To the scaffold (19 page)

All these types and more were at hand. There was Count Bal-int Esterhazy, an impossibly handsome Hungarian officer whose family was impossibly rich and who claimed among his ancestors Attila the Hun. Antoinette helped him pay his debts and acquire a regiment. There was the Due de Lauzun, a funny, sly Gascon with an inflated ego and a large fund of amusing stories. Antoinette found him entertaining, embraced him as a friend—and wound up having to send him away when he mistook friendship for lust. There was the fifty-three-year-old Swiss, Baron Pierre-Victor Besenval, a lieutenant colonel in the Swiss Guards, who sang topical French songs and was full of heavy flirtatiousness. Besenval too was rejected, and so was the Comte d'Adhemar, a dandy who, like Antoinette, played the harp, and the Prince de Ligne, fortyish and cosmopolitan, who was an Austrian at home in the Hofburg and whom Antoinette enjoyed because he re-

minded her of her childhood. The Prince was an easy companion because he made no effort to seduce her and indeed praised her purity, finding "her soul as beautiful and white as her face."

The gossips watched, and waited for Antoinette to slip from virtue. When she disappointed them, they arrived at a vicious explanation: the Queen did not take a lover, it was said, because she had one already—the Comte d'Artois.

The young Artois, barely seventeen in the winter of 1774-5, had become quite insufferable. He was extremely pleased with himself, and it showed. He had managed to father a child, a feat that neither of his older brothers had been able to match. He was handsome, while his brothers had none of his appeal. He had dash and style; he was popularly known as "the Prince of youth." All the women at court, even some of those old enough to be his mother, came to pay their compliments to him and vied for his smiles and his attentions. He was at the center of the Queen's group of favorites, he was admired and envied. With his wife absorbed in her pregnancy, Artois spent every spare moment with Antoinette—or so it appeared to the spiteful courtiers. He never left her side. They went to the races together; he drove her about in his daring open carriage called a "devil." It was almost as if he, Artois, and not the heavy-footed Louis, were King.

Artois even mimicked the kingly role, walking in front of Louis though etiquette forbade anyone to precede the King, making insolent remarks in his presence, pushing him and stepping on his feet—in short, making a conspicuous nuisance of himself. And Louis did not respond with regal indignity, as he should have; instead he was weak and apathetic, which seemed to confirm the suspicions that Artois was cuckolding him, and that he, pathetically unable to perform toward Antoinette as a husband should, was compliant in the affair.

Young as he was, Artois had already earned a widespread reputation as a rake and a libertine, with mistresses in Paris, visits to costly courtesans, rumored seductions of court ladies and frequent bouts of drinking and wild gambling. A liaison with his royal sister-in-law would fit right in with this pattern of life.

And what of Antoinette? She was no better than he was, so the gossip went. Hadn't she held an orgy one night at Marly, after the King had gone to bed?^ Didn't she wear dresses with names such as "Masked Desire" and "Indiscreet Pleasures"? Didn't she

insult and mock the elderly ladies of the court, just as Artois mocked Louis? And didn't she show her brazenness in riding vicious-looking horses, riding astride like a man and wearing a man's green pantaloons under her English riding coat?

No one could prove that Antoinette and Artois were lovers— and of course they were not. Yet there was something different about her. Her enemies put it down to illicit love; more perceptive observers might have seen in it a kind of desperation.

The Antoinette of good resolutions, of self-imposed study and reading had vanished. So had the Antoinette whom Mercy found to be timid and fearful, dependent and passive. A new self had emerged, a self that was brittle, frenetic, hardened by a constant surfeit of pleasures. The new self became preeminent soon after Antoinette became Queen, but her newfound eminence alone was not responsible for it. Instead the transformation owed much to the pressures of ceremony, the inescapable reminders of her barrenness—of which her sister-in-law Theresa's pregnancy was only one—and her emancipation from the tutelage of the Comtesse de Noailles and Mercy.

Obsessive spending was one symptom of this emerging identity. Day after day Antoinette spent lavishly, excessively, on the Petit Trianon, on gowns and coiffiires and feathers, on her friends, who received costly court appointments and pensions, and on jewels. The spending spree reached new heights in the early months of 1775. The Queen developed a passion for feathered headdresses. Crests of feathers, some of them two or three feet high, became the fashion. Visitors to Versailles found themselves in a "forest of feathers," and a new term was coined— "featherheads"—to describe Antoinette and her giddy coterie.

Feathers were costly enough, but diamonds were prohibitively expensive. Yet Antoinette had to have them, indeed craved them. Diamond earrings, bracelets, more bracelets—nearly a million livres' worth within a few months. And there had to be elegant occasions to wear all this finery. The court balls in the winter of 1774-75 were exceptionally splendid. No expense was spared in the decoration of the theaters and salons where the balls were held, or in the preparation of elaborate costumes for the dancers. Tyrolean, Indian, antique French costumes were demanded. The servants in the department of the King*s pleasures worked for days on each extravagant production; one particular gown that

Antoinette ordered, ornamented with antique lace from the time of Henri IV, kept the seamstresses up all night. ^ In all, the balls for the first three months of 1775 cost more than a hundred thousand livres, chiefly, the officer in charge of them noted, "because of the quantity of gold embroidery which was used for the gowns and the quadrilles."

When the expense sheets were shown to the King and Queen, they defended the extravagance. They "did not find this expense to be too high at all," they said, "for amusing the entire court throughout the entire winter.""^ Louis's Finance Minister Turgot, however, took a different view.

An austere and abstemious nobleman, Turgot did not trouble to hide his disdain for the spendthrift habits of the Queen and her circle. As Controller-General of Finance, he was wedded to economy, as the King declared himself to be. And to honesty, as few at court were. Only by restricting spending, he declared, could the country's economy be restored to health. This policy had brought results in the Limousin, where Turgot had been inten-dant; it would work just as well for all of France, provided the King and Queen were cooperative.

In his distaste for court expense, Turgot articulated a widespread grievance. Many of the French, particularly the businessmen and artisans, resented both the waste and the inefficacy of the monarchy and its political servants. Versailles to them was nothing more than a costly frivolity, where pampered wastrels enriched themselves at the expense of hard-working tradesmen and laborers. And Versailles was only a symptom of an entire system, social and governmental, which exploited the many for the benefit of the worthless few. Turgot was not the most radical exponent of this view, but he was among the most candid. He was blunt in his disparagement of the monarchy and its traditions, traditions that belonged, he said, to the "barbarous centuries" and should not be dragged along into the present. Nothing short of a thoroughgoing reform of the finances would salvage the state; this meant stringent economies, coupled with a commitment to levying no new taxes and taking out no new loans.

King Louis needed Turgot, not only to enforce the cutting of expenses but to bolster his own sagging self-discipline. Louis meant well, his intentions were of the best. He meant to promote austerity, not extravagance. But he was proving to be too weak to

impose his will on those around him, especially his wife. His regal posturing, his loud declarations about the need to exclude women from government, his long hours of desk work had ceased. He had tried, in the first months of his reign, to devote himself to the labor of kingship. But he lacked the toughness to keep up the labor for long. By the time winter came, and with it the Queen's elaborate balls, Louis had resumed his preferred pastimes of hunting, construction and lock-making. He relied on Turgot to do his work for him, just as his grandfather had relied on Choiseul, even though he realized that his Finance Minister was at heart the enemy of monarchical government.

"M. Turgot's ideas," Louis said, "are extremely dangerous." Yet his goal, fiscal solvency, was the same as the King's, and his methods, it seemed, were necessary. He was given a free hand.

Turgot imposed restrictions on court spending, limited the powers of the guilds, and abolished the corviCy the right of the nobles to demand free labor services from the peasants on their estates. In so doing he was attacking outworn customs from the "barbarous centuries." But he went further. He attacked the barbarous network of customs restrictions that impeded the movement of grain throughout the kingdom, thus creating for the first time a free market in grain. The harvest of 1774 had been scanty, and the free movement of grain was expected to alleviate the near-famine conditions by leading to a lowering of bread prices. But in practice the opposite happened. Wealthy speculators bought up all the grain, and drove up the price of bread far beyond what the poor could afford. They blamed Turgot, who earned the hatred not only of the starving people but of the horde of customs officials deprived of their livelihoods. The courtiers too hated him for curtailing their expenditures, as did the nobles and the guild members.

Hatred turned to fear when the severe grain shortage, exacerbated by Turgot's policies, led to rioting. Townspeople plundered the bakeries, peasants attacked the flour mills and even waylaid boats carrying cargoes of flour. Criminals took advantage of the chaos to rob and pillage at will. The turmoil in Paris at the beginning of May 1775 was swift to escalate and the Paris police, many of whom were sympathetic with the rioters, were unable to restore order.

The unrest spread to Versailles, and the courtiers panicked.

/JO CAROLLYERICKSON

An angry crowd, made up of residents of two dozen small villages in the vicinity of the town, stood at the palace gates shouting "that they had no bread, that they had come to get it, and showed pieces of barley bread which was very inferior" though it had cost them two sous.^ They also complained because the marketplace of Versailles had been ordered closed. Turgot had gone to Paris, to deal with the crisis there, and in his absence the young King took charge. "You can count on my firmness," he wrote in a hasty note sent off to the Finance Minister, and indeed he showed firmness— combined with alertness and common sense. He sent a detachment of guardsmen to the marketplace, and ordered it opened under their surveillance. He sent the captain of his bodyguard to speak to the crowd. Meanwhile the Mayor of Versailles, without consulting the King, ordered the bakers to lower the price of good quality wheaten bread to two sous, the price the rioters demanded.

At Versailles all was over in a few hours, with no bloodshed. The presence of the guardsmen had a calming effect, bread was made available at a reasonable price (much to the King's embarrassment; he accused the Mayor of "a stupid maneuver"), the King's fortitude put heart back into his courtiers. "I shall not go out today," he wrote to Turgot in Paris, "not from fear, but in order to let things calm down." In Paris, however, Turgot sent regular troops, including cavalry, against the rioters. Louis advised restraint but the minister, convinced that the riots were part of a political plot and not the protest of hungry and frustrated people, ordered the troops to attack and they shot and bludgeoned at will. With cannon on the ramparts and hangings in the streets, the disorder subsided, yet it left Parisians furious. They blamed Turgot and his royal master as well, and their bitterness was to endure.^

Mercy went to see Antoinette, and found her upset by the reported violence of the crowds. She was accustomed to nothing but adulation from the people. Despite the critical songs and the venomous libels written about her, she believed that the Parisians felt affection for her. Certainly they showed affection when she attended the Opera, cheering her, sometimes for a quarter of an hour, and cheering still more loudly to see that they moved her to tears. She knew that stories circulated in the capital about her generosity toward her servants and toward victims of injustice.

She knew that when early in his reign Louis dismissed the Chancellor Maupeou, thus reversing his grandfather's enlightened policy toward the parlements, the Parisians burned Maupeou in effigy. "Let us avenge our charming Queen," they cried, "of whom this wretch has dared to speak evil and write libels."^ Parisian shops did a brisk trade in royal trinkets and ornaments: porcelain medallions celebrating "Louis le Populaire," engravings, books, crude portraits. An English visitor to Paris saw two expensive porcelain figurines in a china shop, finely executed, representing Louis playing the harp and Antoinette with her embroidery in her lap.^

To be sure, there were caricatures for sale ridiculing the Queen's gigantic coiffures and feathered crests. But the attitude they represented was far from universal. One published collection of headdresses, whose intended audience was admirers of Antoinette, included this poem:

Behold the coiffure of our Queen, Whose J3erfect taste is therein seen. 'Twere well her style to imitate, Herself in acts both small and great. For should you copy her good deeds. You will inspire our love, respect. And like her, sow the seeds Of charity towards God's elect.^

Antoinette believed that she and Louis were admired, loved, even worshipped by the Parisians, despite the evident suffering of the poorest among them and despite the harsh taxes they struggled to pay. Now she was forced to confront their fearsome anger, and it unnerved her.

It unnerved her even more in that her husband's coronation was imminent.