Marie Antoinette Read online

  At nine o’clock there was the official marriage supper lasting several hours; this was a testing occasion physically for Count Khevenhüller who had to stand throughout, behind the chair of the Emperor. Nor were the galas over yet. Yet another took place on the following night, at which ambassadors and others were permitted to kiss the hand of she who could now be officially addressed as “Madame la Dauphine.” It was time for Durfort to take his leave; he had been displaced by the Baron de Breteuil—a character whom we shall meet again in the story of Marie Antoinette. Since Durfort already possessed a pair of imperial portraits for his good offices in the marriage of Amalia to Don Ferdinand of Parma, he was allowed to receive a diamond ring and a diamond-decorated snuffbox instead.

  But the main activity of the day for the Empress and her newly married daughter was letter-writing. First of all the Dauphine had to address Louis XV personally, according to the royal convention, as “Monsieur mon frère et tres chèr grand-père,” for royals were all technically brothers and sisters to each other; thus Maria Teresa addressed Louis XV quite simply as “Monsieur mon frère.” The Dauphine told the French King how long it was since she had first wished to communicate to him the affection she felt for him; she was now taking the first opportunity to do so. The Dauphine was delighted that, thanks to the ceremony yesterday, she now “belongs to Your Majesty” (once again the language of possession). The French King may be sure that she will spend her whole life trying to please him and deserve his confidence. “All the same,” writes the Dauphine, in language, like the letter itself, traceable to Maria Teresa, “I feel my age and inexperience may often need his indulgence.” She craves it in advance, and that of “Monsieur le Dauphin” too, as of the whole family into which she now has the happiness to pass. The signature of the new Dauphine is still the familiar one of her childhood: “Antoine.”33

  It is no surprise to find that the Empress’s postscript, addressed to “my brother,” sounds exactly the same note. She writes of her own unhappiness in losing such a beloved child, and how her entire consolation lies in the fact that she was confiding her to “the best and tenderest of fathers.” She hopes that the French King will want to direct her daughter’s future course of behaviour. “Her intentions are excellent, but given her age, I pray you to exercise indulgence for any careless mistake . . . I recommend her once again as the most tender pledge which exists so happily between our States and our Houses.”34

  The departure of the Dauphine was scheduled for nine o’clock the following morning, 21 April. The early hour was deliberate. Whatever the bride’s glittering future, these partings were not, and could hardly expect to be, happy occasions. Count Khevenhüller reported in his diary that it was hoped to avoid the distress that had attended the farewells of the Archduchesses Maria Carolina and Amalia. In April 1768, Maria Carolina had sprung out of the coach at the last moment to give her adored Antoine a series of passionate, tearful embraces. On this cold spring morning it was the Empress who clasped her daughter to her again and again. “Farewell, my dearest child, a great distance will separate us . . . Do so much good to the French people that they can say that I have sent them an angel.” Then she broke down and wept. Joseph Weber, with his mother the wet-nurse, was allowed to watch the cortège depart. He always remembered how Madame Antoine, unable to control her own sobs, craned her neck out of the windows again and again, to catch a last sight of her home.35

  As the procession of fifty-seven carriages passed by Schönbrunn at the beginning of the long road to France, the postilions blew their horns. They were saluting the past of the Archduchess and the future of the Dauphine.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FRANCE’S HAPPINESS

  Marie Antoinette: “I shall never forget that you are responsible for my happiness!”

  Choiseul: “And that of France.”

  EXCHANGE IN THE FOREST NEAR COMPIèGNE, 13 MAY 1770

  It was to be two and a half weeks of travelling before the Dauphine was officially handed over to France.1 Marie Antoinette would in effect cross the whole of central Europe in her passage from Vienna to Versailles. She spent a great deal of this time cooped up in her velvet-and-gold carriage; sometimes the day’s journey would last over nine hours. Essentially she was a royal package, sealed with the double-headed eagle of the Habsburgs and the fleur-de-lys of the Bourbons.

  The first overnight stop was at the great baroque monastery of Melk. Here the Dauphine was received by her brother Joseph, and some convent pupils performed an opera. Marie Antoinette was reported as looking bored; but given the gruelling schedule to which she had recently been exposed, it is more likely that she was totally exhausted. These partings—having left her mother, she would part from her brother the next morning—were in their very nature distressing, despite Khevenhüller’s precautions. In this, she was not unusual. Maria Carolina had become extremely upset at the last Austrian outpost on her journey south. Louis XV, giving away his beloved daughter Madame Infante in 1748, went a short way with her, then hugged her as she wept. Finally the King had the courage to say to her coachman, “To Madrid,” and leaping into his own carriage, cried, “To Versailles.” Marie Antoinette in her turn was said to have burst into tears as she crossed the border of her mother’s dominions, exclaiming that she was frightened she would never see the Empress again.2

  The nature of her reception at the various towns along the route was, however, enthusiastic, if repetitious. Her august birth was naturally emphasized—this was the daughter of that nonpareil Maria Teresa—but otherwise every kind of goddess of youth and beauty was invoked: Hebe, Flora, Venus, and so forth and so on. Thus the Dauphine in her stately caravan, lauded for her virtues and those of her family, finally reached Munich on 26 April. Here she was entertained by the Elector of Bavaria, Maximilian Joseph, brother of the late Empress Josepha and a cousin on her mother’s side. In the agreeable surroundings of the Nymphenburg Palace, whose gardens were second only to those of Versailles, and with the Amalienburg Pavilion as her personal lodging, the Dauphine was allowed a day of rest. Then it was on to Augsburg, where master craftsmen of the town had specially decorated her apartments, and where she was made an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts, before heading for Günzburg and another two-day stopover, this time with her father’s sister, Princess Charlotte of Lorraine.3

  From Marie Antoinette’s point of view, despite all the acclamations en route of which Prince Starhemberg was keeping Versailles fully informed, it was pleasant to be greeted by one of the familiar figures of her childhood. This emphasis on Lorrainer family ties as Marie Antoinette headed towards Versailles was deliberate. As the two Princesses prayed together at the Lorrainer chapel at Königinbild, the point was being made that Lorrainer claims and connections were not going to be overlooked. The new Dauphine was “de Lorraine” as well as “d’Autriche.”

  After that it was on towards Ulm and then Freiberg, which was reached on 4 May. Here, over two days, the celebrations of the Dauphine’s arrival were notably elaborate, having been plotted well in advance, with all the ins and outs of city politics. It was in the evening of 6 May when, having passed through the Black Forest, the Dauphine reached the abbey at Schüttern where she was to spend her last night on German soil before the handover.

  This was also the night on which Marie Antoinette encountered, formally, the first of the French court officials who were intended to guide her inexperienced footsteps at Versailles. He came in the person of the Comte de Noailles, Ambassador Extraordinary of Louis XV. A man in his fifties, the Comte was a member of that eponymous family that was “the most profitably provided with places and favours at court.” In the words of a knowledgeable observer, the Marquis de Bombelles, the family had reached “the crest of grandeur” by intriguing skilfully.*174 There was certainly an extensive network of them, in successive generations, available to do so. The Comte’s elder brother, the Duc de Noailles, had two adult sons, the Duc d’Ayen and the Marquis de Noailles. The Comte’s o
wn sons, of whom the elder was part of the welcoming delegation, added to the total. Most importantly of all, the Comtesse de Noailles, whom Marie Antoinette would meet the following day, was to be in overall charge as her Mistress of the Household (Dame d’Honneur).

  As a couple, the Comte and Comtesse de Noailles were upright and proud of their unusual marital fidelity. It was a virtue for which they were commended by Louis XV; for, like many roués, he respected what he could not practise. Unfortunately they were also rigid and severe in less admirable ways, obsessed with etiquette and rules for rules’ sake. As a member of Marie Antoinette’s household pointed out, the desiccated Comtesse de Noailles had little of that natural warmth that would induce young people to pay attention to her good advice.*185 As for the Comte de Noailles, he insisted on his right not only to fetch the Dauphine but also to distribute the presents of money and jewels—over 400,000 livres’ worth—that were by tradition given to her accompanying Austrian suite before their return to their own country.

  Immediately there was a hitch, one of etiquette. The Comte de Noailles demanded a last-minute change in the language of the document of the handover. The phrase “Their Imperial Majesties having wanted [the marriage]” could be conceived as offensive to Louis XV, suggesting that he had been in some way manipulated by Austria. It had to be altered to “Their Imperial Majesties having been willing to accede to the King’s wish”: more diplomatically virile. Prince Starhemberg held out in turn for a dais in the handover salon. In the end there were to be two documents, as with the marriage contract. First, France signed before Austria and the order of signatures was then reversed.7

  It was in keeping with this impartiality, so earnestly maintained, that the handover was to take place on an island in the middle of the Rhine, near Kehl. Handovers were never easy to arrange. Islands were the correct spot for actual brides; Maria Josepha of Saxony, the previous Dauphine, had been handed over on this same island twenty-three years earlier. So when Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, aged ten, was brought to the French court as the mere fiancée of Louis XIV’s heir, it was decided after much cogitation to use a hump-backed bridge on a steep slope. A coach was manoeuvred so that its back wheels were in Savoy, its horses and front wheels in France; the doors opened on to neutral territory exactly in the centre of the bridge.8

  The problem with the island near Kehl was that its building had fallen down since the days of Maria Josepha; something wooden had to be hastily put together for this two-way ceremony. Wealthy citizens of Strasbourg were pressed into service to lend furniture and tapestries while the Lutheran University provided a suitable dais. Some of these hastily assembled tapestries struck an odd note; no official seems to have noticed that one series depicted the story of Jason and Medea, the rejected mother who slew her own children. But a young man named Goethe, then studying law at Strasbourg, was deeply shocked: “What! At the moment when the young princess is about to step on the soil of her future husband’s country, there is placed before her eyes a picture of the most horrible marriage that can be imagined!”9 To most of the spectators, however, the ritual details of the occasion were far more important.

  Immediately after the handover, Marie Antoinette would say goodbye to her Austrian attendants, none of whom, except Prince Starhemberg, were to travel on to Versailles. Her farewells were punctuated with tears, protestations of affection and messages to her family and friends at home. Even her beloved pug Mops was not allowed to accompany her into France. This might seem hard, except that once the ritual ceremony of de-Austrification was over, Count Mercy d’Argenteau, the Austrian ambassador, found himself negotiating for the arrival of the pug from Vienna.10 With others, all equally ill trained and “dirty,” Mops was soon distracting the Dauphine from life’s serious purposes—at least in Mercy’s opinion.

  Similarly, the ritual by which the Dauphine was stripped of her magnificent Austrian wedding clothes, even down to her stockings and underwear, in order to don French-made garments, was not quite as harsh and humiliating as it sounds. It was of course a symbolic act of possession; in the words of Madame Campan in her memoirs: “that [the bride] might retain nothing belonging to a foreign court (an etiquette always observed on such an occasion).” But an eighteenth-century princess, even one raised in a comparatively informal court, had little of the modern concept of personal privacy where dressing, undressing and the performing of intimate functions were concerned. Life at Versailles would be even more public. You did not have to be the Francophile who found the Dauphine “a thousand times more charming” in her new attire, to realize that parting from her faithful suite was a good deal more painful for Marie Antoinette than the formal divestment.11 She had, after all, been treated as a doll, to be dressed up in this and that at the adults’ whim since childhood; this was just one more example of that process.*19

  The fate of the rich Austrian bridal clothes, incidentally, was equally symbolic, representing in this case the way things worked at Versailles. Marie Antoinette’s senior attendants, the Dames du Palais, seized them as perquisites of office. A few years later, Charles Emmanuel III of Savoy, negotiating the marriage of his granddaughter Josephine to the Dauphin’s brother, was suitably alarmed to hear about this plundering of Marie Antoinette’s trousseau.

  A rumble of thunder from the nearby Black Forest could be heard during the actual ceremony. Otherwise it went more or less according to the much-debated plan. There were two entrances to the hastily erected building, and two exactly matching rooms, one for the Austrians, one for the French. Marie Antoinette was led from the Austrian room into the salon of the handover by Prince Starhemberg. Here a table covered in red velvet represented the boundary between the two countries. On the other side of it she found the Comte de Noailles, with two aides, awaiting her. A human touch was provided by his son, the eighteen-year-old Prince de Poix, who could not resist peeking through the keyhole from the French side to try to get an advance view of his future Queen. Speeches were made and the deed was done.

  It was time for the Dauphine to meet her French attendants. Here there was a slight hiccup which involved, once again, etiquette and the Noailles family. The Comte de Noailles was anxious that his wife should be handed into the main salon by a gentleman-in-waiting, which he maintained was her right, as opposed to merely walking into it. In order to achieve this, it was arranged that the salon door on the French side should be left slightly ajar, so that it could be nudged open by her heavy flowing skirts at the appropriate moment. Unfortunately this resulted in the door opening too soon . . . Once dignity was recovered, an elaborate quadrille of presentations took place. First of all, the Comte presented the Comtesse to her new mistress. In an impulsive gesture that would turn out to be characteristic of her approach to her new French “family,” Marie Antoinette flung herself into the Comtesse’s arms.13

  This, however, was not the way of Versailles. The Comtesse was quick to establish the right of her husband to a ceremonial embrace. This was based on his additional rank as a Grandee of Spain, rather than as a French count. (As Grandees of Spain, people managed to climb up higher on the ladder of etiquette than otherwise entitled, which was the aim of more or less every courtier at Versailles.) So having just been presented by her husband, the Comtesse now re-presented him back again, for his due embrace.14

  After that the gentlemen of the Dauphine’s household were presented. Then the Comtesse presented the ladies, who had originally attended Queen Maria Lesczinska, who had died two years previously in her late sixties. There was the Duchesse de Villars as her Mistress of the Robes (Dame d’Atour) and among the Dames du Palais the Marquise de Duras, who was yet another Noailles, the Duchesse de Picquigny and the Comtesse de Mailly.

  Not all the ladies-in-waiting, however, were as formidable as the Comtesse de Noailles, who said herself that she saw her role as that of a governess to a young woman as much as an attendant to a Dauphine, thus reincarnating that feared figure in Marie Antoinette’s life, the critical older woman. Although the
Duchesse de Duras, as she became, tended to alarm the Dauphine with her superior intelligence, the Comtesse de Mailly was sweet-natured as well as wise, and would inspire great affection in her young mistress. As for the Duchesse de Picquigny, bold and amusing, her appointment was certainly due to her rank rather than her virtues, since she had a disreputable private life; the appointment raised some eyebrows including those of the Austrian ambassador.

  Nevertheless, for better or for worse, the Dauphine was now officially French. These ladies, all chosen by the King without consultation for a variety of reasons to do with public policy and private intrigue, together with her various Ladies of the Bedchamber and her lesser waiting-women, were to be the companions of her waking hours, until and unless Marie Antoinette took steps to make alternative arrangements.

  Stratx1ourg, conscious of its importance as the first French city to hail the Dauphine, put on a brave show. It was all witnessed by the sixteen-year-old Henriette de Waldner, from an old Austrian family, who as Baronne d’Oberkirch would write a percipient memoir of her varied life. She watched the picturesque arrival of the Dauphine, surrounded by children dressed up as shepherds and shepherdesses, offering her baskets of flowers. Meanwhile the daughters of the bourgeoisie, in their best clothes, strewed further flowers in her path. Marie Antoinette gathered them up “as the goddess Flora might herself have done.” In the evening the entire city was illuminated, the cathedral from top to bottom looking like “one single light.”15

  “Oh, if I lived a hundred years, I would not forget this day, these celebrations, the cries of joy issuing from a people drunk with happiness,” wrote the Baronne d’Oberkirch at a time when those innocent days of Marie Antoinette’s French welcome were a mere memory. Henriette was present when the public orator began to address the Dauphine in German and she stopped him. “Don’t speak to me in German,” she said firmly. “From now on I want to hear no other language but French.” The fact that Marie Antoinette spoke these engaging words with a slight accent made them especially touching.