To the scaffold (26 page)

The youngest child, the fifteen-month-old Louis-Charles, Due de Normandie, was as robust and healthy as his brother was sickly, a round-faced, apple-cheeked baby whom Antoinette called her chou d^amoufy or sweetheart. He had inherited her vibrant good health, she called him **a true peasant child" and took delight in his precocious intelligence and good temper. If her older son was the cause of an abiding sorrow, and deep concern, at least the younger one proved that she could bear healthy offspring and she expected him to flourish. When one day she went to visit him and found a doctor applying leeches to his tender flesh, she was so shocked that she fainted. The little Duke did have one weakness: his nerves were delicate, and any sudden unexpected noise—the barking of a dog, the rumble of carriage wheels—upset him.

As her pregnancy entered its final weeks Antoinette had the rare pleasure of a visit from a member of her family. Her brother Ferdinand, who was a year older than she was and had been her favorite brother in childhood, came to France with his Italian wife in mid-May and remained until mid-June. In the midst of her

troubles Antoinette must have been glad to see him, though it cannot have pleased her to have him witness her humiliation at the hands of the Paris parlement in the Rohan affair, or to know that he was hearing all the slanderous things being said about her. She must have told him how she was innocent of blame in the scandal over the diamond necklace—"that horror," as she called it—but Ferdinand could hardly take a step without encountering pamphlets and cartoons and broadsheets insulting to his sister.

Paris was fiill of lurid accounts of the Queen's love affairs and her sordid dissipations. Old stories were revived, of her orgies in the gardens of Versailles and her nefarious plot to make a drunkard of her husband so that she and her lovers could deceive him more easily. References to "Madame Deficit" and "the Austrian bitch" were everywhere. Not content to steal the infamous diamond necklace and then try to blame the Cardinal, the Queen, it was alleged, had actually paved the floor of the Petit Trianon with precious gems which she crushed under her red heels. Caricaturists mocked the obese King and his spendthrift wife, showing them gorging themselves at a sumptuous banquet while all around them their pinch-faced subjects held their empty stomachs and gazed hungrily at the food.

The libelous pamphlets made their way into the palace, where disgruntled servants handed them out freely and sometimes even had the effrontery to leave them in the royal bedrooms or under the King's napkin when he sat down to dine. Gossip flew. The Queen was pregnant with the Cardinal's child, or Fersen's. She was bankrupting the country by sending hundreds of thousands of francs to her brother in Austria and spending three hundred thousand livres a year on clothes and mammoth hats.^

Spreading slander against the Queen had become a fad, as much in style as the "Henri IV ruffs" sprouting at the necklines of fashionable garments in the sununer of 1786 and the new color called "goose-droppings" that was all the rage. Some Parisians took the King's zebra as their model, and at once everything they wore, from coats and waistcoats to stockings, had to be striped. There was no end to the new fads: coiffures called "porcupine" and "baby's cap," "pomegranate," "periwinkle" and, with a nod to the fledgling United States, "Boston" and "Philadelphia"; powdered hair worn in preference to wigs; "republican" dress (flat shoes instead of heels, skirts worn without paniers for women,

round hats and frock coats for men); hats in the form of cherries and turnips and head-scratchers trimmed with diamonds. A notable change had to do with buttons, which were traditionally of gold or silver, sometimes studded with precious gems. This year the style called for steel buttons instead. "Steel fever" infected the well-to-do, who wore not only steel buttons but steel buckles on their shoes and steel braid on their uniforms. Steel watch-chains hung across their "republican" vests, and even their ancestral swords were replated with steel.

Fashion reflected politics, and in politics the craze was for everything English. So women asked their coiffeurs to dress their hair \ la "English Park" or "Huntsman in Covert," read English novels and danced to English tunes, chose dishes and silver services that were "English in shape," and drove English carriages. Some young men at Versailles affected to speak French with an English accent and "made a study of all the awkwardness of manner, the style of walking, in fact, all the outward signs of an Englishman, so that they could adopt them for their own use." The highest compliment one could be paid was to be mistaken for an Englishman.'^

Surrounded by opprobrium, Antoinette prepared to enter labor for the fourth time. On July 9 a daughter, Sophie Hel^ne Beatrice, was bom. Little attention was paid to the birth, still less to the baby once her sex was disclosed. She was small and delicate, the midwives whispered that she was deformed. No doubt Antoinette murmured consolations and endearments to the tiny child but she too must have been dismayed at her size and imperfect shape. Sophie did not look like a healthy baby, and in her first days of life she did not thrive.

Antoinette had not fiilly recovered from the birth when one of her least favorite relatives arrived in France for a month-long visit. It was her sister Christina, thirteen years Antoinette's senior and very much the meddling, critical older sister. Christina had always been Maria Theresa's well-behaved, perfect daughter, blessed with exceptional intelligence, and blessed too with a happy marriage to a man she chose for love, Duke Albert of Teschen. Her life had not been unblemished by sorrow—she had lost at least one of her children in infancy—but she seems to have been the sort of resolute character who takes such losses in stride and has little sympathy for others who are more sentimental. At

forty-four, Christina had become a domineering matron who, no doubt, saw it as her duty to force Antoinette to see the error of her ways.

The visit began badly, with Christina presenting Antoinette with some "mean-looking boxes" as a gift and lording it over her in a way the latter found "extremely bothersome." "The renewed acquaintance of the two sisters," Mercy informed Emperor Joseph in Vienna, "was not entirely without difficulties." Antoinette felt fragile, both physically and emotionally. The last thing she needed was an annoying relative trying to tell her how to live her life. She enlisted Mercy's help in avoiding her sister, keeping her away from the palace as much as possible and making certain that when unavoidable, Christina's visits were brief.

She was in any case preoccupied with little Sophie, who did not put on weight and, after six weeks, was still as small and as feeble as a newborn. Neither mother nor baby were doing very well; Antoinette confessed to being slow to recover her strength, and was glad to see the last of her sister and brother-in-law at the end of August. Once they had gone, she let down her guard completely and became ill with a high fever and severe sore throat for several weeks.^

At thirty Antoinette was growing stout. Corsets compressed her waist to a trim twenty-three inches, but Madame Eloff, the court dressmaker, measured her bust at nearly forty-four inches and her dimensions were clearly ample. Thirty was a perilous age and aristocratic ladies rarely owned to being over thirty, though it was understood that after they reached that unmentionable age they could no longer dance or wear fresh flowers next to their fading complexions. ("To a bourgeois a duchess was never over thirty," the sixty-year-old Duchesse de Chaulnes once remarked.) To camouflage her generous proportions Antoinette invented a new style of rohe de chambre called the "Aristode," which was voluminous enough in its Grecian folds to drape the figure flatteringly.^

She spent more time than ever in the small circle of her family and female attendants. It was neither safe nor pleasant to go to Paris, where her elegant heated boxes at the Opera and Commie Frangaise remained empty. At the theater there was always the risk that the audience would respond with applause to any reference to "the cruel Queen" in a classic drama, while operas offered

even more opportunities for insult. Instead of seeking entertainment in Paris, Antoinette spent her evenings with her older children, keeping herself amused by playing billiards and solving the riddles in the Mercure de France (she was very good at these) or retiring to the "Gilded Cabinet," where her harp and harpsichord were kept, to play and sing with Madame Vigee-Lebrun (whose artistic talents extended to music) and the composer Gretry. Her singing was tuneful if undistinguished, and her harp-playing had become very fluent through years of practice. According to Madame Campan, Antoinette had become "able to read at sight like a first-rate professor."^ One court observer, the Swedish ambassador, thought that Antoinette spent more time than she had in the past at her prayers and at Mass—no doubt praying for the health of her fragile youngest daughter.

There was very little society for her to mingle in. Versailles continued to be sparsely populated, and the number of the Queen's enemies had grown considerably during the affair of the necklace. Cardinal Rohan was connected by blood or marriage to most of the great families of France, and his relatives shunned the woman who, in their view, had wronged him. Yolande de Polig-nac, for years Antoinette's closet friend, had cooled toward her. Antoinette believed that Yolande had been "subjugated" by the Rohan faction, and though she still summoned the Duchess to comfort her in her worst hours, she no longer felt comfortable visiting Yolande's house, knowing that if she did she might well find enemies there. She knew better what to expect at the house of the British ambassador, the Duke of Dorset, where the musicians played lively Scottish reels and where she could forget the restrictions on dancing imposed at Versailles and enjoy herself.

Fersen had returned to Sweden, Louis was poor company at the best of times, and was usually away hunting or closeted with his locks and his map collection. Antoinette spent many hours alone, busying herself at the Trianon milking Brunette and Blanchette, stroking her white goats and sheep, overseeing the sale of the eighty pounds of oranges her orchard produced each year. Perhaps she turned the pages of a few light books {Memoirs of a Young Virgin, Confidences of a Beautiful Woman, and Anecdotes of Conjugal Love were some of the titles she kept at the Trianon), more probably she wept and prayed and surveyed her face in the mirror, noting the pouches that were filling out under her eyes and the deep creases that ran from nose to chin.

She felt beleaguered. Her subjects despised her, pamphleteers attacked her in print, her enemies shunned her and struck at her behind her back, her erstuhile friends were growing distant. One day in September of 1786, Madame Campan found Antoinette in her bedroom at Trianon, in tears after reading some vicious letters.

"Ah, the wicked men, the monsters!" she said through her tears. "What have I done to them. ... I wish I were dead!"

Orange-flower water and ether were brought—the remedy kept handy for the Queen's fits of nerves—but Antoinette ignored them.

"No," she told her attendants, "if you love me, leave me; it would be better if I were dead!" The servants left, but Madame Campan stayed while Antoinette hugged her and sobbed.

In October, the court left as usual for Fontainebleau, the old decaying palace in the midst of the wild forest of Bi^re with its huge rocks and thick dark woods. Each fall the vast trek was made, hundreds of wagons and carts and carriages trundling along the muddy roads, dragged by thousands of weary horses. (The King and principal courtiers alone requisitioned over two thousand horses to transport themselves and their baggage.) Beyond the personnel of the court, there were ftimishings and tapestries to be transported—some four hundred tapestries in all—by the officials and the servants of the Garde Meuble du Roi. These filled wagon after wagon, along with the accoutrements needed to hang them and clean them and protect them from the dust and jolts of the roads. Then there was the kitchen equipment, and the bedding, the food stores and wines and coals and the tall traveling wardrobes every gentleman and lady possessed. Added to these were the wagons filled with actors from Paris, along with their scenery, their painters, designers and laundresses, and the tailors, embroiderers and wig-makers who created their costumes. New plays were traditionally presented at Fontainebleau before the King and Queen, and this season promised to be no different— except in expense. In all, the move cost some six hundred thousand livres, and Calonne, already hard pressed to meet ordinary expenses, had to borrow to finance it.

Once the travelers reached the palace, they found it more dilapidated than ever. Apart from the Queen's newly redecorated bedroom and gaming room, the former a restrained masterpiece of design in delicate silver and gold ornamentation, the latter redone

in "Pompeian" style, with the walls painted in imitation of Pom-peian artwork and chairs and tables copied from Roman models, the apartments ranged from shabby to uninhabitable. Large areas of the palace were moldy and rat-infested; once elegant wall coverings and floors of inlaid woods were rotted and stained from the rain that leaked through holes in the roof. Fewer than two hundred of the rooms were fit to be occupied, which meant that most of the courtiers had to be lodged, uncomfortably and expensively, in the adjacent village.

Once the rooms were meted out, the tapestries hung and usual court routine established, life at Fontainebleau proceeded pleasantly. And in the view of at least one observer, Necker^s daughter Germaine, now Madame de Stael, it was Antoinette who was the center of attention. "It was above all around the Queen that the waves of the crowd surged," she wrote. Everyone was eager for her attention, "their eyes were glued to the steps of the Queen."®

Her every word, her every gesture were touched with grace and kindness. She was never overly familiar, yet she gave every appearance of having forgotten her exalted rank in her pleasure at being with the people around her. This, however, was in public. In her own beautifully decorated apartments, and in the children's rooms where the tiny Sophie struggled for life, the Queen was sorrowful, especially on the many wet days when it was impossible to ride or to go for long walks in the forest.