The Queen's Necklace

Chapter Seven. The Queen

MARIE-ANTOINETTE, the chief victim of the necklace trial, has probably been more written about than any other woman in world history. Only Mary Stuart — that other Queen Maria to end up on the scaffold — can rival her. The revolutionary years poured out a venomous stream of slander about her; then, with the restoration of the monarchy in the early nineteenth century, she was turned into a sainted royal martyr. More recent writers, in their quest for objectivity, have looked for an answer somewhere between the two. To us it seems she was neither a demon nor a martyr but a woman neither better nor worse than any other woman placed on the throne by fate. Since the portraits by the brothers Goncourt and Stefan Zweig are readily available, and practically everyone has read the latter, there is no need for us to show Marie-Antoinette in premier plan, like the other actors in our story. It will be enough to summarise the facts very briefly and then turn the spotlight solely on those areas that are critically important for the historical argument. What we do need to explain is why Rohan should have believed the things he did about her. To answer that we must examine her prodigality, her war on Court etiquette, her friendships with other women and the erotic legend that grew up around her.

Marie-Antoinette was born on 2nd November 1755, the day of the great earthquake in Lisbon. Her mother was Maria Theresa, her father the genial Lotharingian Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. As a young girl she learnt to dance extremely well, to play music and to recite. Taught by the resident poet at the Viennese court, Metastasio, she memorised the libretti of the great operas in Italian. It was an excellent upbringing — for a future diva. In later years she developed an implacable hostility towards any kind of intellectual occupation or difficult reading matter, no matter how much her wise mother urged her in her letters to study seriously. But one can hardly blame her for that. There is no doubt that she was intelligent and witty, perhaps excessively so. When receiving a delegation she would respond with a formal little speech she had earlier composed with great care. This habit infuriated the female members of the royal household, who thought it quite inappropriate for a princess to speak at such length to ordinary people, rather than simply mumble a few incomprehensible words of greeting.

Her fate was decided by the Duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s Foreign Minister. To enable France to turn her full might on England and Prussia, he broke a long tradition of French policy and made an alliance with Austria, her rival of many centuries. The alliance was sealed and underwritten by the marriage of Princess Marie-Antoinette to Louis XV’s grandson, the future Louis XVI.

Marie-Antoinette’s face and figure have been immortalised in countless contemporary pictures and writings. Mme Vigée-Lebrun alone painted her twenty times.

She was certainly beautiful. A tall, queenly figure, with fine arms and bosom, a full head of ash-blonde hair and a most attractive face — admittedly rather a babyish face, by no means the sort that people nowadays find piquant or very interesting. But the fact is that the women of any particular period do all seem to resemble one other, the way men’s handwriting always does. In the eighteenth century women had baby faces, mainly because of their rounded chins. History of course reminds us that these baby-faced duchesses and princesses were cleverer, more passionate and, if necessary, often more vicious than those who came either before or after them. It is only the women of one’s own period that one can judge by their looks — and even then the results are completely unpredictable.

But for beauty the raw material, the body, is not enough. It depends on what you do with it. Marie-Antoinette’s contemporaries could never praise her smile, her facial expression or her deportment highly enough. Mme Vigée-Lebrun, the painter, said of her afterwards that she had the most elegant walk in the whole of France. That was written after the Queen’s death, and may be too generous. We should bear in mind that women were never more versed in the art of deportment than they were then. It was a difficult art and a highly important one, which young ladies studied with great care over many years. Another expert, Count Tilly, who had been one of her pages, disapproved of her eyes and protruding Habsburg lower lip, and thought that her posture could have been more elegant, but even he thought her carriage marvellous. “She had two kinds of walk,” he said: “one very decided, rather brisk and extremely aristocratic, and one that was altogether more sinuous, a kind of rocking movement, though that term should not be taken to imply disrespect. No one could curtsey with more grace than she. She could greet ten people with a single dip, while her glance gave proper due to each in turn … in a word, if I am not deceived, a man would instinctively want to lead her to a throne, the way he would offer another woman a chair.”

(That curtsey! What would Proust have given to see it!)

Yes, she must have been very beautiful. Perhaps we should be less delighted for her than ashamed of ourselves. Ashamed of our own plebeian century.

These details are offered by way of introduction. We must now move directly on to the subject of the Queen’s extravagance.

We have already mentioned that she lived and died for jewellery, and spent vast sums acquiring it. Another of her expensive passions was cards. At the Château de Marly she gambled constantly, always for substantial sums, following royal tradition. The card games here were a form of public ritual, like mealtimes. Any member of the nobility or gentry could attend provided he was properly dressed, and he would be free to play against the nobility seated at the table. The vast octagonal salon was lined with balconies, where the women, who were not admitted to the area below, were seated. The passion for card games in this period was generally ruinous. Both male and female members of the aristocracy who, as we have seen, were often in longstanding financial difficulties despite their vast incomes, would seek to remedy their situation through the gaming table. The stakes were fantastic. The Marquis de Chalabre (the godfather of the card game Kalaber?) lost 840,000 livres at a single sitting, and the next day won almost two million. He later became the banker of the royal casino. At Fontainebleau one epic game of Faro lasted an unbroken thirty-six hours. The King’s younger brother the Comte d’Artois was said in 1783 to have lost 14,600,000 over seven years. Nor were these princes above the occasional bit of trickery, and it became necessary to introduce various regulatory measures.

So it is not surprising then, that Marie-Antoinette also played and lost. On one occasion the King paid out 100,000 livres she had forfeited in a single sitting. He was not happy doing it, because he was himself very economical by nature: in fact he was the only Bourbon to be that way. It did him little good. In 1777 Marie’s Antoinette’s gambling debts amounted to 487,272 livres.

Naturally she also spent unbelievable sums on clothes; probably more than any other queen in history. Her ambition was to be respected and admired not as the Queen but as the prettiest and most elegant woman in France. The pleasure of being a pretty and elegant woman in France has never come cheap — and we can imagine what it meant then, when all her dresses were made from expensive fabrics. According to the eternally well-disposed Mme Campan, the word was that the Queen had bankrupted every woman in the land by the fashions, and the constant changes in fashion, that she dictated.

She was also fond of building — that greatest of royal passions. The King bought St Cloud for her and then made her a gift of Le Petit Trianon, both of which she remodelled to her own taste. Her taste was of course of the very finest, avoiding anything that might be deemed extravagant. The people naturally were convinced that her financial extravagance was unbounded, and when representatives of the Estates General (regional lawyers and state officials) visited Le Petit Trianon in 1789, they came expecting to find the rooms piled high with diamonds, and the twisting columns of sapphires and rubies with which ‘everyone knew’ the ‘Austrian woman’ had adorned the grottoes in which she conducted her debaucheries.

But in her own way Marie-Antoinette was thrifty. It was her desire to save money that precipitated the whole necklace affair. We have seen that the King was perfectly happy to buy the fatal jewels for her, but she refused. Had she accepted, she would have been spared the whole painful story of the rest of her life. But her economising zeal was always somehow inappropriate and misplaced. One New Year’s Eve, the day on which French children are given presents, she had the latest fashionable toys brought from Paris, and showed them to her children.

“You see,” she said, “these are the toys you didn’t get, because we prefer to give money to the poor, who are freezing and have no winter coats.”

Opinions differ as to whether Marie-Antoinette’s extravagance did put as significant a strain on the state coffers as was believed at the time, and whether she really did deserve the name of Mme Deficit. Probably she did not. The sum total of her various extravagances is dwarfed by the running expenditure of the state, especially in relation to the American war. In 1781 the costs incurred by the King, Queen and Royal Princess, together with the King’s sister, his aunts and their ‘household’, amounted to 27,317,000 livres, and they also paid out pensions to the value of twenty-eight million; while treasury expenditure amounted to 283,162,000 livres. So the outgoings of the royal household amounted to just one tenth of the whole. The war alone, including naval and other outgoings, absorbed around a hundred and thirteen million livres.

Then there is the separate issue of whether Marie-Antoinette was especially prodigal. She lived, as the Queen of France, at the very apex of the glitter and pomp so typical of the age. The French people had put up with the free spending of her predecessors without a murmur; she was made to atone for the sins of the centuries. Or perhaps not for their sins, but simply because the times had changed, and the hour had come for the great reckoning.

But for present purposes appearance is much more important than the reality. The common belief was that Marie-Antoinette squandered gold without a moment’s thought, and was in permanently dire financial straits. Rohan ‘knew’ that too, and he believed it — all the more so, because it applied equally to him.

The second great question concerns etiquette. Rohan ‘knew’ that Marie-Antoinette spurned the ancient protocol of the French court, and lived according to the dictates of her inclinations and caprice. What was the truth in all this?

The life of a court anywhere and in any period is governed by strict conventions. The function of etiquette is to externalise and indirectly express the ‘charismatic’, specially chosen and divinely ordained nature of royalty, and to instil a sense of religious awe in its subjects. It creates a sense of distance between the ruler and his people, making the king and his entourage seem to them as sacred and unshakeable as the eternal stars that pursue their courses with unvarying regularity. The greater the sense of distance desired by the monarchy, the stricter the protocol. The greatest of all was to be found among the ancient god-kings of the East and the rigid formality associated with them, that lived on in Byzantium. In the West, the most unbending protocol of all was that of the Habsburg court of Spain, reflecting the enormous scale of the empire in its heyday and the eternal preoccupation with heaven and hell that characterised the Catholic world view. It enabled the Spanish to channel their immense personal self-respect into the veneration of the persons of the King and Queen as sacred objects. On one occasion the Queen fell from her horse, her foot caught in the stirrup, and the steed dragged her along with him. A nobleman rushed to her aid, freed her, then leapt onto the horse and galloped away out of the country, knowing that the death penalty awaited him for having dared touch her foot.

Louis XIV seems to have had the Spanish example partly in mind when he created the much gentler, more aesthetic, but no less unbending protocol of his own court. But, besides creating a sense of distance, he had other, more practical ends in view. He wanted the aristocrats whom he invited or summoned to Court to have something to do, and something to think about. Everything he personally did was to be made a precedent. In all comparable situations, exactly the same procedures had to be gone through. The majority of his courtiers, it seems, approached the resulting elaborate ceremonial with deadly seriousness. An example is that marvellously talented and inexpressibly dull writer the Duc de Saint-Simon, who meticulously recorded every one of those customs in his monumental tomes, so that posterity would know precisely how to behave.

And Louis XIV had another reason, possibly unconscious. We have mentioned that the unspoken aim of Western culture was to reduce the whole of life to a closed system, like a work of art. The punctilious, undeviating repetition of words and actions imposed by court customs can be seen as analogous to the nightly repetition of dialogue in a play, or movements in a ballet. Etiquette served much the same purpose.

This closed world-system, the triumph of art over the raw material of life, proved no less successful in creating that sense of traditional distance than the Spanish model had done, with its rigid formal attire for men and the great hooped skirts of the ladies (and how uncomfortable their wearers must have been!). But in her early years Marie-Antoinette felt no need for such ‘historic’ distance. For her these things weren’t historic, they were everyday — boring, outdated rubbish.

The capacity of Versailles protocol to produce some strange situations is shown by the famous story of the Queen’s shift, as recorded by Mme Campan.

As Prémière Femme de Chambre it was her task to hand the Queen her slip. However, if a lady of higher rank happened to be in the room, the honour passed to her. Once, in winter — and the Palace could never have been properly heated — Mme Campan was about to pass the garment to the Queen when in stepped the Dame d’Honneur, the person next in rank above her. Seeing the situation, the lady quickly asked Mme de Campan to take off her gloves and lend them to her, as she could not give the Queen her shift without them. But while the gloves were being removed there was a knock at the door, and in stepped the Duchesse d’Orléans. To preserve protocol, the Dame d’Honneur followed the rules and returned the gloves to Mme Campan, who curtsied and offered the shift to the Duchesse, whereupon there was yet another knock on the door and in walked the King’s sister-in-law, the Comtesse de Provence. The Duchesse returned the dress to Mme Campan, who made a fresh curtsey and offered it to the Comtesse, who apologised and quickly handed it to the Queen, who was by now shivering with cold.

What can also be seen in this story is the way members of the royal family were never left to themselves. They were surrounded by attendants at all times, like the gods and goddesses in baroque paintings. This was true even in the most intimate moments of their lives. We know that the lever—when the King got out of bed — was a formal and very public occasion, as was the moment when he put his boots on; and that the members of the royal family gave audience while seated on that discreetly named item of furniture known as the chaise percée. The Queen even took her bath in public — in her shift, naturally.

Whenever she passed from one part of the building to the next, four ladies of the court in full formal dress, together with various other flunkeys, had to follow her around in procession. These ‘processions’ were almost always undertaken in full formal costume.

On certain days, royal mealtimes were a public spectacle. Anyone who turned up could watch. “Once the honest folk,” says Mme Campan, “had had a good look at the way the Dauphine drank her soup, they moved on to see how the Princes ate their bouilli, and then ran themselves out of breath to behold Mesdames polishing off their dessert.”

The rule was that only women could wait at the royal table, the Dame d’Honneur, kneeling on a little stool, and four ladies en grand habit. All these tedious customs were abolished by Marie-Antoinette.

Every book dealing with the Court includes a description of how Marie-Antoinette gave birth to her first child. So many people were milling about the room that she could not breathe, and the King had to haul the windows open with his own hands.

When Marie-Antoinette first arrived at the Court, it was controlled by the most rigidly protocol-minded of the older generation. To counterbalance the situation she found herself obliged to join forces with Louis XV’s ‘girls’—who had inherited none of the Bourbon magnificence beyond an awareness of protocol and a respect for it, but were otherwise just little old ladies. The Dame d’Honneur, the Comtesse de Noailles, she christened ‘Mme Etiquette’.

But her greatest horror was Mme de Marsan, who was connected through her husband to the House of Lotharingia (Lorraine) and thus a relation, but who was also one of the Rohan tribe, and the Cardinal’s most important patroness.

According to the Goncourts she was like the Bad Fairy in the stories. “She more or less personified the narrow and oppressive morality of the age of Henry IV, and retained something of the character of that infamous Marsan who distinguished himself at the time of the dragonnades by the zeal with which he persecuted Huguenots. The Dauphine’s easy, rocking walk was in her eyes the saunter of a courtesan; the airy linen dresses she wore were a theatrical costume calculated to seduce. If the Dauphine raised her eyes, Mme de Marsan saw it as the practised glance of a flirt. If her hair was in the slightest bit awry, it was dishevelled (‘the hair of a goatherd!’ she would complain). If, as was her custom, she spoke in a lively manner, she was talking for the sake of talking when she had nothing to say. If her face lit up during conversation and showed sympathy, Mme de Marsan found it insupportable that she should behave as if she knew everything. If she broke out into happy, childlike laughter, it was simply forced or affected. The old lady was suspicious of everything, and placed an unpleasant construction on all she did. In time Marie-Antoinette took revenge on her, as she did on the Comtesse de Noailles, quite disregarding the fact that Mme de Marsan was the Gouvernante to and friend of the King’s sisters, which ensured that the least of her actions would be criticised and she would be enmeshed in slander.” This was a pattern that would be repeated many times over.

Marie-Antoinette waged war on Mme de Noailles, Mme de Marsan, and even Mesdames the royal aunts. Primarily it was a battle of the generations, the most instinctive conflict in any society. Perhaps she carried her disdain for formality a little too far the greater to annoy them — an all-too-human trait. But then the two generations grew apart in really significant ways. Those with Mme de Marsan represented the old-style grandeur, the baroque pomp and formality of Louis XIV, which had already been undermined in Louis XV’s day by the spirit of rococo. Marie-Antoinette and her entourage were children of that new age, whose sense of beauty depended not on pomp and grandeur but on delicacy, grace, wit, the joli—charm and prettiness, as critics like Kármány and Kazinczy would say of our own belated Hungarian rococo. The formal severity of the baroque had lost its inner meaning: the age of great passions was over and there was nothing left that needed to be restrained through the imposition of formality. The half-savage courtiers of Louis XIV had had to learn calmness and dignity; the cooler spirits of Louis XVI’s needed to display a little vivacity. In her war on protocol, Marie-Antoinette was very much of her time.

This liberation from formality was also, without question, a kind of sexual emancipation — which certainly led Rohan, for one, astray. Wherever she could, the Queen spurned the official court costume and appeared dressed down, in light and comfortable clothing. The ladies were deeply shocked — and frantically imitated her. They queued up for Mlle Bertinel, her official dressmaker. Everyone wanted to be as déshabillée as Marie-Antoinette. But the style was not simply more comfortable, it also revealed rather more of the female form.

The Queen organised donkey rides, during which women sometimes fell off, producing a pretty déshabillée.

“Send for Mme Etiquette,” she cried, “so she can tell us what a queen of France should do when she falls off a donkey.” But what people claimed she said was:

“Anyone who wants to take part should come dressed to fall off.”

We know from Fragonard’s famous painting Les hazards heureux de l’escarpolette—The Happy Accidents of the Swing — how much the rococo age valued those gratuitous moments which unexpectedly exposed the normally-concealed charms of women. Mercier tells us that ladies would often receive their guests in the morning while still at their toilette, because at those times there would be frequent opportunities for them innocently to reveal parts of the body which the clothes of the time enviously concealed. (But do not think the worst — he means, for example, the arms.)

One by one the ladies of the Court began to follow the Queen’s example. They gave up their embroidered costumes, their talons rouges (their red boots, which at one time became so typical that the word was used as a general term for the aristocracy). They began to dress like normal people. One problem was that Parisians could no longer identify them by rank and unpleasant scenes occurred. And here lay a hidden danger. Once a courtier dispensed with protocol, how was he or she different from anyone else?

Even more dangerously, the Queen indulged in that suicidal passion common to every late and over-refined aristocracy: she loved s’encanailler, to mix with the common people, though the translated phrase lacks the suggestion of coarseness and vulgarity in the original. She was thrilled when her carriage broke down and she turned up somewhere in a hired carriage, like a common mortal. Her passion for the theatre in particular presented her with a wealth of opportunities to make contact with the populace, in this case people associated with the stage. She was herself an accomplished actress, brought up as such in Schönbrunn, and as Dauphine she would rehearse and present plays with her brothers and sisters-in-law, with her husband as the only member of the audience (he often fell asleep during performances). When she became Queen she had even more such opportunities, and amateur theatricals became the chief diversion at Versailles, this form of amusement incidentally costing 250,000 livres per annum. (“Do I sing well?” the Comte de Provence once asked Mme Vigée-Lebrun, the painter. “Like a prince!” came the reply.) The Queen took an intense interest in everything going on in the theatre and often visited Paris to keep in touch. She befriended the players, supported an actress with the unfortunate name, given her profession, of Mlle Raucourt, and got herself involved in a diplomatic incident with the Venetian Republic over a tightrope walker called Picq. She knew all the gossip, and had she been alive today she would have been the most ardent reader of the theatrical weekly journals.

In 1773 she took part for the first time in an opera ball, and from then on attended them with great enthusiasm. They presented the best opportunities for mingling incognito among her people, the people of Paris, and having direct contact with them, not as subjects but as one human being with another, or rather, as a woman among men. She enjoyed the amusing situations that occurred, the jeux de l’amour et du hasard—The Games of Love and Chance — as Marivaux, one of the most outstanding writers of the rococo period, expresses it in the title of one of his plays: that subtly erotic ambience elicited by simple feminine charm. This naturally gave rise to a great deal of gossip, and to one or two impudent comments from those who recognised her as the Queen and took unpleasant advantage of the situation. Joseph II rebuked his sister severely for these little outings. He worried that they might prove fatal to the French monarchy. His anxiety was not unfounded.

The rebellion against protocol also involved the Queen’s dressmaker and hairdresser. Mme Campan tells us that Marie-Antoinette would be ceremonially robed in her chamber, in full view of the ladies and other visitors, before briefly thanking them and disappearing into her cabinet, where the really important person, her couturier Mlle Bertin, who according to the rules should not have been there, was waiting. But Mlle Bertin did not work for the Queen alone, nor did her hairdresser Léonard, whose job it was to pile up the mighty tower of her coiffure with emblems, portraits and favourite animals — a whole little market town: he attended to every fashionable female head in Paris. Women readers will find this perfectly natural: if the Queen’s dressmaker worked only for her, and her hairdresser did only her hair, as protocol required, neither of them would have had sufficient practice or been able to keep up with the fashions.

And — perhaps to overcompensate for feelings of inferiority, as an Austrian vis-à-vis the women of Paris — Marie-Antoinette wanted to be absolutely the most fashionable lady in France. But this concern with the mode was itself a form of s’encanailler. Elizabeth of England and Mary Stuart were also beautiful queens, but were regal enough to ignore the fashions of the town and be guided instead by those of the Court. This deferential attitude to the ‘town’ was a sign of the times, the first step towards the downgrading of the monarchy. In this respect Marie-Antoinette was ahead of her own circle — and closer to the Revolution.

But all this applies only to her early years. After the birth of her children the urge to pursue pleasure left her, and she took little interest in fashion. However, her hatred of protocol did not disappear. In fact, it came to a head. At which point she withdrew to Le Petit Trianon.

Le Petit Trianon had been built by Louis XV. This little mansion in the park of Versailles, with its nobly simple outline, had from the very first asserted the spirit of the coming age against its neighbour, the grandiose, marble-clad, pink-coloured Grand Trianon erected by Louis XIV, which stirs up so many painful and humiliating memories for Hungarians. At one time Mme du Barry lived in the newer building, when it was known chiefly for the way the dining table was piled progressively higher from the bottom end so that no one would be embarrassed by the billings and cooings of the King and his mistress. After that, it stood unused for some years. Then in 1774 Marie-Antoinette exerted all her influence to have the banished Duc de Choiseul — whom she had to thank for her becoming Queen of France — recalled to ministerial office, but Louis XVI held out against her, and to make amends he gave her Le Petit Trianon.

“Do you like flowers?” he asked her. “If you do, I have a very pretty bunch waiting for you — Le Petit Trianon.”

The Queen set about redesigning both the house and the garden with a passion. It occupied her, and gave her enormous pleasure, for several years. The garden was a particular labour of love. Gardening was a specialist art in the Ancien Régime, reaching its heyday in the eighteenth century, and the park at Le Petit Trianon is a graphic memorial to the major shift in taste that occurred in this period.

Her immediate inspiration was the Anglo-Chinese garden of the Comte de Caraman, though by this time there were already a number of different ‘English’, that is to say, typically pre-romantic, gardens in the country. People had become bored with mathematically correct creations laid out, in the style of Le Nôtre, like a star — mighty avenues of stiffly erect trees lined with frigid statues of classical gods, with their fixed smiles and disdainful expressions of divine serenity. People were bored with formal fountains and baroque arrogance, bored with the topiarised trees, the geometric figures, the general triumph of art and reason over nature. And the royal family was especially bored with Marly, where, in the vivid phrase of the Goncourts, “The pavilions and gardens were filled with the shades of Louis XIV, his greatness and his tediousness.” They were bored, too, with Versailles, where in winter the cold in the predominantly marble and glass rooms was simply intolerable, along with the appalling draught and the hellish smoke from the old-fashioned, poorly-ventilated fireplaces.

The new fashion, like the whole pre-romantic movement, originated in England. When building, the English nobility began with their gardens. These were to be “like nature itself”. Narrow, winding paths led between fresh, grassy meadows, wild groves and woodland traversed by babbling streams, with flowers growing everywhere, just as one imagined them to do, and with birds singing in the trees the way real birds sing — and heard as if for the very first time. And at night the moon shone just like a real moon, and you were once again transfixed by its long-forgotten, silver-blue enchantment.

That was the sort of park that Marie-Antoinette wanted. Her excellent taste protected her from the wilder excesses of the fashion, and her garden in Le Petit Trianon had no professionally constructed ruins or professionally designed grottoes, no Chinese bridges or Swiss log cabins, and only one broken column and one miniature pyramid to evoke the required sentimental melancholy. Along with these pre-romantic accessories we find a single little Belvedere, or lookout tower, where the Queen would take breakfast on summer mornings and from where she could survey the whole of her empire. There was also a temple d’amour, a little circular shrine with antique columns: it can be seen in the background of Wertmüller’s celebrated painting of the Queen and her children.

It is here that the memory of Marie-Antoinette lives most strongly. As you stroll in the park something catches your throat, some remnant of that pre-romantic melancholy hovers in the air around you. Tongues fall silent, and you stand there secretly hoping for the royal ghost to appear, leading her children by the hand, before vanishing at a bend in the path.

How she loved this place! For a while she was content simply to escape there from Versailles during the day, with only the royal family and her closest confidantes accompanying her. Le Petit Trianon was her happy isle, where protocol was set aside and you did not have to go about in formal dress, and where the prying multitude and the ever-demanding, perpetually scheming nobility could never set foot. Here the family could live out the great dream of the age—“to be human, and to live as ordinary citizens”.

Then she began to spend nights there too, with growing frequency. The first occasion was in 1779, on the pretext that she had the measles and needed to isolate herself to avoid passing the disease on to her husband. She arranged for four knights to watch over her in turns: the Duc de Coigny, the Duc de Guines, Count Esterházy and the Baron de Besenval.

“And if the King were ill?” malicious tongues asked. “Which four ladies would watch night and day over him?”

At Le Petit Trianon the Queen did sometimes arrange more formal events. She was much happier bestowing recognition on genuinely talented writers and theatre directors here rather than at Versailles. Here, the guests were genuinely her guests. The grandest occasion of all was the summer evening party, with the invitees strolling among Chinese lanterns, given in honour of the Russian Grand Duke and his wife, with twelve hundred people dining. That was the evening when Rohan spied on her in disguise.

But as time went by the place ceased to fulfil her yearning for the simple life. So inside the park she built the famous Hameau Rustique, the model country village and farmstead. It too was the height of fashion. The Duc de Condé also had one, in the park at Chantilly. Marie-Antoinette’s consisted of several buildings, the largest of them her own house, where the entire royal family could withdraw from the Court in the afternoon. The King had a billiard room at his disposal, to fend off boredom, and there was a dairy farm, with cows grazing on the turf of the park — from time to time the Queen would milk her two favourite animals herself. There was also a mill, a granary, a poultry yard and a cottage for the gardener. It was a real working farmstead, not just a toy, as the Goncourts assumed.

On the basis of research done by Pierre de Nolhac, the leading authority on the subject, we must set aside the rather charming story that the Queen settled twelve poor families in the village, together with a saintly hermit to tend to their spiritual needs. Similarly discredited is the legend that the royals would occasionally play at village life there, with the King as miller, Marie-Antoinette as the farmer’s wife, the Comte d’Artois as gamekeeper, the Duc de Provence as schoolmaster, the Duc de Polignac as magistrate and Cardinal Rohan as curate. It cannot be true, if only for the fact that by the time the village was completed Rohan was already a prisoner in the Bastille.

What is beyond doubt is that in building it Marie-Antoinette was paying homage to the current fashion for folksiness. When, as the new Dauphine, she first arrived in France, at Châlons, actors came from Paris to play Charles Collé’s Une partie de chasse de Henri IV in her honour. The play is about Henri IV, the French equivalent of our own great King Matthias, who loses his way in the woods during a hunt, comes upon some country folk, does not reveal who he is, and tucks into the village hospitality with hearty appetite. However, when the peasants want to drink to his health he refuses to give his name, whereupon they read him a thorough lecture, just as the grey-haired Peterdi does to Matthias in Vörösmarty’s Szép Ilonka (The Beautiful Ilonka). At this point his courtiers arrive, reveal who he is, and he marries every girl off to whoever it seems appropriate. Collé’s piece is not an isolated instance. Leafing through the volumes of Grimm’s Literary Correspondence dealing with events in literature and the theatre in the 1780s, we find that a great many plays given in the period had a similar folk theme, celebrating the uncorrupted morals of village people as opposed to the thoroughly corrupt ones of the Court and the city. The convention originated in England, and the French naturally added the sentimental ‘back to nature’ touch, as in Rousseau’s slogan.

That this was how Marie-Antoinette really imagined the virtues of the people is made clear in the letter we quoted earlier, à propos the philanthropic activities of the Freemasons. Amongst other things, she writes: “… there are hidden virtues among these social classes, wise souls who embody Christian virtues to the highest degree, and we should do all we can to reward them.” She would have loved to have been the sort of popular, simple, patriarchal ruler in the folk tradition that her ancestors, the princes of Lotharingia, supposedly were. Mme Campan says of them that, if they were short of money they went to church, and when the sermon was over, waved their hats in the air to signify they wanted a word, explained how much they needed, and those of their subjects who were present would immediately club together to donate the required sum. What a fine, pre-romantic dream of the relationship between ruler and people!

From all this it appears that Marie-Antoinette was in her own way just as much a pre-romantic as her admirer Rohan. What the belief in miracles and mysticism were to him, nature, the simple life and a return to the common people were to her. The Queen was bored with her elevated, inhuman role, and yearned for some real connection with a more normal way of life.

In the course of this work we have said many times that the Ancien Régime was brought down not so much by its vices as by its virtues. The crimes, the ‘abuses’ of Louis XVI’s period, were no greater than those of any previous century, and were moreover, steadily diminishing. The difference was in the prevailing morality — in the new philanthropy and cult of all things popular.

When a ruling class starts to show understanding and pity for the lower orders, idealising them in verse, arguing over plans for reform and how to better their lot, it is a fine thing, history tells us, and a sign of genuine nobility. But on the one hand it does very little for those same lower orders, and on the other, it augurs very badly for the ruling class. It is a sign that it has lost its self-belief, lost faith in its own divinely ordained superiority: in short, it has lost its raison d’être.

The medieval nobility understood the people far better than their eighteenth-century counterparts, because they lived among them on their estates, and did much more for them in a practical way. But they never talked or spent time thinking about them. They knew that God had ordained that there should be the rulers and the poor, and that when they helped the peasantry they were carrying out God’s commandment. It was a debt due to God and to their own souls, but not to the people. And it never occurred to them to s’encanailler¸ to mingle with the multitude; they would not have understood the eighteenth century’s strange nostalgia for what lay below them, for roots and origins, simplicity and the Rousseauistic sense of life, which was in fact itself arbitrary and ‘cultured’—a form of class suicide. So long as a racial group continues to believe in itself it will keep aloof from every sort of physical intermingling.

The same applies to Marie-Antoinette. It was all very fine, thoroughly human and extremely worthy of her that she should love nature, the people, and the whole romantic ideal that would bring the Revolution to a triumphant head. That she hated stiff Spanish formality and wanted to be just one person among others, was deeply sympathetic in her. But it is not the business of a Queen to be human.

Rather, her duty was to glide through the dazzling, inhumanly magnificent halls of Versailles in blaser, erdenferner Festlichkheit—‘in pale splendour far removed from earth’—unapproachably aloof from her subjects, her every movement like a formally perfect work of art, and to do, as a beautiful queen, what the King, the man, never could in the same measure, simply by being what she was, to make her millions of subjects feel the superhuman magnificence of royalty: to let them know that in the infinite heights above their heads dwelt powers as fixed as the stars, beings that watched over them by night. That would have been a far greater service to the people. Would it also have been death to her sensitive soul? Every vocation has its martyrs.

Marie-Antoinette did not do that, and the reason was that, like the glittering Court folk around her, she too had lost faith in her calling, in the institution of the monarchy, and with it her own raison d’être. The queen who no longer understands what it is to be a queen, who pays homage to the purely personal rather than the radiance of the crown, becomes superfluous. Marie-Antoinette did not fulfil the highest duty of her calling. When viewed sub specie aeternitatis, her downfall was not, in the end, undeserved.

The pre-romantic period was the great age of friendship. While the knights of the middle ages enjoyed the kind of brotherhood in arms that expressed itself through sword and deed, and faithfulness in life and death, it was never a matter of ‘kindred spirits’. And while intellectual friendships also developed, following examples from the age of classical humanism and involving companionship of the highest order, with long philosophical discussions at dawn, great banquets and fine wine, and the exchange of beautifully phrased letters, it was only in the eighteenth century that the friendship of shared sensibility was born.

In response to the prevailing intellectual aridity of the time, when love had become a sophisticated and devious social game that failed to meet their needs, the women of the late rococo period took refuge in friendship. Female friends were always in each other’s company, supporting and comforting one another, and whispering secrets in each other’s ears. They would accept an invitation only if their friend was included. The two would walk about the salon arm-in-arm, or sit on the sofa with their arms around each other. They persuaded poets to compose hymns to Friendship, and temples were erected in parks to the same deity. Like everything else in this period, it became a dizzy, theatrical fashion. Women wore each other’s hair on their heads, sometimes from a stock taken from a whole collection of friends, or they would have portraits of their favourites worked into their towering coiffures. Hair rings, hair watchstraps, hair chains, hair necklaces, hair bracelets and hair boxes came into fashion, and pictures of girlfriends as angels dangled from bracelets. “J’ai un sentiment pour elle, elle a un attrait pour moi”—I have a feeling for her, she has an attraction for me — they would proclaim. (L Goncourt La femme au dix-huitième siècle.)

As a young girl Marie-Antoinette paid full homage to this fashionable mania. The longing for friendship was no doubt intensified by the long years when she had no real relationship with her husband and, finding herself truly alone, really needed someone who could understand her. Her most passionate friendships have been much discussed by historians. The first was with the Princesse de Lamballe, who met such an appalling end in the Revolution. This lady was descended from the houses of Savoy (the old ruling family of France) and Carignan, and was loosely related through her Savoy connections to the wives of the Duc de Provence and the Comte d’Artois, as well as the Queen’s sister-in-law. Her husband, the Duc de Penthièvre, the grandson of Louis XIV and Mme de Montespan, had died young. But this lofty status did not shield her from the common disease of courtiers: they all wanted something from the King and Queen, and when they got it, they wanted more. The Princesse, to the great annoyance of her opponents, was made Surintendante de la Maison de la Reine, shortly after which their friendship suddenly cooled. She was replaced in the Queen’s heart by the young wife of Comte Jules de Polignac — an even more passionate relationship. The Comtesse Jules, as she was known, was relatively poor, but she sincerely loved the Queen, and in the sincerity of her loyal nature allowed herself to be loved in return. But she was a blind instrument in the hands of her relations. Her husband soon became the Duc de Polignac, and within a few years the family had an annual income of 500,000 livres.

The Goncourts tell us that the Queen had a burning need for the Polignacs and the group that formed around them as a party in opposition to the royal aunts and other members of the Court aristocracy, to protect her from being completely isolated and reduced to subservience. But the reverse is also true: by confining her favours to her tiny clique to the exclusion of everyone else, and perhaps too for absenting herself so much from Versailles so that those others would not be able even to speak to her, she drew even more resentment upon herself. By around 1777 the Versailles balls were almost completely depopulated, leaving scarcely eight to ten people to circulate in the vast rooms, to the Queen’s great annoyance. She was being boycotted by the offended nobles and left to the company of her friends. That clique of friends was undoubtedly one of the reasons for her unpopularity. Increasingly, the money she set aside for her friends became a source of reproach, and slanderers put an obscene construction on her intense feelings for her lady friend.

The persecution originated in the Court itself. The cause was jealousy. Here, however, we might be permitted to venture a theory of our own, not endorsed by other historians: that it was not the only reason but was exacerbated by feelings aimed at her circle of an even baser kind.

This is of course difficult to prove. Most writers show the Queen’s companions as superficial beings, creatures of fashion who lived only for the sterile round of pleasure. The Queen’s brother, Joseph II, took precisely that view of them, as is evident from the didactic and reproving tone of his letters to her. But it is possible that he was wrong, and that historians have simply taken over the common prejudice of his contemporaries. The Duc de Polignac, M de Châlons, the Duc de Guines, the Duc and the Comte de Coigny and the rest, were all sensible, intelligent men, and their circle included people of unquestionable intellectuality.

Chief amongst them was the Comte de Vaudreuil. The somewhat taciturn, occasionally demonic, pampered favourite, known to the group as the ‘magician’, was the Duchesse de Polignac’s friend. He was one of the greatest connoisseurs of art in his time, and a powerful patron of writers and painters. It can hardly be fortuitous that the authors he personally helped came also to enjoy the patronage of Marie-Antoinette, who was normally so indifferent towards literature. These were Beaumarchais and Chamfort, the brightest, most cynical and most disillusioned writers of the age — in neither of whom is there the slightest trace of a courtly style, and who would never have achieved official status even under the most liberal system. Vaudreuil must have been the same sort of person himself: he found everything amusing, except when his bad nerves racked him with pain and he was seized with fits of uncontrollable anger, when he lost even his respect for the Queen — as when he once deliberately broke her favourite billiard cue. We should add that he had a rather ugly face, scarred by smallpox, so it was clearly not for his external appearance that he was so much liked. “I know only two men,” said one of his contemporaries, a duke, “who know how to speak to a woman: the actor Lekaint, and M de Vaudreuil.”

One very popular member of the clique was a parvenu, the Comte d’Adhémar, who had dug up his romantic-sounding name from some old documents and bought permission to use it. He was a modest man, of modest means, but respected in the group because he ‘knew everything’. He played the role in the Queen’s circle that fell to the abbé elsewhere: he represented the world of books, and had a fine singing voice besides.

The group also included one of the cleverest men of the age, the Duc de Ligne. He was greatly admired by Goethe, and is one of the most notable examples of a genuinely superior man of the world in this period.

Marie-Antoinette, however, was by nature of a sarcastic and critical tendency. Like her brother Joseph II, she was never short of a malicious remark, and the superior tone of her irony and her satirical wit were simply reinforced by her upbringing. Two bad angels struggled for the soul of the young Dauphine: Mme de Marsan, the embodiment of tradition, and the demonic Abbé Vermond, iconoclasm made flesh. Vermond, in particular — a churchman without an ounce of religion in him — exemplified the political morals of the age. He was convinced that, at a time when authority and discipline were weakening, a lead should be given by the Church, an organisation that for two thousand years had preserved the secret of holding on to power. Like Thomas Mann’s Naphta, he respected its enormous accumulation of authority. “He embodied,” in Goncourt’s words, “all the ambition and arrogance of the age: the arrogance of thinking himself somebody, and the determination to do everything by himself.” Secret, all-powerful influence, without public office or form, was his dream. The role was not entirely different from the one Rohan yearned for, and Marie-Antoinette’s attachment to Vermond must certainly have encouraged his hope that one day she would attach herself in the same way to him.

At Schönbrunn Vermond’s job had been to teach the young Princess what the French were like. He almost certainly told her that they were a supercilious, hypercritical people who disliked anything that was boring. At Versailles he was constantly pointing out how very much better things were done in Vienna. The formalities, the empty traditions, everything to do with the French past, he treated with the embittered ‘philosophical’ hostility of a parvenu.

So one can imagine that the group that formed around Marie-Antoinette, of which Vermond was the leader and Vaudreuil the truest representative, was regarded by others as uniformly arrogant. Not perhaps with a strictly intellectual arrogance, nor the arrogance based on greater knowledge and a broader view of the world, but rather the easy assumption of superiority conferred by knowing oneself to be more fashionable, more articulate and more abreast of the times. It was the sort of superiority the citizen in a great metropolis feels towards someone from the country, and the self-consciously ‘modern’ person towards the people of the past. Lord Chesterfield, the greatest theorist of court life in the eighteenth century, is right when he observes in one of his letters: “It calls for a great deal of intelligence to accept the highest degree of intelligence of other people. The cleverer you are, the more goodwill and courtesy you are called on to display to be forgiven for your superiority. It is not an easy thing!” Marie-Antoinette’s entourage, it seems, failed to understand this.

To which we must add that she and her set consisted almost entirely of young men and women, while in the clique opposing them it was the older lords and ladies who dictated the tone. Young people, especially when in a group and with nothing to restrain them from being vengeful, are always mockingly supercilious towards their elders, undoubtedly encouraged to do so by their own wit and intelligence. They find the customs and habits of older people amusing, and wherever they can will exaggerate or even mimic differences between the two groups.

In her circle, the younger members of the Court found themselves ranged against the powerful women, ministers (like Maurepas) of astonishing antiquity, and the King’s aunts — all of them religious bigots, political conservatives, people who were hostile to all forms of social change and intellectually dull. It was inevitable that this clique should feel superior in themselves and have little difficulty making other people feel that superiority — and that it would be deeply resented. The feelings of inferiority they imposed on the rest of the Court must have been one of the most important sources of the hatred felt towards Marie-Antoinette.

By the time of the necklace affair, the circle of friends had largely dispersed. Marie-Antoinette now found herself most at ease with foreigners. When anyone remarked on the danger in this, she would solemnly reply:

“You are quite right, but at least they don’t ask me for anything.”

(From the Hungarian point of view, it is interesting to note that among these foreign friends was the already mentioned Count Bálint Esterházy. Born in 1740, he was the grandson of Antal Esterházy, the military general and companion in exile of Ferenc Rákóczi II. His father, József Bálint Esterházy, had left Bulgaria and returned to France, where he served as a soldier, married a Frenchwoman and died young. The present Esterházy was a follower of the Comte de Choiseul, and it was he who took the portrait of her fiancé to Marie-Antoinette at Schönbrunn. Maria Theresa had not been pleased by Esterházy’s behaviour in Vienna: he allegedly spent 100,000 forint on another man’s wife and became involved in a duel. He was much given to duelling, and continued the practice at Versailles whenever he considered that Marie-Antoinette had favoured someone else over him. Later, when the War Minister proposed downgrading his regiment of hussars, Marie-Antoinette intervened on behalf of her devotee. In 1780 he became a general. He was an intimate friend of the Comte d’Artois. In the Revolution his hussars provided cover for the flight of the royal princes. Esterházy later emigrated, settled in Volhynia, and died there.)

Rohan must have been aware of all these developments at the Court: the Queen’s need for intimate friendships and her extreme proneness to taking lively, clever, dominant women into her confidence. Women like Jeanne de la Motte.

When Rohan first became enmeshed in Jeanne’s intrigues, he was in truth showing no more credulity than ninety per cent of the population. He believed the Queen was no different from any other young, attractive woman of high birth and did not take the sanctity of marriage very seriously. By this stage a whole erotic myth had grown up around the person of Marie-Antoinette. To some extent it had sprung up independently of any basis in reality, but whether or not any such basis existed, the myth was a necessary one. Every social group has certain collective mental requirements. It needs men it can look up to as objects of hero worship (one of the major driving forces of history) and it needs women who can serve as objects of collective desire. In our time these women are the great screen actresses; in our parents’ time they were opera singers, dancers and circus performers. Erotic legends grow up around all female film stars, and publicity agents take great care to foster and sustain them.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the heyday of the monarchy, the woman closest to the King, whether his Queen or his mistress, attracted the same level of interest that film stars do nowadays. Their situations were similar in that their lives were played out in the full glare of publicity, and their whole existence was a performance, a role they had to play. The queens of old and the great actresses: figures in the collective consciousness, people to whom everything is attributed that can be dreamt of about a woman.

This phenomenon reached its highest level of importance in the eighteenth century. It was the century, as we are frequently told, of women — the intellectual life of women in salons, women wielding unseen influence, women as members of academies, theatrical productions whose success depended on the power of actresses to charm; in the economic sphere, financiers amassing great fortunes in order to marry their daughters into the aristocracy, and women ruling over whole peoples and empires: Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Queen Elisabeth Farnese of Spain, as well as the likes of Mme de Pompadour and Mme du Barry. It was as if some residual matriarchy — the oldest culture of the Mediterranean — was struggling to emerge from the blood and the collective unconscious; as if the time would one day return when, in every tribe, it was the women who possessed wealth and power and the men who ‘married out’, moving into the wife’s extended family, where they became gentle, pampered, more or less superfluous drones. In the nineteenth century, with the age of emancipation, some sort of equilibrium was established, but the twentieth century has seen a reaction, and today we find ourselves once again living in a powerful patriarchy. Even in politics there are similarities with the male-bonded societies of old, with groups of men, to a lesser or greater extent armed, adhering to one another and exercising the power of male strength. What the reasons might be for this alternation between periods of male and female dominance is not yet something science can explain, but it is not inconceivable that they are rooted not in historical processes but in biology.

In the century of women, it was inevitable that these erotic legends should attach themselves to the outstanding female figures of the time, and not just to the likes of Mme de Pompadour and Catherine the Great, who provided plenty of suitable material, but even to the ever-virtuous Maria Theresa, who fulfilled all the duties of a self-effacing monarch, wife and mother. Even today there are countless dreadful stories circulating in this country about the Empress and her Hungarian hussars.

And all this applied even more strongly in France. It was there that women reached the greatest positions of power, and there that this erotic momentum was at its strongest, by virtue of the traditions and nature of the French people.

Nonetheless they still looked to their king to be first and foremost a loving husband, and they respected him as such. Louis XV lost his popularity not on account of his political ineptitude but because of Mme du Barry, and not so much because he had a mistress but because he failed to choose a better one, the sort of woman with whom his more respectable subjects might wish to converse. And it played a large part in Louis XVI’s loss of public esteem that people were so dissatisfied with his wife Marie-Antoinette. Besides, it was felt that he did not conduct himself like a true husband, or conform to the national ideal of manliness, in contrast to the gallant Henri IV. This is all characteristically French. With the English, for example, it was only in their most Gallicised period, the reign of Charles II, that they took any interest in their king’s mistresses. In the eighteenth century they were so indifferent to the question of whom their monarch was sleeping with that the names never feature in the historical record. This was not a question of morality. The English were at that time a thousand times more moralistic than the French, but even they were not especially perturbed by these royal liaisons: their hatred of their monarchs existed quite independently. No, this was something in the sexual nature of the French, and everything to do with their fundamentally bourgeois attitudes. The basic character of a people does not change, and most of the French were probably no less petty bourgeois under the Ancien Régime than they were later. Their petty bourgeois character is most truly seen in the insatiable delight people took in the gnawing away at the love life of the royals that finally destroyed the life of Marie-Antoinette. Those who condemned her allegedly immoral behaviour were, deep down, embittered by the fact they could not do the same themselves, and found a certain erotic compensation by colouring in the details.

To this we should add the extraordinary tendency to gossip mentioned earlier, which arose from the fact that people no longer believed in the concept of greatness, and had lost that feeling of distance — they loved to see everything in naked, intimate proximity. It was an age of flunkeys.

But all this, you remind me, gentle reader, is just a theory, smoke without fire — what is needed is some sort of basis in fact. So we can no longer avoid closer inspection of the raw material of the myth. Indeed, we are obliged to provide one, lest we give the impression that we are guilty of the same petty bourgeois prurience.

So let us dispose of the most delicate question of all.

Marie-Antoinette was married in 1770, but properly became Louis XVI’s wife only in 1777. One morning she told Mme Campan:

“At last I am Queen of France.”

The following year her first child was born, the Madame Royale, who was christened by Rohan. In 1781 came the Dauphin (who died in 1789), and in 1785 the Prince of Normandy, later Louis XVII, the luckless child inmate of the Temple prison whose fate is lost in the shadow of mystery. “If Marie-Antoinette had known the joys of motherhood earlier,” said the excellent Casimir Stryenski, “she would not have taken to seeking a remedy for her idleness and boredom in the pursuit of empty pleasures; she would have had no time to listen to flatterers and self-seeking advisers, and no time to get involved in intrigues. Perhaps then she would have avoided slander, or, at the very least, it would have had no purchase on a life filled with the laughter of children and the tearful joys and pains of child rearing.”

Today it is common knowledge what caused that seven-year delay. Stefan Zweig, in his somewhat coarse psychoanalysis, sees it as the foundation of her entire fate. Louis XVI had been born with a certain physical abnormality, which produced no symptoms but which impeded intercourse. After years of hesitation, Joseph II visited France for a heart-to-heart talk with his brother-in-law, and he at last made up his mind to have the necessary minor operation.

So for seven years Marie-Antoinette was a wife and not a wife. A less delicate nervous system than hers would have found those seven years’ uncertainty a trial. At all events, they do explain a lot: her yearning for pleasure, her capricious behaviour and the strangely erotic atmosphere that grew up around her — the ambience of a woman whom nothing could satisfy.

In seeking consolation in this way, did Marie-Antoinette behave just as any other Frenchwoman in her situation might have? At all events, her contemporaries tended to see a pattern in her many diversions.

First and foremost of those was the person closest to her, her brother-in-law, the Comte d’Artois. Of Louis XV’s three male grandsons only Charles, Comte d’Artois, bore any resemblance to the French kings of old. The future Louis XVI was shy and low-spirited, the Comte de Provence clever, cunning and duplicitous, but Artois was a good-looking, sociable, sunny character, who kept high-born mistresses and ran up appalling levels of debt. Easy-going and sensual, he was a true Bourbon. The melancholy fate in store for him was to become, as Charles X, the very last of the senior Bourbon branch to take the French throne. But the genial young man became an intransigent king. He was the one Bourbon who in his time in exile learnt nothing and forgot nothing, who would have given up the throne rather than make any concession that might diminish his royal status. When, a great many years later, his steadfast supporter Chateaubriand called on the aged ex-King in Prague, he found him just as he had always been: a man who, if he had had his time all over again, would have done exactly what he had done before.

The relationship between the Queen and Artois must have been one of genuine friendship from the start. While Louis XV was still alive, the younger members of the royal family ate together, went everywhere together and entertained one another. Artois even learnt how to rope dance because the Queen admired one particular master of the art. Their fun-loving, pleasure-seeking temperaments brought them close together. She would no doubt have listened eagerly to his revelations about his many amorous experiences, because she was always interested in such stories. Before very long scandal linked their names, and by 1779 an unspeakably obscene poem was going the rounds under the title: Les amours de Charlot et de Toinette.

Speculation also strongly linked Marie-Antoinette and a startlingly handsome young courtier called Édouard Dillon. According to the legend, she once said to him, during a Court ball:

“Monsieur Dillon, just put your hand here a moment, and feel how my heart is beating.”

To which the King replied, in his phlegmatic way:

“Madame … Monsieur Dillon will take your word for that.”

According to some, Marie-Antoinette bestowed her favours on the not-so-very-young Duc de Coigny (he was aged between forty and fifty). Tilly, who was not ill-disposed to the Queen, was certain of it, as was Lord Holland. According to him, Mme Campan, who presents Marie-Antoinette as a model of sexual probity in her memoirs, was less discreet in her younger days, and did not dissuade Talleyrand from acting as a go-between for the Queen and Coigny. But was Talleyrand a man whose word you would always trust?

It would be tedious to cite every such detail concerning the Queen. But in 1792 a leaflet announced itself with the following title: “A price on their heads. Here follows a list of the names of those with whom the Queen has had illicit relations.” The list is a long and varied one. Alongside the aristocrats we also find a guardsman, an official in the Ministry of War and the son of an actor, Guibert. Eventually, the pamphlet becomes bored with its own inventory and summarises it as toutes les tribades de Paris. E de Goncourt calls the copy in his possession a “pamphlet imbécilement enragé”. It names rather more women than men. The more surprising entries include Jeanne de la Motte, Cardinal Rohan, Mme de Marsan (whom the Queen hated more than anyone) and M Campan, that excellent lady’s pious and devout husband.

There is also one self-volunteered entry, the Duc de Lauzun, the greatest Don Juan in an age of Don Juans and a supreme example of the cynical attitudes that prevailed at the end of the century. To explain why he had abandoned his wife, the charming Amélie de Bouflers, he observed: “Well you see, in the end Mme de Lauzun brought me no more than 150,000 livres a year.” “In those words,” wrote Sainte Beuve, “you have the whole vanished Ancien Régime and the complete vindication of the Revolution, which in the end, and considering all the other similar outrages, was justified.” It was Lauzun who, being at breakfast when they arrived (during the Revolution) to take him off to be executed, remarked:

“With your leave, I’ll have another dozen oysters first.”

In his memoirs he claims that the Queen was desperately in love with him. She begged him for a heron’s feather and thereafter wore it ostentatiously in public; she would not allow him to stray from her presence, and on one occasion, when they were alone together, she threw herself on his breast and, in the refined phraseology of the eighteenth century, offered herself to him. But he declined the honour, because he did not wish to let his mistress, the Duchesse de Czartoriska, down, and his manly soul had no desire to play the dubious role of Queen’s favourite. But all the same he allowed her to think that he might nonetheless relent at a later date. In the meantime he went off to the East Indies for a year with the army, and when he returned the Queen kept her distance from him, and the whole court treated him with a derisive coolness.

Lauzun’s memoirs became very influential after the restoration, and Mme Campan protested bitterly against his slanders. The heron’s feather story was true in that he had bullied her into accepting it from him via the Princesse de Guéménée, but not long afterwards Mme Campan was standing in an adjacent room when she heard the Queen pronounce the words: “Go, sir!” Lauzun left the room dumbfounded, and Marie-Antoinette gave orders that he should never be allowed back. This throws considerable doubt on the veracity of his memoirs. Perhaps they were written not by a successful Don Juan but by a miserable hack.

Rather more serious than all this (not inconsiderable) gossip and conjecture hovering in the air, was the story involving Baron Besenval.

Besenval was a Swiss, a member of the Queen’s own inner entourage and the Polignac circle. He was the Naturbursche of the Court — its raw, straight-talking hillbilly, who expressed his opinions in open, unguarded language but with the courtier’s confident belief that he knew just how far he could go.

It happened that Artois and the Prince de Bourbon fell out over some issue, and all the talk at Versailles was that there would be a duel. Marie-Antoinette, who was intensely curious by nature, would peer out through a lorgnette from her bedroom window to see who was walking in the park, and kept asking who had been in the theatre on those evenings when she hadn’t been there, calming down only when reassured that “there hadn’t been so much as a cat”. She was especially curious about the details of the duel and wanted Besenval to explain them. So Campan brought the Baron, in great secrecy, into the upper level of the palace, into a suite of apartments he had never seen before, consisting of an antechamber and a bedroom. The bedroom, in practice, was for the use of the Dame d’Honneur when the Queen was ill. Campan let him in and told him to wait for the Queen. And there, inspired by the location, the grizzle-haired Baron fell to his knees before her and offered her his heart.

“Rise, sir,” she said. “The King shall be ignorant of an offence which would disgrace you for ever.”

And Besenval remained at the Court.

From this story it naturally appears that Besenval was simply another ‘volunteer’, so much so that his name does not even feature in the extremely long list. His behaviour could be put down to the unbounded stupidity and arrogance of the male sex, which was even more in evidence in this licentious age of pampered knights. To drive a final nail into the gentleman’s coffin, Besenval, though an intelligent man and one who knew the Queen well, actually believed that, in spite of his grey hairs, she had invited him into the little room with amorous intent.

We get something of the measure of all this unfounded gossip if we can believe, with the Duc de Ligne, that the basis of the slander was “the Queen’s coquettishness, with which she hoped to please everyone”, and that “the Queen’s supposed flirtatiousness was simply an extreme form of amiability”. But even if we also accept the noble, elevated portrait painted by Mme Campan and the nineteenth-century writings that followed her, there remains absolutely no doubt of her feelings for Axel Fersen.

That love, far from destroying the overall charm of Mme Campan’s idealised portrait, actually completes and enhances it — the noble passion of a noble mind, the one serious, deep and truly romantic attachment in an age of coldly elegant and frivolous love games.

In the middle of the last century, suitably bowdlerised to fit the prudishness and discretion of the times, Marie-Antoinette’s letters to Fersen were published. “That publication,” says Stefan Zweig, “totally changed the received image of her as a thoughtless woman. A profoundly dramatic story was laid bare, a story of danger and power played out half in the royal court, half in the shadow of the scaffold — like one of those tear-jerking novels whose plots are so improbable that they can occur only in real life — two people, one of them the Queen of France, the other a minor Scandinavian nobleman, united in passionate love yet compelled by duty and prudence to conceal their secret in the depths, to be separated over and over again, forever yearning for one another across the terrible gulf between their two worlds. And in the background of this tale of two individual fates, a world collapsing, a time of apocalypse …”

The most significant expressions of this great love were enacted only after the main event in our story was over, when the Queen found herself completely isolated following the necklace trial. But its origins went back to a time long before it, and Rohan must have known about them.

Axel Fersen was a nineteen-year-old Swedish count who arrived in Paris in 1774 while on a grand tour of Europe. The Dauphine met him at a ball, in which they were both masked, and the young man discovered only later who it was that he had spoken with at such length. When he returned to Paris in 1778 she greeted him like an old acquaintance. The young man had grown into the most beautiful person in all Europe: tall, slender, blond — like the youthful hero of a Nordic saga. Both outwardly and inwardly he was worlds apart from the likes of Lauzun, the roués, the sort of men most Frenchwomen idolised. Fersen was both shy and proud, pure of soul, reticent and discreet; a sensitive and yet order-loving northerner — almost aridly so. The efforts of the Abbé Vermond and the French Court to turn Marie-Antoinette into a Frenchwoman had not succeeded; instead, the mysterious workings of racial type led this blonde Germanic woman to the fair-haired Nordic man, with his Northern richness of feeling and spiritual purity. While the French courtiers around them seemed to have stepped from the pages of Les liaisons dangereuses, these two inhabited the world of the young Werther.

Although they both concealed their feelings with true northern modesty, perhaps even from each other, the gaze of the Court was always on them. The Swedish ambassador Creutz took a certain fatherly pride in telling King Gustav III of his young compatriot’s success.

A stanza of Verlaine’s comes to mind — it is from the Fêtes galantes, which captures the whimsical mood of the eighteenth century in its most exquisite form:

Ce fut le temps sous de clairs ciels,

(Vous en souvenez-vous, Madame?)

Des baisers superficiels

Et des sentiments à fleur d’âme.

It was a time of cloudless skies,

(My lady, do you recall?)

Of kisses that brushed the surface

And feelings that shook the soul.

And when they could no longer deny what they meant to each other, the wise and sober Fersen thought it better to put an ocean between the two of them, and went off to fight for freedom, as Lafayette’s aide-de-camp in America.

But in 1783 he was back.

Did Rohan know of the love that the Queen felt for the Nordic Count? Perhaps not. Fersen was not French. He did not brag about his conquest, and, as a wealthy, independent foreigner, he wanted nothing from her. He was seldom at Court. Probably they met in secret in Le Petit Trianon, or the rustic village. But if Rohan did know about it, it was all the more French of him not to have understood it. He would not have been capable of grasping that, given the nature of their relationship, he could not possibly draw hope from it that the Queen, having given her love to one man, would then bestow it on another; but that, on the contrary, such a love would be truly moral — and the full force of the marriage vow, as well as the Queen’s sense of honour, would set a wide gulf between her and any man who was not Axel Fersen.

So far we have spoken of an ‘external morality’; there is also the ‘inner’ morality that Rohan would have been able to understand, and which may well have supported him in his belief.

Appearances certainly suggest that Marie-Antoinette shared the frivolous tastes of her age, including its love of refined and not-so-refined scandal. The eighteenth century had discovered Pompeii and made much use of the motifs of Pompeian art. This was not a chance thing — since the time of Pompeii there had been no period in European culture in which the erotic played such a central role as in the rococo. The novels, plays and paintings of the period are often, by our notions, quite shocking, especially the plays, such as those by Charles Collé, which were performed in the private theatres of the aristocratic houses for the delectation of the noble ladies. It is even possible that Marie-Antoinette acted in these herself. Certainly the conversation in her little circle would not have differed from that in the other salons. People quickly realised that they could say whatever they liked in front of the Queen, and that it delighted her when they did. And perhaps it was no secret to Rohan how much she loved reading dubious literature. In her boudoir were the beautifully bound adventures of Les amours du Chevalier Faublas and other such works, which in the prudish centuries that followed could not even be mentioned And perhaps he also knew that the beautifully-bound prayer book she was so busy reading at Mass contained nothing more than a titillating novel.

Above all, people in the eighteenth century thought it rather odd, even vulgar, for married people actually to love each other. Married love had not yet become associated with bourgeois values but with the lower orders. Should it occur in ‘good’ society, it would be something to hide. Husbands connived at their wives’ affairs. In aristocratic circles, according to Mornet, these ‘open marriages’ were the necessary compromise between arrangements forced on young women and the need to attend to the ‘words of the heart’.

There is a well-known story of the Count who opened the door to his wife’s room and discovered her in a surprising situation, with a man.

“For God’s sake, Madam!” he cried. “How could you be so thoughtless, as to leave your door unlocked! … Imagine if anyone other than myself came in!”

Chamfort’s anecdotes show a constant preoccupation with the extent to which jealousy had fallen out of fashion. Someone says to a jealous husband:

“You are jealous? You are very conceited, sir. N’est pas cocu qui veut—it is not enough to want to be cuckolded — you have to know how to do it. You need to understand the running of a great house, and be very polite and kind. Who would want to cuckold the sort of person you are at the moment?”

“What a pity that people nowadays have so little respect for cuckolded husbands,” says another of his examples. “It used to be an honourable title, now it’s just a game — it means nothing.”

“One day,” Chamfort adds, “Monsieur de Nesle, whose wife was the mistress of the Duc de Soubise, said to her in his presence:

“‘Madame, I hear that you’ve been having an affair with your wig-maker. That sort of thing is extremely bad form.’

“And with the air of a man who has done the right thing, he left the room and Soubise slapped her face.”

Another husband said to his wife:

“Madame, I realise that this man has his claims on you, and I have no wish to stop whatever it is that he does with you when I am not here, but I cannot tolerate his demeaning you in my presence. It’s an insult to me.”

Another man knew that his wife was having affairs left, right and centre, and for that reason exercised his conjugal rights from time to time. One day the lady repelled him with some violence:

“I can’t, now. I love Monsieur X.”

“What’s this? I thought you loved Messieurs Y and Z?”

“That was just a phase. This is true passion.”

“Ah, that’s different,” the husband said, and turned away.

Marmontel, one of the most popular writers of the time, in one of his novellas—Heartwarming Legends—makes the following remark:

“Freedom is the soul of love. Without freedom the object of one’s choice is no better than a husband.” (That is to say, nothing.)

Marmontel also writes:

“You should realise, my friend, that when women transfer their affections elsewhere, they do so out of delicacy and the desire for novelty.”

Was the young Queen, the most fashionable woman in France, really any different from the rest of her kind? And would she at some point transfer her affections “out of delicacy and the desire for novelty” to Prince Louis de Rohan? Qui vivra, verra—What will be will be — he told himself.