To the scaffold (14 page)

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N the dimly lit sickroom at Versailles, where Louis XV lay in torpor, his three daughters were alarmed. The King did not acknowledge them or speak to them. The surgeons and physicians filed past his narrow bed, each in turn bending over him. The servants, instructed to keep the room dark as the light hurt the King's weak eyes, stood in the gloom, waiting for instructions. Suddenly a torch flared, and in the instant of brightness the cadaverous royal head was illuminated. The face was covered with dark red spots. The King's illness was not catarrhal fever, but smallpox.

In France, inoculation against smallpox was still an exotic practice, widely distrusted. The King had not been inoculated, nor had any of the other members of the royal family. (And in fact, several of the courtiers who had been inoculated had died soon afterwards—including the Comtesse de Noailles's son— which argued against the procedure.) But smallpox was dreaded, and there was a general shudder when the King's spotted face was disclosed. He had had smallpox once before, in the long-ago year of 1728, but that was no protection against a fatal recurrence of the disease, and he himself seemed to sense that he would not recover. He had become ill on April 27; on May 4 he sent Madame Du Barry away, so that he could give at least the appearance of repentance and die an edifying death.

He was in considerable pain. The powdered elm bark the apothecaries administered to him did not ease his agony. After eight days of illness he stank horribly, as if his wasted body al-

ready gave forth the stench of death. The dauphin was kept strictly away, but Adelaide, Victoire and Sophie were in daily attendance, risking their lives out of filial duty. And the royal ministers too came and went from the sickroom at intervals, alternating with the doctors who were well aware that, having failed to cure their master, their own positions were precarious. Antoinette was allowed to see the dying King on the morning of May 7, and was informed that he had summoned his confessor and desired to receive the eucharist. As Louis XV had not made his confession in nearly four decades, the courtiers took this to be an unmistakable sign that his end was near.

The courtyards of the great palace were filling with people, some in tears, many mumbling prayers, others eager to be rid of the hateful old roue who had ruled them since his boyhood. However mild his actual attitude toward his subjects was, however useful his recent belated attempts at governmental reform, he was widely regarded as cruelly indifferent to the needs of the people. In her memoirs Madame Campan recorded a chilling encounter between Louis and a peasant in the forest of Senart. The King was hunting when he came across a man on horseback carrying a coffin.

"Where are you taking that coffin?" Louis asked.

"To the village of ," answered the peasant.

"Is it for a man or a woman?"

"For a man."

"What did he die of?"

"Of hunger," was the blunt response.

The King spurred his horse and rode on.*

Now death had come for the man who had shown so little concern for the starving. By May 9 he was delirious at times, too weak to do more than whisper. He was unable to pronounce the words of the public repentance his confessor had enjoined on him, so Monsignor de la Roche-Aymon, grand almoner, read it for him. "Gentlemen," the Cardinal said solemnly to the assembled courtiers, "the King has charged me to tell you that he asks pardon of God for having offended him and for the scandal he has caused his people."

The courtiers, fearing the contagion that lurked in the King's apartments and knowing that, once he died, the court would immediately move to another palace, rushed to gather their posses-

sions and make arrangements to leave. The soldiers of the guard were ready to march, there were hundreds of saddled horses in the crowded courtyards and the royal coach waited to carry the new King and his brothers to safety.

The old King lingered until May 10, groaning in agony, his swollen face black with corruption. Finally in midaftemoon he died, and the Grand Chamberlain, the Due de Bouillon, emerged from the dim sickroom to make the solemn announcement.

"Gentlemen, the King is dead. Long live the King!"

The news was passed down the staircases, along the corridors, into the farthest reaches of the vast palace. In the courtyards, horses pawed the pavingstones and grooms shouted to one another to prepare to leave. With a thunderous noise, the courtiers rushed to Louis's apartments, paid their respects to their white-faced new young King, and then sped to their waiting vehicles. Within an hour Versailles was deserted. Only the corpse was left, and the few officials entrusted to escort it to St.-Denis for burial.

Louis and Antoinette joined the departing cavalcade, bound for Choisy, just outside Paris. They soon moved on to La Muette, in the Bois de Boulogne. Louis was now in command, his word was law, his person sacred. Having had no preparation whatever for this, his first day as King, he trembled—yet he was not entirely without resources. He brought with him to Choisy a document written by his late father, a "List of various persons recommended by the Dauphin to that one of his children who shall succeed Louis XV." The list was not long, nor were its recommendations prolix. M. de Nivemois, it said, had "spirit and grace," M. de Castries was "good for the army," M. de Muy was "virtue personified." Louis chose M. de Machault ("a man of unbending temper and some errors of judgment, but a man of worth"). But Adelaide, debilitated and poxy as she was from her weeks of vigil by her dying father's bedside, intervened: I^uis, she said, must send for the aged Comte de Maurepas ("has retained the true principles of politics") and none other.^ Louis allowed himself to be j>ersuaded. Maurepas it was.

Meanwhile the courtiers, anxious above all to align themselves with the real power at court, flocked to Antoinette and made their approaches to her with all the subtlety of leeches attaching themselves to a swimmer. She received them, clad in black mourning and devoid of rouge—though quite as enchanting without it—and

showed the younger of them her usual warmth and sparkle. The older women, however, felt the sting of her acerb tongue when they came to pay their formal "mourning respects." Hating all ceremonies as she did, and determined, now that she was Queen, to pare them down or do away with them, Antoinette smiled at the sight of these "centenarians" and "prigs," as she called them, and "most improperly burst out laughing" in their wrinkled faces. It was an ill-advised debut; the elderly Duchesses and Princesses were enraged, especially when they heard that the Queen, who was not yet nineteen, had remarked flippantly, "When one has passed thirty, I cannot understand how one dares appear at court." Such cruel impudence would not be tolerated even in a French Queen, but in a brazen Austrian! The women gossiped, censured, slandered. Antoinette became the victim of a new song, of the kind she and Provence had once sung about Madame E)u Barry:

Little Queen barely twenty

You who mistreat people so badly

You'll be sent back home.

New cliques were forming among the courtiers, new battle lines being drawn in the constant struggle for place and prestige. It had been assumed that the new King would be shy, feeble and ineffectual, that he would be governed by his wife. But Louis was showing himself remarkably forceful. When approached by his grandfather's ministers and asked for his conmiands, he was decisive, regally curt. Among his first acts was to disgrace the doctors who had failed to cure the old King. With the help of Maurepas, his chosen mentor and guide, he began to study foreign policy, taxation, above all finance. Setting aside his passion for locks, hunting and construction, he spent all day at his desk, writing letters, reading dispatches and recommendations, learning the intricacies of Abbe Terray's accounts. Lest the tax burden on his subjects be increased, he announced that he would not ask for the tax of forty million livres traditionally assessed on the accession of a new monarch. The people, overjoyed, stood in their hundreds outside the gates of La Muette and shouted ''Vive le Roir

Louis was at first possessive about his newfound power. He

confided in Maurepas and Terray, and not in Antoinette. When she approached his desk he covered up his papers and struck a pose of irritability. "Madame," he said, "I have business to attend to." Others heard him say pointedly that "what has always ruined this country has been women, whether legitimate wives or mistresses."^ The British ambassador Lord Stormont reported to his superiors in London that Louis did not appear to consult his wife at all, and that he firmly believed that women ought not to involve themselves in politics.

Common sense told Louis in his first few weeks as King that the expenses of his swollen and extravagant court were worsening the country's fiscal crisis. "He is eternally repeating the words economy, economy," Lord Stormont wrote. Yet economy was impossible in a season of royal mourning. The hundreds of palace servants had to have new black liveries—the stable staff alone required nearly fourteen hundred new suits—plus shoulder knots of blue. Thousands of ells of dark cloth had to be ordered to drape the beds and furnishings of the royal palaces, and more cloth of violet for the King's carriages. Mourning wardrobes for the royal family and courtiers were costly, for it was not sufficient to order black clothing alone—there had to be new black coifs, stockings, gloves and even fans to match it.

Ordering new clothing was in fact one of the few permitted amusements during the drawn-out months of mourning. No balls were held, visits to the theater were not permitted. Antoinette filled in the hours by taking a harp lesson daily and giving an informal concert in the afternoon, walking or riding on fine days, and submitting to pose for the painters who, she complained, "worried her to death" demanding royal portraits. Twice a week she looked forward to the visit of her dressmaker and milliner Rose Bertin, proprietress of the fashionable shop called the Grand Mogul in the rue St. Honors. Madame Bertin was no stranger to the court, having enjoyed the patronage of the Duchesse de Chartres. But the Queen's patronage was precious, and with the aid of her skillful dressmaker she rapidly became the leader of fashion. What Antoinette wore, every woman coveted.

This was true of gowns, but even more of hats—and of the high-piled coiffures that went with them.

In the summer and fall of 1774, the women of the court succumbed to a sort of millinery madness. To begin with, there were

hats a ripbigenie, which celebrated the recent performance in Paris of Gluck's Iphigenia —an opera that Antoinette championed (Gluck had been her clavichord teacher in Vienna) and which had a great vogue just before Louis XV's death. The Iphigenia hats, circlets of black flowers with short veils and a crescent moon, were relatively modest in size, but the poufs d la circonstance that appeared the following month were much more elaborate. These featured a cypress and black marigolds, a wheat sheaf, and a cornucopia filled with every sort of fruit and white feathers. The allegorical meaning of the Circumstance Pouf was that while mourning Louis XV, France welcomed the bounty certain to be enjoyed under the new King. A medical coiffure came next, the pouf a Vinoculation. Louis had submitted to being inoculated against smallpox about a month after becoming King, and the new hairstyle commemorated this with a rising sun, an olive tree and a serpent entwined around the trunk, a flowery club near him.

Hair and its adornment had been receiving more and more attention in the last years of the old reign. Bonnets named for the Turkish Sultan, for the royal treasury, for the Carmelite nuns brought notoriety to Rose Bertin, and women were accustomed to sitting patiently while their hair was wrapped in curling papers and frizzed with hot irons, combed out with nettle-juice and powdered with a nourishing mixture of rose roots, aloes wood, red coral, amber, bean flour and musk. For several years the hair had been elevated, with false hair added to the natural locks to provide height and fullness. But these trends were greatly accelerated once Antoinette became Queen. Now the coiffures called for large horsehair cushions to be placed on top of the scalp, with false and natural hair combed over them and long steel pins driven through the hair and cushion to anchor the latter in place. Into this high tower of hair were placed the flowers, jewels, fruit, feathers and figurines that made up the current modes.

Hours in the construction, these creations were naturally preserved as long as possible, which meant that the scalp, itching and perspiring under its heavy load, had to be protected with pomade. But the pomade, being organic, turned rancid within a few days, and to its stink was added the torment of the sharp pins. Critics of the high-piled hair poinced out that it made women's blood rush to their heads, and caused eyestrain, headaches and erisypelas. Hair fell out, teeth ached, fleas and lice bred in the nests of curls;

genteel women carried long thin sticks with small ivory claws at the end to reach into their headdresses and scratch their heads.

But the effects produced by the magnificent—if ridiculous— edifices were worth any amount of inconvenience and pain. To be in fashion was the thing, even if a coiffure two or three feet high prevented one from sitting in a coach seat (the women knelt on the floor) or entering a ballroom (one of Antoinette's most fantasti-cated piles had to be dismantled, then rebuilt so that she could attend a soiree). Sacrifices were expected. Sleep was made uncomfortable, if not impossible. "At night," wrote the contemporary social critic Mercier, "the whole erection is compressed by means of a sort of triple bandage which everything goes under, false hair, pins, dye, grease, until at last the head, thrice its right size, and throbbing, lies on the pillow done up like a parcel, so that even in sleep the coiffeur's handiwork is respected."^

The fantastic coiffures were, for Antoinette, an engaging distraction, and one she needed only too badly, for now that she was Queen she found herself caught in a steel web of etiquette and obligation.

Private life, private action were a thing of the past. She could not make a gesture, take a step, utter a word without triggering a reaction in the attendants who never left her. Her first morning yawns brought a wardrobe woman into her bedroom with a basket of underclothes, handkerchiefs and towels. A waiting woman presented her with the day's first task—the choice of her dresses: a formal court gown, an informal afternoon dress, and a gown for the evening entertainment and supper. The choices were made from a picture book with drawings of all the various available toilettes. Antoinette marked those she wanted with a pin, and the waiting woman left to fetch them. A tub was rolled into the bedroom for the Queen's morning bath, and with it came the bathing corps with all things necessary—including the long flannel gown, lined with linen and buttoned up to the neck, in which the modest Antoinette bathed. She emerged from the tub screened from the servants' eyes by a sheet held in front of her; then she put on a wrap{)er of white taffeta and dimity slippers trimmed with lace and went back to bed until it was time for her sparse breakfast of hot chocolate or coffee.