To the scaffold (23 page)

All the tradespeople of Paris sent delegations to Versailles to honor the dauphin's birth. Each delegation, wearing distinctive costumes and accompanied by musicians, carried an object representing their occupation. The chimney sweeps carried a make-believe chinmey, with a small boy emerging from the top. The butchers carried a side of beef, the blacksmiths an anvil, the bootmakers a small pair of boots intended for the little dauphin. The tailors brought a small uniform made for the baby in the appropriate regimental colors. When the gravediggers appeared, however, bearing an infant-sized coffin, the royal family was offended and the police had to intervene.

The formal celebrations in Paris in honor of the dauphin's

birth were not held until he was three months old. Fearing the dark mood of the Parisians, and recalling how scant their cheers for Antoinette had been when Madame Royale was bom, the Mayor and city officials tried to keep the spectators from massing before the Hotel de Ville, center of the festivities. Free food, wine and entertainment were offered in various parts of the city in hopes of keeping the crowd dispersed. The people behaved themselves, though they cheered far more loudly for the King's coach as it passed along the streets than they did for the Queen's. After a banquet there was a fireworks display in the evening—somewhat spoiled by bad weather—and two days later a huge masked ball was held where some thirteen thousand people danced and stuffed themselves with rich food all night long.

At last there was an heir to the throne. Yet if the succession problem was solved, France's other dilemma, how to deal with the huge national deficit, was growing worse.

From 1776 to 1781 the national finances had been guided by the Genevan banker Jacques Necker, a wealthy parvenu who was considered quite vulgar by the overrefined courtiers. Necker was believed to be a financial genius, a businessman with a Midas touch who could make the economy thrive as he had made his own investments thrive. He had a wide acquaintance in banking circles, where he enjoyed the confidence of his peers. It was hoped that he could transmute this confidence in himself into confidence in the French government, and in fact he did—though the long-term results of this success were disastrous.

Necker faced enormous difficulties. Economic recession had been the norm in France since the last years of Louis XV's reign, and the recession had meant lower tax yields, and hence smaller resources with which to meet the growing expenses of government. Compounding the problem was the fact that there was no central treasury, no single state bureau where hordes of bookkeepers toiled over massive account books tallying income received and monies paid out. Such record-keeping was in the hands of independent financiers who bought the privilege of serving as payer, receiver or treasurer to a particular government department. Taxes were collected by independent financiers as well, who were members of the company of Farmers-General. Thus the task of supervising state finance was fragmented and decentralized, and menaced by the unhealthy practice of allowing

public money to pass through private hands. For the financiers who bought state offices naturally expected to profit from them, and the route to profit lay in using the King's money to finance personal enterprise. There was no central bank to provide stability and to anchor the economy, only a crowd of businessmen who, like Necker, sought to strike the optimum balance between the health of the government and that of their own bank accounts.

Necker waded bravely into the Augean stables of public finance and tried to clean them out, but made little headway. He was not devoid of reforming ideas, and had his tenure lasted past 1781 he might have been able to make beneficial changes in both fiscal policy and practice. But during his five years in power he was under great pressure to finance the American war, and to gather the needed funds he used the most expedient method: raising loans. It was here that his reputation was an advantage. He was able to attract investment on an unprecedented scale—some five hundred and twenty million livres—by offering lucrative terms and promising to repay in less than twenty years. It was a mark of Necker's success that the Dutch, who traditionally invested in Britain, channeled some of their funds into France for the first time during his ministry.^ The debt service on these gigantic loans strained the economy; annual interest was in the hundreds of millions of livres. Beyond this, the loans stimulated bankers and financiers to a frenzy of speculation, and what slender means came into the royal coffers was quickly lent to the government again by the payers, receivers and treasurers who were put in charge of it.

Necker was trusted and admired by the public, but was forced out of government in 1781 by Maurepas, who informed the King that the other ministers had threatened to resign unless Necker was sent away. The dismissal was very unpopular, all the more so because the Controller-General had published an optimistic (and thoroughly misleading) work on the state of the public finances, the Compte rendu au roiy which claimed to show that there was a small surplus in the King's accounts. The Compte rendu was widely read and even more widely discussed; few other than Necker's enemies realized that it omitted to tell the whole story, and covered up the growing deficit. Consequently, Necker remained popular and continued to be a highly vocal critic of the government after his dismissal.

In September of 1782 a shock wave rippled through the court and spread out from it in ever widening circles. The Prince de Guemenee, one of the greatest of the court nobles, married to an intimate of the Queen who was governess to the royal children, was forced to declare himself bankrupt. His debts, when finally totaled in later years, amounted to some thirty-three million livres. He owed hundreds of thousands of livres to other courtiers—for it was common practice for the office-holders of Versailles to lend one another money, secured by the future income from the debtor's offices. He owed bankers, financiers, nobles, jewelers, tradesmen, wig-makers, tailors, servants, even the well-to-do peasants who lived on his estates in Brittany who had entrusted their savings to his administrators. Everyone had lent him money on the strength of his name, his powerful connections, his expectations. His possessions and those of his wife in land, houses, jewels, all the rich accoutrements of a privileged life, seemed endless. But they were in fact heavily mortgaged, ultimately so heavily that the entire edifice of debt collapsed, leaving some three thousand creditors to seek desperately to recover their losses while cursing the Prince and Princess. Madame de Gu6m^n6e, eccentric and extravagant, hostess of so many ruinous gambling parties, was especially resented.

It was a shock, it was a scandal. More than that, the Gu6m6n6e bankruptcy was a rent in the gilded curtain of court life. It exposed, for a moment, the precarious system of loans and speculations, risks and expedients that lay behind the facade of splendor. If such a man as the Prince de Guemenee could fall from grace, if his high connections and ancient name could not ultimately protect him, then everyone else was vulnerable. Credit, extended and overextended, was the life blood of the court and its inhabitants. The more a man owed, the wealthier he was presumed to be. Yet somehow the Prince's credit had run out, and no one, not his friends, not his relatives (who were selling off their jewels and paintings and horses as fast as they could in an effort not to be dragged down with him), not even the King, had intervened.

Was it possible, people asked themselves, that the credit would not go on forever, and if so, what should they do to protect themselves? Everybody owed everybody else money. What would happen if, one day, all the loans were called in at once?

For a moment the myth that sustained Versailles was shat-

tered, the myth that wealth and glory came to those who served the King patiently, borrowed heavily against their future prospects, and showed the world an image of success while waiting for genuine success to arrive. The courtiers trembled and held their breaths.

There was no prison sentence for the Prince de Gu^m6n6e, though his notary did not escaf)e justice. While hundreds of lesser figures suffered ruin, the Prince merely retired to his lands in Navarre, and his wife quietly left court for Brittany, taking her dozens of little dogs with her. Louis and Antoinette maintained a discreet silence about the couple's unfortunate fate, treating it more as an embarrassment than a scandal. After all, they too were enormously in debt, as were all the members of the royal family. Artois was estimated to owe some twenty-one million francs, and Antoinette continued to order gowns and jewels, and to refurbish the Petit Trianon, as though she knew no limits.

Weeks went by, the bankruptcy proceeded, the courtiers scrambled to find new sources of credit. Eventually the crisis passed. But they felt less secure than ever in their dealings with one another and with the dizzying world of the financiers. With each new transaction they wondered how long it might be before their own credit, and perhaps even that of the government, ran out.

T twenty-seven Antoinette was at the height of her beauty. Her candid blue eyes looked benevolently out at the world, their delicate tint set off by her masses of ash-blond hair and by a complexion so perfect in its radiant freshness that portrait painters despaired of capturing it on canvas. She had become quite plump, with a very large bust and a double chin, but her arms were beautifully shaped and her hands and feet small and dainty. The majesty of her bearing was unequaled. "She walked better than any woman in France," wrote the painter Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, "holding her head high with a majesty which made one recognize the sovereign among all her court."

Maturity and motherhood had softened her vivacity and added depth to her expression. She was as warmly affectionate as ever, but in repose her face held sorrow. She was growing older, blessed with two children whom she adored, but burdened with a husband who was more ungainly boy than man, who offered her no real companionship and who was increasingly dependent on her to help him make decisions and to keep up his limited courage.

She was very much alone. To be sure, Yolande de Polignac was some comfort, a friend she could cry with, confide in, and hug to her when she needed to feel a friend's warmth. But Yolande was not enough. To be fulfilled Antoinette needed a man's love, and at twenty-seven she finally found it, gave in to it, and became a changed woman.

Tall, patrician, poetically handsome. Axel Fersen was a young

Swedish nobleman who had been groomed from birth for a life of distinguished court service. His father, Field Marshal Frederick Axel Fersen, was an important figure in Swedish politics, and the son was expected to imitate if not surpass his success. A dutiful, well-behaved young man, at sixteen Fersen was sent abroad with a tutor to study at the best military schools in Europe and to polish his manners at foreign courts. He stayed for a time in Brunswick, went on to Turin, studied at Strasbourg. He paid a visit to Voltaire at the latter's estate at Femey, and was amused when the elderly celebrity received him dressed in an antique scarlet waistcoat, a shabby old wig and a faded dressing-gown. ("But we were struck," Fersen noted in his diary, "with the beauty of his eyes and the liveliness of his glance.")

Inevitably, Fersen visited Versailles, and met Antoinette, who was then dauphine. Later, at a masked ball, she talked to him for some time before he realized who she was. She must have been quite taken with him, not only because he was singularly handsome, with classic features and an almost feminine beauty, but because he was intelligent and, as a contemporary remarked, "he thinks nobly and with singular loftiness." There was a dignified melancholy about Fersen that touched a chord in the isolated Antoinette; like her, he had an undertone of sadness. And like her, he disliked formality and pretense. "All his art is in his simplicity," the Comte de Tilly wrote of Fersen, and Antoinette prized simplicity highly.

His grand tour complete, Fersen returned to Sweden. In 1778 he was at Versailles again, however, and this time he noted in his diary that Antoinette was "the prettiest and most amiable princess that I know." In his Swedish cavalry uniform of blue doublet, white tunic and tight chamois breeches he must have been a sight to warm any young woman's blood, and by the end of his stay Antoinette was clearly infatuated with him. Enthusiasm for the cause of the American colonists was then at its peak, and Fersen determined to go to America and fight against the British. When he said his good-byes it was noticed that Antoinette "could not take her eyes off him," and her tears pooled unspilt.