_BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD_
_2nd November 1755 to the Autumn of 1768_
ALL that summer of 1755 the intrigue—and its success—proceeded.
I have said that the design of Kaunitz was not so much to impose upon
his time a new plan as to further a climax to which that time was
tending. Accidents in Europe, in America, and upon the high seas
conspired to mature the alliance.
Fighting broke out between the French and English outposts in the
backwoods of the colonies. Two French ships had been engaged in a fog
off the banks and captured; later, a sharp panic had led the Cabinet in
London to order a general Act of Piracy throughout the Atlantic against
French commerce. It was a wild stroke, but it proved the first success
of what was to become the one fundamentally successful war in the annals
of Great Britain.
In Versailles an isolated and mournful man, fatigued and silent, who was
in the last resort the governing power of France, delayed and delayed
the inevitable struggle between his forces and the rising power of
England. Louis XV. looked upon the world with an eye too experienced and
too careless to consider honour. His clear and informed intelligence
would contemplate—though it could not remedy—the effects of his own
decline and of his failing will. He felt about him in the society he
ruled, and within himself also, something moribund. France at this
moment gave the impression of a great palace, old and in part ruined.
That impression of France had seized not only upon her own central
power, but upon foreign observers as well; the English squires had
received it, and the new Prussian soldiers. In Vienna it was proposed to
use the declining French monarchy as a great prop, and in using it to
strengthen and to revivify the Austrian Empire until the older order of
Europe should be restored. Louis XV., sitting apart and watching the
dissolution of the national vigour and of his own, put aside the
approach of arms with such a gesture as might use a man of breeding whom
in some illness violence had disturbed. Thus as late as August, when his
sailors had captured an English ship of the line, he ordered its
release. The war was well ablaze, and yet he would consent to no formal
declaration of it: Austria watched his necessities.
It was in September that Maria Theresa sent word to her ambassador in
Paris—the old and grumbling but pliant Stahremberg—that the match might
be set to the train: in a little house under the terrace at Bellevue, a
house from whose windows all Paris may be seen far away below, the
secret work went on.
It has been asserted that the Empress in her anxiety wrote to the
Pompadour and attempted, by descending to so direct a flattery of Louis
XV.’s mistress, to hasten that King’s adhesion to her design. The
accusation is false, and the document upon which it is based a forgery;
but the Austrian ambassador was Maria Theresa’s mouthpiece with that
kindly, quiet, and all-powerful woman. It was she who met him day after
day in the little house, and when she retired to give place to the
Cardinal de Bernis, that Minister found the alliance already fully
planned between Stahremberg and the Pompadour. Louis XV. alone was still
reluctant. Great change, great action of any sort was harsh to him. He
would not believe the growing rumour that Frederick of Prussia was about
to desert his alliance and to throw his forces on to the side of the
English Power. Louis XV. attempted, not without a sad and patient skill,
to obtain equilibrium rather than defence. He would consider an
arrangement with Vienna only if it might include a peaceful
understanding with Berlin.
[Illustration:
MADAME DE POMPADOUR
FROM THE PORTRAIT BY BOUCHER IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY AT EDINBURGH
]
As, during October, these negotiations matured so slowly in France, in
Vienna the Empress awaited through that month the birth of her child.
She jested upon it with a Catholic freedom, laid wagers upon its sex
(and later won them), discussed what sponsors should be bidden, and
decided at last upon the King and Queen of Portugal; to these, in the
last days of October, her messengers brought the request, and it was
gladly accepted in their capital of Lisbon. Under such influences was
the child to be born.
The town of Lisbon had risen, in the first colonial efforts of Portugal,
to a vast importance. True, the Portuguese did not, as others have done,
attach their whole policy to possessions over-sea, nor rely for
existence upon the supremacy of their fleet, but the evils necessarily
attendant upon a scattered commercial empire decayed their military
power, and therefore at last their commerce itself. The capital was no
longer, in the Arab phrase, “_the_ city of the Christians”; it was long
fallen from its place as the chief port of the Atlantic when, in these
last days of October 1755, the messengers of the Empress entered it and
were received; but it was still great, overlooking the superb anchorage
which brought it into being, and presenting to the traveller perhaps
half the population which it had boasted in the height of its
prosperity. It was a site famous for shocks of earthquake, which (by a
coincidence) had visited it since the decline of its ancient power; but
of these no more affair had been made than is common with natural
adventures. Its narrow streets and splendid, if not majestic, churches
still stood uninjured.
The valley upon which stood the commercial centre of Lisbon is formed of
loose clay; the citadel and the portion which to this day recalls the
older city, of limestone; and the line which limits the two systems is a
sharp one. But though the diversity of such a soil lent to these tremors
an added danger, they had passed without serious attention for three or
four generations; they had not affected the architecture of the city nor
marred its history. In this year, 1755, they had already been repeated,
but in so mild a fashion that no heed was taken of them.
By All-Hallow’een the heralds had accomplished their mission, the Court
had retired to the palace of Belem, which overlooks the harbour, and the
suburbs built high beyond that Roman bridge which has bequeathed to its
valley the Moorish name of Alcantara. The city, as the ambassadors of
Maria Theresa and the heralds of her daughter’s birth were leaving it,
was awaiting under the warm and easy sun of autumn the feast of the
morrow.
In the morning of that All Saints, a little after eight, the altars
stood prepared; the populace had thronged into the churches; the streets
also were already noisy with the opening of a holiday; the ships’ crews
were ashore; only the quays were deserted. Everywhere High Mass had
begun. But just at nine—at the hour when the pressure of the crowds,
both within the open doors of the churches and without them, was at its
fullest—the earth shook.... The awful business lasted perhaps ten
seconds. When its crash was over an immense multitude of the populace
and a third of the material city had perished.
The great mass of the survivors ran to the deserted quays, where an open
sky and broad spaces seemed to afford safety from the fall of walls.
They saw the sea withdrawn from the shore of the wide harbour; they saw
next a wave form and rise far out in the land-locked gulf, and
immediately it returned in an advancing heap of water straight and
high—as high and as straight as the houses of the sea front. It moved
with the pace of a gust or of a beam of light towards the shore. The
thousands crammed upon the quays had barely begun their confused rush
for the heights when this thing was upon them; it swirled into the
narrow streets, tearing down the shaken walls and utterly sweeping out
the maimed, the dying, and the dead whom the earthquake had left in the
city. Then, when it had surged up and broken against the higher land, it
dragged back again into the bay, carrying with it the wreck of the town
and leaving, strewn on the mud of its retirement, small marbles, carven
wood, stuffs, fuel, provisions, and everywhere the drowned corpses of
animals and of men. During these moments perhaps twenty, perhaps thirty
thousand were destroyed.
Two hours passed: they were occupied in part by pillage, in part by
stupefaction, to some extent by repression and organisation. But before
noon the accompaniment of such disasters appeared. Fire was discovered,
first in one quarter of the city, then in another, till the whole
threatened to be consumed. The disorder increased. Pombal, an atheist of
rapid and decided thought, dominated the chaos and controlled it. He
held the hesitating Court to the ruins of the city; he organised a
police; as the early evening fell over the rising conflagration he had
gibbets raised at one point after another, and hung upon them scores of
those who had begun to loot the ruins and the dead.
The night was filled with the light and the roar of the flames until, at
the approach of morning, when the fires had partly spent themselves and
the cracked and charred walls yet standing could be seen more clearly in
the dawn, some in that exhausted crowd remembered that it was the Day of
the Dead, and how throughout Catholic Europe the requiems would be
singing and the populace of all the cities but this would be crowding to
the graves of those whom they remembered.
That same day, which in Lisbon overlooked the clouds of smoke still
pouring from broken shells of houses, saw in Vienna, as the black
processions returned from their cemeteries, the birth of the child.
* * * * *
Maria Theresa, whose vigour had been constant through so many trials,
suffered grievously in this last child-bed of hers. She was in her
thirty-seventh year. The anxiety and the plotting of the past months,
the fear of an approaching conflict, had worn her. It was six weeks
before she could hear Mass in her chapel; and meanwhile, in spite of the
official, and especially the popular, rejoicing which followed the birth
of the princess, a sort of hesitation hung over the Court. Francis of
Lorraine was oppressed by premonitions. With that taint of superstition
which his Faith condemned, but which the rich can never wholly escape,
he caused the baby’s horoscope to be drawn. The customary banquet was
foregone. The dreadful news from Lisbon added to the gloom, and
something silent surrounded the palace as the days shortened into
winter.
With the New Year a more usual order was re-established. The life of the
Court had returned; the first fortnight of January passed in open
festivities, beneath the surface of which the steady diplomatic pressure
for the French alliance continued. It reached an unexpectedly rapid
conclusion. Upon the 16th of January the King of Prussia suddenly
admitted to the French ambassador at Berlin that he had broken faith
with Louis and that the Prussian Minister in London had signed a treaty
with England. For a month a desperate attempt continued to prevent the
enormous consequences which must follow the public knowledge of the
betrayal. The aversion of Louis to all new action, his mixture of apathy
and of judgment, led him, through his ambassador, to forget the insult
and to cling to the illusion of peace; but Frederick himself destroyed
that illusion. His calculation had been the calculation of a soldier in
whom the clear appreciation of a strategical moment, the resolution and
courage necessary to use it, and an impotence of the chivalric functions
combined to make such decisions absolute. It was the second
manifestation of that moral perversion which has lent for two hundred
years such nervous energy to Prussia, and of which the occupation of
Silesia was the first, Bismarck’s forgery at Ems the latest—and probably
the final—example: for Europe can always at last expel a poison.
Frederick, I say, was resolved upon war. He met every proposal for
reconciliation with German jests somewhat decadent and expressed in
imperfect French, which was his daily language. By the end of February
1756 the attempt to keep the peace of Europe had failed, and Louis XV.,
driven by circumstances and necessity, had at last accepted the design
of Maria Theresa and of Kaunitz. The treaty would have been signed in
March had not the illness of the French Minister, the Cardinal De
Bernis, intervened; as it was, the signatures were affixed to the
document on the 1st of May. By summer all Europe was in arms. The little
Archduchess, who was later to lay down her life in the chain of
consequence which proceeded from that signing, was six months old.
The first seven years of Marie Antoinette’s life were, therefore, those
of the Seven Years’ War.
As her mind emerged into consciousness, the rumours she heard around
her, magnified by the gossip of the servants to whom she was entrusted,
were rumours of sterile victories and of malignant defeats; in the
recital of either there mingled perpetually the name of the Empire and
the name of Bourbon which she was to bear. She could just walk when the
whole of Cumberland’s army broke down before the French advance and
accepted terms at Kloster-Seven. Her second birthday cake was hardly
eaten before Frederick had neutralised this capitulation by destroying
the French at Rosbach. The year which saw the fall of Quebec and the
French disasters in India was that with which her earliest memories were
associated. She could remember Kunersdorf, the rejoicings and the
confident belief that the Protestant aggression was repelled. Her fifth,
her sixth, her seventh years—the years, that is, during which the first
clear experience of life begins—proved the folly of that confidence; her
eighth was not far advanced when the whole of this noisy business was
concluded by the Peace of Paris and the Treaty of Herbertsburg.
The war appeared indecisive or a failure. The original theft of Silesia
was confirmed to Prussia, the conquest of the French colonies to
England. In their defensive against the menace to which all European
traditions were exposed, the Courts of Vienna and Versailles had
succeeded; in their aggressive, which had the object of destroying that
menace for ever, they had failed. In failing in their aggressive, as a
by-product of that failure, they had permitted the establishment of an
English colonial system which at the time seemed of no great moment, but
which was destined ultimately to estrange this country from the politics
of Europe and to submit it to fantastic changes; to make its population
urban and proletariat, to increase immensely the wealth of its
oligarchy, and gravely to obscure its military ideals. In the success of
their defensive, as by-products of that success, they had achieved two
things equally unexpected: they had preserved for ever the South-German
spirit, and had thus checked in a remote future the organisation of the
whole German race by Prussia and the triumph over it of Prussian
materialism; they had preserved to France an intensive domestic energy
which was shortly to transform the world.
The period of innocence then and of growth, which succeeds a child’s
first approach to the Sacraments, corresponded in the life of Marie
Antoinette with the peace that followed these victories and these
defeats. The space between her seventh and her fourteenth years might
have been filled, in the leisure of the Austrian Court, with every
advantage and every grace. By an accident, not unconnected with her
general fate, she was allowed to run wild.
That her early childhood should have been neglected is easier to
understand. The war occupied all her mother’s energies. She and her
elder sister Caroline were the babies whose elder brother Joseph was
already admitted to affairs of State. It was natural that no great
anxiety upon their education should have been felt in such times. The
child had been put out to nurse with the wife of a small lawyer of
sorts, one Weber, whose son—the foster-brother of the Queen—has left a
pious and inaccurate memorial of her to posterity. Here she first learnt
the German tongue, which was to be her only idiom during her childhood;
here also she first heard her name under the form of “Maria Antonietta,”
a form which was to be preserved until her marriage was planned.
Such neglect, or rather such domesticity, would have done her character
small hurt if it had ceased with her earliest years and with the
conclusion of the peace; it was no better and no worse than that which
the children of all the wealthy enjoy in the company of inferiors until
their education begins. But the little Archduchess, even when she had
reached the age when character forms, was still undisciplined and at
large. There was found for her and Caroline a worthy and easy-going
governess in the Countess of Brandweiss, an amiable and careless woman,
who perhaps could neither teach nor choose teachers and who certainly
did not do so.
All the warmer part of the year the children spent at Schoenbrünn; it
was only in the depth of winter that they visited the capital. But
whether at Court or in the country they were continually remote from the
presence and the strong guidance of Maria Theresa.
The Empress saw them formally once a week; a doctor daily reported upon
their health; for the rest all control was abandoned. The natural German
of Marie Antoinette’s babyhood continued (perhaps in the very accent of
her domestics) to be the medium of her speech in her teens, and—what was
of more importance for the future—not only of her speech but of her
thought also. In womanhood and after a long residence abroad the
mechanical part of this habit was forgotten; its spirit remained. What
she read—if she read anything—we cannot tell. Her music alone was
watched. Her deportment was naturally as graceful as her breeding was
good; but the seeds of no culture were sown in her, nor so much as the
elements of self-control. Her sprightliness was allowed an indulgence in
every whim, especially in a talent for mockery. She acquired, and she
desired to acquire, nothing. No healthy child is fitted by nature for
application and study; upon all such must continuous habits be
enforced—to her they were not so much as suggested. A perpetual
instability became part of her, and unhappily this permanent weakness
was so veiled by an inherited poise and by a happy heart that her
mother, in her rare observations, passed it by. Before Marie Antoinette
was grown a woman that inner instability had come to colour all her
mind; it remained in her till the eve of her disasters.
It is often discovered, when an eager childhood is left too much to its
own ruling, that the mind will, of its own energy, turn to the
cultivation of some one thing. Thus in Versailles the boyhood of the
lonely child, who was later to be her husband, had turned for an
interest to maps and had made them a passion. With her it was not so.
The whole of her active and over-nourished life lacked the ballast of so
much as a hobby. She was precisely of that kind to whom a wide, careful,
and a conventional training is most useful; precisely that training was
denied her.
The disasters and, what was worse, the unfruitfulness of the war had not
daunted Maria Theresa, but her plans were in disarray. The two years
that succeeded the peace produced no definite policy. No step was taken
to confirm the bond with France or to secure the future, when there fell
upon the Empress the blow of her husband’s death; he had fallen under a
sudden stroke at Innsbruck, during the wedding feast of his son, leaving
to her and to his children not only the memory of his peculiar charm,
but also a sort of testament or rule of life which remains a very noble
fragment of Christian piety.
Before he set out he remembered his youngest daughter; he asked
repeatedly for the child and she was brought to him. He embraced her
closely, with some presentiment of evil, and he touched her hair; then
as he rode away among his gentlemen he said, with that clear candour
which inhabits both the blood and the wine of Lorraine, “Gentlemen, God
knows how much I desired to kiss that child!” She had been his
favourite; there was a close affinity between them. She was left to her
mother, therefore, as a pledge and an inheritance, and Maria Theresa,
whose mourning became passionate and remained so, was ready to procure
for this daughter the chief advantages of the world.
The loss of her husband, while it filled her with an enduring sorrow,
also did something to rouse and to inspire the Empress with the force
that comes to such natures when they find themselves suddenly alone. The
little girl upon whom her ambitions were already fixed, the French
alliance which had been, as it were, the greatest part of herself, mixed
in her mind. Maria Theresa had long connected in some vague manner the
confirmation of the alliance with some Bourbon marriage—in what way
precisely or by what plan we cannot tell; her ambassador has credited
her with many plans. It is probable that none were developed when, a few
weeks after the Emperor’s death, there happened something to decide her.
The son of Louis XV., the Dauphin, was taken ill and died before the end
of the year 1765. He left heir to the first throne in Europe his son, a
lanky, silent, nervous lad of eleven, and that lad was heir to a man
nearer sixty than fifty, worn with pleasures of a fastidious kind, and
with the despair that accompanies the satisfaction of the flesh. A great
eagerness was apparent at Versailles to plan at once a future marriage
for this boy and to secure succession. Maria Theresa determined that
this succession should reside in children of her own blood.
Nationality was a conception somewhat foreign to her, and as yet of no
great strength in her mixed and varied dominions. How powerful it had
ever been in France, what a menace it provided for the future of the
French Monarchy, she could not perceive. Of the silent boy himself, the
new heir, she knew only what her ambassador told her, and she cared
little what he might be; but she saw clearly the Bourbons, a family as
the Hapsburgs were a family, a bond in Catholic Europe with this boy the
heir to their headship. She saw Versailles as the pinnacle still of
whatever was regal (and therefore serious) in Europe. She determined to
complete by a marriage the alliance already effected between that Court
and her own.
[Illustration:
THE FIRST DAUPHIN: (THE FATHER OF LOUIS XVI)
]
She knew the material with which she had to deal: Louis XV., clear
sighted, a great gentleman, sensual, almost lethargic, loyal. She had
understood the old nonentity of a Queen keeping her little place apart;
the King’s spinster-daughters struggling against the influence of
mistresses. She understood the power of the Prime Minister Choiseul,
with whose active policy the King had so long allowed his power to be
merged; she knew how and why he was Austrian in policy, and she forgave
him his attack upon the Church. Though Choiseul had not made the
alliance he so used it, and above all so maintained it after the
doubtful peace, that he almost seemed its author, as later he
seemed—though he took so little action—the author of her daughter’s
marriage. She did not grudge the French Minister such honours. She
weighed the historic grandeur of the royal house, and what she believed
to be its certain future. She sketched in her mind, with Kaunitz at her
side, the marriage of the two children as, years before, she had
sketched the alliance.
It was certain that Versailles would yield, because Versailles was a man
who, for all his lucidity and high training, never now stood long to one
effort of the will; but just because Louis XV. had grown into a nature
of that kind, it needed as active, as tenacious, and as subtle a mind as
Maria Theresa’s to bring him to write or to speak. Writing or speaking
in so grave a matter meant direct action and consequence; he feared such
responsibilities as others fear disaster.
It is in the spirit of comedy to see this dignified and ample
woman—perhaps the only worthy sovereign of her sex whom modern Europe
has known—piloting through so critical a pass the long-determined
fortunes of her daughter. There is the mother in all of it. That
daughter had imperilled her life. The child was the last of nine which
she had borne to a husband whose light infidelities she now the more
forgave, whose clear gentility had charmed her life, whose religion was
her own, and in respect to whose memory she was rapidly passing from a
devotion to an adoration. The day was not far distant when she would
brood in the vault beside his grave.
The old man Stahremberg was yielding his place (with some grumbling) to
Mercy. He was still the Austrian ambassador at Paris; but his term was
ending. Maria Theresa would perhaps in other times have spared his
pride, and would not have given him a task upon which he must labour but
which his successor would enjoy; but in the matter of her little
Archduchess she would spare no one. She had hinted her business to
Stahremberg before the Dauphin’s death; the spring had hardly broken
before she was pressing him to conclude it. Up to his very departure her
importunity pursued him. When Mercy was on the point of entering his
office (in the May of 1766), Stahremberg, in the last letter sent to the
Empress from Paris before his return, told her that her ship was
launched. “She might,” he wrote, “accept her project as assured, from
the tone in which the King had spoken of it.”
Maria Theresa had too firm and too smiling and too luminous an
acquaintance with the world to build upon such vague assurance. The
dignity of the French throne was too great a thing to be grasped at.
It must be achieved. When old Mme. Geoffrin passed through Vienna in
that year, Maria Antonietta was kept in the background off the
stage—but France was cultivated. The baby, who was Louis XV.’s
great-grand-daughter, Theresa, Leopold’s daughter, was presented to
that old and wonderful bourgeoise and made much of. They joked about
taking her to France; another baby, after all not much older, only
eight years older, was going to that place in her time.
And, meanwhile, the common arts by which women of birth perfect their
plans for their family were practised in the habitual round. The little
girl’s personality, all gilded and framed, was put in the window of the
Hapsburgs. She was wild perhaps, but so good-hearted! In the cold winter
you heard of (all winters are cold in Vienna) she came up in the
drawing-room, where the family sat together, and begged her mother to
accept of all her savings for the poor—fifty-five ducats.
Little Mozart had come in to play one night; he had slipped upon the
unaccustomed polish of the floor. The little Archduchess, when all
others smiled, had alone pitied and lifted him! Maria Theresa met the
French ambassador and told him in the most indifferent way how her
youngest, when she was asked whom (among so many nations) she would like
to rule, had said, “The French, for they had Henri IV. the Good and
Louis XIV. the Great.” Weary though he was of such conventionalities,
the ambassador was bound by the honour of his place to repeat them.
There still stood, however, in this summer of 1766, between the
Empress’s plan and its fruition a power as feminine, as perspicuous, and
as exact in calculation as her own. The widow of the Dauphin, the mother
of the new heir at Versailles, opposed the match.
She would not retire, as the Queen, her mother-in-law, had done, into
dignity and nothingness, nor would she admit—so tenacious of the past
are crowns—that the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs had all the negotiations
between them. She was of the Saxon House, and though it was but small—a
northern bastion, as it were, of the Catholic Houses—yet she had
inherited the tradition of monarchy, and she might, but for her
husband’s sudden death, have inherited Versailles itself. She was still
young, vigorous, and German. She had determined not only that her son,
the new heir, should marry into her house—should marry his own cousin,
her niece—but that he should marry as she his mother chose, and not as
the Hapsburgs chose. He was at that moment (in 1766) not quite twelve;
the bride whom she would disappoint not quite eleven years old! But her
plan was active and tenacious, her readiness alive, when in the
beginning of the following year, in March 1767, she in her turn died,
and with her death that obstacle to the fate of the little Archduchess
also failed.
With every date, as you mark each, it will be the more apparent that the
barriers which opposed Marie Antoinette’s approach to the French throne
failed each in turn at the climax of its resistance, and that her way to
such eminence and such an end was opened by a number of peculiar
chances, all adjutants of doom.
The House of Hapsburg was never a crowned nationality; it was and is a
crowned family and nothing more. Its states were and are attached to it
by no common bond. There is no such thing as Austria: the Hapsburgs are
the reality of that Empire. The French Bourbons were, upon the contrary,
the chiefs of a nation peculiarly conscious of its unity and jealous of
its past. Their greatness lay only in the greatness of the compact
quadrilateral they governed and of the finished language of their
subjects, and in the achievements of the national temper. Such
conditions favoured to the utmost the scheme of Maria Theresa, not only
in the detail of this marriage, but in all that successful management of
the French alliance which survived her own death and was the chief
business of her reign. _She_ could be direct in every plan, unhampered,
considering only the fortunes of her House; Louis XV. and his Ministers,
as later his grandson, were trammelled by the complexity of a national
life of which they were themselves a part.
Versailles had not declared itself: Vienna pressed. It was in March that
active opposition within the Court had died with the mother of the heir.
Within a month the French ambassador at Vienna wrote home that “the
marriage was in the air”: but the King had not spoken.
In that summer, as though sure of her final success, the Empress threw a
sort of prescience of France and of high fortunes over the nursery at
Schoenbrünn. The amiable Brandweiss disappeared; the severe and
unhealthy Lorchenfeld replaced her.
The French (and baptismal form) of the child’s name, “Antoinette,” was
ordered to be used: still Versailles remained dumb.
In the autumn the parallels of the siege were so far advanced that a
direct assault could be made on poor Dufort, the advanced work of the
Bourbons, their ambassador at Vienna.
Dufort had been told very strictly to keep silent. He suffered a
persecution. Thus he was standing one evening by the card-tables talking
to his Spanish colleague, when the Empress came up and said to this last
boldly: “You see my daughter, sir? I trust her marriage will go well; we
can talk of it the more freely that the French ambassador here does not
open his lips.”
The child’s new governess was next turned on to the embarrassed man to
pester him with the recital of her charge’s virtues. The approaching
marriage of her elder sister Caroline with the Bourbons of Naples was
dangled before Dufort.
The play continued for a year. Louis XV. bade his ambassador get the
girl’s portrait, but “not show himself too eager.” He is reprimanded
even for his courtesies, and all the while Dufort must stand the fire of
the Court of Vienna and its exaggerated deference to him and its
occasional reproaches! Choiseul was anxious to see the business ended.
Dufort was as ready (and as weary) as could have been the Empress
herself, but the slow balance of Louis XV. stood between them all and
their goal.
In the summer of the next year, 1768, the Empress’s eldest son, Joseph,
now associated with her upon the throne, determined to press home and
conclude. It was the first time that this man’s narrow energy pressed
the Bourbons to determine and to act; it was not to be the last. He was
destined so to initiate action in the future upon two critical occasions
and largely to determine the fortunes of his sister’s married life and
final tragedy.
He wrote to Louis XV. a rambling letter, chiefly upon the marriage
of yet another sister with the Duke of Parma. It wandered to the
Bourbon marriage of Caroline; he mentioned his own child, the
great-granddaughter of the King. It was a letter demanding and
attracting a familiar answer. It drew its quarry. Louis, answering
with his own hand and without emphasis, in a manner equally domestic
and familiar, threw in a chance phrase: “... These marriages, your
sister’s with the Infante, _that of the Dauphin_....” In these
casual four words a document had passed and the last obstacle was
removed.
The Empress turned from her major preoccupation to a minor one. This
child of hers was to rule in France; she was now assured of the throne;
she was near her thirteenth birthday—and she had been taught nothing.
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