_FIGARO_
_Monday, October 22, 1781, to April 27, 1784_
THE birth of an heir struck, as it seemed, an epoch in the evident
transformation of the Monarchy and in the increasing position which
Marie Antoinette occupied upon that scene; not that such a birth was
either unexpected or unlikely. The Court and the nation had known for
now three years that the royal family was established; it was certain
that children would now support and surround the throne, and even in the
preceding year nothing but a natural accident had postponed the hope of
a prince. But the living presence of the child, the founding of a secure
succession within so short a period from the earlier disappointment,
had, as have all symbols, an effect greater than that which calculable
chances could expect.
A wide popular enthusiasm, though later it was extinguished, did for the
moment rise spontaneously to the encouragement of Government, and that
initiative which the French had for centuries demanded and still
demanded from the custodians of their State was, as it were, thrust into
the hand of Louis.
Of all qualities in ruling that which this people will least forgive is
ease: in their delight at the news of a Dauphin, France, and
particularly Paris, implicitly urged to energy if not the good-humoured
and slow-thoughted man who was in theory the whole executive, at least
the machinery of which he was the centre. A new phase of one sort or
another had certainly begun.
Sudden causes of change are never unaccompanied by coincidence; allied
forces invariably converge upon the main cause of change and unite for a
common effort. Three such advancing supports synchronised in these last
months of 1781—the new aspect of the Austrian Alliance, the success in
America, and the death of old Maurepas, who since the accession of Louis
XVI. had presided at the Council. Each of these accidents was singly
powerful; in their combination they were irresistible; and a moment of
opportunity, to which a man of rapid decision might have given great
effect, was apparent even to Louis in the close of that year.
The result of Maria Theresa’s death and of Joseph II.’s uncontrolled
power in Austria had now matured. The naïf but persistent enmity of the
Emperor towards the Faith—whose doctrines were in his little vision as
barbaric as the Gothic architecture, and whose rapid elimination from
European culture he took for granted—was, if not the mainspring, at
least the chief expression of that general action whereby he imperilled
his house and profoundly modified the situation of Austria. His
preparation to rob and destroy the religious orders, his unconcealed
contempt for the ideal they represented, his similar pretension that
patriotism was a superstition, his petty but sincere conviction that
none save material benefits guided by moral abstractions were of use to
mankind—in a word, his despotic atheism—culminated in an “Edict of
Toleration,” which, when allowance is made for a century’s development,
may be compared for its affront against the customs of his subjects to
that which had cost James II. of England his throne. In itself it had no
bearing upon France and was hardly heard of in that country, but it was
a recantation of all that Maria Theresa had stood for; it meant an open
admiration for Frederick of Prussia, his method and his principle; it
argued a philosophy which would, not reluctantly and of necessity, but
eagerly and of set purpose, overset old traditions and sacred landmarks,
that had attempted the suppression of a national language in Hungary,
and was to suggest time and again, as a simple solution of political
problems, the denial of all that for which men have always been prepared
to die.
This act, the precursor and the type of so many others of his, was
signed in Vienna during that same month of October 1781 which saw the
happy delivery of his sister at Versailles and the culmination of the
American War upon the Chesapeake. Nay, these capital events fell within
one week. It was upon a Monday that the Edict was promulgated, upon the
following Monday that the Dauphin was born, upon the Friday between that
the English and German garrison in Yorktown laid down its arms.
The success of the war in America, especially the dramatic finale of
Cornwallis’ surrender, had an effect upon opinion in Paris which, though
it was sudden and short, was yet very powerful. The French, having of
all nations by far the most general experience of war, are slow to
adventures of such a kind as had been their intervention in America: the
Court had been especially slow; the King perhaps the most reluctant of
all—in the last peril of death he exclaimed against the memory of that
campaign. Once engaged, therefore, if matters had gone ill (as the
French troops in America most characteristically swore they would go
ill!), or even if a long and indefinite campaign had dragged on through
succeeding years so that the full financial effect of the struggle could
have been felt before its close, then the whole weight of blame would
have fallen upon Versailles. At it was, Yorktown came like the thrust of
a spur, and the Monarchy, doubtful as was its course, leapt forward.
The death of Maurepas was the last coincidence of these three; it was as
exactly synchronous and as full of effect as either of its fellow
accidents. The capitulation of Lord Cornwallis was known in Paris
precisely thirty-one days after it had taken place. It was upon the 19th
of November, a Monday, that Louis had the news. The Queen had not yet
risen from child-bed, Louis was sitting with her in her room, when the
Duc de Lauzun was announced, and gave the message that Yorktown had
surrendered. Upon the Wednesday following, De Maurepas was dead. The
importance of that passing lay in this, that Louis, at such a juncture,
now first attempted to be free.
All men are chafed, and that perpetually, by what they know of their own
defects, and Louis could not forget, from his accession onwards, that it
was always in him to yield to a quicker brain. He thought it shameful in
a King. He never yielded from weakness, but often from bewilderment. His
own decision would come to him after he had acted on the decision of
another. He understood, he desired to act, later than did his advisers:
often so late that, by the time his will was formed, occasion had
passed. If, when his slow judgment had matured, he found it different
from that upon which immediate action had been taken, he was angered. If
that immediate action had proved disastrous, he was secretly indignant
that his slower wit had not prevailed. But, stronger than all these
reasons, the mere instinct of the imperfect warned him to a distaste of
guidance.
He had, however, come to the throne a boy; in years but twenty, in
experience (save in the excellent art of horsemanship) null. He had
found ready to hand this old Minister, Maurepas, courteous, active, with
a good though a too facile judgment; a patriot whose career had been
ruined by the mistress of Louis XV. (in itself this was a recommendation
to the young King), and a courtier whom his father, the Dauphin, had,
upon his deathbed, pointed out to be the true counterweight to the
irreligion of Choiseul: Louis XVI. had accepted such a guide and had
upon the whole not repented of his choice. For seven years the young
King had received the counsel of this old man; a habit had been formed,
and a strong affection with it. But as Maurepas approached his end, as
the gout forbade him his former clearness of thought, and a continual
confinement interfered with his attendance at the Council, the maturer
judgment of Louis began, though secretly, to assert itself. He showed
for the depositary of so lengthy a Court tradition a filial devotion; he
would come in person, and familiarly, to bring news to the old man’s
room—notably the news of the Dauphin’s birth was so given, domestically
and alone. There subsisted between them one of those intimate relations
which so often arise between the permanent official upon the one side
and the responsible authority upon the other: it became a personal tie,
and when, Maurepas died Louis would renew it with no one. After some
hesitation the King lit for a first Minister upon Vergennes, but he
would not give to this new officer the official title of Premier; he was
jealous of a fuller power which he now proposed to exercise continuously
and with a more direct affirmation than in the past. Louis was incapable
of the task he so attempted, but if ever there was a time in the reign
when such a task could be attempted, this autumn and winter of 1781 was
that time.
Here then was the field: a treasury embarrassed, but relieved, in
appearance at least, by a frank audit—for the “cooked” accounts Necker
had prepared before his dismissal bore the aspect and title of a public
audit; great and unexpected success in a doubtful foreign war; a monarch
possessed of a power approaching that of a modern Cabinet, and now ready
to experiment with that power; abroad, Joseph II., who was the chief
element of international politics and the national ally of France, had
entered upon a new direction of the Austrian House. Upon such a field
was to work the increasing influence of the Queen.
It is true that a certain part of her repute was now fixed in public
opinion: that she was extravagant, that she was bound to favourites,
that she was foreign. The legend had arisen in Paris, and no detail of
her action, no appreciation of complexity could easily alter the simple
conclusions of the Parisian populace. But, on the other hand, she was
the mother of the heir, her position was stable while the opinion of the
capital was not so, and it did not seem impossible that in the long
course of years the great and dumb national mass should be indoctrinated
in her favour, as the growth of her children, an older judgment in her,
and perhaps a continued peace and a return to prosperity, should restore
the tradition of the Monarchy, or rather confirm it in its new
characters.
If the King was now ready to act and to reform the State, Marie
Antoinette was of far more influence with him than ever she had been
before. It was hers, if she chose, to regulate the new phase of
Government. She did in part so choose, and she might have succeeded. Her
habits would, indeed, have continued—her cards, her theatre, her gems,
her familiarity—but all, as it were, tinctured, accepted, taken with the
life of the Court and little affecting a new-found order. Had the
problems presented to her been of those that fitted her intuition or
experience, she might even then have lifted her fate. For a year and for
more than a year—all 1782 and on into 1783, the solidity of her position
was assured; the future was apparently prepared. A group of trifling
incidents passed her quite, or almost, unperceived in the midst of an
established leadership in Europe, of royal visits that cemented a
general alliance, and of accomplished hopes; another year passed, she
was presented—her influence being then at its height—with the affair of
the Scheldt, a problem in which the interests of her Austrian House
clashed with that new patriotism which, least of all things French,
could she understand. She blundered, she necessarily blundered; but as
she looked around to see what forces were left her, she found not only
the results of that blunder confronting her, but an appalling menace
proceeding from a direction wholly unconnected with her life—from the
business of the diamond necklace—and beside it, grown suddenly quite
loud like an offensive chorus of disdain, the voice of a writer whom she
had half patronised and wholly despised, the neglected voice of
Caron—Beaumarchais: by the beginning of ’84, one of those accidents—the
pen of Beaumarchais—had shaken her influence and that of all the
Monarchy; by the end of ’85 the other—the affair of the necklace—had
destroyed it.
* * * * *
The year 1782 opened upon the new gladness of the Queen; her churching
at Notre Dame (now customary) was marked, if not by a vivid popular
greeting, yet by no coldness. At the Hôtel de Ville in the evening she
met an official and commercial world that was warmly hers; she shared as
warmly in the glories of the American news; she would have driven home
in her own carriage the wife of La Fayette to show her enthusiasm for
his triumph and his return. Her ampler manner, her more contained and
settled bearing was consonant with the position she had gained; it
promised her, in those who saw and approved it among the magistracy of
the city, a continuance and an increase of influence. Back at Versailles
she continued without scandal, and yet at a fast-rising expenditure, the
habits which had now become permanently hers: new fashions in dress
perpetually changing and in head-dress, cards into the small hours, and
her private theatre at Trianon still receiving her upon its stage to the
applause now, not of a half-dozen or so of the royal family, but of a
full audience; many courtiers, many friends of friends, and even the
officers of the Guard were permitted to see her painted behind the
foot-lights, to note her true rendering of vivacious parts, and to
accept when she sang her imperfectly-trained, insufficient, and somewhat
violent voice. Of these regular dissipations the last was the most
criticised, though even that seemed by this time so normal that of
itself it did not lessen her growing power; but in distant connection
with her taste for such things there arose, and precisely at this
critical moment, a discussion which was largely to affect her life: it
was the discussion upon the “Mariage de Figaro.”
The “Mariage de Figaro” was no great thing; it was a well-written play
from the pen of a man, now advanced in middle age, whose diction and
care for letters were typical of his own time, but whose vices were
entirely modern. Born in a low position, his darting mind had carried
him to a sort of fluctuating eminence, especially in wit. He had taught
music to princesses, married an infatuated widow, adopted her name of
Beaumarchais, purchased some insignificant post and with it a nominal
right to the “de” of nobility, preserved his health, speculated,
probably robbed, certainly made and lost considerable sums, traversed
and thoroughly understood English society, repaid its hospitality by
advancing the American cause in France, speculated upon the commissariat
of that campaign, rendered jealous years ago the equally cynical
Voltaire, and now at fifty was getting talked of again in the matter of
his new play.
He and it were little things to Marie Antoinette, but the rumour of them
was considerable, for, a few months before, at the end of the past year,
the King had heard that this “Mariage de Figaro” was not tolerable: it
was a satire upon all established things. The play was already ordered
for the Théâtre Français. Louis had it read to him privately, and for
once made a rapid decision. As literature he could not judge its
considerable merits; as politics he put his foot down: such laughter at
such an expense to government and all tradition was not to be borne—and
the licence was withdrawn. The public rumour rose and grew.
Every witty lady about the Court and in the capital, many more who
desired a reputation for wit, insisted upon reading the play; upon
hearing it read aloud; upon having Beaumarchais come and read it aloud.
All the Polignac world was mad on it. Loménie de Brienne boasted that he
had heard it oftenest. The Princess de Lamballe moved heaven and earth
to have it read by the author in her very rooms.
The “Mariage de Figaro” was, therefore, to the Queen a perpetual phrase
on the lips of the smart, literary and unliterary: it is doubtful if she
read a line of it, but she heard of it and heard of it again. She forgot
it for the moment; later she remembered it again—not to her good.
Meanwhile a much larger matter vexed her. In the midst of her active and
interested life, of promotions, personal successes and habitual
pleasures, the insistence of her brother Joseph continually pursued her,
and a mixed anxiety, an anxiety to be political, an anxiety to escape
responsibility, came to her almost daily—from Mercy immediately,
ultimately from Vienna: she felt upon her the uneasy burden of the
Hapsburgs.
While her mother still lived there had at least been between her and
Marie Antoinette an unbroken habit of command upon the one side,
obedience and protest upon the other. The pressure of Vienna had been a
natural one then. Maria Theresa possessed, moreover, the tact not only
of a woman, and of a religious woman, but the large vision of a careful
and perilous diplomacy brought to success. Joseph lacked all these:
religion, honour, tact, acquaintance, experience. His commands to Mercy
were as crude as any of his judgments upon the world: “Had Mercy seen
the Queen?” “Was she doing her duty by the House of Austria?” “Would
Mercy suggest this, that?” “Since the Queen was so powerful with the
King, why had this, that detail of French policy not _exactly_ suited
the demands of the Empire?” Broken by the buffer of Mercy’s long
experience these arid and unfruitful hastes came less brutally to the
ears of Marie Antoinette. She never felt herself the servant of her
family, nor in direct antagonism to the Crown of her husband; she felt
only that she was perpetually required to be doing—she hardly knew
what—much as in her mother’s time, but without the aid of her mother’s
handwriting and remembered voice—certainly without her mother’s wisdom
to control.
The pressure from Joseph II. continued; it was to be two years before it
took effect in a great matter, but when that matter arose the Queen’s
plain service to Vienna—something far in excess of what she had done in
the Bavarian affair—showed how much that irksome and long pressure had
effected. She came to act as an Austrian army would have acted, and
quite understanding all she did, she came very near to betraying her
allegiance to the French throne.
For the rest these early months of ’82 were filled, among her pleasures
and her rising power, with other annoyances; notably that from time to
time her friends in that excessive society of hers spoke to her of their
debts, and she knew well that in the matter of money grants at that
moment of increasing embarrassment in public finance the King himself
was slow to listen to her.
There were many such friends. The greatest and the nearest perhaps of
those whom Marie Antoinette knew to be embarrassed were the Guémenées,
and the Duchesse de Guémenée, the titular governess of the Dauphin, a
woman whom she met most constantly and cherished, closely concerned her.
She further suffered the ceaseless and recurrent advances of the
Cardinal de Rohan.
It had become enough for her to see his handwriting upon a note to make
her burn the thing unread. Her dislikes were now often reasoned, always
steady: it was enough that she had to meet the Grand Almoner upon State
occasions of religion or ceremonial; her society she forbade him. Had
the Cardinal wanted proof of that stupidity which he was later to plead
in Court as the excuse of his follies, he could have given none better,
nor any of more weight with posterity, than his complete ignorance of
such a woman as was this daughter of Maria Theresa, and his absurd
pretensions to gain her intimacy, her support, and possibly her heart.
Had he known women even vaguely, by types, this florid and handsome man
would have abandoned at fifty the attempt to interest a vital, impetuous
woman of twenty-seven, loving swift pleasure, but superior to him in
rank, chaste, a mother, and carrying against him in particular a
traditional grudge for the loose jests which, during a brief embassy at
Vienna, he was wont to pass at the expense of her own people. But the
Cardinal de Rohan did not know women even in the mass, and it was
necessary, as he thought, that he should play cards with her and be from
time to time one of the fifty or so who eat supper with her at Trianon.
He had the weakness of stupid men when they are well born and have
attained office—I mean the ambition for political titles.
A thousand lesser incidents of this time she could not herself, had you
asked her daily, have recorded. One among such petty details it is worth
the reader’s while to recall, though it had made upon her even less
impression than the babble about Beaumarchais’ play; though it passed
completely from her memory. It was the presence now and then upon the
stairways of Versailles, and for moments only, of a short woman, very
fair, with a small, well-arched foot, and delicate hands, quick and even
furtive of glance, not beautiful but attractive and provoking in face,
dressed in a manner that combined excess with the evidences of poverty,
but in her gestures of a passable breeding. This figure was often seen;
now leaving the room of some lady of the Court, now crossing the
courtyard on foot towards the town.
The Queen may or may not have heard that this woman, though an
adventuress, was (from over the left) a Valois; of some birth,
therefore, but very poor, and given to borrowing small sums: Marie
Antoinette’s sister-in-law of Provence, Madame, may or may not have told
the Queen that she had got this woman a tiny advance of thirty pounds
upon her tiny pension of twenty-four. Whether her name of “De la Motte,”
or so much as the presence of this chance passer, was noted by Marie
Antoinette is not known, but certainly if either were, it took no more
place in her mind than any other of the hundred insignificant names she
heard and forgot every day. Moreover, after the early spring of 1782,
this woman was no longer seen at Versailles; she had borrowed a few
pounds, and was gone.
With May the true life of the Court and the active interests of the
Queen awoke to receive the first of those great political visits which
form the historical pageant of Versailles: the heir of Catherine of
Russia came with his wife, and the whole year might almost have been
named from so conspicuous an event.
The inordinate pomp of royalty in its old age had led to a fashion of
incognito which did not have, and was not intended to have, its
occasional modern effect of privacy, but which, by cutting short
interminable and necessary ritual, left crowned travellers the freer for
luxury and dissipation. It saved them the judges, the orators, the
Governors, the Universities—in general the middle classes, and left them
free for actors, wine, and their own company, and the frenzied plaudits
of the innumerable poor. The Emperor of Austria had set the fashion five
years before; it was followed now by the Russian Court, and Catherine’s
son chose to present himself in France under the somewhat theatrical
alias of the “Comte du Nord.”
The Grand-Duke Paul had the face of a Tartar, and—what was piquant—the
manners, and, above all, the ready epigrams of a Parisian. His wife was
a huge German woman, rather absolute and—what was curious—learned. For
exactly a month they dominated the Court of France; from the end of May
to the end of June they filled it with their presence, and not a little
of the hankering after French things and French alliances, which, much
later, distinguished Paul III. during the revolutionary wars, may have
sprung from this short and vivid episode of his twenty-eighth year.
It is characteristic of Marie Antoinette that the prospect of a great
encounter and of the society of equals confused her; it is equally
characteristic of her that once she had got over that nervousness she
drew the young man and his wife at once into that rather isolated and
over-familiar circle of intimates with which Mercy, her brother, and the
French reproached her, but without which, as it seemed, she could not
live. Behind the solemn and rare functions, the regal hospitality of the
Condés at Chantilly and the Court ball at Versailles, was a whole
atmosphere of gambling and private theatricals; of plays at Trianon,
intimate suppers, costly presents given at a moment’s thought, and, very
late at night, in the rooms of Madame de Polignac or in the Queen’s,
when the King had left them, a complete ease full of little improvised
dances and familiar jests. In such an atmosphere the German
Grand-Duchess maintained, perhaps a little stiffly, her formal
compliments, but the Russian Grand-Duke went headlong; he suffered the
spell; there was even a moment when he confided to the Queen his
humiliation at home and the tyranny of his mother Catherine.
Upon one matter the husband and the wife most certainly agreed, for to
the second it was belles-lettres, to the first Parisiana: they must have
things read to them “by the authors.” All the little tricks with which
the wealthy and leisured enveigle the masters of the pen to visit their
palaces, to amuse them for an hour, were set at work.
Of the many so caught one was especially demanded, and the Queen heard
again, not without boredom, the perpetual name of Beaumarchais. “Oh yes,
you must hear Beaumarchais!” Madame de Lamballe had got him to her
rooms. It was difficult, but she had got him. The Archbishop of Toulouse
knew him well. He was splendid. “You must hear him read this play of
his; it has been forbidden, you know. It is seditious. It is so witty,
and he does read it so well!” The Comte du Nord and his wife asked no
better than to be in the swim. Beaumarchais was willing enough; he came
and read to them, and they heard from his thin ironic lips, saw
illustrated by his exact gesture and brilliant, ambitious little eyes,
the edge and sharpness of a drama that worked—once it was public—like an
acid, to the destruction of all their world. How they applauded!
That warm month of long evenings that fade into early dawns shining with
lamps in the park, with candles and mirrors in the vast length of the
palace, was approaching its end, when, for the last time, Marie
Antoinette devised her last considerable fête—once more at Trianon.
It was to be a garden fête at night: by this time certainly wearisome to
the Grand-Duchess, but to the Grand-Duke attractive—with this one flaw,
that on the morrow he would be gone. The fête was held; it was brilliant
and full. At its close when, as custom demanded, the royal party passed
out, down a lane of guests on either side, the Queen saw—for a moment—a
pair of red stockings; the legs were neither meagre nor young. All the
rest of the figure was a large dark cloak, but she caught beneath the
hat of it the somewhat flushed and large face of the Grand Almoner.
This little incident disturbed her. Here was a private gala of her own,
given only to those of her private circle privately invited by her, and
this odious man must creep in. Next day when her guests were gone she
spent some portion of her considerable energy in ferreting out the
culprit. The incident was traced to the lodge-keeper of Trianon, who had
taken a bribe from the Cardinal under a promise that if he were let in
he would keep a strict disguise and would not penetrate into the
gardens. The lodge-keeper was sent his way to starve, and later—since he
really did begin to starve—was given back his place by this impulsive
woman.
It was a very little though a very exasperating incident that a great
officer of the Crown, whom etiquette compelled her to meet in chapel,
but whom she had carefully excluded from her intimacy and her
privileges, should have appeared by a trick at a party so especially her
own. Perhaps she remembered it as one remembers for a long while petty
accidents that have sharply moved us for an hour. He certainly
remembered it, for he had been found out in no very dignified manœuvre.
He was certainly sore; but in men of his stupidity, of his privileges,
and of his habits of luxury, hatred is no enduring passion. His
ambition, however, such as it was, remained; he was the more determined
to succeed in that high object of recognition and of friendship with the
Queen, from the results of this disastrous attempt and from the failure
of his appearance on that June night at Trianon.... It was but a week
later that Madame de la Motte came in to Paris, called at his palace in
the Marais, and reminded him of his earlier charities.
The uneventful summer came and passed, full of the customary glories and
the customary distractions. No date marked evil or good. The American
War, though it languished, was now decided, and England had given up the
struggle. The reform of the French finances, though ceaselessly a topic
of council, was as ceaselessly neglected. The Emperor continues to
badger Mercy, and Mercy to badger the Queen upon matters of no
importance save to Joseph II.’s ill-considered plans of aggrandisement.
* * * * *
Fersen, pottering between Philadelphia and Baltimore, wrote
home—wearily—but not to her.
* * * * *
It was a long summer of nothingness during which Marie Antoinette’s
position was confirmed, her public view a trifle, if but a trifle,
enlarged. With her habits permitted, her popularity sufficient, her
influence established, she had a foretaste of that security such as
should accompany middle life, and such as is native to women for whom
such satisfaction is allied with maternity; she turned for an added
interest to her children.
The little Princess Royal could talk and run; the baby Dauphin knew his
sister already and moved his arms at her approach. The two children
between them filled daily a larger and more natural place in the Queen’s
thoughts. They could not indeed weaken the habits which those first
feverish three years had rooted and the next had done nothing to
destroy, but their innocence and the nameless bond of the flesh enlarged
her; their growth, their surprising discovery of new days. It was not
wholly without reason that the King their father grew at this moment to
listen in smaller things to her advice beyond that of others.
Ceremonial, or rather lucrative, as were the functions of the Princesse
de Guémenée, she was yet constantly in attendance upon the children, of
which she was titular governess, and the Queen was constantly in her
society. The charge was a great one; if it had first been granted as a
favour to one of the set of favourites, it had now ripened into
something more, for the common interest in such a couple as Madame
Royale and the heir gave rise, in this middle of ’82, to an occasional
communion between the Queen and the gouvernante which neither found in
the general and much more continual amusement of their set. Their
intimacy was the greater that the children had been sent through the
park to Trianon during the hot weather, that the Princesse de Guémenée
was with them secluded there, and that there she and the Queen were
necessarily often alone together. In her favourite retreat and under her
domestic trees, the approaching vaccination of the little girl—a matter
of moment at that time—and a dozen details of the sort concerned them.
By a petty accident of a sort common to aristocracies the Cardinal de
Rohan, the Queen’s aversion, happened to be own brother to Madame de
Guémenée, the Queen’s chief friend. Not a word was said in favour of
that brother, for these were matters upon which even the Queen’s
favourites were compelled to keep silence; but the populace, who do not
understand such complexities, remembered the relationship.
The complaints of the lesser woman upon the debts of herself and her
husband—though such complaints are wearying to the closest
friendships—did no more than slightly weary the Queen. They were soon
forgotten, for Marie Antoinette held in a profound manner that faith in
chance good fortunes and in ultimate relief from embarrassment without
which those who never labour could not live; and when the complaints
were done with, she turned to speak of the children.
So August went by and most of September, when, one morning at the close
of that month, Monsieur de Guémenée very suddenly declared that he could
not so much as attempt to pay his debts, and threw himself upon his
creditors.
It was a shock. I have repeatedly insisted in this book upon the
insignificance of French extravagance in the close of the eighteenth
century, in comparison with the modern figures of our Plutocracy, and on
the modesty of the sums the historian has to deal with—£5000 a year was
a princely fortune; the Cardinal de Rohan’s £30,000 a year seemed almost
the revenue of a State, an income beyond computation. Well, in such a
world, accustomed to such a scale of wealth, the Guémenées went bankrupt
for a solid million of our English pounds. It opened a whirlpool in the
finances of the time, and the creditors, to make matters worse, were of
every rank and spread throughout the kingdom; there were peasants among
them, prelates, farmers-general, and—most clamorous of all—a few large
and many small shopkeepers of Paris. To these last—especially to the
smaller ones—delay would be fatal. Delay was precisely the expedient
chosen.
There exists a little, ill-written scrawl addressed to the Princess; it
is ill-spelt, with words omitted in its haste. It runs: “You have heard
that my daughter’s vaccination has gone off well—I breathe again!... The
King will see you get those letters all right.” That scrawl was written
by Marie Antoinette, and the “letters” mentioned were the _Moratorium_
which a French King could of his own free will impose as might the
caprice of a judge upon the process of law. It was a royal decree
forbidding during the King’s pleasure the recovery of a debt. The
creditors must wait till it was lifted.
That little scrap of paper was not known to the populace—it was not
discovered till a few years ago—but the populace, with an instinct that
rarely failed them during the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary time,
guessed by what influence had been granted this privilege of delay, with
all its fatal consequences to the smaller folk, who spread their anger
until Paris was humming with it; and even the remoter provinces (notably
Brittany), wherever there was a wretched unpaid creditor to be found,
whispered the name of the Queen.
She, upon her part, felt she had done next to nothing—an obvious and
small act of courtesy for a dear friend. She had chosen that very moment
to be at La Muette with the Court—not at Versailles, to which such
things were native, but right at the gates of Paris, and there thought
fit to do something more for her friend than the trifle already
effected. She went to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Fleury—at a time
when the Treasury in its deep embarrassment was expecting the
counter-shock of the American War, at a time when the last additional
taxes could hardly be paid—to ask him if (irony of ignorance!)
“something could not be done” for the Guémenées. Fleury could do
nothing, and it was as well.
All this while and all that summer and autumn the little active, furtive
woman, De La Motte, the Valois with the well-arched foot and the shifty
but provocative eye, was pecking at De Rohan: now knocking discreetly at
his palace doors in Paris, now travelling, as cheaply as could be, to
his great château in the Vosges—borrowing a few pounds, and again a few
pounds. It was a very little thing, like a drifting rag in a great
city—but a rag infected with the plague.
* * * * *
In such a commotion as the crash of the Guémenées made, no one noticed
that the Queen procured for her chief friend, for one who hardly desired
it and who was ill fitted for it, for Madame de Polignac, the high post
which Madame de Guémenée had been compelled to resign. The new charges
such an appointment involved were forgotten in the torrent of feeling
that followed the great bankruptcy. It came just as the excitement upon
America had thoroughly died down, just as the bills for that war had to
be met, and just as winter was upon the populace. The new taxes were
collecting, the whole financial system was at a breaking-point, when,
early in ’83, Fleury resigned the finances. His fall was furthered by
the Queen, who remembered his refusal.
If, a year before, the satire of Beaumarchais had been wisely suppressed
by the King, and if, nine months before, even the reading by heirs
apparent of so fierce a piece of wit was thought hazardous, now it was
plainly a peril. To extend the fame of that solvent of society, even by
discreet recitations within the palace, was unwise; to act it, to add to
its native force of aggression gesture, life, and publicity of the
stage, would be a piece of madness. Most ardently was that amusing piece
of madness desired by the lassitude of the Court and by those amateurs
in changing pastime who surrounded the Queen. It is said that she
pleaded again for her friends, and begged, as she had before, for the
piece to be licensed. If she did so, she failed; for leave to act the
“Mariage de Figaro,” even upon the private stage of a courtier, was
again refused.
Side by side with such details went the growth of yet another great
European conflict, and with it once again the pressure of Austria upon
Marie Antoinette.
For over a century the Scheldt had been closed to commerce by
international treaty, and the trade that should naturally flow along
that magnificent estuary of which Antwerp is the port had been
artificially deflected to Holland. The Austrian Netherlands were
therefore mechanically starved of a trade that had once been pre-eminent
in Europe. It was as though Lancashire should be forbidden by a
parchment to use Liverpool to-day, and should be dependent upon Preston
or—as would more probably follow—upon Bristol and Glasgow. That part of
the Low Countries which is, roughly speaking, the Catholic part and most
of which is now included in Belgium formed, by an accident of history,
an isolated fragment of the Hapsburg domain, and the closing of the
Scheldt acutely affected a monarch whose mind, being narrow, was
especially alive to anomalies that interfered with the rotundity of his
rights. There was to Joseph II. something monstrous in the decay of
Antwerp and the silence of that vast waterway—something out of nature,
like the diversity of tongues, within his empire; it was a sentiment he
felt less keenly in matters less disadvantageous to himself.
The chief beneficiary by this quaint artifice was, of course, Holland,
but, among the greater Powers, England. If any one would know why, he
has but to travel to-day from the Pool of London to Antwerp, and wonder
next morning at the orderly and teeming crescent of the quays. Antwerp
is London’s chief and most dangerous rival.
It was, therefore, during the failure of England in America that Joseph
proposed the destruction of so ancient an instrument as the Peace of
Westphalia and determined upon the opening of the river. To such a
project the assent of France was essential, but the Cabinet of
Versailles, in one of those acts of wisdom which were not unknown to the
decaying Monarchy, postponed the discussion till the close of the war.
The war had been over since the autumn of ’82; the peace had been signed
at Paris in the new year. It was in 1783, therefore, that there began
the growing pressure of Joseph II. upon Mercy, of Mercy upon Marie
Antoinette, to see that the interests of Austria in this matter, as in
others of the past, should predominate at Versailles. This purely
Austrian move, though it took months to mature, was the political motive
of the whole year, and side by side with it, like a tiny instrument
accompanying a loud orchestra, went the rising popular demand for
Beaumarchais’ play: also, just once or twice and for a moment only, one
can hear in the background the occasional note of Madame de La Motte.
Thus on Candlemas Day (a feast of the 2nd of February) she was seen at
Versailles. It was a brief episode; she stood patiently in the rank of
petitioners waiting for the Queen to pass upon her way to High Mass, and
presented some modest demand—directly or indirectly—for money. It was
refused, with a crowd of others, by the secretaries appointed to examine
such things; and, if the Queen’s eyes had rested upon her face at all,
no sort of impression of her remained. The Queen entered the chapel, and
the Cardinal de Rohan pontificated there.
“Figaro” was more amusing and deserves a greater mention. All the jokes
of the spring and all the society question was of “Figaro.” By June,
somehow or other, by some intrigue, very possibly by a word from the
Queen, the scandalous, the delightfully tickling attack upon all their
privileges, their scandals—their very life; the comedy that half of them
already knew by heart, and from which the younger could recite whole
passages in Beaumarchais’ very manner, was to be acted at last—but only
for the Court. Of course, such a scandal could not be allowed in Paris,
or in the town. The Hall of the Menus Plaisirs was got ready, the parts
were learnt, the actors of the Comédie Française were come, the
courtiers and their wives had their tickets in hand, the carriages were
at the door, the theatre half full, when a messenger came from the King
bearing a _lettre de cachet_, a peremptory, secret and immediate order:
the “Mariage de Figaro” was not to be played.
All who have seen a jostle of the wealthy suddenly deprived of some
pleasure—especially of a satire upon themselves—may imagine the anger
that arose. Meanwhile the King, who had bethought him so late of this
vigorous act, murmured thoughtfully in his room that probably in the
long run Beaumarchais would have the best of it.
He had. By September M. de Vandreuil had the play ready for “the ladies”
and young Artois—he had put up a private stage. The smart and the
literary were assured there would be no disappointment—nor was there.
Beaumarchais had been recalled by a special secret messenger from
England, whither he had retired in a pretended pique; secret permission
was given, the “Mariage” was secretly played (before two hundred
people), and the thing was done. Play-acting and a sort of passionate
frivolity had conquered the State. I must ask pardon for wasting so many
lines upon so light a matter.
Two greater things were at hand: Calonne was about to be put at the head
of the finances; Joseph II. was beginning to be decisive about the
Scheldt.
The business of the Scheldt had dragged all through 1783. The active
hostility of France and England had ceased a year before—to the grave
disadvantage of England. Peace had been actually signed for nine months,
yet nothing had been done, and the Cabinet of Versailles still
temporised. To Joseph this recalcitrance upon the part of his ally was
not only irritating, as had been years ago the French hesitation to
support him in the Bavarian chance of war, it was incomprehensible; he
could lay it to nothing but folly. To what depths of folly Versailles
might descend he would admit even his clear brain incapable of judging.
The French lay, as he conceived, open to every attack; theirs was a
power visibly in decay which had made indeed a chance lucky move beyond
the Atlantic, but which could not long continue great. It was surely
their duty, as it was obviously their policy, to be guided by Vienna. It
was not till now—after so many years!—that he had come across the sharp
French “jib” which has since his time disconcerted so many diplomatists.
For the statesmen of that people, under every régime—at least, every
modern régime (wherein I count the later Ministers of Louis XV. and the
anti-clericals of the present Republic)—have much in them, whatever
their rank, of their own peasantry. It is as though the Frenchman, when
he acts as a Minister for the collectivity of France, was collectively
inspired and thought like the mass of ploughmen that build up his
nation. As the peasants perpetually bewail the weather, so he the times.
As the peasants curse authority (which they are so zealous to maintain
as a guarantee of property), so the Statesman the régime of his epoch.
As they will speculate rashly once in a generation, so he in the Seven
Years’ War or in 1870. As they for years after such an error build up a
fortune in the stodgiest securities, so he will build up alliances and
an army in the long periods of national repose. As they with
protestations of ruin and yet with courtesy will relinquish as
make-weight to a bargain some article wholly worthless to them, so he
will reluctantly throw into the diplomatic scale some barren or
untenable possession overseas. As they in a bargain ask with the most
natural air a most fantastic price, so he in a diplomatic proposition.
But, above all, as the French Peasantry, when their apparent stupidity
tempts the city man to ask for something that really concerns them,
become first dumb, then nasty, so the French Statesman, quite
unexpectedly and in one day, clouds over and reveals an astonishing
obstinacy to yield any point of material value to his nation.
The opening of the Scheldt was of no advantage to France. The existence
of a strong Austrian State to the north of her was a thing to avoid; the
diplomatic tradition of a hundred years was in support of Holland, and,
though the Austrian Alliance had changed much, it had been made to
exercise pressure towards the Elbe, not towards the North Sea. Hence for
all the courtesy, the postponements, the protestations of a continued
warmth in the Alliance and the rest of it, France steadily refused to
move. The Emperor Joseph did something he had been slow to do of recent
years: he wrote directly to his sister.
* * * * *
Far off in the Vosges Madame La Motte, the little, proud, active woman
with the furtive eyes, was closeted with the Cardinal de Rohan in his
château of Saverne. She had, she told him, _all but_ recovered her true
place as a Valois; she needed aid for a _very_ little time longer. Here
was a bill upon a Jew, down on the plain in Nancy; quite a small
bill—not a hundred and fifty pounds. The Cardinal backed her bill.
* * * * *
Marie Antoinette could not for the life of her have shown you the
Scheldt on the map; she knew her own incompetence, the advice she
proffered was null or uncertain, and, in any case, whatever slight
suggestion she may have made was quite passed by in the counsels of her
husband. From that moment Joseph was turned, if somewhat slowly, towards
action. He would clear the Scheldt by force, and compel the Cabinet of
Versailles to follow; he took his time and made his plan—but he did not
succeed.
The advent of Calonne was not the least of the accidents that impeded
him, and Calonne’s appointment with its large consequences was partly—as
were now so many things—the work of the Queen. A man of fifty,
provincial, a gentleman, a good lawyer, Calonne was also a friend of the
Polignacs; and Marie Antoinette, on that account alone, supported his
candidature to the Direction of Finance: when she knew him she grew to
dislike him. He was intensely national, vigorous, gay, a trifle too
rapid in thought, ambitious, virile with a Latin virility; he was of a
type she could never affect, and it is certain that he despised her
intellect and resented her interference with affairs—he probably showed
it.
But once he was appointed to the Treasury, her distaste came too late.
That department, as the entanglement of the public fortune increased in
complexity, grew to absorb in importance every other. The complete
autonomy of each Minister within his department (which was a necessary
consequence of Autocracy and the mark of government at Versailles) left
him independent of his colleagues. The vast consequence of any Exchequer
Act at that moment and thenceforward made the Exchequer supreme over
War, over Home, and even over Foreign affairs.
It is difficult to describe the man: his acts must describe him. It is
enough to say that he was not corrupt, that he carried through his
attempt with courage, that he spent the public money largely and gaily
in order to forward his plan of procuring a large increase of revenue
rather than a large reduction of expenditure; that he was saddled with
the remains of the American War debt; was heir in office to the
dishonest and incompetent Necker, and that, so far as mere
administration could, it was he in particular who later opened the
Revolution by one act of courage, and not without deliberation, when he
clearly saw that an active nation needed action to live: for it was he
who summoned the Notables and so convened the first of the Assemblies.
* * * * *
The winter of ’83-’84 was very hard. The new taxes—imposed in the
desperate attempt to fill the Treasury during the preceding year, before
Calonne came, were just beginning to tell. The new loans—which were
Calonne’s own—hung over the prosperity of the State.... The Queen was at
ease; the letters of Rohan no longer came for her to burn; he no longer
crept by tricks into her presence.... Then there was “Figaro.” “Figaro”
was being talked of more than ever.... The King must give his consent
... he had given it to a private stage.... Come, would he not give it
for the public? The play lay there, in the minds of the leisured and the
wealthy; it was potentially a destroyer of the State on which they
battened; but boredom is stronger than appetite with the smart, and the
smart urged “Figaro” on towards its full and final publicity.
The winter drew on towards spring. It still froze hard. Calonne
continued loans and largesse. “To be free of a tangle, you must borrow;
to borrow, you must be at ease; to be at ease, you must spend.” He spent
largely upon the poor of Paris; he consented to fêtes; he took the thing
at a charge. As a nation in the grasp of a dreadful foe might win
through by loan upon loan and pouring out fresh millions, bribing
colonial soldiers recklessly—five, six, seven, ten shillings a day, and
to hell with the commissariat—so he in the grasp of an embarrassed
fiscal system that was dying in an agony and that nothing could recover.
Such procedure invited force of itself; it paved the way for a vast
physical, armed change to effect renewal. With the old régime no man
could have done anything, not the gayest or the most daring; and what
régime has ever changed itself? Calonne was killing the old régime.
He even attempted to feed the people of Paris by free gifts. But still
the people of Paris were not contented, and above them, in the ranks
that make “Opinion,” there was an increasing demand, an insistence for
the “Mariage de Figaro.” It was already March, and the play was still
disallowed.
* * * * *
In his bishop’s palace that March, the woman La Motte was telling the
Cardinal de Rohan one of those truly considerable lies upon which
history turns; a lie comparable to the lie of Bismarck at Ems—or to any
other that any of my readers may cherish. The Cardinal sat listening,
his florid, proud, prominent, unintelligent face all ears. “_She had
reached the result of so much patient waiting. Her dignity of Valois_
(and she was a Valois) _was to be recognised; her lands_ (she had no
lands) _were_ _to be restored to her. It was the_ QUEEN _whom she had
conquered: the_ QUEEN _was now her friend, her intimate friend. The_
QUEEN _would do anything in the world for her. Through her was Rohan’s
avenue to the_ QUEEN. _Her poverty was at an end. She could soon repay
so many years of his kindness._”
* * * * *
Marie Antoinette was concerned with little in those weeks; it is just
possible she again spoke a word for that eternal “Figaro.” If she did
she was but one of a hundred—and the King gave way. The censorship
should be removed, but on condition that certain passages most offensive
to the established order of the State should be deleted. On that point
Louis would not budge ... it made all the difference. They were deleted,
and the King—misjudging now—said (not without foreboding): “I hope it
will be a frost.” On the first night the Public answered him.
A vast crowd broke for hours against the railings of the Comédie
Française, a crowd in which every kind of man was crushed against every
kind. The doors opened to a mob that stormed the theatre like a citadel,
and that, when it entered, could see, in reserved places and entered
earlier than the public, every head in Paris that counted. Even
Monsieur, deep in his private box, was there, and there behind their
bars were the Parliament, the Ministry—even, discreetly, the Church.
The play began.... To-day, in a society which it has helped to create,
its jests seem obvious, its epigrams platitudes. To that eager people,
starved of reform in the midst of a huge transformation of society, they
were brilliant exactitudes of wit, struck off like bright
coins—precisely the thing desired. This man found satisfied as the play
proceeded his revenge against bought law, that man his brooding against
an old insult of privilege, that other his disgust at an apparent
national decline, yet another his mere hunger: and all these Frenchmen
found in the play an echo of their national contempt for a government
that cannot excuse itself, even by logic; all found and each found his
necessity for passion against existing things assuaged by the sparkle
and the venom of the play. They roared at it with delight as men do at
the close of successful assault. They laughed as do men satisfied to
repletion. They felt a common enemy gone under. There was not one so
privileged but had heartily supped of ridicule against some aspect of
the society he had learnt to despise.
The curtain fell to a storm of triumphant noise. The Parisians went out
into the darkness full and fed with the idea of change, and a great
crack had opened in the walls of the palace. It was the 27th of April
1784.
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