To the scaffold (20 page)

Preparations had been under way for this great event since the previous summer. The coronation would be in Rheims cathedral, following ancient tradition; Kings of France had been crowned there since the time of Louis VII in the twelfth century, and Clovis I had been baptized there by Saint Remi in 496. But there had been no coronation in over half a century, the cathedral needed repair and new buildings had to be built to house the

/J2 CAROLLY ERICKSON

courtiers and dignitaries of Louis XVFs swollen court. Carpenters and stonemasons labored over the work for many months, while at the same time tailors and seamstresses and embroiderers worked to produce the elaborate vestments for the clergy and the robes and mantles and vests to be worn by the King and the peers.

All this was very costly. Even though Turgot pared down the expense, and Louis ordered additional retrenchment—he told the Paris merchants not to spend any money on coronation festivities and instead to use it to relieve the poor—the total bill came to about a million livres. ^^ Maurepas, cautious and circumspect, suggested that the ceremony be postponed. But this would mean canceling orders given to goldsmiths, jewelers, clothiers, lace-makers and drapers, not to mention ensuring more cost at a later date, for the road from Paris to Rheims would have to be repaired not once but twice. At the risk of angering an already outraged public, the decision was made to go ahead with the coronation.

The response was on the whole enthusiastic. To be sure, when the dozens of glittering carriages passed along the road to the cathedral, carrying the peers and clergy and functionaries, and the members of the royal entourages, laborers knelt along the roadside and entreated them for bread. But they did not riot, or throw stones at the carriages, and the spectators cheered when the King passed by.

The coronation ceremony itself was most impressive, the solemnity of it as imposing as the spectacle. Before an immense crowd, the clergy and lay peers gathered, the Bishops in fiill pontificals and the peers in vests of cloth of gold with ducal mantles of violet cloth lined with ermine. Two Bishops led in the King, splendid in violet boots with red heels, a cloak of violet velvet and an ermine cape, all his garments decorated with golden fleurs-de-lis. Despite the length of the ritual, and the stifling heat, which made Louis perspire freely and visibly as he knelt in his burdensome vestments, the spectators watched and listened intently, frequently bursting into acclamations. They saw the Archbishop of Rheims take the Holy Ampulla containing the coronation oil from the Master of Ceremonies and anoint the King with it on his head, breast, shoulders and arms. They heard him promise to prevent violence and injustice, exterminate heretics and rule his people justly. They listened while the Archbishop intoned the prayers.

"May the King have the strength of the rhinoceros," he said, his words echoing throughout the ancient building with its high clerestory and brilliant stained glass, "and may he, like a rushing wind, drive before him the nations of our enemies, even to the extremity of the earth."

Louis was handed the golden sceptre, nearly six feet long, and the hand of justice, a mighty golden staff encrusted with jewels, and was crowned with the crown of Charlemagne, its rubies and sapphires glowing in the candlelight. Then he was led to the throne, and the Archbishop made him a profound bow, and then shouted, ''Vivat Rex in aetemumf' "May the King live for ever!" At this the great church doors were opened, and the people who had been waiting outside for hours in the heat rushed in, "and instantly made the roofs resound with shouts of 'Long live the King!' which were reechoed by the crowd of persons engaged in the ceremony, who filled the enclosure of the choir like an amphitheater."

People began to applaud, the applause grew until it filled the cathedral. It went on and on, becoming thunderous, and as it continued the fowlers loosed dozens of caged birds, which fluttered up through the vast space under the vaulted ceiling, their freedom the symbol of France's freedom under the rule of a beneficent King. 11

It was too much for Antoinette. Moved to tears, she had to retire to the inner rooms prepared for her, and the crowd, watching her, was pleased by her show of emotion. When she returned their applause swelled. According to the Abb6 Veri, a rather jaundiced observer of royal affairs and an adviser to Maurepas, the crowd applauded more loudly for Antoinette than they did for Louis—but in the Abbe's view their applause gave an entirely false impression of public opinion. Flatterers there were in plenty, he wrote in his journal, but the coronation was little more than "formalities and decoration." In truth the French looked sourly on the expense of the ceremony, and waited impatiently for the government to deal seriously with its financial burdens. ^^

All of Antoinette's touching loyalty to Louis and her natural optimism came out in her letter to Maria Theresa about the coronation. She wrote that it was "perfect in every way," that "all the world seemed delighted with the King," and that the ceremony seemed to her to bind the monarchy and the people with even

more intimate ties of emotion and obligation. "I could no longer restrain myself; my tears flowed in spite of me, and the people liked this. I did my best throughout the whole time to return the greetings of the people, although it was very hot and the crowds were very great. But I did not mind my weariness." Above all Antoinette was surprised and pleased that the same hungry folk who had stormed the granaries and shouted their dissatisfaction at the gates of Versailles could receive their King with such great enthusiasm.

"It is an astonishing thing, and a very happy one, to be so well received two months after the revolt, and in spite of the deamess of bread, which unfortunately still remains. It is an amazing feature in the French character, that they will let themselves be led away so easily by bad counsels, and yet return again so quickly."*^ Antoinette was right, the French were volatile, but not because they were "led away" by troublemakers. They loved the monarch yet hated the monarchy, with its expensive trappings and sycophantic entourage. Louis they hoped would be another Henri IV, a hero to his people, a savior to his country. But Louis's ministers, and their disruptive policies, were detested. And the detestation was growing.

Meanwhile the little Comtesse d'Artois was nearing the time of her expected delivery. She had not suffered much during her pregnancy, and if her husband's dissipation and habitual infidelity affected her at all she did not show it. "She is happy enough not to fear her delivery," Antoinette wrote to her mother toward the end of June 1775. "It is true that she is such a child that she is overjoyed because she has been told she would not be given any black medicine." What the dreaded "black medicine" was Antoinette did not say, but clearly Theresa's pleasure in preceding the Queen and her own sister in childbearing swept aside any fears for her safety. Antoinette must have dreaded the coming birth, for her own marriage was as hopelessly barren as ever and she knew that she would have to undergo the humiliation of being present at Theresa's delivery.

By custom all the members of the royal family and the courtiers attended the birth of a prince or princess. When Theresa's labor began Antoinette took her place in the birth chamber, and watched, outwardly solicitous, inwardly in pain herself, as the midwives and doctors did their work. Theresa had an easy

To the Scaffold / J5

time. The labor was not prolonged—"only two or three strong pains" toward the end—and the baby was a healthy boy. The mother put her hand on her forehead and cried out, "My God, how happy I am!"

Antoinette was completely mortified. "I need not tell my dear Mama how I suffered in seeing an heir who isn't mine," Antoinette wrote to Maria Theresa six days later. "But I still managed not to forget any attention due the mother and child."^'^

The courtiers were informed of the birth of a boy, the Due d'Angouleme, and the noise of rejoicing in the galeries and salons where the public waited carried throughout the palace. Antoinette lingered with Theresa until the latter was washed and put to bed. Then, making an effort to look as calm as possible, she returned to her own apartments, passing by the crowd of spectators and guessing their thoughts. A delegation of fishwives from Paris dogged her footsteps, following her through the long corridors and "calling out to her in the most licentious expressions, that she ought to produce heirs."*^ She quickened her steps, and hurried in to her inner sanctum where Madame Campan waited. There she wept, freely and bitterly, while her bedchamber woman did her best to console her inconsolable sorrow.

>i^X3^

N April of 1777 a tall, well-built man of thirty-six, wearing a plain cloth suit of outdated cut and color, got down from a modest carriage and entered an inexpensive Paris hotel. He had only a single servant with him, and very little luggage. Passers-by might have taken him for a traveling schoolmaster or clerk, except that his mobile features seemed to express extraordinary intelligence and his alert, somewhat protuberant eyes exceptional discernment. He wore a toupee over his bald pate, and his own long hair was gathered into a very thin queue at the nape of his neck. His servant addressed him as "Sir," but he announced himself in the hotel as Count Falkenstein, which title created a certain amount of bustle and deference—not to say frank surprise—in the hotel staff.

Count Falkenstein was none other than Antoinette's oldest brother Joseph, Holy Roman Emperor and co-ruler of the Austrian lands with his mother Maria Theresa. He was traveling incognito, to save expense and, more important to him, to avoid fiiss and etiquette. He liked to be free to go and come as he pleased, without fanfare. He was by nature simple and direct, even rudely blunt, and unnerving in his frankness; whenever possible he preferred to cut through formality and artifice to find the reality behind it. He knew that he would see more of reality traveling as Count Falkenstein, and it was important that he discover as much about his sister's situation, and about France, as he could.

The sullen and moody youth had grown into a sharp, hypercritical man, curmudgeonly and unpredictable. He had not remar-

To the Scaffold / J7

ried after the death of his second wife Josepha, he answered to no woman save his august mother and she closed her eyes to his numerous Haisons. More worldly than his father had been, Joseph was at the same time fiercely idealistic, skeptical of the prevailing social order with its ranks and hierarchies, distrustful of monarchy and contemptuous of aristocrats. He had opinions on everything, not excluding topics about which he was poorly informed. He liked to shock people and expose their complacency. He liked to stir things up. To be sure, he had his vulnerable side. Flattery disarmed him. As his mother wrote, "he loves to shine." And there was an undertone of affection beneath his bluff exterior, though as one who knew him very well wrote, he feared involvement, and kept both love and friendship at bay.

No doubt Joseph wanted to visit Antoinette, for he seldom did anything he did not want to do. Yet he also made the journey to France at his mother's urging. She was desperately worried about her daughter, now twenty-one and still childless after seven years of marriage and three of those years as Queen. Scandalous rumors about her had been reaching Vienna for a long time, and even Mercy admitted, in dispatches that sometimes went on for fifty pages, that Antoinette was extravagant, that she had a taste for disreputable companions and louche amusements, and that she gambled heavily and recklessly nearly every night. Her contempt for the courtiers and her devotion to a clique of intriguing favorites had led, Mercy said, to an unprecedented situation. During the winter of 1776-77 Versailles had been all but deserted. People had stayed away in droves, partly as a protest against Antoinette's ill-advised exclusivity and uncontrolled behavior. Clearly the Queen was doing damage to herself and to her adopted country, and her husband was unable or unwilling to stop her.

Joseph might have more influence over her. He was her older brother, he had been fond of her as a child and could give her fraternal advice. Besides, it was in his interest as a ruler to keep France allied with Austria; Antoinette's behavior, and still more her failure to give France an heir to the throne, threatened that alliance. Joseph had plans to annex territories in Bavaria and the Low Countries. Should the French government oppose him, these plans would have to be abandoned, and Austria would also become more vulnerable to her ancient enemy Frederick II of Prussia.

Nor could the long-term effects of Antoinette's childlessness

be ignored. Every court in Europe was concerned about the French succession. The birth of the Due d'Angouleme meant that, for the present at least, the King of Sardinia (the infant Duke's grandfather) could expect to see his descendants become Kings of France. The King of Spain, a descendant of Louis XIV, might become a pretender to the French throne if Louis and Antoinette had no children. Savoyards, Spaniards, Prussians, Saxons, all sent spies to Versailles, beyond the authorized spies of every country who held diplomatic rank, to monitor the status of the succession. The fecundity of the royal couple was vital to the peace of Europe, and certainly to the well-being of Austria.

Count Falkenstein had himself driven to Versailles and entered the palace by a secret staircase. His reunion with Antoinette, whom he had not seen since she was a child of fourteen, was touchingly warm. They talked in private for several hours, and Antoinette, with her customary candor, told him everything he wanted to know about her pastimes, her favorites, and her intimate life with Louis. It must have been a relief to her to be able to speak freely to her brother, even though she knew he was bound to disapprove of how she lived. To unburden herself, to admit the actual state of her marriage and her humiliation because of it, must have been cathartic.

She told him how she had suffered during her sister-in-law's delivery, and how she was hounded by the taunts of the fishwives and by the mocking songs people sang about her and Louis ("Everyone whispers/Can the King, or can't he?/ The sad Queen is in despair"). Attempts were being made to tempt Louis to take a mistress, an actress at the Comedie Frangaise; he spent so few nights with his wife that the courtiers, ever alert for opportunities, thought that his head might be turned by another woman. ^ Interfering people offered aphrodisiacs and fertility aids; there were fears of malevolent influences, spells or witchcraft that prevented conception. Only a few months earlier, when Louis and Antoinette were returning from the chapel along one of the galleries open to the public, a cleric had thrown himself down in front of them, blocking their path, and pressed into Louis's hand a paper containing "the secret of perpetuating his august race." The man was ejected, and the King laughed. But he read the paper, which recommended that he eat mandrake root (a traditional aphrodisiac) or apply it directly to his troubled flesh.

As Antoinette talked, weeping from time to time in her distress, Joseph began to realize what a tangled problem his sister's marital relations had become. What ought to have been a healthy physical union, mutually pleasurable and mutually lustful, had from the outset been overlayered with tensions and psychological quirks arising from Louis's slight deformity and both partners' sexual innocence. The pressures associated with the succession had made the problem worse and worse over the years. The royal physicians, too eager to please to give blunt advice, had been no help whatsoever. None of them was bold enough to tell Louis clearly that his phimosis was the problem, that it could be corrected, and that until it was he would not be able to ejaculate.

No doubt the doctors were reluctant to cause pain to the cowardly Louis, and so they gave vague and contradictory judgments, some saying that the "difficulty" would resolve itself in time without their intervention, others wrapping themselves in equivocations. (One gave his sage opinion that "there are many drawbacks to having it [the operation] performed and many drawbacks to not having it performed.") Half-believing that time alone might bring about a miraculous spontaneous cure, the couple had experimented naively from time to time, but their failures had made them both feel ashamed and inadequate. Only a few days before Joseph's arrival they had tried again, and Antoinette wrote to her mother that she had "greater hopes" and was "convinced that the operation is no longer necessary."

But it was clear to Joseph that these hopes arose from ignorance. Louis was able, Joseph discovered through his candid conversations with both husband and wife, to "have strong, well-conditioned erections," but not to complete the act. "He introduces the member, stays there without moving for perhaps two minutes"—probably wincing with pain all the while—"withdraws without ejaculating but still erect, and says good night." Such was the sad ritual the couple played out, painful for Louis and frustrating for Antoinette, and on it their hopes were based. "This is incomprehensible," Joseph wrote to his brother Leopold, "because with all that he sometimes has nightly emissions, but once in place and going at it, never, and he is satisfied; he says plainly that he does it all purely from a sense of duty but never for pleasure. "^ Antoinette, he added, lacked the passion to demand more from Louis—and apparently she lacked the common sense to ask any of

her women, even Madame Campan, whom she trusted, what was missing in their lovemaking. Lx)uis too, it seems, had no one in whom he could confide, and was so isolated from the other men of the court, more from shyness than because of his exalted rank, that he could not discuss his plight with any of them.

Joseph was privately contemptuous of the "two complete blunderers," and told Leopold he wanted to whip Louis "so that he would ejaculate out of sheer rage like a donkey," but for once he understood the need for tact. He befriended the timid King, explained the facts of life to him and, in the end, got him to promise to have the dreaded operation that would make a man of him. He cornered Antoinette and advised her to entice Louis into her bed in the afternoon, when he still had energy; in the evening, after a huge meal, he would be no good to her. Joseph did not spare his sister's feelings. Her entire security depended on her having a son, he told her. Preferably more than one. Barren queens had a way of being put aside, buried away in convents or exiled to undesirable country houses. She listened and nodded, her eyes big with fear. He felt assured that she would heed his advice.

Antoinette took her eccentric brother to meet everyone of consequence at the palace. He was present at the lever and coucber, at the elaborate Sunday ceremonies, he attended elegant suppers and gambling parties. Where Joseph was concerned Antoinette forgot modesty. She boasted of his intelligence, his knowledge of military affairs, his austerity and lack of pretentiousness. The courtiers looked askance at "Count Falkenstein," with his plain suit the color of fleas (puce). Flea-color had been in style at Versailles briefly two years earlier; there were many shades, from "old flea" to "young flea" to "flea's head" and "flea's thigh." Joseph's shade of flea did not provoke admiration. Besides, the fashionable world had long since moved on to newer shades: Paris mud, indiscreet tears, dandies' guts. They took offense at his rudeness, and ridiculed his fluent but idiosyncratic French. He was looked on, Madame Campan wrote widi icy primness, as a prince "rather singular than admirable."

They liked him better than they had liked Antoinette's younger brother Maximilian, who had made a short visit to Versailles in 1775 and failed utterly to impress or charm them. They applauded Joseph's taste in actresses (he sampled the Parisian demimonde) and did not mind, though his mother and sister certainly

did, that he went to visit Madame Du Barry at Louveciennes. But they smiled at his preference for plain food and almost monastic living (he slept on a small uncomfortable bed in his inexpensive Paris hotel, and would not stay in the palace, preferring a lodging-house at Versailles), and they resented the curiosity he showed about the workings of government and especially about financial affairs. He investigated the expenses of the court, took notes on finance and quickly arrived at highly critical opinions. Madame Campan noted how Joseph collared her father-in-law and lectured him vehemently for over an hour, "without the slightest reserve," about the government—no doubt with emphasis on its shortcomings.^

For his part, Joseph was thoroughly put off by the overdeco-rated courtiers and their dissipated amusements. He teased Antoinette about using too much rouge. One day when she was putting on more rouge than usual, before going to the theater, he "advised her to put on still more; and pointing out a lady who was in the room, and was, in truth, highly painted, *A little more under the eyes,' said the Emperor to the Queen: lay on the rouge like a fiiry, as that lady does.'" Antoinette told him in private to blunt his rudeness, although, as Madame Campan remarked in an aside, Joseph's cutting comments "agreed very well with the sneering spirit which then prevailed.'"^ The trailing plumes, mountainous headdresses and ingenious styles appeared laughable to the curmudgeonly Austrian, who derided them vociferously and criticized Antoinette for leading the French into such grotesque aberrations of taste.

Joseph's views on the royal family were cruelly negative. The obese and sour Provence he found "nondescript and very frigid," his wife vulgar and scheming. Artois, whose uncontrolled carryings-on at the racetrack made him appear worse than worthless in Joseph's eyes, was dismissed as a "fop" whose wife was "an absolute imbecile." (Imbecile or not, Theresa had by this time borne two children and would soon have a third.) Joseph did not comment on the royal aunts, who were very much at the periphery of things by this time, but Adelaide took a liking to him. On the pretext of showing him some portraits, she persuaded him to visit her, whereujx)n she embraced him once they were alone and said that an embrace at least "should be permitted to an old aunt."^

Whether he was blinded by a brother's affection, or whether

Antoinette's fresh loveliness and ingenuous charm simply won him over, Joseph ended by feeling sympathy for his little sister despite her lapses of judgment and her wayward amusements. He saw clearly that she lived in a constant state of nervous tension. She often burst into tears, her weeping exhausting her and leaving her drained. She was often sad, but she had an imperiousness that rarely deserted her, and when she wanted something she had a large arsenal of weapons to use to get it, from bullying to guile to wheedling to tears and tantrums. She trained her most potent weapons on her husband, who had to withstand her emotional scenes and who rarely said no to her.

"Her situation with the King is very odd," Joseph told Leopold in a letter. "He is only two-thirds of a husband, and although he loves her, he fears her more; our sister has the kind of power to be expected from a royal mistress, not the kind a wife should have, for she forces him to do things he doesn't want to do."^ Louis was so childlike that he needed firmness at times, and was bound to look to any woman he cared for for mothering. This was not Antoinette's fault, but it did skew their relationship and gave her an unwarranted amount of power over him. It also allowed her, paradoxically, to prolong her own childhood and indulge herself, since he offered her no mature companionship and exercised no restraint over her.

"The Queen is a pretty woman," Joseph told Leopold candidly, "but she is empty-headed, unable as yet to find her advantage, and wastes her days running from dissipation to dissipation, some of which are perfectly allowable but nonetheless dangerous because they prevent her from having the thoughts she needs so badly." Antoinette was amiable enough, but she "thought only of having fun." She was "tied down by no etiquette," she "ran around alone or with few people without the outward signs of her position, she looked a little improper." In short, "she was not doing her job," either as a queen or as a woman, and this was bound to lead to bad consequences in the future.

Fortunately, Joseph concluded, his sister was a thoroughly virtuous woman. The worst of the slanders associated with her, that she had Artois and any number of other men, and probably women as well, as lovers, was obviously untrue. "Her virtue is intact, even strict," Joseph told Leopold, "but less through forethought than inborn disposition; in a word it has been all right