The Life of Marie Antoinette

CHAPTER IX. The Comte de Provence intrigues against the Queen.-The King gives her the Little Trianon,-She lays out an English Garden.-Maria Teresa cautions her against Expense.-The King and Queen abolish some of the Old Forms.- The Queen endeavors to establish Friendships with some of her Younger Ladies.-They abuse her Favor.-Her Eagerness for Amusement.-Louis enters into her Views.-Etiquette is abridged.-Private Parties at Choisy.- Supper Parties.-Opposition of the Princesses.-Some of the Courtiers are dissatisfied at the Relaxation of Etiquette.-Marie Antoinette is accused of Austrian Preferences.

Her accession to the throne, however, had not entirely delivered Marie Antoinette from intrigues. It had only changed their direction and object, and also the persona of the intriguers. Her chief enemy now was the prince who ought to have been her best friend, the next brother of her husband, the Comte de Provence. Among the papers of Louis XV. the king had found proofs, in letters from both count and countess, that they had both been actively employed in trying to make mischief, and to poison the mind of their grandfather against the dauphiness. They became still more busy now, since each day seemed to diminish the probability of Marie Antoinette becoming a mother; while, if she should leave no children, the Comte de Provence would be heir to the throne. He scarcely made any secret that he was already contemplating the probability of his succession; and, as there were not wanting courtiers to speculate also on the chance, it soon became known that there was no such sure road to the favor of monsieur[1] as that of disparaging and vilifying the queen. There might have been some safety for her in being put on her guard against her enemy; and the king himself, who called his brother Tartuffe, did, in consequence of his discovery, use great caution and circumspection in his behavior toward him; but Marie Antoinette was of a temper as singularly forgiving as it was open: she could not bear to regard with suspicion even those of whose unfriendliness and treachery she had had proofs; and after a few days she resumed her old familiarity with the pair, as if she had no reason to distrust them, slighting on this subject the remonstrances of Mercy, who pointed out to her in vain that she was putting weapons into their hands which they would be sure to turn against herself.

At this moment she was especially happy with a new pastime. Amidst the stately halls of Versailles she had often longed for a villa on a smaller scale, which she might call her own; and the wish was now gratified. On one side of the park of Versailles, and about a mile from the palace, the late king had built an exquisite little pavilion for his mistress, which was known as the Little Trianon. There had been a building of one kind or another on the same spot for above a century. Louis XIV. had erected there a cottage of porcelain for his imperious favorite, Madame de Montespan; and it was the more sumptuous palace with which, after her death, he replaced it, that gave rise to the strange quarrel between the haughty monarch and his equally haughty minister, Louvois, of which St. Simon has left us so curious an account.[2] This had been allowed to fall into a state of decay; and a few years before his death, Louis XV. had pulled down what remained of it, and had built a third on its foundations, which had been the most favorite abode of Madame du Barri during his life, but which was now rendered vacant by her dismissal. The house was decorated with an exquisite delicacy of taste, in which Louis XV. had far surpassed his predecessor; but the chief charm of the place was generally accounted to be the garden, which had been laid out by Le Notre, an artist, whose original genius as a landscape gardener was regarded by many of his contemporaries as greatly superior to his more technical skill as an architect.[3]

A few hundred yards off was another palace, the Great Trianon; but it was the Little Trianon which caught the queen's fancy; and, on her expression of a wish to have it for her own, the king at once made it over to her; and, pleased with her new toy, Marie Antoinette, still a girl in her impulsive eagerness for a fresh pleasure (she was not yet nineteen), began to busy herself with remodeling the pleasure-grounds with which it was surrounded. Before the time of Le Notre, the finest gardens in the country had been laid out on what was called the Italian plan. He was too good a patriot to copy the foreigners: he drove out the Italians, and introduced a new arrangement, known as the French style, which was, in fact, but an imitation of the stiff, formal Dutch mode. But of late the English gardeners had established that supremacy in the art which they have ever since maintained; and the present aim of every fashionable horticulturist in France was to copy the effects produced on the banks of the Thames by Wise and Browne.

Marie Antoinette fell in with the prevailing taste. She imported English drawings and hired English, gardeners. She visited in person the Count de Caraman, and one or two other nobles, who had already done something by their example to inoculate the Parisians with the new fashion. And presently lawns and shrubberies, widening invariably simple flower-beds, supplanted the stately uniformity of terraces, alleys converging on central fountains, or on alcoves as solid and stiff as the palace itself, and trees cut into all kinds of fantastic shapes, which had previously been regarded as the masterpieces of the gardeners' invention. Her happiness was at its height when, at the end of a few months, all was completed to her liking, and she could invite her husband to an entertainment in a retreat which was wholly her own, and the chief beauties of which were her own work.

As yet, therefore, all was happiness, and prospect of happiness. Even Maria Teresa, whose unceasing anxiety for her daughter often induced her to see the worst side of things, was rendered for a moment almost playful by the reports which reached Vienna of the universal popularity of "Louis XVI. and his little queen!" "She blushed," she said, "to think that in thirty-three years of her reign she had not done as much as Louis had done in thirty-three days.[4]" But she still warned her daughter that every thing depended on keeping up the happy impression already made; that much still remained to be done. And the queen's answer showed that her new authority bad brought with it some cares. "It is true," she writes, "that the praises of the king resound everywhere. He deserves it well by the uprightness of his heart, and the desire which he has to act rightly; but this French enthusiasm disquiets me for the future. The little that I understand of business shows me that some matters are full of difficulty and embarrassment. All agree that the late king has left his affairs in a very bad state. Men's minds are divided; and it will be impossible to please all the world in a country where the vivacity of the people wants every thing to be done in a moment. My dear mamma is quite right when she says we must lay down principles, and not depart from them. The king will not have the same weakness as his grandfather. I hope that he will have no favorites; but I am afraid that he is too mild and too easy. You may depend upon it that I will not draw the king into any great expenses." (The empress had expressed a fear lest the Trianon might prove a cause of extravagance.) "On the contrary, I, of my own accord, have refused to make demands on him for money which some have recommended me to make."

Some relaxations, too, of the formality which had previously been maintained between the sovereign and the subordinate members of the royal family, and especially an order of the king that his brothers and sisters were not in private intercourse to address him as his majesty, had grated on the empress's sense of the distance always to be preserved between a monarch and the very highest of his subjects. And she had complained that reports had reached her that "there was no distinction between the queen and the other princesses; and that the familiarity subsisting in the court was extreme." But Marie Antoinette replied, in defense of the king and herself, that there was "great exaggeration in these reports, as indeed there was about every thing that went on at the court; that the familiarity spoken of was seen but by very few. It is not for me," she said, "to judge; but it seems to me that what exists among us is only the air of kindly affection and gayety which is suitable to our age. It is true that the Count d'Artois" (who had been the special subject of some of the empress's unfavorable comments) "is very lively and very giddy, but I can always keep him in order. As for my aunts, no one can any longer say that they lead me; and as for monsieur and madame, I am very far from placing entire confidence in them.

"I must confess that I am fond of amusement, and am not very greatly inclined to grave subjects. I hope, however, to improve by degrees; and, without ever mixing myself up in intrigues, to qualify myself gradually to be of service to the king when he makes me his confidante, since he treats me at all times with the most perfect affection."

Her reflections on the impulsiveness and impatience of the French character, and of the difficulties which those qualities placed in the path of their rulers, justify the praises which Mercy had lavished on her sagacity, for it is evident that to them the chief troubles of her later years may be clearly traced. And it is difficult to avoid agreeing with her rather than with her mother, and thinking the most entire freedom of intercourse between the king and his nearest relations as desirable as it was natural. Royalty is, as the empress herself described it, a burden sufficiently heavy, without its weight being augmented by observances and restrictions which would leave the rulers without a single friend even among the members of their own family. And probably the empress herself might have seen less reason for her admonitions on the subject, had it not been for the circumstance, which was no doubt unfortunate, that the royal family at this time contained no member of a graver age and a settled respectability of character who might, by his example, have tempered the exuberance natural to the extreme youth of the sovereigns and their brothers.

Not that Marie Antoinette was content to limit the number of those whom she admitted to familiarity to her husband's kinsmen and kinswomen. Still fretting in secret over the want of any object on whom to lavish a mother's tenderness, she sought for friendship as a substitute, shutting her eyes to the fact that persons in her rank, as having no equals, can have no friends, in the true sense of the word. Nor, had such a thing been possible anywhere, was France the country in which to find it. There disinterestedness and integrity had long been banished from her own sex almost as completely as from the other; and most of those whom she took into favor made it their first object to render that favor profitable to themselves. If she professed in their society to forget for a few hours that she was queen, they never forgot it; they never lost sight of the fact that she could confer places and pensions, and they often discarded moderation and decency in the extravagance of their solicitations; while she frequently, with an overamiable facility, surrendering her own judgment to their importunities, not only granted their requests, but at times even adopted their prejudices, and yielded herself as an instrument to gratify their antipathies or resentments.

And the same feeling of vacancy in her heart, of which she was ever painfully conscious, produced in her also a constant restlessness, and a craving for excitement which exhibited itself in an insatiable appetite for amusement (as she confessed to her mother), and led her to seek distraction even in pastimes for which naturally she had but little inclination. In these respects it can not be said that, during the first year of her reign, she was as uniformly prudent as she had been while dauphiness. The restraint in which she had lived for those four years had not been unwholesome for one so young; but it had no doubt been irksome to her. And the feeling of complete liberty and independence which had succeeded it had, by a sort of natural reaction, sharpened the energy with which she now pursued her various diversions. It is possible, too, that the zest with which she indulged herself may have derived additional keenness from the knowledge that her ill-wishers found in it pretext for misconstruction and calumny; and that, being conscious of entire purity in thought, word, and deed, she looked on it as due to her own character to show that she set all such detraction and detractors at defiance. To all cavilers, as also to her mother, whose uneasiness was frequently aroused by gossip which reached Vienna from Paris, her invariable reply was that her way of life had the king her husband's entire approbation. And while he felt a conjugal satisfaction in the contemplation of his queen's attractions and graces, the qualities in which, as he was well aware, he himself was most deficient, Louis might well also cherish the most absolute reliance on her unswerving rectitude, knowing the pride with which she was wont to refer to her mother's example, and to boast that the lesson which, above all others, she had learned from it was that to princes of her birth and rank wickedness and baseness were unpardonable.

Indeed, many of the amusements Louis not only approved, but shared with her, while she associated herself with those in which he delighted, as far as she could, joining his hunting parties twice a week, either on horseback or in her carriage, and at all times exhibiting a pattern of domestic union of which the whole previous history of the nation afforded no similar example. The citizens of Paris could hardly believe their eyes when they saw their king and queen walk arm-in-arm along the boulevards; and the courtiers received a lesson, if they had been disposed to profit by it, when on each Sunday morning they saw the royal pair repair to the parish church for divine service, the day being closed by their public supper in the queen's apartment.

And this appearance of domestic felicity was augmented by the introduction of what may be called private parties, with which, at the queen's instigation, Louis consented to vary the cold formality of the ordinary entertainments of the court. In the autumn they followed the example of Louis XV. by exchanging for a few weeks the grandeur of Versailles for the comparative quiet of some of their smaller palaces; and, while they were at Choisy, they issued invitations once or twice a week to several of the Parisian ladies to come out and spend the day at the palace, when, as the principal officers of the household were not on duty, they themselves did the honors to their guests, the queen conversing with every one with her habitual graciousness, while the king also threw off his ordinary reserve, and seemed to enter into the pleasures of the day with a gayety and cordiality which surprised the party, and which, from the contrast that it presented to his manner when he was by himself, was very generally attributed to the influence of the queen's example.

And these quiet festivities were so much to his taste that afterward, when the court moved to Fontainebleau, and when they settled at Versailles for the winter, he cheerfully agreed to a proposal of Marie Antoinette to have a weekly supper party; adopting also another suggestion of hers which was indispensable to render such reunions agreeable, or even, it may be said, practicable. At her request he abolished the ridiculous rule which, under the last two kings, had forbidden gentlemen to be admitted to sit at table with any princess of the royal family. But natural as the idea seemed, it was not carried out without opposition on the part of Madame Adelaide and her sisters, who remonstrated against it as an infraction of all the old observances of the court, till it became a contest for superiority between the queen and themselves. Marie Antoinette took counsel with Mercy, and, by his advice, pointed out to her husband that to abandon the plan after it had been announced, in submission to an opposition which the princesses had no right to make, would be to humiliate her in the eyes of the whole court. Louis had not yet shaken off all fear of his aunts; but they were luckily absent, so he yielded to the influence which was nearest. The suppers took place. He and the queen themselves made out the lists of the guests to be invited, the men being named by him, and the ladies being selected by the queen. They were a great success; and, as the history of the affair became known, the court and the Parisians generally rejoiced in the queen's triumph, and were grateful to her for this as for every other innovation which had a tendency to break down the haughty barrier which, during the last two reigns, had been established between the sovereign and his subjects. Nor were these pleasant informal parties the only instances in which, great inroads were made on the old etiquette. The Comte de Mirabeau, a man fatally connected in subsequent years with some of the most terrible of the insults which were offered to the royal family, about this time described etiquette as a system invented for the express purpose of blunting the capacity of the French princes, and fixing them in position of complete dependence. And Marie Antoinette seems to have regarded it with similar eyes; her dislike of it being quickened by the expectations which its partisans and champions entertained that her every movement was to be regulated by it. And its requirements were sufficiently burdensome to tax a far better-trained patience that was natural to one who though a queen, was not yet nineteen. Not only was no guest of the male sex, except the king, allowed to sit at table with her, but no man-servant, no male officer of her household, might be present when the king and she dined together, as indeed usually happened; even his presence could not sanction the introduction of any other man. The lady of honor, on her knees, though in full dress, presented him the napkin to wipe his fingers and filled his glass; ladies in waiting in the same grand attire changed the plates of the royal pair; and after dinner, as indeed throughout the day, the queen could not quit one room in the palace for another, unless some of her ladies were at hand in complete court dress to attend upon her.[5] These usages, which were in reality so many chains to restrain all freedom, and to render comfort impossible, were abolished in the first few months of the new reign; but, little as was the foundation which they had in common sense, and equally little as was the addition which they made to the royal dignity, it is certain that many of the courtiers, besides Madame de Noailles, were greatly disconcerted at their extinction. They regarded the queen's orders on the subject as a proof of a settled preference for Austrian over French fashions. They began to speak of her as "the Austrian," a name which, though Madame Adelaide had more than once chosen it to describe her during the first year of her marriage, had since that time been almost forgotten, but which was now revived, and was continually reproduced by a certain party to cast odium on many of her most simple tastes and most innocent actions. Her enemies oven affirmed that in private she was wont to call the Trianon her "little Vienna,[6]" as if the garden, which she was laying out with a taste that long made it the admiration of all the visitors to Versailles, were dear to her, not as affording a healthful and becoming occupation, nor for the sale of the giver, but only because it recalled to her memory the gardens of Schoenbrunn, to which, as their malice suggested, she never ceased to look back with unpatriotic regret.

In one point of view they were unquestionably correct. The queen did undoubtedly desire to establish in the French court the customs and the feelings which, during her childhood, had prevailed at Vienna; but they were wholly wrong in thinking them Austrian usages. They were Lorrainese in their origin; they had been imported to Vienna for the first time by her own father, the Emperor Francis; when she referred to them, it was as "the patriarchal manners of the House of Lorraine[7]" that she spoke of them; and her preference for them was founded on the conviction that it was to them that her mother and her mother's family were indebted for the love and reverence of the people which all the trials and distresses of the struggle against Frederic had never been able to impair.

Nor was it only the old stiffness and formality, which had been compatible with the grossest license, that was now discountenanced. A wholly new spirit was introduced to animate the conversation with which those royal entertainments were enlivened. Under Louis XV., and indeed before his reign, intrigue and faction had been the real rulers of the court, spiteful detraction and scandal had been its sole language. But, to the dispositions, as benevolent as they were pure, of the young queen and her husband, malice and calumny were almost as hateful as profligacy itself. She held, with the great English dramatist, her contemporary, that true wit was nearly allied to good-nature;[8] and she showed herself more decided in nothing than in discouraging and checking every tendency to disparagement of the absent, and diffusing a tone of friendly kindness over society. On one occasion, when she heard some of her ladies laughing over a spiteful story, she reproved them plainly for their mirth as "bad taste." On another she asked some who were thus amusing themselves, "How they would like any one to speak thus of themselves in their absence, and before her?" and her precept, fortified by example (for no unkind comment on any one was ever heard to pass her lips), so effectually extinguished the habit of detraction that in a very short time it was remarked that no courtier ventured on an ill-natured word in her presence, and that even the Comte de Provence, who especially aimed at the reputation of a sayer of good things, and affected a character for cynical sharpness, learned at last to restrain his sarcastic tongue, and at least to pretend a disposition to look at people's characters and actions with as much indulgence as herself.