_THE ESPOUSALS_
THE fortnightly despatches from France customarily arrived at Vienna
together in one bag and in the charge of one courier. The Empress would
receive at once the letters of Mercy, the official correspondence,
perhaps the note of a friend, and the very rare communications of
royalty. In this same batch which brought that decisive letter of Louis
XV. to her son, on the same day, therefore, in which she was first
secure in her daughter’s future, there also arrived the usual secret
report from Mercy. This document contained a phrase too insignificant to
detain her attention; it mentioned the rumour of a new intrigue: the
King showed attachment to a woman of low origin about him; it was an
attachment that might be permanent. This news was immediately forgotten
by Maria Theresa; it was a detail that passed from her mind. She perhaps
remembered the name, which was “Du Barry.”
* * * * *
The Court of Vienna, permeated (as was then every wealthy society) with
French culture, was yet wholly German in character. The insufficiency
which had marked the training of the imperial children—especially of the
youngest—was easily accepted by those to whom a happy domestic spirit
made up for every other lack in the family. Of those who surrounded the
little Archduchess two alone, perhaps, understood the grave difference
of standard between such education as Maria Antonietta had as yet
received and the conversation of Versailles; but these two were Kaunitz
and Maria Theresa, and short as was the time before them, they did
determine to fit the child, in superficial things at least, for the
world she was to enter and in a few years to govern. They failed.
Mercy, the ambassador, was instructed to find in France a tutor who
should come to Vienna and could accomplish the task. He applied to
Choiseul. Choiseul in turn referred the matter to the best critic of
such things, an expert in the things of this world, the Archbishop of
Toulouse. That prelate, Loménie de Brienne, whose unscrupulous strength
had judged men rightly upon so many occasions and had exactly chosen
them for political tasks, had in this case no personal appetite to
gratify and was free to choose. A post was offered. His first thought
was to obtain it for one who was bound to him, a protégé and a
dependant. He at once recommended a priest for whom he had already
procured the Librarianship of the Mazarin Collection, one Vermond. The
choice was not questioned, and Vermond left to assume functions which he
could hardly fulfil.
There was needed here a man who should have been appalled by the
ignorance he might discover in his charge, who should be little affected
by grandeur, who should be self-willed, assertive, and rapid in method;
one whom the Empress might have ridiculed or even disliked, but whom she
would soon have discovered to be indispensable to her plan. Such a man
would have tackled his business with an appreciation of its magnitude,
would have insisted upon a full control, would have communicated by his
vigour the atmosphere of French thought, careless of the German
shrinking from the rigidity of the French mind. He would have worked
long hours with little Marie Antoinette, he would have filled the days
with his one object, he would have shocked and offended all, his pupil
especially, and in a year he would have left her with a good grounding
in the literature of his country, with an elementary but a clear scheme
of the history and the political forces which she was later to learn in
full, with an enlarged vocabulary, a good accent, and at least the
ability to write clearly and to work a simple sum. His pupil would have
been compelled to application; her impulse would have been permanently
harnessed; she would have learnt for life the value of a plan. Such a
tutor would hardly have desired and would certainly not have acquired a
lasting influence later on at Versailles. His work would have been done
in those critical years of childhood, once and for all. He would
probably have fallen into poverty. In later years he might have appeared
among the revolutionaries, but he would have found, face to face with
the Revolution, a trained Queen who, thanks to him, could have dealt
with circumstance.
In the place of such a man, Vermond arrived.
He was a sober, tall, industrious priest of low birth; his father had
let blood and perhaps pulled teeth for the needy. His reserve and quiet
manners reposed upon a spirit that was incapable of ambition, but
careful to secure ample means and to establish his family and himself in
the secure favour of his employers. He was of middle age, a state into
which he had entered early and in which he was likely long to remain.
His mind within was active and disciplined; its exterior effect was
small. He thought to accomplish his mission if he was but regular in his
reports, laborious in his own study, and, above all, tactful and subtle
in handling the problem before him.
To such a character was presented an exuberant child, growing rapidly,
vivacious, somewhat proud, and hitherto unaccustomed to effort of any
kind, a monkey for mimicry, clever at picking up a tune upon the keys, a
tomboy shouting her German phrases down the corridors of Schoenbrünn, a
fine little lady at Vienna—acting either part well. The light russet of
her hair and her thick eyebrows gave promise of her future energy; she
had already acquired the tricks of rank, the carriage of the head and
the ready mechanical interest in inferiors—for the rest she was empty.
In this critical fourteenth year of hers, during which it was proposed
to fashion out of such happy German childhood a strict and delicate
French princess, she did not read and she could barely write. The big
round letters, as she painfully fashioned them in her occasional
lessons, were those of a baby. Her drawing was infantile; and while she
rapidly learnt a phrase in a foreign language by ear, a complete
revolution in her education would have been needed to make her accurate
in the use of words or to make her understand a Latin sentence or parse
a French one.
To cultivate such a soil, exactly one hour a day was spared when the
Court was at Vienna—somewhat more when it was in the country—and these
few minutes were consumed in nothing more methodical than a dialogue,
little talks in which Vermond was fatally anxious to bring before his
pupil (with her head full of those new French head-dresses of hers, the
prospect of Versailles, and every other distraction of mind) only such
subjects as might amuse her inattention.
The early months of 1769 were full of this inanity, Vermond regularly
reporting progress to the Austrian Embassy in France, regularly
complaining of the difficulty of his task, regularly insisting upon his
rules and as regularly failing in his object. In the autumn the Empress
was at the pains of asking her daughter a few questions, notably upon
history. The result did not dissatisfy her, but meanwhile Maria
Antonietta could hardly write her name.
Side by side with this continued negligence in set training, and in the
discipline that accompanies it, went a very rapid development in manner.
The child was admitted to the Court; she was even permitted the
experiment of presiding at small gatherings of her own. The experiment
succeeded. She acquired with an amazing rapidity what little remained to
be learnt of the externals of rank. The alternate phrases addressed to
one’s neighbours round a table, the affectation of satiety and of
repose, the gait in which the feet are hardly lifted; the few steps
forward to meet a magnate, the fewer to greet a lesser man, and that
smiling immobility before men of the ordinary sort which is still a
living tradition in great drawing-rooms; the power of putting on an air
in the very moment between privacy and a public appearance—all these
came to her so naturally and by so strongly inherited an instinct, that
she not only charmed the genial elders of the Austrian capital but
satisfied experienced courtiers, even those visitors from France, who
examined it all with the eyes of connoisseurs and watched her deportment
as a work of art, whose slight errors in technique they could at once
discover but whose general excellence they were able to appreciate and
willing to proclaim.
She did indeed preserve beneath that conventional surface a fire of
vigorous life that was apparent in every hour. Once in the foreign
atmosphere of France and subject to exasperation and contrast that heat
would burst forth. She became, as her future showed, capable of violent
scenes in public and of the natural gestures of anger—it is to her
honour that she was on the whole so often herself. Here at Vienna in
this last year her young energy did no more than lend spirit and grace
to the conventions she so quickly acquired.
The opening of the year 1770 found her thus, her German half forgotten,
her French (though imperfect) habitual, her acquaintance with the air of
a Court considerable. Though she was still growing rapidly she was now
dressed as a woman and taught to walk on her high heels as did the
ladies her seniors. Her hair was brushed off her high forehead in the
French manner, the stuff of her frocks and the cut of them were French,
her name was now permanently Frenchified for her, and she heard herself
called everywhere “Marie Antoinette”; none but old servants were left to
give her the names she had first known.
March passed and the moment of her departure approached. The child had
never travelled. To her vivacious and eager temper the prospect of so
great a journey with so splendid an ending was an absorbing pleasure. It
filled her mind even during the retreat which, under Vermond’s guidance,
she entered during Holy Week, and every sign of her approaching progress
excited in her a vivid curiosity and expectation, as it did in her
mother a mixture of foreboding and of pride.
The official comedy which the Court played during April heightened the
charm: the heralds, the receptions, that quaint but gorgeous ceremony of
renunciation, the mock marriage, the white silver braid and the white
satin of her wedding-clothes, the salvoes of artillery and the feasts
were all a fine great play for her, with but one interlude of boredom,
when her mother dictated, and she wrote (heaven knows with what a
careful guidance of the pen) a letter which she was to deliver to the
King of France. With that letter Maria Theresa enclosed a note of her
own, familiar, almost domestic, imploring Louis XV., her contemporary,
to see to the child as “one that had a good heart,” ... but was ardent
and a trifle wild.
These words were written upon the 20th of the month; on the morning of
the 21st of April 1770 the line of coaches left the palace, and the
Archduchess took the western road.
There was no sudden severance. Her eldest brother, Joseph, he who was
associated with her mother in the Empire, accompanied her during the
whole of the first day. Of an active, narrow, and formal intelligence,
grossly self-sufficient, arithmetical in temper, and with a sort of
native atheism in him such as stagnates in minds whose development is
early arrested, a philosopher therefore and a prig, earnest, lean, and
an early riser, he was of all companions the one who could most easily
help Marie Antoinette to forget Vienna and to desire Versailles. The
long hours of the drive were filled with platitudes and admonitions that
must easily have extinguished all her regrets for his Court and have
bred in her a natural impatience for the new horizons that were before
her. He left her at Melk. She continued her way with her household,
hearing for the last time upon every side the German tongue, not knowing
that she heard also, for the last time, the accents of sincere affection
and sincere servility: the French temper with its concealed edges of
sharpness was to find her soon enough.
Her journey was not slow for the times. She took but little more than a
week to reach the Rhine from Augsburg—a French army on the march has
done no better. It was on the evening of the 6th of May that she could
see, far off against the sunset, the astonishing spire of Strasburg and
was prepared to enter France; only the Rhine was now between her and her
new life.
She bore upon her person during this last night on German soil a last
letter of her mother’s which had reached her but the day before
yesterday. It was the most intimate and the most searching she was to
receive in all the long correspondence which was to pass between them
for ten years, and it contained a phrase which the child could hardly
understand, but which, if texts and single phrases were of the least
advantage to conduct, might have deflected her history and that of
Europe. “_The one felicity of this world is a happy marriage: I can say
so with knowledge; and the whole hangs upon the woman, that she should
be willing, gentle, and able to amuse._”
Next day at noon she crossed in great pomp to an island in mid-river,
where a temporary building of wood had been raised upon the exact
frontier for the ceremony of her livery.
It is possible that the long ritual of her position—she was to endure it
for twenty years—was already a burden upon her versatility, even after
these short weeks. Here, on this island, the true extent of the French
parade first met her. It was sufficient to teach her what etiquette was
to mean. The poor child had to take off every stitch of her clothes and
to dress, to a ribbon or a hair-pin, with an order strictly ordained and
in things all brought from Versailles for the occasion. Once so dressed
she was conducted to a central room where her German household gave her
to her French one, at the head of which the kindly and sometimes foolish
Countess de Noailles performed the accustomed rites, and the Archduchess
entered for ever the million formalities of her new world. They had not
yet fatigued her. She was taken to Mass at the Cathedral; she received
the courtesy of the old bishop, a Rohan, in whose great family Strasburg
was almost an appanage.
There was a figure standing by the Bishop’s side. She saw, clothed in
that mature majesty which a man of thirty may have for a child of
fifteen, the bishop’s coadjutor, a nephew and a Rohan too. She noted his
pomposity and perhaps his good looks, but he meant nothing to her; he
was but one of the Rohans to be remembered. He noted her well.
Next day and for six more her journey proceeded amid perpetual
deputations, Latin, flowers, bad verses, stage peasantry, fireworks,
feasts and addresses, until, a week after she had crossed the Rhine, she
slept at Soissons and knew that on the morrow she would see the King.
The pavement of the long road out from Soissons, the great royal road,
had sounded under the wheels of her carriage for now the best part of
the day. She had already found Choiseul awaiting her in state, and had
exchanged with this old friend of her mother’s those ceremonial
compliments of which the child was now well weary, when, through the
left-hand window of her coach, which was open to the warm spring day,
she saw before her a thing of greater interest—the league-long line of
trees that ends abruptly against the bare plain and marks the forest of
Compiègne.
Into this wood the road plunged, straight and grand, until after a
declivity, where a little stream is crossed (near the place where the
railway lines join to-day), there appeared awaiting her, as Choiseul had
awaited her some miles before, a great and orderly group of people, of
carriages, and horses; but this company was far larger and was ranked
with more solemnity than others that had met her upon her progress. She
knew that it was the King.
The splendour which a history full of trumpets had lent to the French
name, the lineage of the Kings, the imagined glories of Versailles—all
these had penetrated the nursery and the schoolroom of the Princess. As
she came down from her carriage, with either hand reposing in the hands
of her escort, an awe of the Capetian monarchy came upon her, and she
knelt upon the roadway in the midst of the Court, of the Princesses who
now first saw the little heiress of their lives, of the gilded carriages
and the men-at-arms.
The King raised her up and kissed her forehead; he motioned forward a
heavy, shambling, frowning boy, his grandson, for whom all this pomp
existed. The lad shuffled forward, bent a little perhaps, and kissed her
in his turn with due ceremony—for he was to be her husband. When this
little ritual and its sharp emotions were over she had a moment, before
her introductions to the Blood, to the King’s mature daughters, to the
Orleans and the rest, in which to seize with that bright glance, which
was always so ready for exterior things, the manner of the King.
Louis XV. was at that moment a man just past his sixtieth year. Long
habit had given him, as it gives to all but the greatest of those
educated to power, an attitude constrained though erect. His age had
told on him, he had grown somewhat fat, he moved without alertness and—a
weakness which had appeared but lately—his rare and uncompleted gestures
expressed the weight of his body; but his muscles were firm, his command
of them perfect, and he still had, especially in repose, so far as age
can have it, grace.
The united pallor of his complexion, which had been remarkable in youth,
seemed now more consonant to his years. The steady indifference to which
he had reduced his features was now more dignified than when its
rigidity had seemed unnatural and new. His expression had even acquired
a certain strength from the immobility and firmness of his mouth, whose
lines displayed a talent for exact language and a capacity for continued
dignity; but his eyes betrayed him.
They were warm in spite of a habit of command, but the sadness in them
(which was profound and permanent) was of a sort which sprang from
physical appetites always excessive and now surviving abnormally beyond
their time. There was also in those eyes the memory of considerable but
uprooted affections, and, deeper, of a fixed despair, and deeper far—a
veil as it were behind their brightness—the mortal tedium, to escape
from which this human soul had sacrificed the national traditions and
the ancient honour of the crown.
This great Monarch, whom no one since his boyhood had approached without
a certain fear, received his grandson’s betrothed with an air almost
paternal. It was a relaxation upon his part to which he owed, during the
remainder of his life, the strongly affectionate respect which Marie
Antoinette, vivacious and ungoverned, paid to him alone in the palace.
He presented the rest in turn. She heard names which were to mix so
intimately with her own destiny, and when they set out again upon the
road she could discreetly watch during the long ten miles to Compiègne,
Chartres who would soon be Orleans, the faded faces of the King’s
spinster-daughters, the old Duke of Ponthièvre; and she watched with a
greater care that daughter of his whose foolish, dainty, and sentimental
face, insecure upon its long thin neck, was that of a young, unhappy
widow: the Princesse de Lamballe.
When they had slept at Compiègne in state, the whole pageant moved on
next morning down the Paris road upon the last day’s march of that
journey, and the child thought that she was now upon the threshold of
nothing but an easy glory. She was nearing—amid great mobs and a whole
populace come out to greet her, not only Paris and Versailles, but much
more—she was nearing that woman whose name her mother had heard and half
forgotten, whose name she herself had never heard. It was a name whose
influence was to deflect the first current of her life: the name of Du
Barry.
* * * * *
There is but one instrument efficacious to the government of men, which
is Persuasion, and Persuasion sickens when its agent fails in dignity.
Dignity is the exterior one of the many qualities necessary to
commandment; these in some cases touch closely upon virtue, so that, in
some situations of authority, a dignified man is presumably a good one.
But in the particular case of national government it is not so. The
audience is so vast, the actor so distant and removed, that in this
matter dignity resides mainly in the observance of whatever ritual the
national temper and the national form of the executive demand. Such
functions of ritual endanger rather than strengthen the soul of him who
is called upon to assume them. To his intimates they appear as
mummeries. It is often a sign of personal excellence in a ruler when he
is himself disgusted with them and even casts them aside; but they are
necessary to the State. For if such ritual is ill-observed, dignity
fails; in its failure persuasion, I say, sickens, and when persuasion
sickens, government, upon which depends the cohesion of a nation and the
co-ordination of its faculties, breaks down.
The method of government in France at this time was a true personal
monarchy.
The institution had increased in consciousness and in executive power
down the long avenue of fourteen hundred years. Its roots were in Rome.
It stood up in the seventh century as a memory of the Roman Peace, in
the eighth as a promise to restore the Roman order. From the ninth
onwards it was vested in a Gaulish family and already had begun to
express the Gaulish unities; by the thirteenth its mission was ardent
and victorious. When the religious wars of the sixteenth century were
resolved in a national settlement and the Bourbon branch was finally
acknowledged, the crown was supreme and the whole people held to and
were summed up in the Monarchy. It had made a yeoman of the serf, it had
welded the nation together, it had established the frontiers, it had
repressed the treason of the wealthy Huguenots: it was France.
The person of the Monarch was public and publicly worshipped. His spoken
words were actually law: he could impose a peace; his private decision
could suspend a debt, imprison a transgressor, ruin or create an
industry. Into such a mould had the French energy forced the executive
when the genius of Richelieu and the cunning of Mazarin confirmed the
powers of the throne, and left them in legacy to the virile sense of
Louis XIV.
This King was very great and cast accurately also to the part he should
fill. The conventions and the trappings of the part delighted him; he
played it royally, and when he died, though he left the crown to an
infant great-grandson, yet its security seemed as permanent as does
to-day the security in similar powers of our English rich. But that
great-grandson, at first gradually and at last rapidly, undermined the
stable seat he had inherited. Louis XV., by his good qualities as well
as by his evil, tended more and more to reject the ritual necessary to
his kingship. His good breeding and his active physical appetites, his
idleness and his sincerity, all combined to weary him of the game, so
that at the end of his long reign he had almost ceased in the eyes of
the populace to be a King at all.
The Monarchy therefore perished, and mainly through Louis XV.’s
incapacity to maintain its essential livery. Its collapse, its
replacement (with consequences enormous to the whole of Europe) by that
other French formula which we call “The Revolution” or “The Republic,”
was so exactly contemporaneous with Marie Antoinette’s marriage and with
her presence at Versailles, that far too great a part in the catastrophe
is assigned to her own misjudgments and misfortunes. No error or
disaster of hers gave the death shock to the institution with which her
life was mingled; that stroke had been delivered before the child
crossed the Rhine, and the moment when the blow was struck was that in
which Mercy had penned the name “Du Barry,” which Maria Theresa had read
so carelessly in Vienna on the same day that brought the letter sealing
her daughter’s marriage.
The public appearance of Madame Du Barry was the turning-point in the
history of Versailles, and the little Archduchess, when she came upon
French earth, did not bring a curse to her new country, for the destiny
of that country was already determined; rather this France which she had
entered had prepared a tragedy for her and a fate expected by her own
unhappy stars.
Those who have watched the destruction of an old and strong wall will
remember that it seemed at first to resist with ease every battery of
the assault. At last there came one effort, more violent than the rest,
which broke long, zig-zag lines throughout the fabric. The work was
done. A few succeeding impacts visibly disintegrated the now loosened
stones until the whole fell rapidly into ruin. So it was with the French
Monarchy. The Regency, the floating theories of public criticism, the
indeterminate foreign policy, the military reverses of the Seven Years’
War, the careless lethargy of Louis XV. in State affairs, had impaired
the fabric of tradition, but that fabric still stood. It might yet have
been restored and made whole had not the King in his last years chosen
the particular mistress and presented her in a particular manner, which
threw chaos into the scheme that every Frenchman took for granted when
he considered his sovereign. This last thud, coming after so many
accumulated tremors, loosened all the wall. The trials and distractions
of the next reign did but pull apart, and that easily, the loosened
stones. The imposing posture which the French demand of their symbols
had been dropped by the old King; the new one could not restore it.
Choose at random any man or woman of your acquaintance in history, put
them upon the throne after the death of Louis XV., and though the
succeeding quarter of a century would have varied somewhat with various
individualities in power, the doom of the Monarchy would by none have
been averted.
Let us see what happened when that fatal news of Madame Du Barry’s
advent spread through the Court and the capital of France and reached,
like the ripple of a wave, the shores of Vienna.
The King (as has almost every other King in history) had indulged his
body; he had also indulged his desire for intimate companionship, his
man’s whim for an expression, a tone of voice, or a gesture. This
licence, which to their bane is granted to privileged and symbolic men,
had led him into every distraction. His amours were many, but middle age
had fixed his routine, if not his constancy, upon one woman of
remarkable character.
Madame de Pompadour, as she came later to be called, was not of the
nobility. To have taken a mistress publicly from the rank of business
people was a serious reproach to the King; but though the mass condemned
such an alliance, and though the wealthy, both of the middle class and
of the courtiers, found an added blame in the financial reputation of
her father and the notorious lightness of her mother, yet there was
about this young, vigorous, and commanding hostess something that could
prevent too violent a reaction of opinion.
She was extremely rich; her drawing-room had held all the famous men of
her day; her education was wide and liberal, her judgment excellent. She
played and sang with exceptional charm. She had good manners; she rode,
spoke, read, and entertained as might the principal of her
contemporaries.
The acknowledged position of such a woman at Court, though a new
degradation, was a tolerable one. It was easy for the most reserved to
understand how, in those years between thirty and forty when the
strongest affections take root, the King had found in her company a sort
of home. Her character was, moreover, comprehensible and secretly
sympathetic to that vast proprietary body, the Bourgeoisie, which then
were and are now the stuff of the nation.
She was prudent, she could choose a friend or a servant; her vivacity
did not lack restraint. She was decent, fond of quiet silk, of good
taste in decoration and of management. Her position at Versailles was a
sort of conquest effected by the middle classes over the Court. Such a
mistress, ruling for many years, the nation received at last with far
more calm than could the buzzing nobles of the palace. As she (and the
King) grew older, as her power became absolute and his individual
presence grew remote, the situation was acceptable to Paris even more
than to those who immediately surrounded the throne.
She died. There was an interval of puzzled silence about the person of
the King. No one dreamt of a new power at Court. A nullity of action in
the King himself, a few more stories, obscure and scandalous, the end of
the reign and the accession of the heir who should bring with him such
reforms as all the intellect of the country demanded: these were the
expectations which followed her death, and especially were they the hope
or the certitude of that group of men, mostly not noble, who had long
managed both law and finance.
This prospect had, however, omitted one capital factor in the
calculation. Louis XV., during these long years of regular habit, had
grown old, and age in such a character, thus isolated, thus re-entrant,
and yet hungry for whatever might tempt the senses, could only lead to
some appalling error. In years he was, when Madame de Pompadour died,
but little past fifty, but that blindness to exterior opinion and that
carelessness for the future which properly belong to an age much more
advanced, had already spread like a mist over his mind. After an
interval of less than four years from the Pompadour’s death, the nation
and the capital and those leaders of opinion who awaited a mere negative
decline full of petty rumours but controlled as to great affairs by that
Choiseul whom the Pompadour herself had chosen for Minister, were
presented with the Du Barry: the scandal and its effect were
overwhelming.
This woman was a prostitute.
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