To the scaffold (3 page)

"There is nothing in the world that appeals to me so much, not even diamonds, as that which comes from India," Maria Theresa once said, and at Schonbrunn she indulged her taste for things Indian to the full. Her private apartments on the ground floor near the orangery were painted in Indian style, the walls covered with date trees, birds, and festoons of flowers and fruit. The Blue Chinese Drawing Room, one of the palace's ornate state

rooms, had handpainted wallpaper with exotic figures etched in gold and black on a background of deep greenish-blue—a color scheme whose Far Eastern flavor was thrown into relief by the preponderant rococo white and gilt of Schonbrunn. The Lacquer Room was paneled in black lacquer with chinoiserie decorations, the Porcelain Room displayed valuable Chinese vases and other objets d'art, their translucent surfaces illuminated by hundreds of candles set in rich chandeliers. For the adornment of the "Millions" Room, so called because its decor reputedly cost a million florins, the Empress ordered her ambassador at the court of the Sultan to buy antique Persian and Hindu miniatures; they were mounted around the walls, their scenes of elephants and horsemen, soldiers and temples rendered in brilliantly glowing colors.

The magnificence of Schonbrunn took many years to complete, and when the imperial household was in residence there the courtiers were forced to conduct their business and pursue their pleasures amid the chaos of ongoing construction. The enormous Great Gallery, scene of gala entertainments and solemn receptions, was filled with scaffolding throughout its hundred-and-fifty-foot length, and its vast ceiling took many workmen years to complete. Throughout the palace, painters and gilders labored, and in the acres of grounds, crews of gardeners and under-gar-deners toiled year-round laying out walks and digging ponds and uprooting bushes and trees to replace them with neat clipped hedges.

The constant disorder at Schonbrunn was as nothing, however, compared to the turmoil and discomfiture of a court move. When the Empress traveled, her staff and servants had to travel with her, along with the personnel of her kitchens, table, wardrobe and secretariat. Even for short journeys her personal carriage—in which she customarily rode with her husband and the chief lady-in-waiting—was accompanied by at least two dozen more vehicles, plus postilions, trumpeters, couriers, pages and bodyguards on horseback. There were coaches for her ladies and maids, the master of her plate, her cellarer and numerous pastrycooks. Her apothecary rode in a chaise to himself, her master of table linen and gentlemen-at-arms in two carriages and her father confessor and chaplain in two more. Four special kitchen coaches carried provisions, utensils and implements (the cooks were already in residence at the final destination, having ridden on

in advance), while huge baggage wagons, each drawn by twenty-four cart horses, were loaded with the courtiers' luggage and more provisions. Because the coaches and wagons frequently broke down en route the cortege had to include two coach masters and a blacksmith, and three reserve coaches and twenty reserve draft horses were kept on hand in case of need. Given the state of the narrow, unpaved country roads, pitted with deep ruts and holes, dusty in summer and muddy in winter, the Empress's traveling party did well to cover ninety miles in a good day, with three or four stops to change horses. When the weather was bad or the roads flooded, progress was much slower; when even the reserve coaches broke their axles and had to be repaired, there was no progress at all.

One contingent among the court population never moved: that which was in permanent residence in the capital.

The small, dark cramped city of Vienna sheltered within its bastioned medieval walls, three square miles of frenetic activity amid unspeakable filth. Everyone in the city, it seemed to visitors, was either employed by the imperial court or had continuing business there. The streets were filled with servants, officials and petitioners hurrying to and from the Hofburg, nobles in sedan chairs being carried to the palace, artisans bringing their wares to their noble and imperial customers. It was a polyglot crowd. Vienna's narrow alleyways were full of people of various nations, an English traveler wrote. "I constantly meet Hungarians, Greeks, Turks, and Poles, all habited in the peculiar dress of their respective countries. Nothing is more picturesque and amusing than such a diversity, which rarely occurs in London or Paris."^

Because of the enormous press of people requiring housing in the city, buildings were five and six stories high, with several families occupying each of the stories. "The builders seem," another visitor wrote, to have "clapped one town on the top of another." Aristocrats lived cheek-by-jowl with common folk and servants. "The apartments of the greatest ladies are divided but by a partition from that of a tailor or a shoemaker, and I know nobody who has above two floors in any house, one for their own use, and one higher for their servants."^ By imperial command the lower floors of these apartment houses were reserved for court personnel. In the attics wig-makers, dressmakers, bootmakers and jewelers toiled at making the fine articles the courtiers demanded.

With so much of the city's space devoted to the imperial household and those dependent on it, there was no housing for ordinary citizens. Even tradesmen were for the most part forced to sleep in the sprawling suburbs, then to come to the city gates in the mornings and spend the day hawking their wares from door to door. The overcrowding bred dirt, smells and noise. It was all but impossible to clean the narrow streets, even if an effort had been made to do so. The stairways in the tall buildings belonged to no one and everyone; slops and garbage rotted on the marble landings, piles of refuse discolored the wide steps. From every street, corridor and alleyway rose a miasmic stench, leading the more fastidious of Vienna's citizens to hold scented handkerchiefs to their noses when they were carried abroad in their sedan chairs. The stink was matched by the din. Over the clatter of hooves and carriage wheels the street vendors tried to out-shout one another, their raucous cries clashing with the imprecations of carriage drivers and the indignant curses of foot travelers jammed together in spaces too small for half their number.

The babel in the streets of Vienna was matched—though in more subdued tones—by the babel at the palace. "Everybody here speaks three languages!" a French observer commented, and it was an understatement. The Hapsburg royal house spoke German, but the language of the court was French. Many of the courtiers were Hungarians, or Czech-speaking Bohemians, and on any given day one could hear Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian in the corridors of the Hofburg along with a variety of Slavic, German and Swiss dialects. A generation earlier, in the reign of Maria Theresa's father, the courtiers had been required to speak Latin, and to observe a stiff and punctilious etiquette; the current Empress had discarded much of the formality along with the Latin, though she had not substituted a prescribed new etiquette in place of the old. The Lord High Chamberlain Khevenhuller complained that "the etiquette is curiously confused and uneven at court nowadays," and noted that at one Schonbrunn banquet, "in order to avoid disputes about precedence, everybody sat down pell-mell."^

With the relaxation of formality went a loss of the austerity that had characterized the Hapsburg court in the days of Charles VI. Under Maria Theresa, the great nobles felt free to spend their extravagant riches extravagantly. And their wealth was indeed extraordinary. Feudalism still prevailed throughout most of the

Hapsburg lands. Twenty thousand serfs worked on the imperial manors alone; millions more toiled on the estates of the feudal magnates, their labor producing the wheat and timber and other crops that created riches. The Hungarian Esterhazys lived like royalty, ruling entire counties, numbering among their possessions dozens of castles and hundreds of villages. Nikolaus Es-terhazy, called "Nikolaus the Magnificent," built a palace to rival Versailles, and some Bohemian landowners had incomes even higher than the Esterhazys.

Given such affluence, it was no wonder the nobles dressed with conspicuous brilliance at court, wearing rich stuffs embroidered in gold and silver threads, ruby buttons and diamond shoe-buckles, rings and watches sparkling with huge jewels. One aristocratic minister prided himself on possessing three hundred suits of clothes, no two alike, each suit complete with matching watch, snuffbox, Spanish cane and sword. His wardrobe was said to fill two entire large rooms in his palace—and in addition to the contents of these rooms he owned two hundred pairs of shoes, eight hundred dressing gowns and fifteen hundred wigs.

Entertainments too were extravagant. The lavish balls, fetes and masquerades held at Schonbrunn, where supper might be served to ten thousand people in three immense salons, were more than matched by the spectacular pleasure parties the nobles held for the Empress and her retinue. There were hunts and balls, feasts and theatrical performances. New buildings were often built for these occasions, new plays and operas commissioned, new gardens laid out.

When the Prince of Sachsen-Hildburghausen invited Maria Theresa to his palace, Schlosshof, in the fall of 1754, he spared no expense to make the three days of diversion memorable. On the first day the royal guests were treated to a concert and an outdoor play, staged in a beautifully illuminated garden. On the following day a spectacular hunt was held, with the Empress and her consort taking their places in a specially built shooting stand while beaters drove game out of the forest toward them. The day concluded with an opera and an abundant banquet. On the third and final day the Prince outdid himself, ordering his chamberlains to prepare an elaborate "water carousel," held in a large pond. At the center of the pond was an island where hundreds of wild animals were chained, setting up a cacophony of howls and roars. There

were bears dressed in pantaloons, sows dressed as Columbines and two enormous bulls—plus dozens of ducks and geese and swans. In the midst of the noise and tumult a choir sang and musicians played, then at a signal game birds were loosed and foxes and hares released to swim across the pond to dry land. At the finale of the water carousel an immense sailing ship on wheels was dragged to the pond, its timbers groaning under the weight of the meats, breads and cheeses fastened to its sides.

Invariably seated alongside the Empress at these gala entertainments was her husband Francis of Lorraine, who in his mild-mannered, easygoing way was one of the chief adornments of her court.

"Don't mind me," Francis once said when a group of courtiers insisted upon showing him special honor, "I am only a husband; the queen and her children are the court." He was more than a husband, he was Holy Roman Emperor, Maria Theresa having secured for him the office her father had held. Yet he was, in demeanor at least, less than a monarch, with his pleasantly self-effacing manner, his atrocious German and his nervous cough.

Nine years Maria Theresa's senior, Francis had been brought up at her father's court, where he excelled at hunting and fencing and managed to avoid acquiring all but the rudiments of literacy. She adored him, and in due course they were married—though not without a considerable sacrifice on Francis's part. As a condition of the marriage, he resigned his hereditary rights to Lorraine, and thus became little more than Maria Theresa's consort. In time she saw to it that he was elected Holy Roman Emperor, but the title brought with it largely ceremonial duties and no real power. He tried soldiering, but proved to be a disappointing general (unlike his more rough-hewn brother Charles, who was an able commander and toward whom the Empress felt an enduring affection).

Yet if he was not a shining asset, Francis was hardly a liability at court, and certainly did not deserve his son Joseph's cruel description of him as "an idler surrounded by flatterers." He was clever with money, investing his own income profitably and advising on the handling of the imperial revenues. He contributed to the planning of Schonbrunn, he was something of an amateur chemist—though his experiments, which included many attempts to agglomerate a number of small diamonds into one very large

one, bordered on alchemy—and he was always on hand when needed to be a gracious host and a handsome and personable escort for his wife. He diligently fathered sixteen children. And to Maria Theresa he was, quite simply, "the best husband in the world," whom she called ''mon vieux,'' and her "little mouse."

She loved him, and yet she knew full well that he was far from being the best husband in the world. He had a weakness for beautiful young women, and he indulged it all too publicly. In fact, hard as she tried to keep up an appearance of cozy domesticity, to maintain the appealing fiction that behind the facade of regality she, Francis and their children were in truth a conventional Austrian family, living a comfortable, decent life untainted by the corruptions attendant upon extravagance and sophistication, her husband's behavior shattered the illusion. And she, being the strong-willed, high-minded and powerful woman that she was, ultimately sought revenge.

Francis had strayed early and often, flirting with the charming young dancers and opera singers who appeared in the Vienna theaters, making a fool of himself over one young danseuse in particular, Eva Maria Violet, until she had to be hustled out of the country. The elegantly gowned, bejeweled women of the court he found alluring as well, and in 1755, the year the Empress gave birth to her fifteenth child, the eighth Archduchess Antoinette, he became enamored of one of them. She was Princess Auersperg, a seventeen-year-old beauty with masses of soft brown hair and a lovely face. Despite the difference in their ages—he was thirty years older than the Princess—Francis developed a deep and enduring attachment to her, relying on her as not only his mistress but his confidante and friend. Aside from her youth and beauty, she seems to have had qualities that the Empress lacked, and so he sought to be with her as often as possible, buying a house for her where they could meet and arranging rendezvous at his hunting lodges or in his theater box in Vienna.