To the scaffold (52 page)

When the news of Franklin's death reached Paris in 1790, Mirabeau made a funeral oration in his honor, and the municipality of Paris held a ceremony in the rotunda of the com market, which was draped in black for the occasion. Campan, MemoirSy I, 210, 306-7.

15 Mercy, II, 595.

Chapter 14

1 Campan, Memoirs^ I, 182.

2 Padover, p. 103 note.

3 Mercy, II, 614.

4 According to Madame Campan, Antoinette "often testified the regret she felt in thinking that the numerous duties of her august mother had prevented her from watching in person over the education of her daughters; and modestly said, that she herself should have been more worthy if she had had the good fortune to receive lessons directly from a sovereign so enlightened, and so deserving of admiration." This tribute sounds like a backhanded criticism. No doubt Antoinette's deepest feelings about her mother were ambivalent. Campan, Memoirs, I, 191.

5 Campan, Memoirs, I, 192.

6 Castelot, p. 160.

7 Viewed for years as the man who singlehandedly brought about the cataclysm of 1789 by his misguided policies, Necker has been partially rehabilitated by recent studies. J. F. Bosher, French Finances 1770-1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge, 1970), J. Egret, Necker, ministre de Louis XVI (Paris, 1975), R. D. Harris, Necker, Reform Statesman of the Ancien Regime (Berkeley, 1979) and the latter's Necker and the Revolution of 1789 (Lanham, 1986) all moderate the traditional criticisms lodged against Necker by historians. Harris, in particular, argues that Necker's Compte rendu au roi was not a falsification of the state of French finances and presents a revised view of Necker's loans.

Chapter 15

1 What follows summarizes Andr^ Castelot's survey of the evidence for this, which when coupled with what we know of the personalities involved seems to me convincing. Fersen referred to Antoinette as "Josephine" in his private diary and kept up a secret correspondence with her. In 1878 some sixty letters from Antoinette to Fersen were published, full of suspicious lacunae; the editor of the letters, Fersen's grand-nephew Baron Klinckowstrom, subsequently burned them. The one letter that escaped the Baron's fire reads, "I can tell you that I love you and indeed

jjd Notes

that is all I have time for. . . . Let me know to whom I should address the news I may write to you, for I cannot live without that. Farewell, most loved and loving of men. I kiss you with all my heart."

Alma Soderjhelm uncovered more material that argues that Fersen and Antoinette had a long love affair. Fersen at one point referred to "the parallel" that existed between his relationship to Antoinette and the Swedish Count Gyllenstiema's relationship with Queen Hedvig Eleanora, and the latter pair were lovers. Castelot, pp. 179-184. In 1787 Antoinette made alterations to her interior apartments at Versailles which correspond to those noted in Fersen's correspondence book. In that book he referred to "lodging upstairs" and "me living upstairs." Philippe Huisman and Marguerite Jallut, Marie Antoinette (Stw York, 1971), p. 157. While none of the above constitutes proof of a liaison, it is very strong evidence.

Historians and biographers have had to tread warily on the question of whether or not Fersen and Antoinette were lovers for a variety of reasons. Some have been so eager to idolize Antoinette, or to portray her as a tragic victim of her violent times, that they have been unwilling to besmirch her image by admitting that she might have been unfaithful to Louis with Fersen. After all, to admit the strong probability of one infidelity would open the door to the possibility of more than one, and to lend credence to the many accusations made against her of illicit love affairs and orgies and dissolute living on a grand scale. It would also, at least in theory, open the question of the Due de Normandie's paternity.

What seems closest to the truth (which, barring the discovery of further documentary evidence, will never be known) is that her liaison with Fersen was Antoinette's one and only indiscretion, and that he was the only man she ever loved, deeply fond though she was of her husband.

2 Castelot, p. 177.

3 Mercy, II, 441-2.

4 Campan, Memoirs, I, 125, 128.

5 An unappealing character, Vaudreuil was highly cultivated. Madame Campan called him "a friend and protector of the fine arts" and described how he gave a dinner party every week to which writers and artists were invited. "The evening was spent in a saloon [sic]," she said, "furnished with musical instruments, pencils, colors, brushes and pens. Everyone composed or painted or wrote." Campan, Memoirs, I, 131-2 note.

6 Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment, trans. William Doyle (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 53, 55.

7 Castelot, pp. 111-12.

8 Mercy, I, 118 2Lnd passim.

9 Cagliostro ended his life in Rome, charged by the Inquisition with heresy and sorcery and condemned to imprisonment in a dungeon for life.

Chapter 16

1 Lettres de Marie Antoinette^ II, 92.

2 Ibid,, II, 112.

3 In fact, in 1786 Antoinette did spend some 272,000 livres on dress, which was nearly twice what her budget permitted. Castelot, p. 220.

4 Mercier, pp. 241, 240, 88; Souvenirs du Baron de FrSnilly pair de France, 1768-1828 (Paris, 1908), pp. 79-80; La Tour du Pin, Memoirs, p. 98.

5 Lettres de Marie Antoinette, II, 97, 99, 106.

6 Fr^nilly, Memoirs, p. 81.

7 Campan, Memoirs, I, 36.

8 Rocheterie, I, 322-3.

9 William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1988), pp. 43-52.

10 Lough, p. 267; La Tour du Pin, Memoirs, pp. 71-2. The editor of Mercy's dispatches, Lillian Smythe, savagely described Louis as a "waddling, blinking, corpulent, bungling, incapable imbecile, defective in body, deficient in mind, with the low receding forehead of an idiot, and a monstrous double chin that measured the third of his face." Mercy, I, 229.

11 H^z^ques, p. 217; Campan, Memoirs, I, 112, 297.

12 Campan, Memoirs, I, 294-7. Campan*s source is the generally unreliable Soulavie, Historical and Political Memoirs of the Reign of Louis XVI, but on the design and contents of the King's rooms Soulavie's recollections are presumably trustworthy.

Chapter 17

1 Diary and Correspondence of Count Axel Fersen (New York, 1899), p. 68.

2 Huisman, p. 157.

3 Castelot, p. 224.

4 Ibid.

5 Campan, Memoirs, II, 43.

6 Ibid., I, 36.

7 Ibid., I, 102 note. Madame Campan wrote that Antoinette "affected to say that she had lost the German," though this is hard to credit. She spoke French very fluently, though she did not write it correctly. According to Campan, Antoinette also spoke Italian "with grace and ease, and translated the most difficult poets." Campan, Memoirs, I, 36.

8 Lough, p. 177.

9 Padover, p. 142.

10 Peter Robert Campbell, The Ancient Regime in France (Oxford, 1988), p. 78.

11 Historians now believe that, had Louis allowed a vote to be taken at the Royal Session, the result would have been favorable to the King. Doyle, p. 109.

Chapter 18

1 This was largely an illusion. As Doyle writes, the actual power of the parlements has been "much exaggerated, as has the degree of unity within them and between them. In particular, the conflicts between the nobles and the magistrates of the parlements have been emphasized by historians." Doyle, p. 122.

2 Napoleon believed that the French Revolution was a result of three factors: the diamond necklace scandal, the French defeat at the hands of the Prussians at Rossbach during the Seven Years' War, and the inability of the French to intervene in the Dutch Netherlands in 1787. Campan, Memoirsy I, xlix.

3 Padover, p. 146. ^Ibid., 146-7.

5 The King's right to order any subject arrested and indefinitely detained, by issuing a lettre de cachet, came to symbolize all arbitrary monarchical power at this time. Although Louis XVI used lettres de cachet against his opponents, both in the parlement and outside of it, in fact the use of these royal warrants was in decline during his reign. They were in any case used less often against political figures than against wayward members of aristocratic families—at the request of the families themselves. Richard Cobb, Voices of the French Revolution (Topsfield, Mass., 1988), pp. 9, 69.

6 Lettres de Marie Antoinette, II, 119, 116, 112-13.

7 Ihid., 112, 115-16, 119.

8 Lough, pp. 212-14, 216.

9 Lettres de Marie Antoinette, II, 128.

10 Lough, p. 297.

11 Ibid., 298-9.

12 Ibid., 125. The Hotel-Dieu had some four thousand patients, crowded into fourteen hundred beds. A traveler found it to be "a place of vermin, filth and horror," the "corrupt air and effluvia . . . loathsome and abominable." Patients in all stages of disease were crammed together six or seven to a bed; the beds were checked periodically and the corpses removed. Jacques Necker's wife became a public benefactress when she

Notes $S9

founded a hospital in 1778 where every patient had a bed to himself, and good care.

13 Fersen, Diary and Correspondence, p. 70.

14 Olivier Bemier, Words of Fire, Deeds of Blood (Boston, 1989), p. 228. \S Lettres de Marie Antoinette, II, 121.

Chapter 19

1 Madame Campan recalled in her life of Antoinette how, when the deputies came to the Petit Trianon, they could not believe what their eyes told them, having heard for so many years the tales of the Queen's extravagance and dissipation. "As the extreme simplicity of this pleasure-house did not correspond with their ideas, they insisted on being shown even the smallest closets, saying that richly furnished apartments were being concealed from them. Finally they designated one, which according to their account was ornamented with diamonds, and twisted columns studded with sapphires and rubies." Campan, Memoirs, II, 49.

2 Fersen, Dairy and Correspondence, p. 69.

3 Cobb, Voices, p. 38.

4 Ibid., 30.

5 Bernier, Words of Fire, p. 235.

6 Castelot, p. 226. Madame Campan noted that the King "frequently kept from [Antoinette] particulars which it was proper she should know." Campan, Memoirs, II, 42-3.

7 Campan, Memoirs, II, 42-3.

8 Bemier, Words of Fire, p. 243.

9 Campan, Memoirs, II, 47.

10 Bemier, Words of Fire, p. 241, citing the deputy Duquesnoy.

11 Cobb, Voices, p. 48.

12 La Tour du Pin, Memoirs, pp. 105-6.

Chapter 20

1 Campan, Memoirs, II, 51-3; J. M. Thompson, English Witnesses of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1938), pp. 32-3. Madame Campan includes the pitiful detail that when Antoinette tried to bring candy to her dying son, his governors and valets turned her away.

2 Only ten months earlier, in August of 1788, the Ecole Militaire in Paris had been closed because of the new bankruptcy of the state treasury. All the furniture was sold at public auction. Lough, p. 295.

3 Cobb, Voices, p. 64.

jtfb Notes

4 Padover, p. 179.

5 As early as 1782 Mercier, the chronicler of Paris, wrote that "there was some talk of pulling down the execrable Bastille." Louis had in fact approved its demolition—though the treasury lacked the funds to carry it out, and the project had a low priority.

6 Authorities differ on the number of persons held in the Bastille, but the consensus is that there were seven. The British ambassador Lord Dorset, who recorded that "only four or five prisoners were found in the Bastille," described Major White with his yard-long beard. Another witness, a Norwich physician, recalled seeing some of the Bastille prisoners who had just been liberated, among them one old man who must have been Major White. Deeply affected by the sight of the prisoners, the physician burst into tears. Maxwell, p. 157.

Chapter 21

1 Campan, MemoirSy II, 55-7.

2 The well known entry in the King's diary for July 14, 1789, ''Rieriy'^ or "Nothing," has often been cited as an example of his rather fatuous indifference to the political crisis erupting around him. But it must be recalled that this was a hunting diary, not a record of daily events. Louis went hunting on July 14, killed no game, and so entered ''Rien" in his journal. After the hunt he returned to the palace and went to sleep. But when the news of the siege of the Bastille was brought to him, he lost no time in addressing the National Assembly and going in person to Paris. He was conscientious, if ineffectual, in confronting his responsibilities.

3 Nearly three years later, in February of 1792, Louis confided to Fersen that he regretted having taken the safe but ultimately shortsighted advice of the men around him instead of following his wife's counsel. "I missed the moment," he told Fersen. "I should have left and wanted to, but what could I do?" Bernier, Words of Firej pp. 31-2.

4 Campan, Memoirsy II, 63.

5 Lettres de Marie Antoinettey II, 134-6.

6 Campan, Memoirsy II, 64.

7 La Tour du Pin, Memoirsy pp. 112-14. Madame La Tour du Pin was convinced that the Great Fear was the result of a deliberate conspiracy on the part of the revolutionaries. She had a narrow escape at Gaille-fontaine, where she was mistaken for Antoinette and mobbed. Fortunately, a man who had recently seen the genuine Antoinette persuaded the others that the real Queen was "at least twice as old and twice as large" as the slim young noblewoman, and so she was released. Meanwhile, the people of Forges-les-Elaux had armed themselves "with

anything they had been able to lay hands on" and were prepared for an assault by the mythical marauders.

8 Fersen, Diary and Correspondence^ p. 72.

9 Tourzel, Memoirs, I, 24.

10 Lettres de Marie Antoinette, II, 144, 141-2.

11 The following account of the interview of August 25 is taken from La Tour du Pin, Memoirs, pp. 121-2.

12 Younghusband, pp. 21-2 described how, in 1751, more than twenty years before Antoinette came to France, Louis XV*s daughter Sophie was credited with remarking, "If only those poor people could bring themselves to eat pastry!" when she heard that the Parisians were crying for bread. Louis XVFs brother Provence attributed the identical remark to his great-great-grandmother Queen Maria Theresa, wife of Louis XIV.