place to which she could withdraw, where she could be herself, free of the attendants and guardsmen who dogged her steps at the larger palace. She liked to picnic on strawberries from the Trianon gardens—the strawberries, in all known varieties, which Louis X V's distinguished gardeners had cultivated there at his request—sitting on a simple bench and "behaving in the most informal way imaginable." It delighted her to be able to admire the flowers, listen to the nightingales, smell the laburnum and feel, through her thin slippers, the dew on the lawns. After all, there were plenty of servants to look after the little house and its elaborate grounds, plenty more amusements to turn to when these palled, plenty more pairs of slippers to replace those she ruined on her afternoon walks. Louis, thinking that Antoinette's taste for the simple life meant that she wanted to learn the humbler pursuits of country folk, made her a spinning wheel in his workshop and presented it to her proudly. She was charmed, she thanked him wirmly—and as soon as he had gone, gave the spinning wheel away.

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ONG before dawn the tiny closets and dim corridors of Versailles were bustling with life. Pages, footmen, kitchen servants and grooms washed and dressed hurriedly in their liveries, standing before the low hearth fires that barely warmed their cold, drafty rooms and gulping down a few bites of bread in their haste before dashing off to take their appointed places and begin their morning duties. Noble men and women too rose early and dressed quickly, though they had servants of their own to assist them at their more elaborate toilettes; for exalted though the nobles were, at court their duties were those of menials—the opening of a door, the holding of a wig or cane, the arranging of flowers in porcelain vases. And they had to be ready to perform these tasks as soon as their masters and mistresses arose.

There were nearly nine hundred officials and servants at the court of Louis XVI. The Almanach de Versailles listed them all, and the list alone covered one hundred and sixty-five pages. Each had his or her particular obligations and privileges, precisely defined and jealously defended. The captain of the King's mule carriage would not have dreamed of driving horses, the gentlemen who brought the King his chaise percee and removed it when he was finished with it would never have presumed to comb his hair, the valets who rubbed him each morning with hard-bristled brushes soaked in perfumed spirit would have balked at folding and knotting his cravat. The honor of the servant depended on the nature of his service; what he did was who he was. Life at court was an

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intricate choreography of special acts and functions carried out by designated personages, each of whom derived his dignity and identity from his part in the great royal dance.

For if the King and Queen were captives of etiquette, their hundreds of servants were obliged to be masters of it. Antoinette's lady of honor, Madame de Noailles, with her nagging reminders of proper form and her punctilious attention to detail, was only doing her job, albeit officiously; good service called for correctness in every particular. Officers and servants new to court had to master hundreds of rules and observances: what kind of bow to tie in the ribbon that bound the Queen's paniers, which liveries were to be worn at Choisy (blue) and which at Compi^gne (green), which doors could be knocked on and which had to be scratched with the fingernails instead. In some rooms servants were permitted to sit, but in others, such as the King's bedroom, they had to stand, even if the King was not present. Only the King's family and those on intimate terms with him could speak to him direcdy; others had to use polite indirection and speak to him in the third person. ("Did the King enjoy a good hunt?" "Does the King still have a cold?") Even inanimate objects had to be approached in different ways at different times. Thus the Queen's bed was considered furniture, to be tended by the first upholsterer of the bedchamber, only when the Queen was not lying in it; when she was in bed the upholsterer had no jurisdiction over it and had to yield to the bedchamber servants.

"I should never finish," Louis XVI's page, the Comte d'Hez^-ques, wrote in his memoirs of service at Versailles, "if I recounted all the little things that one must know, not only to be a perfect courtier, but in order not to make mistakes." Mistakes could be costly. Servants who forgot the rules or who transgressed in other ways could be suspended from their positions for two weeks, a month, or even longer. Dismissal was a more common punishment than suspension. Absolute obedience to their superiors was required of all servants, and disobedience was harshly punished, sometimes with extra duties, sometimes with beatings or worse cruelty—the page H^z^cques was shown a livid scar borne by one of his colleagues, the mark burned into the man's flesh by a red-hot spur.

One of the things a court officer had to learn was how to stay out of his colleagues' way. The office of train-bearer to the Queen,