To the scaffold (4 page)

Francis was not discreet about his liaison with Princess Auersperg. A visitor to the Austrian court wrote that "the Emperor makes no secret of his passion for her," and even the imperial children were well aware of what was going on. "The Emperor is a very good-hearted father," wrote Archduchess Christina, "one can always rely upon him as a friend, and we must do what we can to protect him from his weaknesses. I am

referring to his conduct with Princess Auersperg." According to the Archduchess, her father was totally under the Princess's influence, and her mother was "very jealous of this devotion."'^

In fact, in taking a mistress Francis was only doing what virtually all men of his class and station did. Vienna had always been "a city of free adultery," as one visitor remarked, with husbands and wives condoning each other's liaisons and showing courtesy to each other's lovers. "Men look upon their wives' galants as favorably as upon deputies that take the troublesome part of their business off their hands," Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had written during the reign of Maria Theresa's father, "though they have not the less to do, for they are generally deputies in another place themselves. In short, 'tis the established custom for every lady to have two husbands, one who bears the name, and another who performs the duties."^ The extramarital liaisons were usually of long duration, and were sealed with agreements under whose terms the woman received a "pension" from her lover. Without such a pension, and a lover, no woman could be regarded as genteel, Lady Mary noted; securing the pension was considered an essential part of the bargain. So well established were these arrangements that hostesses regularly invited both a woman's husband and her lover to dinner, seating her equitably between them.

To be sure, the Church frowned on adultery. But this did not affect the habits of the Viennese. "They sin, pray and confess," a contemporary observed, "then begin all over again, never forgetting to attend Mass." Religion never interfered with pleasure, the old habits persisted even though it was becoming more and more obvious that the Empress was displeased.

Maria Theresa, who took both her religion and her marriage very seriously, was very displeased indeed, and was determined to use her authority to bring fidelity and decency to her subjects' private lives.

The chief agency in her campaign for morality was the Chastity Commission, a special department of the police whose five hundred officers were charged with suppressing vice. Aided by a huge cadre of spies and informers, the officers of the Commission infiltrated social gatherings, theaters, public banquets, even private houses, and seized everyone they suspected of departing from virtue. Men found in the company of "lowly women" were arrested, women found leaving their own doorsteps after dark with-

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out a respectable escort were accused of wantonness. Foreigners suspected of careless morals were expelled from the country, and companies of traveling entertainers, particularly Italians, were harried out of Vienna if the Empress had reason to think they were corrupting the local citizenry.

"I have heard," she wrote to the head of the Chastity Commission on one occasion, "that a man named Palm has taken advantage of a virtuous danseuse in the Deutschestheater, and by means of false promises, has brought her to serve him in the same capacity as his wife. You will investigate this case and find out the truth. It was very bad in Palm to be such a hypocrite, and also bad in the girl to injure him in this manner."^

Many hundreds of such cases were investigated, and many individuals found themselves at the mercy of the police. The long arm of the Chastity Commission reached across borders and into other realms. When the Empress heard that one of her subjects, a married nobleman, was living in Switzerland with his mistress, she instructed her commissioners to extradite both of them so that they could be properly punished. In due course they were brought back to Vienna, but Maria Theresa was dissuaded from placing the woman in a convent and having the man beheaded, as she at first insisted on doing. The usual punishment for immorality was harsh enough. The condenmed were chained to stone pillars at the city gates, their ankles fastened to cannonballs. Often they were left there for weeks or months, dependent for their survival on the charity of passersby.

But if the chained wretches were meant to set a public example, the plan miscarried. Instead of seeing the offenders as miscreants to be scorned and reviled, the Viennese looked on them as martyrs to the Empress's wrongheaded obsession with purity. Instead of letting them starve, the citizens fed them, generously, and laughed at Maria Theresa while they did it. The campaign for chastity backfired, giving rise to jokes and jibes about the high-minded Empress with the profligate husband. People said that Maria Theresa herself had joined her secret police, disguising herself as a man and roaming the streets of Vienna, peering shortsightedly into dark corners in search of Francis. And the Empress, for her part, reacted to the public ridicule by becoming increasingly caustic and irritable, insulting her ministers, at times arrogant in flaunting her powers, her innate humanity and capacity for tenderness quite extinguished by her spite.

After less than a year she dissolved the Chastity Commission—though keeping its personnel intact, to continue their surveillance work and send in their reports—but she extended her campaign of moral improvement to other spheres, issuing an edict against dueling (which was largely ignored) and attempting to control the mania for gambling among her courtiers by forcing players for high stakes to pay a huge license fee for the right to gamble, and donating the proceeds from the sale of licenses to charity.

A less high-minded ruler than Maria Theresa might have foreseen the outcome of all her efforts. Vice became less visible ("I can imagine no city in Europe," wrote an English visitor to Vienna, "where a young gentleman would see fewer examples, or have fewer opportunities for deep gambling, open profligacy, or gross debauchery, than in Vienna"), but no less prevalent. Driven underground, it flourished more briskly than ever, and became more sordid. The police, bribed or compromised, looked the other way or joined in. There were stories of child prostitution, of an archbishop who profited from a brothel, of secret orgies involving prominent men and women at court, planned and even discussed, using a code language, in the very presence of the Empress. The order of Freemasons, which continued to exist in Austria even after it was banned by the Pope, was said to be implicated in the secret orgies. And Francis was a Freemason, though he always managed to avoid capture when the police raided his lodge.

Despite all her efforts, Maria Theresa had to admit that her subjects were worse, not better, at the midpoint of her reign. Every morning she heard the gunshots of the duelists who gathered at dawn just outside the city walls. In private her husband boasted to her that he had won twelve thousand ducats in a single night of gambling. And day after day she endured the humiliation of the Princess Auersperg's presence at court, the beautiful, knowing, increasingly hardened Princess Auersperg who counted not only Emperor Francis but a good many other men among her coterie of lovers.

It was no wonder the Empress was in low spirits. She was greathearted enough to face armies in battle, but the insidious stabs of ridicule and humiliation were too much for her. Her self-confidence was being slowly eroded. Her expression soured, she attacked her piles of papers with a vengeance. For comfort she turned to her prayer books and tried not to think of the corrupt clergy. "My depression never leaves me," she wrote to her confidante Countess Trautson. "Sad days are approaching."

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A^ H ^ HOUGH Maria Theresa felt that she was losing ground to the forces of immorality, she could at least protect her children from corruption. They were sheltered, guarded, kept as much as possible from contact with the sordid world. The girls in particular were kept innocent, encouraged in their religious devotions, their sexual curiosity discouraged. When they danced in court operas they were "not allowed to exhibit their chaste limbs." Unlike the generously rouged women and young girls who attended court functions they were forbidden to wear rouge, even on the most festive occasions, and the least tendency toward coquetry was frowned on.

They were taught to follow their mother's example in dressing simply when not on public view. Maria Theresa wore plainly cut, unadorned gowns and lace caps when alone with her family, and was economical and practical when it came to formal court dress. "For all court functions elaborate dresses are required," she once wrote, "but this does not necessitate a large wardrobe, as one can wear the same dress twenty days in succession."^ Their mother set them an austere example where food and drink were concerned as well. Even at the most sumptuous banquets, where the long tables were piled high with meats and puddings and sweets and the guests prided themselves on the quantities of wine they could consume—the Saxon Minister of State Count Pflug boasted that he could drink ten bottles of wine at one sitting—the Empress ate and drank sparingly, nibbling at slices of orange and lemon and sipping lemonade from a golden goblet.

Her message to her children was clear: even though you are surrounded by luxury and excess, you must not let your exalted status corrode your character. Royalty means responsibility, duty, unceasing and exhausting obligation; there is no room for laxity or weakness, or the self-indulgence of vice. In everything she did, Maria Theresa presented an almost superhuman model of iron self-discipline.

This model impressed itself early on the youngest and smallest of the Empress's daughters. Antoinette learned to sit quietly and do as she was told, to cultivate her natural poise and dignity, to suppress her childish impulses. She was extremely attached to her mother, and eager to please her, and this, coupled with her amiable disposition, made her a model child. She had none of the tru-culence of her quarrelsome brother Leopold, none of her brother Joseph's obstinacy and hauteur. She was in many ways her mother's child, pretty, well made, feminine and with a winning spontaneity and charm. She lacked her mother's strong-willed self-direction, and her outstanding intelligence—qualities that her sister Caroline had—but Caroline was a large, raw-boned and bulky child with a pinched face and a severe expression, while Antoinette was dainty and slender, with delicate features and a smooth pink-tinted complexion. By the time she was five or six years old it was clear that Antoinette would be the beauty of the family, her doll-like prettiness surpassing that of her two most attractive sisters, headstrong Amalia and tragic Elizabeth, whose beauty was disastrously and permanently marred by the marks of smallpox when Antoinette was twelve. And as the beauty of the family, Antoinette could be expected to make the most advantageous marriage.

From her earliest childhood Antoinette was aware that she and her siblings were destined to be, as her mother once wrote, "sacrifices to politics." Their lives were not their own; they belonged to the state. In time the Empress would bestow each of them on spouses suitable to Hapsburg interests.

First to be sacrificed was the heir to the throne, the prickly, arrogant Joseph, whom his mother nicknamed ''Starrkopfy" or Stubborn One. The celebrations attending his marriage to Isabella of Parma, granddaughter of King Lx)uis XV of France, went on for days, balls and banquets and gaudy outdoor displays following one another in giddy succession. The immensely long wedding

procession took many hours to wind its way through Vienna, the Archduke's magnificent silver and gilt coach escorted by scores of noblemen's coaches, each gilded and painted and upholstered, each with its team of matched horses and its complement of liveried postilions.

The event must have impressed itself on five-year-old Antoinette, and the presence at court of her brooding, melodramatic sister-in-law must have impressed her even more. Isabella was a tortured soul who, to her confusion, conceived a much stronger passion for her husband's sister Christina than she felt for him. A lesbian attachment was unthinkable at Maria Theresa's sternly moral court, and the unfortunate Isabella quickly retreated into mental illness. She began to hear voices. "Death speaks to me in a distinct secret voice that rouses in my soul a sweet satisfaction," she told her horrified in-laws. Death haunted her, and ultimately stalked her. Four years after marrying Joseph she died of smallpox, having been delivered of a dead child a few days earlier.

Joseph loved Isabella, disturbed though she was, and was piqued when his mother insisted that he marry again. He was far more piqued when he discovered that he had to choose between the repulsive Cunigunda of Saxony and the short, thickset and pimply Josepha of Bavaria. "I prefer not to marry either," the heir to the throne announced to his mother, "but since you are holding the knife at my throat, I will take Josepha, because, from what I hear, she at least has fine breasts."^

Fine or not, Josepha's breasts were ultimately judged to be as disappointing as the rest of her. After a funereally gloomy wedding, Joseph refused to have anything to do with his wretched bride, humiliating her by his public displays of indifference. He told whoever questioned him about his marriage that he found Josepha "insupportable," with horrible teeth and a shapeless and unappealing body. "They want me to have children," he snapped. "How can one have them? If I could put the tip of my finger on the tiniest part of her body which is not covered with pimples, I would try to have a child." Josepha, childless and sadly friendless, disappeared into her apartments and wept.

Maria Theresa's favorite son Karl having died in 1761, followed shortly afterward by his sister Johanna, the next child to be offered up on the altar of dynastic ambition was Leopold, whose wedding festivities—he married the Infanta Louise of Spain—

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were marred by the sudden death of his father, Emperor Francis. Antoinette did not take part in the wedding ceremony, but most likely she associated it with her father's death, which plunged the court into prolonged mourning and effected a profound change in her mother.