To the scaffold (6 page)

She impressed them even more at a ball held in October of 1769. Four thousand guests had been invited, and all of them were eager to glimpse the Empress's youngest daughter, the winning girl, not quite fourteen years old, who had been chosen to marry the dauphin. They surged forward when Maria Theresa walked through the crowded rooms, with Antoinette by her side. The Empress walked slowly and with some difficulty, encumbered by her increasing girth, her breathing evidently labored. An attack of smallpox two years earlier had left her with a weakened heart and unsteady nerves, and she looked aged and tired as she passed by.

"The day of her beauty and brilliancy was past," an eyewitness noted. "Her countenance, marked by smallpox, had lost its former charm and showed traces of the emotions produced by an illustrious but laborious reign, joined to an expression of weariness and lassitude."^ She was tired, but triumphant. By arranging her daughter's marriage, she had saved Austria, for as long as Bourbon and Hapsburg were allied by marriage, the Monster Frederick of Prussia would remain at bay. But few in the crowd took notice of the Empress, except to remark on her evident ill health. Her day was past, while her daughter's was just dawning. It was the fresh-faced, lovely child with the striking coloring, the Archduchess Antoinette, who drew the attention of all eyes.

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T Versailles, the dauphin Louis Auguste was far from enthusiastic when he learned that he was to marry the Austrian Archduchess. He had no desire to be married, in fact he had no interest whatsoever in women and the subject of sex filled him with dread. At fifteen, he was a clumsy, loutish youth, pudgy and dirty, with appalling manners and a terror of public ftinctions. His grandfather's mistress, Madame Du Barry, who was none too well-bred herself, called him a "fat, ill-bred boy" and the Neapolitan ambassador remarked wryly that he seemed to have been "bom and raised in a forest." That this enfant sauvage should be the heir to the throne of his grandfather Louis XV was a disaster the King and his ministers would gladly have averted. The Due de Choiseul, chief promoter of the Austrian marriage and a man of blunt pronouncements, prophesied glumly that if the dauphin grew into as embarrassing a man as he was a boy, he would one day be "the horror of the nation."

An unkind fate had thrust Louis into his role. The most unpromising of his father's four sons, bullied by his siblings, a piteously shy and sickly child, he had suddenly become dauphin at the age oif eleven, when his father and older brother died. He wept from terror, and took reftige in his favorite haunt, the forest of Compi^gne. There he could hunt, and bury himself in the forest depths far from the disapproving eyes of his grandfather's ministers. Louis was an eccentric child, poor at his lessons yet bookish and pedantic (he compiled a detailed, prosaic Description of the

Forest of Compi^gne before he was twelve), ill at ease with other children and with the courtiers of Versailles, happiest in the company of ordinary laborers and servants. Maps were his passion, though in his early teens he developed an interest in history as well, particularly in the English Civil War with its sensational regicide. He also kept a diary, primarily to record his hunts and to keep a record of expenditures.

Overweight, uncouth, badly dressed and painfully self-conscious, the dauphin was not unaware of his shortcomings, yet he seemed incapable of rising above them, and still more incapable of coming to grips with the challenges of rule. "My greatest fault," he wrote candidly, "is a sluggishness of mind." Others were prepared to enlarge on this assessment. "This prince, by his face and his talk, shows only an extremely limited intelligence, much clumsiness," was the judgment of the Austrian envoy to Versailles, Count Mercy. "Nature seems to have refused everything to the dauphin."^

Nature had refused him everything—except a charming and pretty wife. In the summer of 1769, the French and Austrian diplomats began negotiating the betrothal contract, with an understanding that the wedding would take place in the following April. Antoinette's dowry was fixed at two hundred thousand silver florins in cash, with an equal amount in jewelry. With the pride of two great powers at stake, ceremonial details took on heightened significance. Who would sign the betrothal contract first, the French or the Austrians? Whose pageant would come first when the entertainment began? Who would escort the bride from Vienna to Paris, and what formalities would take place when she was handed over to her new family? What wedding presents would she receive? The imperial Chancellor Kaunitz, and his envoy Count Mercy, did battle with Choiseul and his deputy Dur-fort over these issues, with draft agreements going back and forth between the Austrian and French capitals throughout the summer and fall.

Mercy, a sophisticated Lorrainer and Kaunitz's close friend, played a key role in the negotiations, shrewdly able to assess the positions of both sides and to anticipate their demands. Knowing both courts well, Mercy could foresee difficulties, and not only with the legalities of the contract. And he foresaw that, unless

Antoinette received some proper education, she would be unfit to become the dauphin's wife.

Polite pretense aside, Antoinette was shockingly ignorant and all but illiterate. She hated to read, and no doubt read very badly, she wrote painfully slowly, and with great effort. Very likely she could not compose a simple letter without considerable help. She had been brought up to be idle, she had been overindulged by Countess von Brandeiss and Brandeiss's recent replacement. Countess Lerchenfeld, was not having much more success in educating her. Mercy found a French tutor for her. Abbe Mathurin Vermond, an inconspicuous, ingratiating man who undertook to remedy her deficiencies. It was an enormous task. The future dauphine's mind was a tabula rasa on which anything might be written. Vermond set about instructing his pupil in French history and customs, teaching her the names and histories of the leading families whose representatives she would encounter at Versailles, and going on to present French literature to her in as painless a manner as possible. All the instruction was conversational, though Vermond also sat beside Antoinette while she struggled with her writing exercises.^

To her credit, she did make progress under Vermond's tutelage. "She is cleverer than she was long thought to be," Vermond remarked. She was capable of learning, eager to please—if it didn't take too much effort—and possessed of sound judgment if she applied her mind to an issue. Vermond had difficulty "accustoming her to get at the root of a subject," as he put it, and he had to keep her amused in order to keep her attention. Still, he persisted.

"I began the history of France," he wrote in one of his periodic reports to Mercy, "but I only employed it as a background on which I could work up all the objects it is necessary to know in the ordinary course of life. Excepting the history of recent times, I only called her attention to important facts, especially to epoch-making occurrences in our habits or government. I profited by every opportunity of giving her ideas on the arts, on laws and customs; I rather tormented her by my questions on the reign of Henri IV." Since he was educating a future queen, Vermond paused frequently in his narrative of French history to pose questions about how this or that ruler ought to have reacted in a given situation. He was gratified to discover that his pupil "often took

the right view." He spent a disproportionate amount of time covering the lives of the French Queens related to the house of Hapsburg, and found Antoinette particularly interested in them.

"We are now finishing the reign of Louis XIV," Vermond informed Mercy in October of 1769. "Her Royal Highness is already familiar with French names, she has some idea of genealogy, the journals of the reign of Louis XV will add to her knowledge, and assist me in giving her an idea of the important places about the court and in the kingdom while accustoming her to the names of those who fill them." The French army had special appeal for her, he discovered. "I am certain that shortly after her marriage she will know the colonels by name, and will distinguish each regiment by its number from the color of the uni-forms."^

It remained only to improve her French, and this Vermond was finding it very difficult to do in the linguistic chaos of Vienna. Everyone was multilingual, but no one spoke any language purely and correctly, without corruption from other tongues. Bad French was rife at Maria Theresa's court, but good French was very rare. He did his best to weed the Germanisms out of Antoinette's French, but she still spoke very incorrectly. He could only hope that her linguistic faults would be overlooked for the sake of her liveliness and attractiveness.

She was becoming more attractive day by day. Concerns about her shortness of stature had receded, for she had grown considerably in the course of her fourteenth year. She was filling out as well, the tight bodices of her Parisian gowns displaying more than a hint of cleavage. The aged French Cardinal de Rohan, sent to Vienna to judge at first hand how she had grown, was quite awestruck. "The form of her face is a perfect oval," he wrote, "the eyebrows well furnished as a blond can have, and a shade darker than her hair, the eyelashes of a charming length. . . . She has a little mouth, scarlet as a cherry, the lips are thick, particularly the lower one, which is, one knows, the distinctive trace of the House of Burgundy [i.e., the Hapsburgs]." In common with all other observers, the Cardinal was impressed with Antoinette's unblemished porcelain skin and natural coloring. Setting aside her usual strictures governing the use of makeup by her daughters, the Empress had allowed Antoinette to rouge her cheeks, but the rouge only covered up her own blush, which

was far more becoming. "Her natural dignity is softened by her sweetness," the Cardinal concluded, "also natural, and by the simplicity of her education.""^

Antoinette was ripening into a woman. Only one thing was lacking: she had not yet begun to menstruate, and until she did, the French could not permit the wedding to take place. Then in February of 1770, two months before the scheduled date for the ceremony, her period arrived. Maria Theresa informed the French envoy Durfort, who sent a fast courier to Versailles with the happy news. The "little bride," as the Empress called Antoinette, was a woman at last.

If the bride-to-be had expressed any curiosity about the dauphin—and she was curious by nature—the surviving sources do not record it. Possibly such curiosity was thought to be unladylike, certainly it could have led to disillusionment. Louis XV had asked for portraits of Antoinette, but no portraits of his grandson had been sent to Vienna. Finally, as the wedding day approached, the Empress requested one. Two portraits arrived, neither of which was able to disguise the oafishness of the jowly, fleshy dauphin. Here too the sources are silent about Antoinette's reaction, save to note that she asked permission to hang one of the portraits in her sitting room.

Durfort believed that the likenesses had given satisfaction, but in truth the Empress was dismayed. Having known the deep contentment of a happy (if far from untroubled) marriage to a handsome man, she foresaw a misalliance of the most painful sort. She tried to prepare Antoinette for the ordeal of marriage to a clumsy boy, telling her that a wife must always be pleasing and submissive, that passionate love is only a fleeting pleasure and neither a sound nor necessary foundation for a marriage, that a man's personal appearance is far less important than what is in his heart. Antoinette listened, looking down at the dauphin's ring which she had worn since January, and looked up at her mother with her innocent, trusting blue eyes. Clearly she did not understand.

On April 15, Durfort entered Vienna at the head of an immense procession of coaches, with over a hundred liveried servants, pages and grooms in attendance. He and his entourage represented Louis XV, arriving to fetch his grandson's bride. Among the coaches were two very large traveling berlins, commissioned from a Parisian saddler, designed to carry Antoinette to

Versailles in comfort. Both were made of rare wood, lined with satin, upholstered in crimson and blue velvet. Their costly embroideries were works of art in themselves, thread-paintings of the four seasons and of bouquets of golden flowers. Durfort presented Antoinette with a letter from her future husband, and another portrait of him, this one mounted in diamonds and attached to a ribbon, to be worn as an ornament. Two days later Antoinette solemnly renounced all claims to her mother's lands, and, while Austrian officials and French diplomatic clerks looked impatiently on, scratched and blotted her way through her signature on the document of renunciation.

That evening a memorable supper was held for fifteen hundred carefully chosen guests, who consumed two thousand roast game birds, five hundred meat pies, ten thousand servings of delicious cakes and pastries washed down with hundreds of bottles of liqueurs and wines. A masked ball followed the supper, with a much larger guest list. Most of Vienna was lit with lanterns, and those citizens who were not lucky enough to attend the ball crowded into the streets to watch the favored guests arrive, and to see the fireworks that lit up the night sky as the dancing drew to an end.