_THE DU BARRY_
THE presence of the Du Barry at the Court of Versailles, the fact that
this presence preceded the Austrian child’s arrival, that it was first
publicly admitted at the first public appearance of the Dauphiness, and
that the four years of her tutelage were overshadowed by the new Royal
Mistress was the initial and irretrievable disaster of Marie
Antoinette’s life. It moulded her view of the nation and of the family
with whom she had now to mingle; it deeply affected the populace she was
to attempt to rule; it cloistered, warped and distracted her vision of
France at a moment in adolescence when vision is most acute and the
judgment formed upon it most permanent. All the Queen’s tragedy is
furnished by the early spell of this insignificant and licentious woman.
With her advent was introduced for the first time into the Court that
insolent and calculated disregard for rule in gesture and vocabulary
wherein which the rich will often secretly relax their ordered lives,
but which, when it appears publicly amidst their daily furniture, is as
shocking as nakedness or as blood.
Judged in the pure light of human morals the position of the Du Barry
was surely less offensive to God than that of any mistress any King has
ever chosen. Louis wronged no one by this whim. He wrecked no remains of
chastity—the woman had never known the meaning of the word. He wronged
no subject (as has and does almost every royal lover in every amour)—her
marriage had been but a hurried form run through to satisfy etiquette,
“that she might be presented at Court.” He provided himself with a
companion too inferior to make political intrigue her main ambition, and
with one that could and did surround him with an abject but constant,
familiar, and comfortable affection. It was such a vagary of old age as
those in which have terminated countless lives, when old gentlemen of
breeding but of enfeebled will surround their last years with youth and
with the vigour, tainted vigour, that is inseparable from vulgarity.
There is not one of us but has come upon a dozen such unions: they are
often confirmed by a tardy marriage.
But in the case of Louis and this scandal of his a necessary element to
such disgrace, the element of retirement, was lacking. Those symbols
which, if they are insisted upon, are mere hypocrisies, but which, taken
normally, are the guardians of a tolerable life, were outraged. The eyes
of the noble-women at Versailles were full, some of a real or affected
timidity, others of a real or affected dignity. Such ladies as chose to
be sprightly or even to advertise their loose habit with over-brilliant
and vivacious looks, retained, considered, and could always assume
refinement; but the beautiful eyes of the Du Barry were brazen. The
_mignardises_, which are always ill-suited to a woman, might be
deliberately affected by the less subtle of the more elderly beauties:
with the Du Barry, despite her evident youth, they had already become
native and ineradicable. She lisped alarmingly; she lolled, or, when it
was necessary for her to sit erect, was awkward. Her entry into a room
was conscious; her assertions loud, her amiability oiled, her
animosities superficially violent. It is upon solemn occasions that such
deficiencies are most glaring, and solemn occasions were of continual
recurrence at Versailles. In a word, she was most desperately out of
place, and therefore produced an effect as of dirt, jarring against
whatever was palatine and splendid in the evil of the Court by her
parade of the loose good-nature and the looser spites of the Parisian
brothels.
Yet it is not difficult to see what had brought the King into so fixed a
relation with her. Whoever will compare any of the portraits of her by
Drouais with any by Boucher of the Pompadour will see, not the same
character indeed, but the same brows and forehead.
Louis could not continue in those early and familiar relations with her
which had become a necessity to him, unless in some way her place were
publicly acknowledged; but to force such a personality upon the Court,
to give it precedence and to see that its position should be permanent,
was an effort he had avoided for months. A scene was intolerable to him.
He suffered from the most common defect attaching to men of lineage and
wealth in that he feared, or rather could not endure, the prospect of
violence. Orders even and debate, if they were of a personal and verbal
kind, he shrank from as do some men from loud noises. The more important
and decisive of his actions were effected in short notes, every line of
which, as we read them to-day, manifest his urgent need of isolation: of
getting the business done without the friction of another presence, and
once done, put aside for ever.
For the public presentation of the Du Barry the marriage of his
grandson, and especially the presence of the little Archduchess, offered
a fatal opportunity. It would be impossible for the malicious to allude
to the office of the Mistress in the presence of the child; the occasion
would compel the princes and princesses of the blood to attend, and
would equally forbid any general revolt. He determined to give the
Archduchess a formal banquet on the journey before the Court and its
company had reached Versailles, to summon to it the chief members of the
Court, and to let them find at table, without warning, the woman whose
existence had hitherto not been spoken of in his presence.
The official limit of Paris upon the west—in those days—a line drawn far
beyond the houses and enclosing many fields, gardens, and suburbs, ran
from what is now the Trocadero to what is now the Arc de Triomphe.
Outside the gate or barrier was an empty space of land but partially
cultivated and with no more than a scattered house or two upon it, save
where, along the waterside and on the hill above it, clustered the
village of Passy. This empty space merged gradually into what were then
the wild and unfrequented Boulogne woods. Just on the edge of these, in
a situation which was close to the town and yet upon one side accessible
to the forest, stood a royal hunting-box called “La Muette,” which had
gradually developed into a little palace. Here, on the evening of the
day after Compiègne, the long and splendid train of the Court arrived,
bearing in the chief coach the King, the Dauphin, and this new Austrian
girl for whom Louis had already shown so much respect and tenderness,
and whose entry into her rank he was yet to distort.
The day had been long for the child, but her curiosity and the vitality
of her years had forbidden her to feel fatigue.
Dense mobs of people, cheering and running by the side of the carriages,
had indeed been familiar to her since her babyhood, but the vivacity and
the shrillness and the surprising contrasts of this active
civilisation—its solemn roads, its simple architecture, broken by an
occasional and unexpected magnificence, the long lines of ordered trees
which here seemed as native as in her own country they had seemed
artificial and foreign; the half-hour’s glimpse of an austere French
convent which she had had when she visited at St. Denis (in passing);
the King’s daughter, veiled among the Carmelites; the outskirts of a
gigantic city such as she had never known—all these sufficed to distract
her until the fall of the cold spring evening, when the line of
carriages clattered into the paved courtyard of La Muette.
As though such experiences were not sufficient to bewilder her with the
new world, the girl found when she came to her room, attended by Madame
de Noailles and the ladies of her suite, such a parade of diamonds upon
her table as to-day one will see only in the vulgar surroundings of a
public show.
The instinct for gems which was latent in her, but which the extreme
simplicity of the Austrian Court had not permitted to arise, awoke at
once. They were the diamonds of the woman who would have been her
mother-in-law had she lived, or rather who, had she lived, would never
have permitted this marriage. They had reverted to the Crown upon her
death, and Louis XV. had had them placed there upon Marie Antoinette’s
table in readiness for her appearance; he had so sent them partly from a
sort of paternal kindness, partly from a desire typical in him to exceed
even in giving pleasure; but also, perhaps, partly to atone for the harm
he was about to do her. For when the child came down, some two hours
later, and was led in the strict etiquette of the Court procession into
the dining-hall of the little palace, she could not but notice
throughout the meal that followed a constraint less natural than that
regular constraint of the French Court life which, in twenty-four hours
of experience, had already struck her quick apprehension. It was not
that men and women waited for the King to speak, but that their answers
were given without vivacity, and with that curious mixture of restraint
and purpose which she had already perhaps noticed, in her brief
acquaintance with the French, to be the mark of their conversation in
anger. She saw also that the old King looked straight before him with
something of sullenness in his dignity, and she saw sitting next to him
a woman whose presence there must have perpetually intrigued her
imagination. That woman was the Du Barry.
To whatever adventures and novelties the children of gentle-folk are
exposed, there is always one note of vulgarity which they can make
nothing of and which, while it offends them, disturbs and astonishes
them much more than it offends. In the midst of that curiously silent,
erect, and very splendid table, where forty of her sex and of her rank
were present, the presence of this one woman was in its nervous effect
like the intolerable reiteration of a mechanical sound interrupting a
tragic strain of music. The Du Barry had not the art, so common to the
poorest members of the nobility or of the middle class, when they would
slip in among the wealthy, of remaining silent and of affecting a
reverence for her new surroundings. She held herself with a loose ease
before them all, was perhaps the only one to laugh, and permitted
herself an authority that was the more effective because it hardly
concealed her very great hesitation in this first public recognition of
her place.
What the child Marie Antoinette made of such an apparition will never be
known. Her first letters to her mother upon the matter come later, when
she had fully understood the insult or at least the indignity which had
been done her. The only record we possess of her emotion is this: that
when just after supper some courtier was at the pains to ask her, with
infinite respect and a peculiar irony, what she had thought of Madame Du
Barry, she said, “Charming,” and nothing more.
Next day in the early morning the coaches took on again the last steps
of the journey to Versailles. Twelve miles which were a repetition of
those scenes, those crowds, and those cheers of which the little
Archduchess was now sufficiently weary, but which were leading up to
that event toward which her childhood had been directed, and which could
not but drive out of her mind the doubts of the evening before.
By ten o’clock the procession had passed the great gates of Versailles;
three hours were spent in the long, distressing, and rigid ceremonies of
the Court in whose centre she was now placed and whose magnificence now
first enveloped her. It was one before the procession formed for the
marriage ceremony, and had placed at the head of it the girl, and the
boy whom, in this long trial of two days, she had but little regarded.
She came under the high vault of the new, gilded chapel as full of life
as the music that greeted her entry. On her left the boy, to whom so
much publicity was a torture, went awkwardly and with the nervous
sadness of his eyes intensified; his gold braid and his diamonds
heightened his ill-ease. He managed to give her the ring and the coins
proper to the ceremony, to kneel and stand when he was told; but _she_
went royally, playing, as girl children so easily play, at womanhood,
and smiling upon all around.
The contrast was gravely apparent when they passed together down the
aisle with the Quête, and when they sat—he effaced, she
triumphant—during the little sermon which the Grand Almoner was bound to
deliver. The heir was not relieved till the Mass was over and the book
was brought wherein the signature of the witnesses and principals to a
marriage are inscribed.
It is natural to the extreme of privilege that it should affect
occasional and absurd simplicities. The last generation of Versailles
was eager for such things, and it had become the custom that a royal
marriage should be registered not in any grand and parchment manner but
in the common book of a parish church, the church to whose parish the
palace was nominally attached. Father Allart, the rector of this, in
whose hard and unimportant life such days were set, came in to give the
book. The Grand Almoner set it before them and they signed—the King
first, with his large and practised name; the Dauphin next in a writing
that was thin, accurate, and null. He passed the pen to this little new
wife of his, who was to sign third. At so practical a test her womanhood
dropped off her, her exceedingly ignorant childhood returned. She got
through the “Marie” with no mistake of spelling, but the letters were a
trifle uncertain and the word askew. Why had not some one ruled a line
as lines are ruled in copy-books? “Antoinette,” the second word, was
larger and gave more trouble; the last letters fell away deplorably. And
when it came to the third name, “Josepha,” it was too much for her
altogether. She did her best with the “J”—it ended in a huge blot, and
she became so flurried that she spelt her last name anyhow, without the
“e,” and let it go to pieces. She was relieved to give the pen to
Provence, who, though he was yet so young, wrote his name strongly like
a man. Artois, Mesdames, the Orleans followed. Each as they signed could
see at the head of the page that deplorable and dirty scrawl which the
child, whose advent each of them feared, had left as a record of her
fifteenth year.
The Court left the chapel. As they passed into the outer galleries of
the palace before the enormous and increasing crowd which thronged the
stairways and the landing-floors, the air seemed much darker than when
they had passed in an hour before. Through the great windows the sky
could be seen lowering for a storm. As she entered the private
apartments to receive homage the darkness increased; the ceremony was
not over before a first loud clap of thunder startled them; the rain
fell with violence upon the populace that had crowded the gardens, the
fireworks set out for that evening were drenched, the fine dresses of
the Paris shop-women were spoiled: all the grandeur in front of the
palace was lost in umbrellas. It cleared, and they crushed in, with
their muddy boots well scraped, to file in thousands, a long procession
urged on by the Guards and passing, behind a barrier, down the immense
hall, where the tables were set for cards. The King and his Court played
solemnly like actors who must pretend to see no audience, sitting thus
as a public symbol of the nation.
The crowd passed thus, company after company, staring at Monarchy and at
the dresses and the gems till the West grew dark, and the myriads of
candles, reflected on a wall that was all mirrors, lent that evening its
true colours. When the last reluctant sightseer had looked his last over
his shoulder and had felt the tapestry drop behind him, the ceremony
ceased, the tables were cleared, the King rose and conducted the bride
to her room. A full ceremonial of etiquette was wearily and thoroughly
performed, the Grand Almoner (once again) blessed the children’s bed,
and that was the end of the marriage.
Outside, the crowd went back through the May night to their lodgings or
to Paris, full of feasting, damp, surrounded by the fresh air that
follows rain. They carried with them a confused memory of a great
outing—music, grandeur, diamonds, innumerable lights, no fireworks, and
a storm.
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