_THE DAUPHINE_
_Wednesday, 16th of May 1770 to Tuesday, 10th of May 1774_
WHEN the mock-marriage was over and the night passed, and when, with the
Thursday morning, the long routine that was to be her life opened upon
her, the child could watch with less excitement and with less illusion
the nature of that new world. Her vivacity was not diminished, but her
spirit immediately adopted a permanent attitude of astonished
observation towards emotions and conventions whose general scheme she
could not grasp at all. Daily the incidents which passed before her
while they violently moved also repelled her senses; she was reconciled
to them only by their repetition.
Versailles was the more bewildering to her because, in all its
externals, it was the world she had known from her birth. The French
cooking, architecture, dress, and social manner had for a century
imposed themselves upon the palaces of Europe; but the French mind, now
first in contact with her own, remained to her a marvellous and
unpleasing revelation, which, even after years of regarding its energy,
still shocked her.
There was a ball that night. She danced with her bright-eyed and tall
young brother-in-law. At what he was sneering she could not understand,
nor even if the boy’s expression was a sneer: she knew that it was
strange. She did not notice the absence of half the Court; she did not
know that her mother’s request for Precedence to be given to the
Princesses of Lorraine had raised this silent French storm; had she been
told she would not have comprehended. The extreme and individual French
jealousies, the furious discussions that underlie the united formality
of French etiquette, were alien and inhuman to her German breeding; for
active and living, almost Southern, as was this Viennese girl, she
enjoyed to the end the good simplicity of her mother’s race. She danced
with young Chartres. If something in him chilled her, she could not
divine what it was in that character which even then seemed closed, and
which later was to make him vote her husband’s death, and sit at wine in
his palace while she sat a prisoner and widowed in her prison at hand.
For days the feasts continued and for days her unexpected experiences of
persons and of a strange nationality were relieved by pageants and
popular clamours which, at her age, could distract her from weary
questions. It was at one of these that there sounded once more that note
of disaster which came at rhythmic intervals across her life and
continued to come until a climax closed it. She had leave to go with her
aunts, the King’s daughters, by night with a small escort to see the
public holiday in Paris which celebrated her marriage. She was to go
without ceremony, not to be recognised, merely to satisfy a child’s
curiosity for a spectacle in her own honour. As the coach came up the
river road towards what is now the Trocadero hill she could already see
far off the flash of the rockets, and she heard with increasing pleasure
the roar of a great crowd met to do her honour. As she neared the great
square which is called to-day the Place de la Concorde she was
disappointed, as children are, to see that the coach was late; the great
scaffolding and final set-piece in which her initials were interlaced
with those of the Dauphin was sputtering out in the inglorious end of
fireworks—but something more intimate to her (had she known herself) and
worse than her childish disappointment had marked the moment of her
arrival. The coach was stopped abruptly, the guards closed round it, and
it was turned back at once towards Versailles. As it rumbled through the
darkness more quickly than it had come, she seemed to hear in the
distant clamour both fierceness and terror. It was a sound of panic. She
heard the news whispered respectfully and fearfully to her aunts during
a halt upon the way. Perhaps they thought her too young to be told. She
complained as she went that the truth was concealed from her, and when
they reached the palace late that night she was crying. Next day the
news was public, and she learned that after this first rejoicing, in
what was to be her capital city, there had been crushed and maimed and
killed many hundreds of her people; it proved one of those misfortunes
which, as much from their circumstance as from their magnitude, remain
fixed for years in the memory of a nation, and the day on which she
learned it was the last of the month of her wedding.
During the summer that followed this presage she learnt the whole lesson
of Versailles. She was still a child. Mercy still wrote of her to her
mother in a tone which, for all its conventional respect, was a tone now
of irritation against, now of amused admiration for, a child. She had
her daily childish lessons with the Abbé Vermond and daily exasperated
him by her distractions. She still wrote painfully her childish letters
to Maria Theresa, took her little childish donkey-rides, and was
strongly impressed, as a child would be, by those of her elders who
alone could show some authority over her—Mesdames, her husband’s aunts.
She was growing fast; and there is nothing more touching in the minute
record of her life than the notes of her increasing stature during this
year, so oddly does the nursery detail contrast with the splendour of
her place in Europe and the titles of her rôle.
She was still a child; but as her fifteenth birthday approached and was
passed she had learnt (while it wearied her) the full etiquette of her
part, and she had begun, though imperfectly, to recognise what were the
politics of a Court and in what manner intrigue would approach her: how
to avoid or master it she discovered neither then nor at any later time
throughout her adolescence and maturity.
With the advent of winter and its long and brilliant festivals, another
thing which she had begun to comprehend in the palace became for her a
fixed object of hatred: the position and influence of the Du Barry.
She knew now what this official place was which the Favourite held. Her
disgust for so much regulation and pomp in such an office would in any
case have been strong, for Marie Antoinette came from a Court where the
sovereign was herself a woman and where all this side of men’s lives was
left to the suburbs: that disgust would in any case have been sharp, for
she was too young and too utterly inexperienced to be indulgent; it
would in any case have been increased by a sense of isolation, for all
around this German child were the French gentry taking for granted that
everything touching a King of France, from his vices to his foibles,
must be dressed up in a national and symbolic magnificence. Her disgust
would, I say, in any case have risen against so much complexity allied
to so much strength, but that disgust turned into an active and violent
repulsion when she saw the Du Barry not only, as it were, official but
also exercising power. This to her very young and passionate instincts,
whether of sex, of rank, or of policy, was intolerable; it was the more
intolerable in that the Du Barry’s first exercise of power happened to
go counter to interests which the Dauphine regarded rather too
emphatically as those of Austria and of her family.
The chief Minister of the Crown, the Duc de Choiseul, kindly, sceptical,
well-bred and rather hollow, had been, if not the mere creation or
discovery, at any rate the ally of Madame de Pompadour. Madame de
Pompadour had been a statesman herself: Choiseul had perpetually
supported her and she him, more especially when he ran in the rut of the
time, showed himself conventionally anti-Christian, and (having been
educated by the Jesuits) was drawn into the intrigue by which that order
was suppressed. He had been ambassador at Vienna, though that in a year
when Marie Antoinette was a baby, so that she had no early memories of
his snub-nose and happy, round face; but she had known his name all her
life from the talk of the palace in Vienna, and she had known it under
the title which he had assumed just after her birth. The Duc de Choiseul
was for her, as for every foreigner, a name now permanently associated
with French policy and a Minister who was identical with Versailles.
Maria Theresa was grateful to him for having permitted the marriage of
her daughter: that daughter after some months of the French Court very
probably imagined that he had not only permitted but helped to design
the alliance. It was against this man that the Du Barry stumbled.
It would not be just to accuse the young woman Du Barry of design. The
State was a very vague thing to her. She held good fellowship with many,
owed her advancement to Choiseul’s enemies, and was, in general, the
creature of the clique opposed to him, while for D’Aiguillon, who
already posed as the rival of the elder man, she felt perhaps a personal
affection. She was very vain and full of that domestic ambition which
comes in floods upon women of her sort when they attain a position of
some regularity. She loved to feel herself possessed of what she had
learned in the old days to call (in the jargon of her lovers) “office,”
“power”; to feel that she could “make” people. As for the pleasure of an
applauded judgment, or the satisfaction of that appetite for choice
which inspires women of Madame de Pompadour’s sort in history, the Du
Barry would not have understood the existence of such an emotion. The
most inept and the most base received the advantage of her patronage,
not because she believed them capable of administration, but simply
because they had shown least scruple in receiving her, or later, amid
the general coldness of the Court, had been the first to pay her an
exaggerated respect. As for those with whom she could recall
familiarities in the past, she was willing to make the fortunes of them
all.
Though such an attitude could easily have been played upon by the
courtiers of her set, it could never have supplied a motive force for
her demands nor have nourished the tenacity with which she pressed them;
that force and that tenacity were supplied to her by her own acute
sensitiveness upon her new position. The angry pique to which all her
kind can be moved in the day of their highly imperfect success was
aflame at every incident which recalled to her the truth of her origin
and the incongruity of her situation: in her convulsive desire to
revenge against every slight, real or imagined, she found an ally in the
old King, her lover. He also knew that he was in a posture of
humiliation, and under his calm and tired bearing he suffered a
continual irritation from that knowledge. As he pottered about his
frying-pans, cooking some late dish to his liking, or went alone and
almost furtively down the hidden stair between her little, low,
luxurious rooms and his own rooms of state, his silent mind was even
less at ease than in the days, now so long past, when an utter weariness
with the things of the flesh and a despair of discovering other emotions
had first put into his eyes the tragedy that still shines from them upon
the walls of Versailles.
All, therefore, that the Du Barry did through Louis XV. as her power
increased was not for this or that person whom she feared or loved; it
was rather against this or that person whose presence she found
intolerable. All that she suggested, so far as persons were concerned,
the King was ready to achieve.
Had some married woman of force and subtlety formed the centre of
opposition to the Favourite, the reign would have ended easily. Mary of
Saxony, the Dauphin’s mother, had been such a woman, and would, had she
lived, have conducted affairs to a decent close. Fate put in the place
of such a woman first three old maids—the King’s daughters—and next this
little girl, the Dauphine.
The origins were slight, but in its course the quarrel gathered impetus.
At first came that silent great supper-party at La Muette and the
instinctive repulsion which the child felt and which this woman from the
streets as instinctively resented. Next, in the summer, one of the
Dauphine’s women had a sharp quarrel with the Favourite in the stalls of
the Court theatre. The Favourite had her exiled from Court, and the
Dauphine, crying secretly with anger in her rooms, could obtain no
redress. During the summer absences of the Court in the country palaces
a perpetual travel and larger room to move prevented an open battle; in
the following winter that very grave event, the exile of Choiseul,
sealed the difference.
It was the error of Choiseul not that he had opposed the Favourite’s
entry—on the contrary, he had thought it a useful whim that would amuse
and occupy his sovereign—but that he could not take her seriously. His
“world,” his relatives, his intimates, those whom he had placed and
salaried during twelve years of power, were outspoken in their contempt
for the Du Barry. Her own simple spite lumped all together and made the
Minister the cause of her difficulties and their victim. For months she
had half amused, half frightened Louis by an increasing insolence to De
Choiseul at cards and at table. He had met this insolence at first with
the ironic courtesy that he must have shown during his life to a hundred
such women; later, by a careful and veiled defence; last of all by a
resigned and somewhat dignified expectation of what he saw would be the
end.
When a society approaches some convulsion the pace of change increases
enormously with every step towards the catastrophe. “_This_ at least no
one dreams of. _That_ at least cannot happen!” But this and that do
happen, and at last all feel themselves to be impotent spectators of a
process so forcible and swift that no wisdom can arrest it. Political
literature in such moments turns to mere criticism and speculation; it
no longer pleads, still less directs. So it is to-day with more than one
society of Western Europe; so it was with the close of Louis XV.’s
reign.
In May 1770, when the Austrian alliance was consummated by the arrival
of Marie Antoinette and by the wedding at Versailles, the revocation of
the one conspicuous statesman in France would have seemed impossible. He
had no more capacity than have the most of politicians, but he did at
least read the rough standard demanded in that trade, and his name was
rooted in the mind of his own public and of Europe. If the dismissal of
Choiseul had been proposed in the summer, there still remained enough
active force opposed to this new Du Barry woman to have prevented the
folly; but at the rate things were going every month weakened that
force; by the end of the year it was too late to act in his defence.
On Christmas Eve fat Hilliers came lurching out of the Favourite’s room
and brought Choiseul a note in Louis’ hand. It was a short note exiling
him to his place at Chanteloup and relieving him of office.
There was no one to replace the Minister: the action was that of a
common woman who exercised a private vengeance and could conceive no
reasons of State. Yet no one was astonished—save perhaps the child to
whom so vast a change was the climax of all that had bewildered her
since she had first spoken to the French Court.
Maria Theresa and Mercy, her ambassador to Versailles, had that
knowledge of the world which permitted each to find footing, even in
such a welter. Each from a long experience knew well that the depth of
political life moves slowly for all the violent changes of machinery or
of names. Each felt the alliance—the object of all their solicitude—to
be still standing, in spite of Choiseul’s fall; and each divined that
their little Princess, who was the pledge of that alliance at the French
Court, and whom they destined, when she was Queen, to be its
perpetuator, might at this moment weaken and ruin it: her probable
indiscretion and her simplicity were the points of danger. Her
plain-spoken anger might ruin their plans for a recovery of Austrian
influence. Each therefore concentrated upon a special effort—Mercy by
repeated visits from the Austrian Embassy in Paris to the Court at
Versailles and by repeated admonitions; Maria Theresa (in whom the fear
for her daughter’s future and position was even greater than her
solicitude for the Austrian policy) by repeated letters, too insistent
perhaps and too personal wholly to effect their object.
Marie Antoinette was persuaded to a certain restraint, but she was
neither convinced nor instructed. She saw the whole situation as a girl
would see it, in black and white: Madame du Barry was of the gutter, and
had yet been able to destroy a name she had always heard associated with
the fortunes of her own family and the dignity of the French Crown. The
complexity of the situation, the short years it was likely to last, the
necessity during those years of weighing the intricate and changing
attachments of the great families in their interlacing groups—all this
escaped her.
So little did she see the intricate pattern of politics that, when Louis
XV., less than two months later, exiled the higher courts of law and all
but roused a rebellion, she did not connect with the reign of her enemy
this act of violence which isolated and imperilled the Crown; she
thought it royal, immediate, and just, still seeing mere kingship, as
children see it in a fairy tale, beneficent and paternal.
The six months of administrative anarchy that followed meant nothing to
her. When in July, D’Aiguillon—inept, a mere servitor of the
Favourite’s—was at last appointed to the vacant post of Prime Minister,
this act—in its way more astounding than the dismissal of Choiseul—was
only remarkable to her because it was the Du Barry’s doing. And during
the whole of her sixteenth year she represented at Court a fixed
indignation which, in her alone, steadily increased as the powers of the
Favourite became absolute; for as Marie Antoinette approached womanhood
she developed a quality of resistance which was the one element of
strength of her early character, but from which was fatally absent any
power to design. That obstinate power of resistance was to raise around
her multiplying and enduring enmities; it was to mature her in her first
severe trials, but was also to bring her to the tragedy which has lent
her name enduring and exaggerated nobility.
This opposition which the Dauphine offered to Madame du Barry, an
opposition which did but rise as that woman (during 1771) opened, one
after the other, all the avenues of power to her lowest or least capable
courtiers, took on no form of violence.
Marie Antoinette, as the pale auburn of her hair and her thick eyebrows
darkened, as her frame strengthened and her voice took on a fuller tone,
added to the vivacity of her childhood a new note of passionate emphasis
which was ill-suited to her part, and which in any circumstances but
those of luxury would have approached vulgarity. In many minor matters
she forbore to put the least restraint upon a momentary annoyance; she
would have some design she disapproved destroyed; a bookcase, though it
was Gabriel’s, she had broken before her eyes to appease her discontent.
But in the major matter of this quarrel she put on a sort of solemnity,
and her resistance took the simple but unconquerable form of silence.
She would not recognise the Favourite, though she were to meet her five
times a day, and she would not address one word to her.
That silence, which kept open at Court a sharp wound and which stood a
permanent and a most powerful menace to all that had power at
Versailles, became for Mesdames the King’s daughters (who had first
given this example) and for all the defeated parties a welcome
symbol—though for the Princess herself it was a most perilous one. To
break that silence was the effort of every converging force about her.
Her mother in repeated warnings; Mercy, the King, and most of all the
Favourite herself, came to think it a first point of policy that what
might have been pardoned in the child should not remain a cause of acute
offence in the woman. She was now nearly eighteen months at Versailles;
she had entered her seventeenth year. But whenever the Du Barry crossed
her in the receptions or met her eyes at table, whatever beginnings of a
salute may have escaped the loose manner of the Favourite, she suffered
the mortification of a complete refusal. The feminine comedy was
admirably played, and for the Dauphine the King’s mistress remained a
picture or an empty chair—sometimes to be blankly gazed at; never to be
recognised or addressed.
There was indeed a moment in August when the Dauphine’s resolution
wavered. Mercy had visited the Du Barry; he had spoken to her intimately
and with gallantry. He had probably promised her the graces of the
Dauphine; he returned to Marie Antoinette to press his advice. So
pressed she promised her mother’s ambassador that she would speak, but
when the moment came and the meeting had been carefully arranged, after
cards at evening, she remembered too much: she remembered perhaps most
keenly a recent thing, the choice of one of this woman’s friends, in
spite of her protests, for one of her ladies-in-waiting. She strolled to
the table where Mercy and the Favourite were talking together. As she
came up Madame du Barry put on an air of expectation which invited her
approach. The girl hesitated and turned back. A scene not consonant to
that society was avoided only by Madame Adelaide, who had the presence
of mind to summon her niece at the critical moment of the insult; but
the fiasco led to further and more peremptory orders from her mother, to
a long and troubled interview between Mercy and the King, and at last to
the conclusion which they all desired. The Dauphine recognised the Du
Barry; but the recognition came in a manner so characteristic of Marie
Antoinette that it would have been better for her and for them if they
had not won their battle.
Upon the New Year’s Day of 1772 at Versailles, on which day it was
agreed (and this time most solemnly vowed) that a greeting should be
given, and during the formal reception held at Court that day, there
came a moment when, in an uneasy silence, the moving crowd of the Court
saw the Dauphine approach the Favourite, pass before her, and say as she
passed—not so directly nor so loudly as might be wished, but still so
that the Du Barry might have taken the words as addressed to herself:
“_There are very many people at Versailles to-day_.” Before a reply
could be given her she had passed on. Next day she said to Mercy: “I
shall not let that woman hear the sound of my voice again.”
The moment of time during which this quarrel reached its height was one
of extreme anxiety to Maria Theresa, and indeed to all. It was that
during which the first public renunciation of the international morality
which had hitherto ruled in Christendom was in negotiation at the
instance of Prussia. It was secretly proposed that an European
government should be disregarded without treaty and subjected to mere
force without the sanction of our general civilisation. Frederick had
suggested to Russia long before with deference, recently to Catholic
Austria with a sneer, the partition of Poland.
It is characteristic of the more deplorable forms of insurgence against
civilised morals that they originate either in a race permanently alien
to (though present in) the unity of the Roman Empire, or in those
barbaric provinces which were admitted to the European scheme after the
fall of Rome, and which for the most part enjoyed but a brief and
precarious vision of the Faith between their tardy conversion and the
schism of the sixteenth century. Prussia was of this latter kind, and
with Prussia Frederick. To-day his successors and their advisers, when
they attempt to justify the man, are compelled still to ignore the
European tradition of honour. But this crime of his, the partition of
Poland, the germ of all that international distrust which has ended in
the intolerable armed strain of our time, has another character attached
to it: a character which attaches invariably to ill-doing when that
ill-doing is also uncivilised. It was a folly. The same folly attached
to it as has attached to every revolt against the historic conscience of
Europe: such blindnesses can only destroy; they possess no permanent
creative spirit, and the partition of Poland has remained a peculiar and
increasing curse to its promoters in Prussia; to their mere accomplices
in St. Petersburg it has caused and is causing less weakness and peril;
while it has left but a slight inheritance of suffering to the
Hapsburgs, whose chief was at the moment of the crime but a most
reluctant party to it.
There is not in Christian history, though it abounds in coincidence or
design, a more striking example of sin suitably rewarded than the menace
which is presented to the Hohenzollerns to-day by the Polish race. Not
even their hereditary disease, which has reached its climax in the
present generation, has proved so sure a chastisement to the lineage of
Frederick as have proved the descendants of those whose country he
destroyed. An economic accident has scattered them throughout the
dominions of the Prussian dynasty; they are a source everywhere of
increasing danger and ill-will. They grow largely in representative
power. They compel the government to abominable barbarities which are
already arousing the mind of Europe. They will in the near future prove
the ruin of that family to which was originally due the partition of
Poland.
Enormous as was the event, however, both in its quality of evil and in
its consequences to mankind, it must not detain the reader of these
pages. Its interest here lies only in the first and principal example
which it affords of Marie Antoinette’s direct and therefore unpolitical
temper. She was indeed only upon the verge of womanhood—she had but
completed her sixteenth year—but her failure to understand the critical,
and, above all, the complex necessities of the Hapsburgs at that moment
was characteristic of all the further miscalculations that were to mark
her continual interference with diplomacy for twenty years. It was
imperative that Austria should find support in the grave issue to which
Maria Theresa had been compelled against her conscience and her reason.
Berlin and St. Petersburg suddenly having agreed to a mutual
aggrandisement, help was imperative, and help could only come from her
ally at Versailles. Upon this one occasion, if upon no other, the young
daughter of the Empress was justified in working for her family, and
that could only be done through the woman whose influence was now the
one avenue of approach to Louis XV. A recognition of the Du Barry was
essential to Vienna in that new year of 1772. The Dauphine made it, but
she made it in such a way that it was a worse insult even than had been
her former silence. Had war broken out that spring, at the melting of
the snow, it is possible or probable that Versailles would not have
supported Vienna against Prussia and Russia in arms.
There was almost a quarrel between the growing girl and the Empress her
mother. To that mother she still remained the child who had left Vienna
two years before; but then, in Versailles and to those who saw her, this
year made her a woman.
That she had passed the boundary of adolescence was apparent in many
ways. She was more and more enfranchised from the influence of elder
women—notably of her husband’s aunts, her intimacy with whom faded
throughout 1772 and disappeared in 1773. Her step had acquired that firm
and rather conscious poise which was to distinguish her throughout her
life. The growth of her stature was now accomplished, and she was tall,
and though her shoulders had not the grace and amplitude which they
later assumed, her figure had, in general, achieved maturity. Her hair,
now a trifle darker and browner in its red, her eyebrows, always
pronounced but now thicker and more prominent, announced the same
change. Her motives also, though insufficient in judgment, were deeper
in origin. Her resistance to her mother’s and to Mercy’s most pressing
insistence in the matter of the Favourite was a resistance no longer
even partially suggested to her by others; it was due now to a full
comprehension of the old King’s degradation, and to a formed abhorrence
of the Du Barry. Moreover, when she yielded for a moment—as she did
perhaps three times in the course of two years—it was with some measure
of thought: she consented to approach the King’s mistress at moments
when the ambassador or her mother had convinced her by speech or letter
of an acute necessity; but already, in her excuses when she refused, she
began to use the argument of a woman, not of a child—she pleaded the
“authority of her husband”: it was a phrase in which she, least of all,
put faith!
With this advent of womanhood there came, of necessity to a character so
ardent, fixed enmities. She was no longer despised as a child; she was
hated as an adult. Mesdames the King’s daughters, whose influence over
her had disappeared, joined, in their disappointment, the over-large
group of her detractors. The fatal name of “Autrichienne,” the foreign
label that clung to her at the scaffold, originated in the drawing-rooms
of the three old maids, and all around her, as her power to order or to
fascinate increased, there increased also new hatreds which attained to
permanence, because her German memories, her eager action, her crude and
single aspect of the multitudinous and subtle French character, her
rapid turning from this pleasure to that, her ignorance of books and of
things, lent her no power to wear these courtiers down or to play a
skilful game against them.
Forgetfulness was easy to her. To help her to forget she had the
intoxication of that moment which comes once in life and is the powerful
blossoming of our humanity. Her eighteenth year, the last year before
she ascended the throne, was the great moment of her youth.
She had not been beautiful as a child, she was not destined to real
beauty in her womanhood; but at this moment, with the spring of 1773 and
on to that of 1774, there radiated from her the irresistible appeal of
youth.
Paris, which had learnt to despise and half to hate the Crown, which had
felt itself widowed and abandoned by the emigration of the Bourbons to
Versailles, caught her charm for a day. When she made with the Dauphin
her first official entry into the city, great crowds acclaimed her
perpetually; she had that emotion, so dear to women that it will drive
them on to the stage itself, of a public applause directed towards their
persons: the general applause of Paris was almost an applause of lovers.
For just these passing hours on a sweet day in early June she saw and
loved the city wherein her doom was written upon every stone, and for
these hours the Tuileries which she inhabited were faëry and so full of
delight that she could not tell whether the air was magical or owed its
fragrance only to the early flowers.
In such a mood, daily drinking in happiness and a certain sense of
power, admired almost openly by distant men and—very likely—by Artois,
her young brother-in-law, who had known her all these years, she passed
the high tide of the summer and autumn, and found in the ensuing winter
for the first time that lively and absorbing interest in social pleasure
which very largely determined her life.
Of the balls in which she danced, of the masked balls that were her
special delight, one stands out in history—and stood out in her own
memories, even to her last hour, a night unlike all others.
* * * * *
The reader has divined that the marriage of May 1770 had been no
marriage. It was contracted between children; and years must pass—years
which were those of the school-room for both of them—before Maria
Theresa could expect an heir with Hapsburg blood for the French throne.
But those years passed; the child was now a woman, and still the
marriage remained a form.
From an accident to which I will return in its proper place, the Dauphin
and herself were not wife and husband; and to this grave historical fact
must largely be attributed the disasters that were to follow. For the
moment, however, this misfortune did little but accentuate her isolation
and perhaps her pride. In her childish advent to the Court it could mean
nothing to her. Lately she had understood a little more clearly; but she
was pure; her training was in admirable conformity to her faith; she was
not yet troubled—until the opening of that last year ’74, with its
gaiety and pride. This season of vigour, radiance and youth lacked the
emotion which has been so wisely and so justly fitted by God to that one
moment through which we make our entry into a full life. She was married
to the heir of France: her virtue and her pride forbade her to be loved.
Yet was she also not married to that heir, and her life now lacked, and
continued to lack, not only love, but the ardent regard that was her
due.
No Frenchman could have turned her gaze. Between her temperament and
that of her husband’s nation the gulf was far too deep. But one night,
late, as she moved, masked in her domino, through the crowd of a Paris
ball-room, she saw, among so many faces whose surface only was revealed
to her, another face of another kind—a boy’s. It arrested her. The
simple and sincere expression which Versailles had never shown her, the
quiet manliness which, in Northerners, is so often allied to courage and
which stands in such contrast to the active virility of Gaul—all that
which, in the secret places of her German heart, unknown to herself, she
thought proper to a man, all that whose lack (though she could not
analyse it) had disturbed and wounded her in the French palace, was
apparent in the face before her. She asked his name, and heard that it
was Fersen. He was a Swede, the son of a considerable political noble,
sent here on his travels with a tutor. She went up and spoke to him.
She could look into his eyes and see their chivalry. His low, handsome
forehead, his dark brows, his refined, firm lips, his large and gentle
eyes completed in detail the profound impression with which that first
glance had struck her. Once she had begun to speak to him, so masked,
she continued to speak continually. A boy of eighteen is far younger
than a girl of his age—they were born within six weeks of each other,
and he was a child compared with her; he desired her, she consenting,
and he became hers in that moment. When they had separated and he
reached his rooms at morning there was ready in his heart what later he
wrote down, that the Dauphine was delightful, and that she was the most
charming Princess he ever had known. She upon her side had followed him
with her eyes to the door of the great assembly. She was not to see him
again for four years, but during all those years she remembered him.
* * * * *
This was the way in which Marie Antoinette entered life, and almost
simultaneously with that entry came her ascent of the throne: the old
King was changing.
He suffered: his digestion failed; from time to time he would abandon
his hunting. It was in the January of 1774 that the Dauphine had met
Axel de Fersen. Before the spring of that year Louis XV.’s increasing
infirmities were to reach their end.
Gusts of strong faith swept over him in these failing years, as strong
winds, filled with a memory of autumn, will sweep the dead reeds of
December. His fear of death, and that hunger for the Sacraments which
accompanies the fear, came to him in dreadful moments. For thirty-eight
years he had neither communicated nor confessed. All his life he had
avoided the terrace of St. Germain’s, because a little lump far off
against the Eastern sky was St. Denis, the mausoleum of the Kings, and
he had not dared to look on it. But, with no such memorial before him,
Death now appeared and reappeared.
Once in his little private room—it was late at night and November—he
played at cards with the Du Barry. They were alone, save for an old
crony of his pleasures, Chauvelin, which well-bred and aged fellow stood
behind the woman’s chair, leaning upon it and watching the woman’s cards
in silence, his rapacious features strongly marked in the mellow light
of the candles. Something impelled the woman to glance up at him over
her shoulder. “Oh, Lord! M. de Chauvelin, what a face!” It was the face
of a dead man. She leapt and started from it, and the body fell to the
floor.
The King, his age and apathy all shaken from him, shouted down the empty
corridors: “A priest! a priest!” They came, and in the presence of the
King absolved what lay immovable upon the shining floor, in a hope or
wish that some life lingered there. But Chauvelin was quite dead.
Now, in his last Easter, the dread came back for ever and inhabited the
King. Upon the Maundy Thursday of ’74 (it was the last day of March) the
Court were all at Mass, and the sermon was ending. The priest, strong in
that tradition of Bossuet which had not perished, turned to the royal
chair and related for his peroration the legend of an ancient curse:
“Forty days, and Nineveh shall be no more.” All the Court heard it and
forgot it before the chanting of the creed was done—but the King was
troubled. He reckoned in his mind; he counted dates and was troubled.
The liturgical times went by; he abandoned his mistress; he lived apart
and gloomy: but his Easter duties were not accomplished, nor did he
communicate or confess, nor was he absolved. Then the cloud lifted and
he began to forget, and the tie which held him to the Du Barry, and
which had in it now something of maturity and routine, was very strong
upon him. He yielded and returned to her where she waited for him down
the park at the little Trianon. His domesticity returned—but not for
long.
It was upon Tuesday the 26th of April that he came in from hunting
changed. He would not eat. He wandered a little and was cherished by his
companion, but his fever grew. Next day he woke to suffering. He
attempted to hunt, but his knees were weakened and he could not ride his
horse; and coming back to Trianon, he groaned with his head in torment.
His dread increased; but his doctors, who had been long familiar with
his moody interludes, thought little of the thing. They carried him back
through the trees to the palace, to his own room in the northern wing,
and that day and the next, as the fever grew, rumours went louder and
louder in the palace. On the Friday, at eventide, as a candle chanced
near the face of the sick man, the doctor looked closer; and in the next
hour, before midnight, the Princess Clothilde, talking in Madame de
Marin’s room in whispers to the Duke of Crois, opened a note from the
Dauphine. She cried aloud: “They say it is the small-pox!”
They dared not tell him. He had the assurance to demand the truth, and
when he heard it he said, “At my age a man does not recover.” He
maintained from that moment, through the increasing torment and
disfigurement of his disease, a complete mastery over himself and even
to some extent the powder of ordering the Court. He saw to it that his
grandson the Dauphin should not come near his room, for of all the royal
families in Europe the French Bourbons alone had not been vaccinated. He
accepted the services of his daughters.
One thing alone he hesitated on, and that was to relinquish the society
of his Favourite.
He was too proud and too silent a man for his contemporaries or for
ourselves to know the full cause of his hesitation. Passion at that
moment it could not have been. The possibility of his recovery he had
himself denied, and his every phrase and act showed how clearly he felt
the approach of death. He himself had drawn the secret of his malady
from the reluctant Cardinal whose duty it was, as Grand Almoner, first
to inform him of his danger, but whose worldly fear of consequence had
kept him from speaking—though he was urged to his duty by every other
prelate at Court. The King was in no doubt as to the nature of the soul,
nor as to the scandal which, under the special conditions of his throne,
his one great frailty had given. He knew the Church; he could not, as
might a philosopher, take refuge in the memory of good deeds to outweigh
the evil, or (as might a monarch of a different civilisation) in the
deep hypocrisies which there shield birth and wealth from
self-knowledge. His Christian faith was strong and clean. Yet he
hesitated. If he still clung to the Du Barry, it was perhaps because
nothing was left him in the visible world but the gaiety and the
assiduous care which had endeared this woman to him.
She kept near him throughout the first hours of his malady, and every
evening, when the Princesses had left their father’s room, she would
come in by a private further door and sit beside the little camp-bed on
which he lay. She overcame all repugnance; she soothed his pustuled
forehead with her hand. He felt, perhaps, as though to abandon her was a
first breaking with life.
The aged Archbishop of Paris, himself suffering grievously from the
stone, bore, not without groaning, the jolting journey to Versailles; he
came to undertake himself what the Grand Almoner dared not do—to demand
the dismissal of the Favourite. He was not allowed into the King’s room.
The group of courtiers continually present in the outer chamber, the Œil
de Bœuf, could watch with much amusement the gestures of command and of
refusal that passed between the Archbishop and the Duke of Richelieu in
the antechamber beyond. At last he was admitted, but it was arranged
that others should be present, and nothing passed between him and the
King save a word of condolence from each for the other’s suffering.
It was by no stimulation from without but by his own act that the King
took the last step in his penance. Upon Tuesday the 3rd of May, towards
midnight, Madame du Barry being with him, as was her custom, to tend him
through the night, he said to her, in those brief sentences of his which
had for years forbidden discussion or reply, that he must prepare for
his end and that she must leave him; he told her that a refuge was
prepared, and that she should want for nothing. She stumbled half
fainting from the room to the Minister whose career she had made, the
Duke of Aiguillon, believing with justice that he was not ungrateful,
and in his rooms she cried and lamented through what remained of
darkness.
With the morning the King gave D’Aiguillon his orders, and that
afternoon the Duke, worthily loyal although his career was ended, sent
his own wife to take her in a hired carriage, without circumstance and
therefore without disgrace, to their country house some miles away. It
was the thirty-fourth of the forty days.
That evening the King asked Laborde, his valet, for Madame du Barry. The
servant answered that she was gone. “Already?” he sighed, and her name
was not heard again.
Thursday and Friday passed: the first with a rally which the more
foolish hoped would save the life of the King; the second with the
disappointment of all that corrupt and intriguing clique which depended
upon his recovery.
Meanwhile the Dauphine kept her rooms. She knew what desperate court
would be pressed upon her husband and herself were the doors to be
opened; nor did the Dauphin give a single order of the hundred that were
already solicited of him, save that all should be ready for the whole
Court to leave for Choisy. Early upon the morning of Saturday this
seclusion was broken: long before the common hour of the palace, at
half-past five, a roll of drums awakened its people, and the Princess
came down with all her ladies to see the Sacrament carried through
Versailles.
[Illustration:
LOUIS XVI
FROM THE PRINCIPAL BUST AT VERSAILLES
]
Between a double row of the Guard, under the great canopy that was
reserved for such solemnities, the priests carried the Viaticum, and
about It in a long procession as It passed were the torches and the
candles. She stood with her sister-in-law at the head of the crowd in
the great hall outside the bedroom door; she endured the stench of
corruption that filled the air, though every window was open to the
morning; she caught, by her tall stature and straight carriage, the
scene that was acting within.
Between the purple robes and the surplices, in the ring of waxen lights,
she saw the old man whom alone she had respected and indeed loved in her
new home attempt to raise himself, calling: “_My great God has come to
me.... My great God!_” She saw him with what strength he had plucking
the cotton cap from his head and failing in his effort to kneel. His
face was no longer the face she had known, but crusted dark and hideous,
swollen, horrible. She heard the Grand Almoner repeat the King’s strong
phrase of repentance, passionately solemn, and she knew the voice so
well that perhaps she also heard the mumble in which he urged its
repetition. Then the doors closed; the Court dispersed. She regained her
apartments, and the isolation and the strain returned. They told her of
his increasing delirium, of the crowds that came from Paris daily, of
the certain approach of death. So Sunday and Monday went by—the
thirty-eighth, the thirty-ninth day.
The dawn of Tuesday broke upon a clear sky. It was the fortieth day.
The spring on that fine morning turned to summer, and before noon the
Park was full of a crowd which moved as though on holiday. The Parisians
had come increasingly since Sunday into Versailles. The inns were full,
and at all the tables outside the eating-houses of the town the people
eat their mid-day meal with merriment in the open air. Between the Park
and the town, huge and isolated, already old, the palace alone was
silent. There, each group shut close in its own rooms, awaited—the one
dismissal, another the fruit of long intrigue, another, in a mixture of
eagerness and dread, the new weight of royalty. It was the 10th of May,
and still the agony endured. A candle burnt in a window above the
courtyard. Passing groups looked up at it furtively; grooms, with
bridles ready in their hands, glanced at it from beneath the distant
doors of the guard-room, and saw it twice renewed, as one o’clock and
two struck through the afternoon from the chimes of St. Louis. Three
struck. They looked again and it was still shining.
Within, his head supported by Laborde the valet, his mind still clear,
the old King still attempted with his distorted lips the answers to the
prayers for the dying. He heard them faintly and more faintly in that
increasing darkness which each of us must face. When the priest at last
came to those loud words, “Go forth, thou Christian soul,” his murmuring
ceased. The candle at the window was extinguished. The clatter of
horse-hoofs rose from the marble court and the jangling of stirrups
against mounting spurs. The Duke of Bouillon came to the door of the
room, stood before the silent crowd in the Œil de Bœuf, and said with
ritual solemnity: “_Gentlemen, the King is dead!_”
At that same hour on that same day a British man-of-war sailed into
Boston harbour: she bore orders to impose the tax on tea which
ultimately raised America.
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