To the scaffold (27 page)

As usual, Louis spent his days at Fontainebleau hunting, in fair weather and foul, and enjoyed visiting the nearby forest of Compi^gne, his favorite haunt as a boy. He loved Fontainebleau, and had recently ordered extensive renovations begun on one wing of the palace to create more livable quarters for himself and his children. He knew that the court's annual visit to Fontainebleau was costly, and becoming more costly year by year, but he was reluctant to give it up, even though Calonne had recently made it plain to him that the country was on the brink of financial ruin.

The Finance Minister had come to him in August with a dismal message. The treasury was empty, investment had slackened, trade was stagnant, Calonne said. Public confidence in government was at its lowest ebb in memory, and, worst of all, for this year of 1786 expenditures promised to exceed revenue by well over a hundred million livres. It was no good proposing small sav-

ings to be made here and there (though it would help if the King gave up his trips to Fontainebleau), or finding new temporary expedients to push back the fatal repayment dates. Nothing short of extensive, thoroughgoing reform of the state would in the long run do any good.^

Louis had been hearing dire warnings of this general kind for at least ten years, and had so far avoided having to come to terms with them, but Calonne's message compelled attention, and must have troubled the King throughout his stay at Fontainebleau. The good of his subjects was more on Louis's mind than usual, for earlier in the year he had made an eight-day journey to the Nor-mandie coast and had been received there with great enthusiasm. Cheering crowds welcomed him to Cherbourg, where vast defensive works were being built for protection against England, and to Caen and Honfleur and Havre. When he heard cries of "Long live the King!" he joyfully shouted back "Long live my people!" and at the end of his trip he announced that he was "the happiest King in the world." It was refreshing to encounter French men and women who were not Parisians, who did not share the Parisians' scorn for monarchy. It was also refreshing, and unpleasantly revealing, to savor the approval of the public knowing that it was meant for him alone—in short, to travel without the Queen.

At thirty-two Louis was uglier and more unprepossessing than he had been as a boy. His squat, fleshy body was that of a "good rough stout man," in the view of one of the gardeners at Versailles, and not that of a King. Madame La Tour du Pin thought that "he looked like some peasant shambling along behind his plough."^^ Although his strength was still prodigious, he seldom used it, and he stuffed himself so gluttonously at meals that his fat made it hard for him to move. Triple, even quadruple chins dominated his moon face, his skin was deeply scarred and pitted and his small yellowish eyes, which were in a perpetual squint because of his short sight (spectacles were not worn at court), looked dully out on a narrowing world.

He was somewhat less timid than he had been as a boy, but no less gauche. The idea of bold, direct action in any sphere was foreign to him, he needed to be led, persuaded, coaxed into action—and into speech, being, as Antoinette said euphemistically, "by nature taciturn." (It was something of a triumph for him to embolden himself to shout "Long live my people!") He had lost

his taste for childish pranks and practical jokes, and his intellect, always eccentric, had blossomed with maturity. His retentive mind was a storehouse unexpectedly rich. He could recite long, passages from the plays of Racine, sometimes interrupting the nightly coucher with lengthy and surprisingly expressive dramatic recitations. He had a very good reading knowledge of English, and, according to Madame Campan, could translate difficult passages from Paradise Lost. He was an expert on the genealogy of the Bourbons, and of the great families of the nobility. His knowledge of geography was extensive enough to permit him to draw up navigation instructions for an explorer about to sail around the world. And he had a good memory for names and numbers, sometimes irritating his ministers by pointing out minute duplications or other minor errors in the accounts they presented to him and insisting that they be corrected. On his favorite subject, which was hunting, he could be amazingly voluble, and his knowledge of forest lore was impressive, if rarely displayed to anyone besides his huntsmen. ^^

Over the years he had retreated more and more into the privacy of his apartments at Versailles, which reflected his interests and tastes and where he found peace.

One entered these apartments to find displayed a number of engravings, all dedicated to the King and some showing the canals built during his reign of which he was especially proud. A stairway led upward to another room which housed his collection of geographical charts, globes and map cabinet. Here he liked to draw maps, and the room was strewn with uncompleted sketches and half-finished charts, some with color washed in, some without. Nearby were records of all the royal hunts, showing the dates and times of each hunt, and the number of game killed. Totals were given for each month, each season, and each year of his reign.

The tools and instruments in the turning and joining room Louis had inherited from his grandfather, who had enjoyed working in wood. The library held treasures from past centuries—the manuscript books of Anne of Brittany and Francis I, the prayer books and expensively bound volumes that had belonged to the later Valois kings and Louis XIV—and books published during the present reign. There were in addition many folio volumes of the debates of the English Parliament and a manuscript history of

all the French plans, made over several centuries, to invade England. In the library Louis kept boxes of state papers, sorted by country, and a few salacious "histories" of the reigns of Catherine the Great and Paul I of Russia.

Without doubt the King's favorite room, and the one in which he spent the most time, was his forge. Here he had two anvils and a large number of iron tools, and with them he worked on his locks. There were locks of every sort and description, from small common locks to intricate secret locks to ornamental locks gleaming with gilt copper. There the master locksmith Gamin was to be found, serving as the King's teacher. Gamin judged his royal pupil to be "good, forbearing, timid, inquisitive, and addicted to sleep. He was fond of lockmaking to excess," the master locksmith said, "and he concealed himself from the Queen and the court to file and forge with me. In order to convey his anvil and my own backwards and forwards [to and from other royal residences], we were obliged to use a thousand strategems."^^

Also in the forge was Louis's favorite servant Duret, who sharpened his tools for him, cleaned the anvils, and kept the apartments in good order. Duret was very fond of his clumsy and ungainly master, and liked to do him small favors. In his private apartments Louis allowed himself the luxury of wearing the spectacles that court etiquette forbade elsewhere, and it was Duret who fitted them and adjusted them to the King's myopic sight.

The locks, the tools, the heavy anvils were trundled along the muddy roads to Fontainebleau along with the other household goods. No doubt the Queen disapproved. She wanted Louis to spend his evenings in the grand salon and at her new Pompeian-style gaming tables, not to secrete himself with Gamin and Duret and his locks. But she could not always have her way. Indeed, the older she grew, the less often she could count on things going to her liking. Louis was who he was; she could tell that he was troubled, and that he needed his privacy, and she knew that sooner or later the fiiU burden of his troubles would fall on her shoulders.

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HiLE the court was at Fontainebleau Calonne approached the King with a reform plan. Instead of the present complicated taxation system, he proposed to institute a land tax, to be levied not in coinage but in goods, at harvest time. No individual or group would be exempt from this tax, and it would be administered by the landowners themselves, through elected assemblies of their own—under the supervision of the royal intendants, as agents of the King. Crown revenues would be increased through the imposition of new duties and through more efficient management of the royal lands. To stimulate the stagnant economy, internal customs barriers would be instituted, and the corvie —the right of landowners to exact unpaid labor services from the peasants on their estates and the right of the King to demand compulsory service repairing roads—conmiuted to a money payment. (Turgot had abolished the corvee in the 1770's, but the abolition had lapsed with his tenure of office, and the reimposed corvie had been in force for over a decade.)

Once his reform program was in place, Calonne told the King, it would be possible to raise short-term loans, to be secured by expected new revenues. And to give potential lenders even more cause for confidence, Calonne proposed a convocation of some hundred and fifty "notables"—noblemen, bishops, mayors and civic dignitaries from all over France—who would lend their prestige to the reforms and restore confidence in the government's ability to solve its financial difficulties.

Calonne's plan went forward, and the Assembly of Notables convened on February 22, 1787. Almost from the outset, however, the strategy went awry. The notables refused to back the Finance Minister's reforms, or even to consider them, and after six acrimonious weeks the King dismissed Calonne. Vergennes, on whom Louis had relied for so many years, had died in February and to replace him Louis, who was in great anguish of spirit, appointed the elderly Archbishop of Toulouse, Cardinal Lom6nie de Brienne.

The upheaval in the government upset Louis greatly, and he turned to Antoinette for solace. After Vergennes's death he came to her apartments and wept, calling himself a worthless bankrupt and in despair over the mountain of debt that was growing higher each day. When Calonne's scheme failed because of the recalcitrance of the Notables, the King was in a fiiry. "That scoundrel of a Calonne!" he roared. "I should have had him hanged!" He punctuated his outburst by smashing a chair, then lapsed into a brooding silence.

His ministers let him down, his subjects were uncooperative, even defiant. And by sununoning the Assembly of Notables, he had all but admitted that he and his ministers could not govern effectively without at least the appearance of popular consent.

Lom^nie de Brienne, well intentioned and capable, hoped to be able to work with the Notables where Calonne had failed. He proposed compromises in the nature of the land tax, and assured the members of the Assembly that the royal family would reduce their household expenditures in order to bring the deficit down. But the Notables were adamant. They were feeling their power, having brought about the fall of Calonne and sensing that their very existence as a body empowered (however vaguely) to speak for the community of the King's subjects represented a significant shift toward some form of representative government. They called on the King to summon the Elstates General, and demanded that a permanent body of auditors be appointed to supervise the management of state finance. Too late, Lomenie de Brienne saw that no compromise was possible. On May 25 he dissolved the Assembly.

Axel Fersen was at Versailles when the closing ceremonies took place. He watched them, noting in his diary how imposing the Notables looked in their robes and gowns of rank and office, and adding that the Assembly had done little to lower the deficit

or improve the outlook for the future. Certain reductions in the expenses of the royal household had been ordered—a lowering of courtiers' pensions, and of the budgets of the Queen's stable and the King's hunting establishment, for example—but no deep systemic changes, and only the latter could ultimately salvage the situation. ^

Fersen was at Versailles often, though in his role as liaison between the French and Swedish courts he had to spend a good deal of time at the court of Gustavus III as well. Sweden and Russia were at war; as Colonel of a Swedish regiment Fersen had military obligations to fulfill, along with his duties in France as commander of the Royal Swedish. He was accustomed to a rather hectic and unsettled life, but in the spring of 1787 Antoinette was preparing to give him a home base of sorts. She ordered alterations made in her apartments so that Fersen would have a place to live during his official visits to Versailles. The most conspicuous feature of the lodging created in the Queen's apartments was a Swedish stove, installed at some expense and necessitating the demolition of part of a wall and an expanse of flooring. This remodeling was recorded in the Service of the Royal Buildings, and Fersen referred to it cryptically in his diary. (On April 7, 1787 he noted the existence of a "plan for lodging upstairs," and two weeks later he wrote of "what she has to find me for living upstairs." The stove and its newly created alcove were mentioned the following October. ^

Even if Fersen and the Queen had not been lovers—and by this time their relationship was long past its intense, incandescent early stage and had become mellow and mature—it would have been advisable to lodge Fersen at Versailles, for he was there nearly every day when in France. He went riding near the Trianon three or four times a week, and Antoinette rode out alone to meet him there. While riding in the park they could enjoy at least some degree of privacy, but, the court being what it was, they were watched, and prying eyes took note of how often they met and how long they stayed away. "These meetings caused a great deal of public scandal," wrote the censorious Comte de Saint-Priest, Minister for the Royal Household, "in spite of the favorite's modesty and restraint, for he never showed anything outwardly and was the most discreet of all the Queen's friends."^ The minister was a reliable source of gossip, though he had no objectivity whatsoever