To the scaffold (8 page)

Louis had reigned for more than fifty years, but as a vapid figurehead. Choiseul, who knew him better than anyone, confided in his memoirs published after the King's death that he had heard his master refer to himself as "inconsequence personified," and add that he would not be surprised to discover that he was in-sane.2 Overbred, overindulged, King since the age of five, this

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great-grandson of the Sun King Louis XIV had no real idea of who or what he was—beneath his carapace of regality—and had long since ceased to care. He knew, for his tutors had taught him, that being King, he was altogether different from ordinary men. He believed himself to be a "chosen vessel" of the Almighty, with the divine mission to protect the Catholic religion. And he believed (which belief did nothing to strengthen his character) that because he was a "direct emanation from providence," God would not punish him for his transgressions by sending him to hell, no matter how egregiously he sinned. Knowing that he could sin with impunity, he sinned—yet sin did not provide him with a sufficient means of defining himself.

"The King's character," Choiseul once wrote, "resembled soft wax, on which the most dissimilar objects can be temporarily traced."^ His excessive malleability would have been unsettling in a private person; in a ruler it was disastrous. Vulnerable to becoming the prey of faction, the King fortunately had Choiseul to rely on—though Choiseul, naturally enough, headed a faction of his own. The chief minister did the King's work, sitting at a desk in a small room adjacent to his master's bedroom at Versailles. Whatever Choiseul recommended. King Louis acceded to, scarcely bothering to read documents before he signed them.

It was as if he ruled in absentia, but no alternative to this sorry state of affairs seemed possible, given the King's frequent lapses into vacuity. "When he is thoughtful," an English traveler wrote describing King Louis, "and not disposed to speak, he is apt to open his mouth, fix his eyes upon some one object, and let his chin drop; to such who only see him at such times, his looks are rather unfavorable.""* He looked, in fact, as if he were drunk, and there were whispers at court that the King was growing much too fond of the bottle.^

Inconsequential and vacuous. King Louis was also virtually devoid of accomplishments, unless stag-hunting and making coffee could be considered accomplishments. Spectators who came to Versailles to watch the King eat noted the skill with which he knocked the top off a soft-boiled egg with his fork, and applauded the feat. Certainly the King was not a success as a husband, or as a father. He had ignored his late wife Queen Marie for a procession of mistresses, leaving her to fill her life with quilt-making, drawing, and long tedious evenings with her ladies of honor.

Toward his children the King was unpleasant at best. He had quarreled with his late son Louis, whose views on the monarchy diverged sharply from his own, and he looked on his four unmarried daughters with contempt, mocking and ridiculing them and treating them as nonentities. His grandson and heir he despised, not just because of his eccentricity but because there was nothing remotely virile about him, and Lx)uis himself was nothing if not virile. The dauphin Louis was certainly not yet ready for marriage, if indeed he ever would be, and at the thought of this his grandfather was apt to fall into one of his glassy-eyed reveries.

Antoinette joined the King and the dauphin in the capacious royal carriage for the drive through the forest to the chateau of Compi^gne. There she met the rest of her new relatives, a crowd of dukes and duchesses, princes and princesses whose names and titles must have gone by her in a blur, especially as there were so many of them and so many other courtiers for her to meet as well. Besides, there were only two days until the wedding, and many last-minute details required attention. After supper—and one wonders what sort of meal it was, with the pretty and amiable young newcomer seated amid a dozen or more highly judgmental strangers, her bridegroom so shy he barely looked at her, her own manners noticeably less formal than those of the French—she was shown to her room, where she received the King's Master of Ceremonies. He presented her with twelve wedding rings, which she tried on one after another until she found one that fit her perfectly. It was put away until the ceremony.

Two days later, at midmoming, Antoinette rode in her coach through the high ornate iron gates of the palace of Versailles. The sheer immensity of the sprawling stone edifice, with its enormous flanking wings and its three vast courtyards, must have made an impression on her, though she never mentioned her reactions to it or her opinions of it in letters to her mother. Far larger and grander than Schonbrunn, Versailles was also much older, and on the day Antoinette first glimpsed it, the palace looked shabby and unkempt. The fountains were broken, their basins dirty and full of debris. The canal too was dirty and mud-clogged. In the gardens, many statues had fallen over, and negligent servants and gardeners let them lie.

Dark and overcast though the morning was, no lanterns had been hung along the streets leading to the palace, and as An-

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toinette^s carriage passed through the iron gates, there was no band waiting to serenade her with fife and drum, no welcoming escort of Swiss Guards or other soldiery. People milled about in the forecourt as always, and stared at the carriage as it rolled into the courtyard and stopped at the entrance to the Queen's staircase.

This being the dauphin and dauphine's wedding day, over five thousand people had been given invitations to the ceremony, and many thousands more, curious spectators who knew that this was to be a day of extraordinary pageantry, fought so persistently to get into the Hall of Mirrors that the guardsmen charged with keeping order were unable to prevent them from gaining entry. Tiers of seats had been erected in the long mirror-lined corridor especially for this day's events, but since early morning these had been filled by courtiers in their most resplendent dress, and the rest of the spectators were forced to find what space they could, flattening themselves against the temporary balustrades and pressing uncomfortably against the official guests. The press of people grew worse when thundershowers began; now everyone who had been outside in the courtyards came inside, their clothes dripping and their boots muddy.

At one o'clock the wedding procession began to wind its way from the State Apartments toward the chapel. The Grand Master of the Ceremonies led the way, with Louis and Antoinette, hand in hand, immediately behind him. Antoinette was smiling and poised. Her small figure glittered with diamonds. An English wedding guest, the Duchess of Northumberland, was surprised at how small she was, and thought that she looked no older than twelve. The Duchess was also critical of her wedding dress. "The corps of her robe was too small," she wrote in her diary, "and left quite a broad stripe of lacing and shift quite visible, which had a bad effect between two broader stripes of diamonds. She really had quite a load of jewels."^ The dauphin, who was as usual terribly nervous, was dressed in a suit of dazzling cloth of gold covered with jewels and orders. According to the Duchess, Louis was timid and trembling, worn out with anxiety.

Behind the bride and groom came pages carrying Antoinette's long brocade train, then the Comtesse de Noailles, her titular guardian, then the royal princes—the corpulent Due d'Orleans, the neurasthenic Due de Penthievre, the Princes of Conde and

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Conti, the Dues de Chartres and Bourbon, and Comte de la Marche—and the dauphin's two younger brothers, the Comtes de Provence and Artois. After them walked the King, looking bemused, then came his ten-year-old granddaughter Princess Clothilde and his three unmarried daughters Adelaide, Victoire and Sophie, the dauphin's aunts. A crowd of be jeweled court ladies brought up the rear of the procession, which paraded the entire two hundred and fifty foot length of the Hall of Mirrors, beneath the massive chandeliers, until it reached the entrance to the palace chapel. Here, amid the baroque magnificence of white marble and gilding, another audience of spectators awaited,

A drum and flute fanfare announced the entrance of the royals into the chapel, and all the assembled guests rose as Louis and Antoinette made their way to the altar and knelt on cushions to repeat their vows before the Archbishop of Rheims. The dauphin blushed beet-red when he placed the ring on Antoinette's finger, and fidgeted nervously throughout the nuptial Mass. Afterwards the couple signed the register, completing the formalities. Antoinette was now dauphine.

She was dauphine—and as such she was feared, hated and resented.

It was the paradox of Antoinette's position that, despite her extreme youth and inexperience, she was, in theory at least, the most powerftil woman at court, and at a court where the men of the royal family were weak and apathetic, this made her doubly poweriful. Her arrival upset the status quo—which had already been seriously upset the year before when the King had his buxom, exuberantly coarse mistress, Madame Du Barry, presented at court. Du Barry controlled the King, and was doing her best to gain control of the court through him. Antoinette, however, was capable of controlling the dauphin, who might become King at any time. Hers was the rising power, and the experienced courtiers, hardened by years of intrigue, presumed that she would lose no time in building and consolidating her faction. They were suspicious of her, and guarded in her presence; behind her back, many of them did all they could to work against her.

Under other circumstances the backstairs rivalries within the royal household would have had limited significance. But France in 1770 was a nation in disorder, with a vacuum at the center of power. According to the Austrian envoy in Paris, Count Mercy,

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who was extremely well informed, a "horrible confusion" reigned at Versailles, and the palace was "the abode of treachery, hatred and revenge." "Everything is worked by intrigues and inspired by personal ambitions," he wrote, "and it seems as if the world had renounced even the semblance of uprightness."^ With no strong authority to provide moral ballast and give direction to affairs, the government became nothing but a sordid scramble for influence, with the rewards going to the greediest and most ruthless of the scramblers. And with the prospective ruler showing even less capability than the feeble Louis XV, seasoned observers such as Mercy shuddered to contemplate the future.

"This monarchy," Mercy had written a year before Antoinette came to France, "is so decadent that it would not be regenerated except by a successor of the present monarch who, by his qualities and talents, would repair the extreme disorder of the kingdom." But the dauphin lacked the requisite qualities and talents. "This prince, by his face and his talk," Mercy thought, "shows only an extremely limited intelligence, much clumsiness."^

It would be up to Antoinette, many thought, to shore up what rudimentary abilities her husband had, to civilize him, if possible, and in time to make a king of him. To do all this would have strained the capabilities of a mature, sophisticated woman. To expect it of a fourteen-year-old naif was futility itself.

On the afternoon of her wedding day, Antoinette was installed in the apartments allotted to her, a smallish but exquisitely appointed suite of rooms with painted walls decorated with carved reliefs. Apart from her bedroom and bathroom, there were two sitting-rooms, a large library, two antechambers, and a private oratory. Here she received the officers of her household, each of whom in turn took an oath of fidelity to serve her. Her lady of honor, gentleman of honor, almoner, intendants, maitre d'hotel, first equerry and controllers-general all knelt to repeat their oaths, having themselves received the oaths of their dozens of underlings. There were nearly two hundred of these concerned with the preparation and serving of her food alone, from cooks to butlers to wine-bearers to the children of the scullery. A ftirther hundred or so servants and officers looked after her every personal need, from the wig-maker who did double service as bath attendant to the two apothecaries to the nineteen valets de chambre. Antoinette had twelve aristocratic ladies to attend her and keep her company

and fourteen waiting women to serve her, two preachers, five chaplains and an almoner (all of whom made Abbe Vermond superfluous), six equerries, nine ushers, two doctors and four surgeons, a clock-maker, a tapestry-maker, eighteen lackeys, a fencing master and two muleteers.

The afternoon was well advanced before the procession of servants and officials ended and the last of them bowed his way out of the dauphine's apartments. But the events of this exhausting day were far from over. The King, his grandson and granddaughter again presented themselves to public view, this time playing cavagnole at a table in the royal apartments while six thousand invited guests took advantage of the privilege of watching them. At the appropriate hour a wedding supper was held in the newly completed opera house, an exquisitely ornate theater whose balconies and wall moldings had been carved, painted and gilded by teams of fine artists. Here the royal family supped, while rain drummed down on the roof and thunder rolled outside. The guests, who had hoped to see a grand fireworks display later in the evening, were disappointed when the rain forced cancellation of the spectacle, and left feeling cheated. Still, they stayed long enough to watch the final event of the wedding day, the blessing of the nuptial bed by the Archbishop of Rheims. The King gave his grandson his nightshirt, and the Duchesse de Chartres helped Antoinette prepare for bed. There was no romance whatever and much embarrassment, at least for the pitifully gauche Louis, when the two young people climbed into bed and the courtiers took their leave.

Left alone with her new husband, half curious, half dreading what was to come, Antoinette waited. And waited. The bulky form beside her in the bed was still. Louis was asleep.

Night after night, over the following weeks, the same puzzling ritual was repeated. Antoinette retired, Louis came to her bed, lay down, and went to sleep without touching her. Though without experience, Antoinette was not naive about sex. Her mother had instructed her on what to expect as a wife, and she knew what her sister Caroline had been through on her anguished wedding night and in the first days of her nightmarish marriage. Something was very wrong, and it was soon a matter for common gossip. The pages and chamberwomen searched the dauphine's bedclothes for telltale signs that she was no longer a virgin; finding none, they