To the scaffold (2 page)

"august Papa" his heartfelt homage. Next Antoinette, who was not quite four, sang a French song. Her sisters sang Italian arias and played the harpsichord, her older brother Karl performed on the violin and Joseph on the viol."*

None of the children rose above amateur ability either in singing or playing instruments, but they were at home with music; Vienna had become the musical capital of Europe, Gluck and Haydn composed for the court and the imperial aristocracy, the infant prodigy Mozart came to Schonbrunn and played for Maria Theresa and her family. The Empress herself had an extraordinarily beautiful singing voice and performed with finesse, though her musical taste lacked discrimination. In her choice of operas she invariably preferred the pleasant and conventional to the pathbreaking and profound. Still, she saw to it that her children's musical culture was extensive. Not only did they each play an instrument—Antoinette played the harp—but they joined together in trios and quartets and even formed a small orchestra on occasion.

Their musical education was much more thorough than their education in history, geography, mathematics and the classics. They were taught penmanship, reading, and French, with a scant hour or two a week devoted to studying maps and reading stories. Priests instructed them in morality and religion. The girls learned needlework and the boys fencing. But for the girls in particular, lessons were often perfunctory. When very young they were put into the care of Countess von Brandeiss, an overindulgent task-mistress at best from whom they learned little self-discipline or mental application. Besides, Maria Theresa was more concerned to have her children learn good manners and healthy eating habits, and to cultivate courage and self-confidence than she was about their formal lessons.

Her attitude is clear from a set of instructions she wrote for Countess Lerchenfeld, who was at the time in charge of supervising Johanna and Josepha, when Antoinette was an infant. "I insist on their eating everything, with no fault-finding and no picking and choosing," the Empress declared. "Further, they must not be allowed to criticize their food. On Fridays, Saturdays, and all other fast-days they will eat fish. Although Johanna in particular dislikes it, she must not be indulged. The sooner the habit is broken the better. All my children had the same aversion, and all had

to overcome it." The girls were not to be allowed to neglect their appearance, but were to be "properly washed and combed" every day. "And never must they be allowed to be afraid," the Empress went on, "neither of thunderstorms, fire, ghosts, witches or any other nonsense. The servants must not talk about such things or tell horror stories." Even the most dreaded scourge of the court and countryside, smallpox, was to be discussed freely and openly in front of the children, so that they might become accustomed to hearing about illness and death and accept both as natural and inevitable parts of life.

The Empress insisted that the royal children learn to be polite toward everyone, even servants, and particularly toward strangers. They were to be neither haughty nor overly familiar, but to maintain a mean between these two extremes, a dignified and detached graciousness that did honor to their lineage without giving offense.

Maria Theresa was a conscientious and well-intentioned mother, but she was also an overburdened ruler. Of necessity she delegated the tasks of childrearing to others, relying on her court physician, Gerhard von Swieten, to look after their health, and on an array of imperial tutors to instruct them. During the winter months, when the court was at the Hofburg, she spent time with the children between meetings with her officials and sessions with her papers. But in the warm season, when the court moved to Schonbrunn, only the older children went with it; the youngest ones remained in Vienna, and saw their mother far less often. As an adult Antoinette recalled that her mother was so preoccupied with matters of state that she sometimes saw her children only every eight or ten days.

During Antoinette's earliest years her mother was more preoccupied than usual with the tasks of governing, for she was waging war.

In the mid-eighteenth century, two great colossi bestrode the European continent: Hapsburg Austria and Bourbon France. The Austrian lands embraced much of Central Europe, parts of Italy, and the Austrian Netherlands (modem Belgium). Through her husband Francis, who was Holy Roman Emperor, Maria Theresa held sway over the German principalities as well. The vast and wealthy territories under the governance of the Bourbon kings included not only an engorged France, its boundaries swollen to include Lorraine, but Spain, southern Italy and Sicily. France

also had hopes of conquering Britain; several times King Louis XV had authorized the preparation of vast invasion fleets with the intention of launching them against the southern coast of England, only to have some last-minute accident of weather or shift in the diplomatic tide foil the plans.

Ever since the sixteenth century the two giants of the continent had been at odds. In battle after battle, through reign after reign the rivalry continued unabated, with now one side in the ascendant, now the other. By the mid-1750*s, however, the time-honored enmity between Bourbon and Hapsburg was waning. England, not Austria, was becoming France's principal rival, for both the English and French possessed lucrative global empires which increasingly brought them into conflict. Austria, for her part, had come to fear and distrust the aggressive might of Prussia more than her traditional enemy France. Frederick of Prussia had already shown his teeth by conquering Silesia, Austria's richest province; clearly he would not be satisfied until he had seized even more Hapsburg land.

Maria Theresa wanted above all to recover Silesia, secure Austria's borders against the Prussians, and revenge herself against the man she called the "Monster," King Frederick. Thus when, to the surprise of the diplomatic world, Prussia and Britain signed a defensive alliance early in 1756, the stage was set for a rapprochement between the Austrians and French. Two diplomats. Count (later Prince) Kaunitz in Austria and the Due de Choiseul in France, favored an Austro-French alliance and as a result of their efforts the Treaty of Versailles was drafted in the following May. Under its terms, each of the signatories promised to aid the other in the event of an attack by a third power, and each agreed not to interfere in the other's military ambitions.

War broke out when Prussian troops marched into Saxony in August of 1756. Confident of the support of her French ally, Maria Theresa was able to concentrate her energies on opposing the Monster, Frederick. Her primary concern was the well-being of her armies, a matter she considered far too important to be left to others. She took a personal interest in her soldiers' welfare, making certain that they were adequately provisioned, shod and clothed. No detail was too small to escape her attention, not the cut of a uniform, the thickness of a blanket, the strength of an axle for a gun-carriage. Tirelessly she sat hour after hour with her ad-

visers, devising strategy and mapping out campaigns. Afterward, alone in her white-and-gold apartments at Schonbrunn, she pondered tactics and struggled with the exigencies of financing the army, ultimately deciding to pawn her jewels rather than send the men into battle under-equipped.

As the war went on she showed steely courage when the Prussians threatened Vienna. The city was all but undefended, for the Austrian army was concentrated in Bohemia where the Prussian attack was anticipated. Maria Theresa's ministers urged her to flee. She refused. "The court shall remain until the last extremity," she announced. To the Crown Princess of Saxony she wrote, "We will meet the Prussians as we can. And if we have no army here, we will arm ourselves with axes and bows and arrows, all women, as well as men, to force them out."^

Vienna was spared. An Austrian general attacked the Prussian supply wagons, forcing Frederick to order them destroyed lest their precious materiel fall into enemy hands. The loss forced the Prussian army to retreat, and the Austrian capital was no longer in danger. Yet the war dragged on, as year by year the Empress grew more hardened and more lined and her children grew older.

A stout, red-faced woman of Amazonian courage, a frown of resolute defiance on her face: such was Antoinette's earliest memory of her mother. When she was brought to see her mother, the Empress looked up from her papers to peer at her little daughter through a magnifying lens. Her features registered approval of what she saw. She asked a few probing questions of von Swieten and Countess von Brandeiss. Was Antoinette eating her fish? Had she developed any foolish fears? She looked small for her age. Was her health good? Satisfied with the answers, she returned to the pressing business of prosecuting the war. The quiet, pretty child, wide-eyed and agreeable, was ushered out of the room.

A HE court of Maria Theresa was one of the most extensive in Europe. Some twenty-five hundred people waited on the Empress, carrying out her governmental orders and those of her ministers, sweeping, cleaning and furnishing the hundreds of rooms in her great palaces, buying and slaughtering the thousands of cows, pigs, sheep and chickens needed to supply the palace kitchens, repairing and painting and ornamenting the state apartments and those of the chief nobles who lived at court. Armies of servants were needed to tend the tall porcelain stoves that warmed the rooms, to wash the mountains of linen that accumulated, to haul off the wastes and turn the handles of the kitchen turnspits and perform in the elaborate nightly entertainments offered in the palace theater. The Empress's servants coped with the herculean tasks that went with the maintenance of a large household, yet they also were attentive to an infinity of detail. They saw to it that there was fresh snow, brought down from the mountains, for the imperial children's sleds to run on when the local snowdrifts melted. They kept filled with water the silver and gold pitchers and basins the great aristocrats used to wash themselves. And they never forgot to send to the Schonbrunn dairies for the few ounces of fresh milk the Empress required every day to fill her drinking cup.

The great court offices were hereditary, the duties passed down from father to son. E^ch generation had to learn anew the lore of each department of the household: the head steward mastered the protocol of the throne room, how and when to announce

persons admitted to an audience with Maria Theresa; the horse master learned the workings of the stables, how to govern the dozens of trained grooms and stableboys that looked after the horses, what the needs of the imperial riding school were and how to fill them, how and where to buy coach horses, cart horses and the costly mounts favored by the Empress. The butler, the heads of the ewery and pantry, the chief falconer, the heads of the treasury and wardrobe—all took years to perfect themselves in the arcana of their offices. Maria Theresa employed hundreds of chamberlains who kept the budgets and paid the staff. These were the actual managers of palace affairs, responsible for the smooth day-to-day running of the court. Above them were the holders of ceremonial offices, members of the highest nobility who jealously guarded the prerogatives of their positions and partook of the Empress's glory. These luminaries each had his own court in miniature within the larger imperial court, complete with servants and under-servants, cooks and stableboys and hangers-on.

During the winter months the imperial household was in residence at the Hofburg, which was not a single building but a whole congregation of buildings, most of them cramped and very old, arranged around a series of courtyards. The Hofburg was more fortress than palace, its twenty-six hundred rooms more functional than grand. Schonbrunn, however, where the court moved in warmer weather, was dazzling in its white-and-gold splendor. Built by Maria Theresa on the site of a modest hunting lodge erected by her grandfather Leopold I, Schonbrunn took its name from a "beautiful fountain" in its gardens. Its long facade of nearly seven hundred feet gave way to a courtyard, and then to extensive gardens filled with statuary and more spectacular fountains. Hothouses, a menagerie, and botanical gardens were to be found in the vast grounds, along with a sumptuous marble summer house, the Gloriette, where the Empress liked to go to do her paperwork in fine weather.