Feelings in Germany and France on the Subject of the Marriage.--Letter of
Maria Teresa to the Dauphin--Characters of the Different Members of the
Royal Family.--Difficulties which beset Marie Antoinette.--Maria Teresa's
Letter of Advice.--The Comte de Mercy is sent as Embassador to France
to act as the Adviser of the Dauphiness.--The Princesse de Lorraine at
the State Ball.--A Great Disaster takes place at the Fire-works in Paris.
--The Peasant at Fontainebleau.--Marie Antoinette pleases the King.--
Description of her Personal Appearance.--Mercy's Report of the Impression
she made on her First Arrival.
The marriage which was thus accomplished was regarded with unmodified
pleasure by the family of the bride, and with almost equal satisfaction by
the French king. In spite of the public rejoicings in both countries with
which it was accompanied, it can not be said to have been equally
acceptable to the majority of the people of either nation. There was still
a strong anti-French party at Vienna,[1] and (a circumstance of far
greater influence on the fortunes of the young couple) there was a strong
anti-Austrian party in France, which was not without its supporters even
in the king's palace. That the marriage should have been so earnestly
desired at the imperial court is a strange instance of the extent to which
political motives overpowered every other consideration in the mind of the
great Empress-queen, for she was not ignorant of the real character of the
French court, of the degree in which it was divided by factions, of the
base and unworthy intrigues which were its sole business, and of the
sagacity and address which were requisite for any one who would steer his
way with safety and honor through its complicated mazes.
Judgment and prudence were not the qualities most naturally to be expected
in a young princess not yet fifteen years old. The best prospect which
Marie Antoinette had of surmounting the numerous and varied difficulties
which beset her lay in the affection which she speedily conceived for her
husband, and in the sincerity, we can hardly say warmth, with which he
returned her love. Maria Teresa had bespoken his tenderness for her in a
letter which she wrote to him on the day on which her daughter left
Vienna, and which has often been quoted as a composition worthy of her
alike as a mother and as a Christian sovereign; and as admirably
calculated to impress the heart of her new son-in-law by claiming his
attachment for his bride, on the ground of the pains which she had taken
to make her worthy of her fortune.
"Your bride, my dear dauphin, has just left me. I do hope that she will
cause your happiness. I have brought her up with the design that she
should do so, because I have for some time forseen that she would share
your destiny.
"I have inspired her with an eager desire to do her duty to you, with a
tender attachment to your person, with a resolution to be attentive to
think and do every thing which may please you. I have also been most
careful to enjoin her a tender devotion toward the Master of all
Sovereigns, being thoroughly persuaded that we are but badly providing for
the welfare of the nations which are intrusted to us when we fail in our
duty to Him who breaks sceptres and overthrows thrones according to his
pleasure.
"I say, then, to you, my dear dauphin, as I say to my daughter: 'Cultivate
your duties toward God. Seek to cause the happiness of the people over
whom you will reign (it will be too soon, come when it may). Love the
king, your grandfather; be humane like him; be always accessible to the
unfortunate. If you behave in this manner, it is impossible that happiness
can fail to be your lot.' My daughter will love you, I am certain, because
I know her. But the more that I answer to you for her affection, and for
her anxiety to please you, the more earnestly do I entreat you to vow to
her the most sincere attachment.
"Farewell, my dear dauphin. May you be happy. I am bathed in tears.[2]"
The dauphin did not falsify the hopes thus expressed by the Empress-queen.
But his was not the character to afford his wife either the advice or
support which she needed, while, strange to say, he was the only member of
the royal family to whom she could look for either. The king was not only
utterly worthless and shameless, but weak and irresolute in the most
ordinary matters. Even when in the flower and vigor of his age, he had
never been able to summon courage to give verbal orders or reproofs to his
own children,[3] but had intimated his pleasure or displeasure by letters.
He had been gradually falling lower and lower, both in his own vices and
in the estimation of the world; and was now, still more than when Lord
Chesterfield first drew his picture,[4] both hated and despised. The
dauphin's brothers, for such mere boys, were singularly selfish and
unamiable; and the only female relations of her husband, his aunts, to
whom, as such, it would have been natural that a young foreigner should
look for friendship and advice, were not only narrow-minded, intriguing,
and malicious, but were predisposed to regard her with jealousy as likely
to interfere with the influence which they had hoped to exert over their
nephew when he should become their sovereign.
Marie Antoinette had, therefore, difficulties and enemies to contend with
from the very first commencement of her residence in France. And many even
of her own virtues were unfavorable to her chances of happiness,
calculated as they were to lay her at the mercy of her ill-wishers, and to
deprive her of some of the defenses which might have been found in a
different temperament. Full of health and spirits, she was naturally eager
in the pursuit of enjoyment, and anxious to please every one, from feeling
nothing but kindness toward every one; she was frank, open, and sincere;
and, being perfectly guileless herself, she was, as through her whole life
she continued to be, entirely unsuspicious of unfriendliness, much more of
treachery in others. Her affability and condescension combined with this
trustful disposition to make her too often the tool of designing and
grasping courtiers, who sought to gain their own ends at her expense, and
who presumed on her good-nature and inexperience to make requests which,
as they well knew, should never have been made, but which they also
reckoned that she would be unwilling to refuse.
But lest this general amiability and desire to give pleasure to those
around her might seem to impart a prevailing tinge of weakness to her
character, it is fair to add that she united to these softer feelings,
robuster virtues calculated to deserve and to win universal admiration;
though some of them, never having yet been called forth by circumstances,
were for a long time unsuspected by the world at large. She had pride--
pride of birth, pride of rank--though never did that feeling show itself
more nobly or more beneficially. It never led her to think herself above
the very meanest of her subjects. It never made her indifferent to the
interests, to the joys or sorrows, of a single individual. The idea with
which it inspired her was, that a princess of her race was never to commit
an unworthy act, was never to fail in purity of virtue, in truth, in
courage; that she was to be careful to set an example of these virtues to
those who would naturally look up to her; and that she herself was to keep
constantly in her mind the example of her illustrious mother, and never,
by act, or word, or thought, to discredit her mother's name. And as she
thus regarded courage as her birthright, so she possessed it in abundance
and in variety. She had courage to plan, and courage to act; courage to
resolve, and courage to adhere to the resolution once deliberately formed;
and, above all, courage to endure and to suffer, and, in the very
extremity of misery, to animate and support others less royally endowed.
Such, then, as she was, with both her manifest and her latent
excellencies, as well as with those more mixed qualities which had some
defects mingled with their sweetness, Marie Antoinette, at the age of
fourteen years and a half, was thrown into a world wholly new to her, to
guide herself so far by her own discretion that there was no one who had
both judgment and authority to control her in her line of conduct or in
any single action. She had, indeed, an adviser whom her mother had
provided for her, though without allowing her to suspect the nature or
full extent of the duties which she had imposed upon him. Maria Teresa had
been in some respects a strict mother, one whom her children in general
feared almost as much as they loved her; and the rigorous superintendence
on some points of conduct which she had exercised over Marie Antoinette
while at home, she was not inclined wholly to resign, even after she had
made her apparently independent. At the moment of her departure from
Vienna, she gave her a letter of advice which she entreated her to read
over every month, and in which the most affectionate and judicious counsel
is more than once couched in a tone of very authoritative command; the
whole letter showing not only the most experienced wisdom and the most
affectionate interest in her daughter's happiness, but likewise a thorough
insight into her character, so precisely are some of the errors against
which the letter most emphatically warns her those into which she most
frequently fell. And she appointed a statesman in whom she deservedly
placed great confidence, the Count de Mercy-Argenteau, her embassador to
the court at Versailles, with the express design that he should always be
at hand to afford the dauphiness his advice in all the difficulties which
she could not avoid foreseeing for her; and who should also keep the
Empress-queen herself fully informed of every particular of her conduct,
and of every transaction by which she was in any way affected. This part
of his commission was wholly unsuspected by the young princess; but the
count discharged such portions of the delicate duty thus imposed upon him
with rare discretion, contriving in its performance to combine the
strictest fidelity to his imperial mistress with the most entire devotion
to the interests of his pupil, and to preserve the unqualified regard and
esteem of both mother and daughter to the end of their lives. Toward the
latter, as dauphiness, and even as queen, he stood for some years in a
position very similar to that which Baron Stockmar fills in the history of
the late Prince Consort of England, being, however, more frequent in his
admonitions, and occasionally more severe in his reproofs, as the youth
and inexperience of Marie Antoinette not unnaturally led her into greater
mistakes than the scrupulous conscientiousness and almost premature
prudence of the prince consort ever suffered him to commit; and his
diligent reports to the Empress-queen, amounting at times to a diary of
the proceedings of the French court, have a lasting and inestimable value,
since they furnish us with so trustworthy a record of the whole life of
Marie Antoinette for the first ten years of her residence in France,[5] of
her actions, her language, and her very thoughts (for she ever scorned to
give a reason or to make an excuse which was not absolutely and strictly
true), that there is perhaps no person of historical importance whose
conduct in every transaction of gravity or interest is more minutely
known, or whose character there are fuller materials for appreciating.
The very day of her marriage did not pass without her receiving a strange
specimen of the factious spirit which prevailed at the court, and of the
hollowness of the welcome with which the chief nobles had greeted her
arrival. A state ball was given at the palace to celebrate the wedding,
and as the Princess of Lorraine, a cousin of the Emperor Francis, was the
only blood-relation of Marie Antoinette who was at Versailles at the time,
the king assigned her a place in the first quadrille, giving her
precedence for that occasion, next to the princes of the blood. It did not
seem a great stretch of courtesy to show to a foreigner, even had she not
been related to the princess in whose honor the ball was given; but the
dukes and peers fired up at the arrangement, as if an insult had been
offered them. They held a meeting at which they resolved that no member of
their families should attend, and carried out their resolution so
obstinately that at five o'clock, when the dancing was to commence, except
the royal princesses there were only three ladies in the room. The king,
who, following the example of Louis XIV., acted on these occasions as his
own master of ceremonies, was forced to send special and personal orders
to some of those who had absented themselves to attend without delay. And
so by seven o'clock twelve or fourteen couples were collected[6] (the
number of persons admitted to such entertainments was always extremely
small), and the rude disloyalty of the protest was to outward appearance
effaced by the submission of the recusants.
But all the troubles which arose out of the wedding festivities were not
so easily terminated. Little as was the good-will which subsisted between
Louis XV. and the Parisians, the civic authorities thought their own
credit at stake in doing appropriate honor to an occasion so important as
the marriage of the heir of the monarchy, and on the 30th of May they
closed a succession of balls and banquets by a display of fire-works, in
which the ingenuity of the most celebrated artists had been exhausted to
outshine all previous displays of the sort. Three sides of the Place Louis
XV. were filled up with pyramids and colonnades. Here dolphins darted out
many-colored flames from their ever-open mouths. There, rivers of fire
poured forth cascades spangled with all the variegated brilliancy with
which the chemist's art can embellish the work of the pyrotechnist. The
centre was occupied with a gorgeous Temple of Hymen, which seemed to lean
for support on the well-known statue of the king, in front of which it was
constructed; and which was, as it were, to be carried up to the skies by
above three thousand rockets and fire-balls into which it was intended to
dissolve. The whole square was packed with spectators, the pedestrians in
front, the carriages in the rear, when one of the explosions set fire to a
portion of the platforms on which the different figures had been
constructed. At first the increase of the blaze was regarded only as an
ingenious surprise on the part of the artist. But soon it became clear
that the conflagration was undesigned and real; panic-succeeded to
delight, and the terror-stricken crowd, seeing themselves surrounded with
flames, began to make frantic efforts to escape from the danger; but there
was only one side of the square uninclosed, and that was blocked up by
carriages. The uproar and the glare made the horses unmanageable, and in a
few moments the whole mass, human beings and animals, was mingled in
helpless confusion, making flight impossible by their very eagerness to
fly, and trampling one another underfoot in bewildered misery. Of those
who did succeed in extricating themselves from the square, half made their
way to the road which runs along the bank of the river, and found that
they had only exchanged one danger for another, which, though of an
opposite character, was equally destructive. Still overwhelmed with
terror, though the first peril was over, the fugitives pushed one another
into the stream, in which great numbers were drowned. The number of the
killed could never be accurately ascertained: but no calculation estimated
the number of those who perished at less than six hundred, while those who
were grievously injured were at least as many more.
The dauphin and dauphiness were deeply shocked by a disaster so painfully
at variance with their own happiness, which, in one sense, had caused it.
Their first thought was, as far as they might be able, to mitigate it.
Most of the victims were of the poorer class, the grief of whose surviving
relatives was, in many instances, aggravated by the loss of the means of
livelihood which the labors of those who had been cut off had hitherto
supplied; and, to give temporary succor to this distress, the dauphin and
dauphiness at once drew out from the royal treasury the sums allowed to
them for their private expenses for the month, and sent the money to the
municipal authorities to be applied to the relief of the sufferers. But
Marie Antoinette did more. She felt that to give money only was but cold
benevolence; and she made personal visits to many of those families which
had been most grievously afflicted, showing the sincerity of her sympathy
by the touching kindness of her language, and by the tears which she
mingled with those of the widow and the orphan.[7] Such unmerited kindness
made a deep impression on the citizens. Since the time of Henry IV. no
prince had ever shown the slightest interest in the happiness or misery of
the lower classes; and the feeling of affectionate gratitude which this
unprecedented recognition of their claims to be sympathized with as
fellow-creatures awakened was fixed still more deeply in their hearts a
short time afterward, when, at one of the hunting-parties which took place
at Fontainebleau, the stag charged a crowd of the spectators and severely
wounded a peasant with his horns. Marie Antoinette sprung to the ground at
the sight, helped to bind up the wound, and had the man driven in her own
carriage to his cabin, whither she followed him herself to see that every
proper attention was paid to him.[8] And the affection which she thus
inspired among the poor was fully shared by the chief personage in the
kingdom, the sovereign himself. A life of profligacy had not rendered
Louis wholly insensible to the superior attractions of innocence and
virtue. Perhaps a secret sense of shame at the slavery in which his vices
held him, and which, as he well knew, excited the contempt of even his
most dissolute courtiers, though he had not sufficient energy to shake it
off, may have for a moment quickened his better feelings; and the fresh
beauty of the young princess, who, from the first moment of her arrival at
the court, treated him with the most affectionate and caressing respect,
awakened in him a genuine admiration and good-will. He praised her beauty
and her grace to all his nobles with a warmth that excited the jealousy of
his infamous mistress, the Countess du Barri. He made allowance for some
childishness of manner as natural at her age,[9] showed an anxiety for
every thing which could amuse or gratify her, which afforded a marked
contrast to his ordinary apathy. And, though in so young a girl it was
rather the promise of future beauty than its developed perfection that her
feat-* as yet presented, they already exhibited sufficient charms to
exempt those who extolled them from the suspicion of flattery. A clear and
open forehead, a delicately cut nose, a complexion of dazzling brilliancy,
with bright blue eyes, whose ever-varying lustre seemed equally calculated
to show every feeling which could move her heart; which could, at times
seem almost fierce with anger, indignation, or contempt, but whose
prevailing expression was that of kindly benevolence or light-hearted
mirth were united with a figure of exquisite proportions, sufficiently
tall for dignity, though as yet, of course, slight and unformed, and every
movement of which was directed by a grace that could neither be taught nor
imitated. If any defect could be discovered in her face, it consisted in a
somewhat undue thickness of the lips, especially of the lower lip, which
had for some generations been the prevailing characteristic of her family.
Accordingly, a month after her marriage, Mercy could report to Maria
Teresa that she had had complete success, and was a universal favorite;
that, besides the king, who openly expressed his satisfaction, she had won
the heart of the dauphin, who had been very unqualified in the language in
which he had praised both her beauty and her agreeable qualities to his
aunts; and that even those princesses were "enchanted" with her. The whole
court, and the people in general, extolled her affability, and the
graciousness with which she said kind things to all who approached her.
Though the well-informed embassador had already discovered signs of the
cabals which the mistress and her partisans were forming against her, and
had been rendered a little uneasy by the handle which she had more than
once afforded to her secret enemies, when, "in gayety of heart and without
the slightest ill-will," she had allowed herself to jest on some persons
and circumstances which struck her as ridiculous, her jests being seasoned
with a wit and piquancy which rendered them keener to those who were their
objects, and more so mischievous to herself. He especially praised the
unaffected dignity with which she had received the mistress who had
attended in her apartments to pay her court, though in no respect deceived
as to the lady's disposition, her penetration into the characters of all
with whom she had been brought into contact, denoting, as it struck him,
"a sagacity" which, at her age, was "truly astonishing.[10]"