To the scaffold (9 page)

passed this information along to whoever would pay for it—and many were eager to do so.

Among them was Mercy, Maria Theresa's worldly envoy who had promised the Empress that he would keep her informed of everything that went on at the court of Louis XV. Mercy was quick to report the odd state of affairs, sending his dispatch via a special courier who took the news to Vienna in the utmost secrecy. Mercy's private correspondence with the Empress, which began in the days following Antoinette's marriage, was a marvel in its time. A securely secret two-way exchange of information and instructions between a diplomat and his sovereign in a distant city was all but unheard-of in an era when spies were everywhere and all posted letters were routinely intercepted and opened. Louis XV and his ministers had an army of informers scattered throughout Europe whose sole purpose was to subvert clandestine communication. Yet the young Austrian and Hungarian couriers recruited to carry Mercy's lengthy despatches to Maria Theresa and hers back to him managed to outwit and elude these informers for years, making it possible for the Count to commit to paper candid observations he would never have dared advance otherwise, and allowing Maria Theresa to feel that, through her representative at Versailles, she was at her daughter's side.^

Mercy's earliest reports were grim. The dauphin, he wrote, had "relapsed into the disagreeable state to which he is inclined by nature. Since their first interview he has not shown the slightest sign of predilection for the dauphine, or anxiety to please her—in public or private." Maria Theresa read between the lines. Her awkward, eccentric son-in-law, whom people said was "very much like a eunuch in his figure," was possibly a eunuch in fact. Her daughter might never produce an heir to the French throne.

The Empress, her envoy. King Louis and his ministers—all were urgently concerned about the situation. The royal doctors were consulted. Nothing was wrong, they said. The dauphin was not yet quite sixteen years old. He was not yet mature. In time, with the right food and sufficient exercise, he would be able to perform perfectly well as a husband.

In fact, the unfortunate Louis had phimosis, a deformation of the foreskin that made it painful to retract and therefore prevented erection. He was not impotent; it was merely that the attempt to make love cost him excruciating agony. Even mild sexual arousal

caused him pain, and triggered fear of more pain. The thought of submitting his tender flesh to the cruel knives of the court doctors caused Louis the most pain of all. He may or may not have had an adolescent boy's gargantuan sexual appetite—though one could argue that he did, and that he sublimated it by stuffing himself with food, so often and so voraciously that he frequently made himself ill—but it is clear that in order to avoid pain he chose to deny himself gratification. And given his blushing timidity, it is easy to understand his running away from the problem entirely rather than confronting it and seeking a cure.

Louis continued to stay away, and to ignore Antoinette on those occasions when court etiquette forced them together. They were rarely alone together, however. They were always surrounded by servitors, courtiers, officials, and the everpresent onlookers who thronged the corridors of the palace, eager for the spectacle of royalty, eager to observe the latest nuance in the dauphin's behavior toward the dauphine. The unconsummated royal marriage was the universal subject of conversation. Was Louis impotent? Did he find Antoinette distasteful? Without her silks and diamonds, shorn of her petticoats and her high-piled hair, was she much less enticing than she appeared to be?

Both young people must have been made uneasy by all the gossip, the staring and whispered comments and sly smiles—not to mention the spying and talebearing. Antoinette maintained her outward poise and self-confidence, but in unguarded moments she appeared grave and thoughtful. "Under her assurance I see moments of sadness," her confessor, Abb6 Vermond, wrote to Kaunitz, adding, "My heart is wrung by all this."^^

But by July there were signs of change. Antoinette's warmth and good-humored acceptance of her awkward young husband had begun to win his trust. He was beginning to speak to her, to seek her out, even to confide in her. He beckoned to her as she passed through his apartments and indicated that he wanted to talk, then drew her away to her own rooms where he could be free of his importunate gentlemen-in-waiting and his tutor, the Due de la Vauguyon, who made it his business to overhear everything the dauphin said. (On one occasion Louis and Antoinette discovered the eavesdropping Duke, hiding behind a door, "stuck like a piling on a fence, unable to back away" when the door was opened. 1^)

One Sunday Louis broached the subject everyone else had been talking about since their wedding night. According to Mercy, who wrote to Maria Theresa a week later, Louis told Antoinette that he was perfectly acquainted with the sexual side of marriage, but had decided to postpone intimacy until an appropriate time—presumably his sixteenth birthday, which would be on August 23. On that day the court would be at Compi^gne, and there, he assured his wife, he would live with her "with all the intimacy required by their union." ^^

Delighted, Antoinette wrote her mother that her "dear husband" had "changed much and all for the best." "The dauphine is winning her way to the dauphin," Mercy told the Empress, "and is so gay and so graceful that the somber, reserved young prince, impenetrable to all, has yielded to her charm."^^ Louis liked being with her, she brought out his softer side. When they were together he "showed her a kind of good will and sweetness which he was not thought to possess." He was even submissive. According to Mercy, Antoinette "ruled him for all the little things and he never contradicted her."^"^

The savage, it seemed, had been tamed. But he was not yet ready to be a husband. August 23 came and went, and Antoinette was still a virgin. If Louis had hoped to overcome his phimosis, he lost his nerve. Once again the gossipmongers made their rounds, and the dauphin, mortified, rode violently off to hunt in the forest and returned hours later, reeling and staggering, so exhausted that he could barely stand.

>i^^aic

NTOINETTE had been in France only three months, and already she sensed that the court had turned against her. She was wife in name only to the dauphin, her governess, the Comtesse de Noailles, disapproved of her and the King, though undeniably charmed with her, was too preoccupied with his favorite Madame Du Barry to pay her much attention.

She had not been prepared for Madame Du Barry. Her mother had not warned her about Louis XV's buxom, blue-eyed mistress or her increasing dominance over the King.

Born illegitimate, the daughter of a poor dressmaker who turned to prostitution to supplement her meager earnings, Jeanne B^cu followed her mother's example and eventually came to the King's notice as the mistress of one Jean Du Barry. Pretty without being a great beauty or even particularly striking, she was nonetheless appealingly sensual, with a look of frank invitation in her widely spaced blue eyes. King Louis was so utterly captivated that he envisioned bringing Jeanne to court—not as just another girl in his private brothel, the Parc-aux-Cerfs, but as his official mistress. To this end he arranged for her to marry Jean Du Barry's brother Guillaume, who was Comte Du Barry. In her new status as Comtesse Du Barry Jeanne was formally presented at court in April of 1769, dazzling even the jaded courtiers of Versailles in robes garlanded with bouquets of diamonds. The King had showered her with glittering gems, and she wore them everywhere, even on the heels of her shoes.

On the day of her presentation her beauty too was dazzling, though her enemies did their best to disparage it. "Her bloom is entirely gone off," wrote an English duchess visiting Versailles, and "she has a kind of artificial smirk which also savors strongly of her old trade." The wanton look in her eyes, her loud voice and vulgar manner marked her as a former woman of the streets.

"Her behavior [is] extremely free and cheerful," the Duchess wrote, "her disposition benevolent, good natured, generous and charitable, but her temper I imagine [is] as warm as her constitution, her language very rough and indelicate when she is angry."* Not all the diamonds in the world could make a common prostitute into a lady of refinement. Still, the King was captivated, and that was what mattered. Others might sneer at Madame Du Barry's affected lisp, or raise their eyebrows when she swore at her chamberwomen, or criticize her for failing to powder her hair and for preferring simple gowns to the grande toilette always worn in the royal presence, but King Louis would not hear a word against her. "She has given me delights I did not know existed," he confided to the Marechal de Richelieu, like himself an aging libertine, and Richelieu had no doubt what his master meant.

Comtesse Du Barry's rise to wealth had been swift and spectacular. The King lost no time in giving her her own small chateau at Louveciennes, an exquisite miniature palace with marble walls, painted ceilings and a large white-and-gold dining room where crystal chandeliers sparkled in the firelight. The luxurious decorations were extravagantly expensive, rich tapestries, fine china and glass, bronzes, furniture upholstered in embroidered satin. Visitors to Louveciennes marveled at how everything, even the handles of the doors, was made of the finest materials the King's treasury could buy. And they did not fail to remark on the large staff of servants, each dressed in a costly livery of crimson or pale yellow, that waited on the royal mistress. At Versailles too the Countess had a large establishment, its most conspicuous member her exotic Bengali page Zamor, who strutted along behind her in his pink velvet jacket and trousers, a white turban wound around his head, a small sword at his side.

By the time Antoinette arrived at Versailles, Madame Du Barry was a power to be reckoned with, and she did not welcome her young Hapsburg rival. When told of Antoinette's good looks she was spiteful. "I see nothing attractive in red hair, thick lips.

sandy complexion, and eyes without eyelashes," she said. "Had she who is thus beautiful not sprung from the House of Austria, such attractions would never have been the subject of admiration." Antoinette returned the insult with good measure. She resented having to sit at the same table with her grandfather's vulgar mistress at his private suppers, and being forced to sf)end time with her at the gaming tables. "She is the most stupid and impertinent creature imaginable," Antoinette wrote to her mother. "She played cards every night with us at Marly; twice she sat next to me, but she did not speak to me and I did not try to open a conversation with her. But, when it was necessary, I did speak to her."2

The rivalry between the two women was played out through their subordinates. A member of Antoinette's entourage, the Comtesse de Grammont, insulted the Comtesse Du Barry one evening by refusing to make room for her at a theatrical performance. Madame Du Barry went to the King and had the Countess sent away from court. Antoinette, on the advice of Mercy, went to her grandfather and gently asserted her prerogative. The Countess ought not to have been sent away until she, Antoinette, had been informed of his displeasure. The King, embarrassed by the contretemps and caught between his doting affection for his mistress and his fondness for his granddaughter, blamed the minister of his household, the Due de la Vrilli^re, and eventually permitted the Countess to return.^

On the surface a petty exchange of affronts involving a minor personage, in reality the incident had a deeper political dimension. Through her sister-in-law, Madame de Granmiont was a relative of the King's chief minister Choiseul, and Choiseul was the sworn enemy of Madame Du Barry. He was also the principal architect of the dauphin's Hapsburg marriage—a marriage that had so far been fruitless and that many said was no marriage at all. Antoinette's failure as a wife was Choiseul's failure, just as his enmity with the King's mistress was hers.

Choiseul had urged the alliance of France with Austria, in order to prevent Maria Theresa from joining forces with Russia and her old nemesis Frederick the Great in Prussia. Such an alliance would threaten the diplomatic stability of the continent and might well lead to war. Yet despite Choiseul's efforts, Austria and Prussia were moving closer together (Maria Theresa's eldest son Joseph,

who had perversely taken Frederick as his hero, had begun meeting with him in person to plot the eventual partition of Poland), and Austrian-Russian ties were also becoming strengthened. Choiseul's policies had not been successful, and Madame Du Barry had become the focus of a faction working to undermine him—and to turn the King against the dauphine he had brought to France.

But Choiseul had his supporters, and these, naturally enough, attached themselves to Antoinette. Here domestic politics had a role to play, for within the royal family itself there were factions, rivalries and grievances. Beyond the rivalry between the dauphin and his younger brothers, particularly the precocious fifteen-year-old Stanislaus Xavier, Count of Provence who was as arrogant, witty and sophisticated as the dauphin was shy, gauche and untutored, there was a formidable rift between King Louis and his three unmarried daughters who lived at court. (His fourth unmarried daughter, Louise, had recently become a nun at Saint-Denis—some said in order to pray for her father's sins.) All three women were in their late thirties, but they impressed visitors as much older, and the novelist Horace Walpole's contemporary description of them made them into figures of farce.