The English-speaking world long ago accepted a conventional view of
Marie Antoinette. The eloquence of Edmund Burke in one brilliant
passage has fixed, probably for all time, an enduring picture of this
unhappy queen.
When we speak or think of her we speak and think first of all of a
dazzling and beautiful woman surrounded by the chivalry of France and
gleaming like a star in the most splendid court of Europe. And then
there comes to us the reverse of the picture. We see her despised,
insulted, and made the butt of brutal men and still more fiendish
women; until at last the hideous tumbrel conveys her to the guillotine,
where her head is severed from her body and her corpse is cast down
into a bloody pool.
In these two pictures our emotions are played upon in turn--admiration,
reverence, devotion, and then pity, indignation, and the shudderings of
horror.
Probably in our own country and in England this will remain the
historic Marie Antoinette. Whatever the impartial historian may write,
he can never induce the people at large to understand that this queen
was far from queenly, that the popular idea of her is almost wholly
false, and that both in her domestic life and as the greatest lady in
France she did much to bring on the terrors of that revolution which
swept her to the guillotine.
In the first place, it is mere fiction that represents Maria Antoinette
as having been physically beautiful. The painters and engravers have so
idealized her face as in most cases to have produced a purely imaginary
portrait.
She was born in Vienna, in 1755, the daughter of the Emperor Francis
and of that warrior-queen, Maria Theresa. She was a very German-looking
child. Lady Jackson describes her as having a long, thin face, small,
pig-like eyes, a pinched-up mouth, with the heavy Hapsburg lip, and
with a somewhat misshapen form, so that for years she had to be
bandaged tightly to give her a more natural figure.
At fourteen, when she was betrothed to the heir to the French throne,
she was a dumpy, mean-looking little creature, with no distinction
whatever, and with only her bright golden hair to make amends for her
many blemishes. At fifteen she was married and joined the Dauphin in
French territory.
We must recall for a moment the conditions which prevailed in France.
King Louis XV. was nearing his end. He was a man of the most shameless
life; yet he had concealed or gilded his infamies by an external
dignity and magnificence which, were very pleasing to his people. The
French, liked to think that their king was the most splendid monarch
and the greatest gentleman in Europe. The courtiers about him might be
vile beneath the surface, yet they were compelled to deport themselves
with the form and the etiquette that had become traditional in France.
They might be panders, or stock-jobbers, or sellers of political
offices; yet they must none the less have wit and grace and outward
nobility of manner.
There was also a tradition regarding the French queen. However loose in
character the other women of the court might be, she alone, like
Caesar's wife, must remain above suspicion. She must be purer than the
pure. No breath, of scandal must reach her or be directed against her.
In this way the French court, even under so dissolute a monarch as
Louis XV., maintained its hold upon the loyalty of the people. Crowds
came every morning to view the king in his bed before he arose; the
same crowds watched him as he was dressed by the gentlemen of the
bedchamber, and as he breakfasted and went through all the functions
which are usually private. The King of France must be a great actor. He
must appear to his people as in reality a king-stately, dignified, and
beyond all other human beings in his remarkable presence.
When the Dauphin and Marie Antoinette came to the French court King
Louis XV. kept up in the case the same semblance of austerity. He
forbade these children to have their sleeping-apartments together. He
tried to teach them that if they were to govern as well as to reign
they must conform to the rigid etiquette of Paris and Versailles.
It proved a difficult task, however. The little German princess had no
natural dignity, though she came from a court where the very strictest
imperial discipline prevailed. Marie Antoinette found that she could
have her own way in many things, and she chose to enjoy life without
regard to ceremony. Her escapades at first would have been thought mild
enough had she not been a "daughter of France"; but they served to
shock the old French king, and likewise, perhaps even more, her own
imperial mother, Maria Theresa.
When a report of the young girl's conduct was brought to her the
empress was at first mute with indignation. Then she cried out:
"Can this girl be a child of mine? She surely must be a changeling!"
The Austrian ambassador to France was instructed to warn the Dauphiness
to be more discreet.
"Tell her," said Maria Theresa, "that she will lose her throne, and
even her life, unless she shows more prudence."
But advice and remonstrance were of no avail. Perhaps they might have
been had her husband possessed a stronger character; but the young
Louis was little more fitted to be a king than was his wife to be a
queen. Dull of perception and indifferent to affairs of state, he had
only two interests that absorbed him. One was the love of hunting, and
the other was his desire to shut himself up in a sort of blacksmith
shop, where he could hammer away at the anvil, blow the bellows, and
manufacture small trifles of mechanical inventions. From this smudgy
den he would emerge, sooty and greasy, an object of distaste to his
frivolous princess, with her foamy laces and perfumes and pervasive
daintiness.
It was hinted in many quarters, and it has been many times repeated,
that Louis was lacking in virility. Certainly he had no interest in the
society of women and was wholly continent. But this charge of physical
incapacity seems to have had no real foundation. It had been made
against some of his predecessors. It was afterward hurled at Napoleon
the Great, and also Napoleon the Little. In France, unless a royal
personage was openly licentious, he was almost sure to be jeered at by
the people as a weakling.
And so poor Louis XVI., as he came to be, was treated with a mixture of
pity and contempt because he loved to hammer and mend locks in his
smithy or shoot game when he might have been caressing ladies who would
have been proud to have him choose them out.
On the other hand, because of this opinion regarding Louis, people were
the more suspicious of Marie Antoinette. Some of them, in coarse
language, criticized her assumed infidelities; others, with a polite
sneer, affected to defend her. But the result of it all was dangerous
to both, especially as France was already verging toward the deluge
which Louis XV. had cynically predicted would follow after him.
In fact, the end came sooner than any one had guessed. Louis XV., who
had become hopelessly and helplessly infatuated with the low-born
Jeanne du Barry, was stricken down with smallpox of the most virulent
type. For many days he lay in his gorgeous bed. Courtiers crowded his
sick-room and the adjacent hall, longing for the moment when the breath
would leave his body. He had lived an evil life, and he was to die a
loathsome death; yet he had borne himself before men as a stately
monarch. Though his people had suffered in a thousand ways from his
misgovernment, he was still Louis the Well Beloved, and they blamed his
ministers of state for all the shocking wrongs that France had felt.
The abler men, and some of the leaders of the people, however, looked
forward to the accession of Louis XVI. He at least was frugal in his
habits and almost plebeian in his tastes, and seemed to be one who
would reduce the enormous taxes that had been levied upon France.
The moment came when the Well Beloved died. His death-room was fetid
with disease, and even the long corridors of the palace reeked with
infection, while the motley mob of men and women, clad in silks and
satins and glittering with jewels, hurried from the spot to pay their
homage to the new Louis, who was spoken of as "the Desired." The body
of the late monarch was hastily thrown into a mass of quick-lime, and
was driven away in a humble wagon, without guards and with no salute,
save from a single veteran, who remembered the glories of Fontenoy and
discharged his musket as the royal corpse was carried through the
palace gates.
This was a critical moment in the history of France; but we have to
consider it only as a critical moment in the history of Marie
Antoinette. She was now queen. She had it in her power to restore to
the French court its old-time grandeur, and, so far as the queen was
concerned, its purity. Above all, being a foreigner, she should have
kept herself free from reproach and above every shadow of suspicion.
But here again the indifference of the king undoubtedly played a
strange part in her life. Had he borne himself as her lord and master
she might have respected him. Had he shown her the affection of a
husband she might have loved him. But he was neither imposing, nor, on
the other hand, was he alluring. She wrote very frankly about him in a
letter to the Count Orsini:
My tastes are not the same as those of the king, who cares only for
hunting and blacksmith work. You will admit that I should not show to
advantage in a forge. I could not appear there as Vulcan, and the part
of Venus might displease him even more than my tastes.
Thus on the one side is a woman in the first bloom of youth, ardent,
eager--and neglected. On the other side is her husband, whose
sluggishness may be judged by quoting from a diary which he kept during
the month in which he was married. Here is a part of it:
Sunday, 13--Left Versailles. Supper and slept at Compignee, at the
house of M. de Saint-Florentin.
Monday, 14--Interview with Mme. la Dauphine.
Tuesday, 15--Supped at La Muette. Slept at Versailles.
Wednesday, 16--My marriage. Apartment in the gallery. Royal banquet in
the Salle d'Opera.