To the scaffold (5 page)

The grieving widow had her rooms painted black, the windows draped with black velvet and her person veiled and swathed in somber widow's weeds. By nature energetic and affirmative, though plagued by periods of depression, the Empress now seemed to lose heart completely, sitting alone in her darkened apartments, her hair shorn, her thoughts increasingly morbid. She even spoke of entering a convent. For her nine-year-old daughter, herself grieving for her father, the transformation must have been disturbing, especially when Maria Theresa ordered her own coffin prepared and placed beside her husband's in the burial vault of the Capucin church. The Empress spent a large part of each afternoon in the vault, sitting beside Francis's coffin and the empty one waiting for her, praying and weeping. Once so efficient with her time, she now became prodigal with it, dragging out her days in visits to the Capucin church and in repeating the office of the dead. The only time that mattered to her was the time she had spent with her husband. "Emperor Francis I, my husband," she wrote in her prayer book, "died on the evening of the 18th of August at half past nine o'clock. He lived 680 months, 2,958 weeks, 20,778 days, or 496,992 hours. Our happy marriage lasted twenty-nine years, six months and six days, 1,540 weeks, 10,781 days, or 258,744 hours."^ The calculations of time became a litany of her mourning, part of the several rituals of grieving that made up her days. And these rituals left her less time than ever to spend with her children.

Still, the business of marrying them off had to proceed. With Leopold gone, there were ten children left, but the eldest daughter, Anna, was unmarriageable because of her physical weakness and frequent illnesses, and Elizabeth too was a poor marriage prospect with her sadly pockmarked features. Both young women were given titular religious offices, Anna as Abbess of a convent in Prague and Elizabeth as Abbess of a convent in Innsbruck; they continued to live at their mother's court.

It must have been difficult for Maria Theresa to part with her favorite daughter Christina when she married Duke Albert of

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Teschen, but by appointing the Duke Governor of Hungary she made certain Christina would remain reasonably nearby, in Press-burg. And she had the consolation of knowing that Christina and Albert were very much in love. Theirs was a happy marriage—^ stark contrast to the sad misalliance between Joseph and Josepha. The miserable Josepha soon caught smallpox and died—indirectly causing another death in the imperial family when the Archduchess Josepha, her sister-in-law, became infected when visiting her sarcophagus in the family vault.

With Josepha's death, in 1767, there were five unmarried children left—Amalia, Caroline, Ferdinand, Antoinette and Maximilian. Ferdinand's betrothal had been arranged several years earlier, and Maximilian was still a very young boy. Amalia, high-spirited and headstrong, was determined to marry the man of her choice, who happened to be the Prince of Zweibrucken, but her mother forestalled this, saving her for a more advantageous match. Meanwhile the marriage contract that had been drawn up for Josepha, which arranged for her to wed Ferdinand of Naples, was still valid, and in the spring of 1768 the Empress determined that Caroline should fulfill it. (Caroline was in fact the third Hapsburg Archduchess to become betrothed to Ferdinand, her late sister Johanna having been the first.)

Caroline's marriage affected Antoinette far more than those of her other siblings. The two girls had been close companions from early childhood, forever laughing and gossiping together, making fun of their relatives, their servants, and Caroline's attendant gentlewomen. Three years older than her sister and far less tractable, Caroline was independent and self-confident, in her presence the compliant Antoinette could be boisterous and playful and unrestrained. The sisters were extremely fond of each other, Antoinette bringing out her older sister's protective instincts and Caroline offering Antoinette a liberating model of girlhood that departed widely from her stem mother's ideal.

Maria Theresa was not pleased with Caroline. "To my astonishment," she wrote her daughter when she set off on her wedding journey to Naples, "I have observed that you say your prayers without the proper piety. Reprimands mean nothing to you and only lead to harsh words and bad temper." In her mother's eyes, Caroline was thoughtless, irritable and rude; she was in fact outspoken and not overly eager to please, and besides,

To the Scaffold J7

as a nervous fifteen-year-old leaving home for the first time to live among strangers, she was no doubt terrified. She had no idea what to expect in Naples, and wept when she and her Austrian escort reached the border, and the Austrians turned back. Things looked blackest when she met her husband-to-be for the first time, and found him ugly. Then came the wedding, and the wedding night, for which she was totally unprepared. The experience was so horrible that she wanted to die.

"One suffers real martyrdom," she was to recall later, in a letter to Countess Lerchenfeld, "which is all the greater because one must pretend outwardly to be happy. ... I would rather die than endure again what I had to suffer. If religion had not said to me: Think about God,' I would have killed myself rather than live as I did live for eight days. It was like hell and I often wished to die." Having endured such anguish herself, Caroline dreaded what marriage would be like for Antoinette when her time came. "I pity Antoinette, who still has this to face," she told the Countess. "When my sister has to confront this situation, I shall shed many tears."'^

Caroline's worries were none too premature. For the past two years Antoinette's future marriage had been discussed, hoped for and anticipated by the statesmen and diplomats at her mother's court. First proposed when she was only ten years old, the potential match came ever closer to becoming reality as she approached her thirteenth birthday. It was the brainchild of Prince Kaunitz and the Due de Choiseul, architects of the Austro-French Treaty of Versailles and continuing advocates of strong ties between their two realms. Antoinette, Maria Theresa's prettiest and most personally agreeable daughter, they reasoned, would make the perfect bride for Louis XV's grandson, who would one day reign as Louis XVI.

For the obscure youngest Archduchess at the Hapsburg court, it would be a breathtaking match. If all went as planned, Antoinette would one day be Queen of France, mistress of Versailles and, with her husband, head of the most refined and exalted court in Europe.

She began to come out of obscurity. As if in acknowledgment of her forthcoming distinction, Joseph deigned to offer Antoinette a place in his theater box. It was a very public honor, as the elite of the Viennese court and society all attended the theater to see

and be seen, and when Joseph entered his box the entire audience stood in respect. We can be certain that they took careful note of the delicate young beauty at his side, her lovely face framed in yards of creamy lace, a pastel satin ribbon tied in a coquettish bow at her throat, the pink tint of her complexion set off by a soft gray wig crowned with pearls.

Although there was as yet no formal betrothal between Antoinette and the fourteen-year-old dauphin Lx>uis, she began to be called "the dauphine," and in the fall of 1768 her mother authorized her ambassador at Versailles, Prince Starhemberg, to spend the extravagant sum of four hundred thousand livres for her trousseau. All the clothes were to be made in Paris, commissioned from the dressmakers who regularly served the French court. It was customary for the dressmakers to send dolls— poupees de la mode — dressed in the current styles to clients in distant cities to enable them to make their selections. Scores of these dolls began arriving at the Hofburg as Antoinette turned thirteen, wearing miniature versions of the robes and gowns proposed for her.

That her trousseau would be extensive was a foregone conclusion. An Austrian Archduchess, soon to be dauphine of France and one day Queen—such a personage would require a wardrobe to rival any in Europe. The dresses, trimmings and accessories would have to be of surpassing excellence in their materials and workmanship, and they would have to conform to the rigid traditions of the Bourbon court, where each season had its prescribed fabrics and certain days their prescribed colors.

Styles were changing in the late 1760's. Voluminous petticoats were beginning to replace the stiff elliptical hoops that had been worn for a generation and more; the hoops were known as panierSy or "hen-baskets," because they resembled the poultry baskets peasant women carried to market. Hen-basket skirts, which spread out to a width of several feet on either side of the wearer's waist, took up the space of three or four people and made for enormous inconvenience in entering and leaving rooms, getting in and out of carriages, and walking up and down staircases. With the waning of the hen-basket skirt came an increase in the heel height of women's shoes and changes in the line of the torso, with more fullness in the bodice and at the hips. Such innovations were watched carefully by the style-conscious denizens of Versailles and other courts, but they were of interest to a wider public as

well, for it was just at this time that fashion plates came into existence—and with them the beginnings of those broad shifts in public taste that we call fashion.

To be sure, formal court dress—as opposed to the informal clothes worn for ordinary occasions and in the privacy of the wearer's apartments—remained traditional. Court gowns had wide hoop skirts beneath heavily embroidered petticoats, with long trains fastened on at the waist and trailing along behind. Special stiff bodices, lined with whalebone, were worn above the petticoats, laced so tightly that they were ready to burst; the neck and chest were bare, the arms covered with rows of lace that fell to the elbow.^

The prevailing colors of the time—cream, pale green, China blue, silver, lavender-pink and pastel yellow—were flattering to Antoinette, and her trousseau must have included dozens of ball gowns, afternoon dresses, robes and petticoats in a score of delicate shades, the silks and brocades embroidered with floral designs or silk ribbon appliqu^, the borders trimmed with serpentine garlands or silver and gold lace. French dressmakers outdid themselves in inventing ornaments, festooning their already overdeco-rated fabrics with fields of artificial flowers, feathers, tassels and silk ribbon bows, rosettes and ruffles, passementerie and beading and costly metallic fringe. The overall effect was one of deli-ciously playful sensuality, luxuriance and youthfulness—a perfect foil for the charms of a thirteen-year-old Queen-to-be.

Charming the ftiture Queen certainly was, but charm alone would not be sufficient in one who was called to be mistress of Versailles. Her doll-like prettiness aside, Antoinette had flaws, and with her exalted marriage in prospect these flaws were magnified a hundredfold. Her longtime governess. Countess Brandeiss, had been accustomed to tie her abundant blond hair back with a woolen band, which pulled at her hair, thinning it and breaking it at the hairline. The new governess. Countess Lerchenfeld, knew better but the damage remained. An expert was called for. Star-hemberg wrote to his colleague Count Mercy in Paris to request that a skilled Parisian friseur be sent to the Viennese court. The Empress, he wrote, "flatters herself that a man who is perfect at his trade will succeed in correcting, or at least in concealing this small defect either by cutting the hair, or by the employment of some innocent remedy calculated to increase the growth of the

hair of which the forehead is denuded, or, in short, by the pains he will take to arrange the whole as it is to suit the face."^ High foreheads, after all, might go out of fashion, and in fact coiffures were beginning to change shape in the late 1760's, becoming higher and more elaborate, putting women with high foreheads at a disadvantage.

Afriseur was found, one Larsenneur, whose sole recommendation was that Starhemberg's wife had patronized him when in Paris. He was not a brilliant coiffeur, but he was adequate; he swept Antoinette's hair back off her forehead in a "simple and decent" style, softening it at the sides and lifting it at the crown. The Empress was pleased, and a visiting Frenchman remarked gallantly that the simpler style would no doubt be adopted by the young ladies of Versailles when their future Queen arrived among them. In truth, though the new style made Antoinette look older, it was not particularly becoming, as she herself realized. She was too kindhearted to complain to Larsenneur, but when his back was turned she tugged at her hair until she loosened it at the front, creating a more flattering line.

It was not only her hair that was less than ideal; her teeth too were flawed, and a French dentist had to be brought to Vienna to work on them over a period of three months. At the same time she had to learn, or rather releam, how to walk, for the women of Versailles walked like no one else in Europe. They glided, taking very small, quick light steps in order to make their gowns float smoothly along the polished marble floors. Antoinette's dancing master, the celebrated choreographer Noverre, undertook to teach her the proper mincing steps and to teach her as well the intricate French court dances that she would be expected to execute.

Then too there was the much more complex matter of teaching her to play the role of royal hostess. At Versailles the Queen was expected to preside at receptions where a rather tedious game called cavagnole was played; these apparently modest gatherings were in fact governed by a rigorous etiquette, and as dauphine Antoinette would have to master its subtleties. She rehearsed for her cavagnole evenings several times a week, practicing on the Viennese courtiers and presiding with increasing graciousness and easy authority over the playing tables.

She was in fact slowly gaining that elusive nameless quality reserved to royalty, an emanation that made itself felt in small

things—a gesture of the hand, the set of the head, a smile, a walk. The transformation did not go unheeded. "Her deportment, general tone, and her observations were universally applauded," wrote one observer. She was acquiring "an air of nobleness and majesty astonishing for her age."^ She was ingenuous by nature; now she added to that ingenuousness graciousness and a degree of polish. She walked among her guests, a small yet regal figure, speaking obligingly to each and impressing each with her growing courtesy.