Dufort had been told very strictly to keep silent. He suffered a persecution. Thus he was standing one evening by the card-tables talking to his Spanish colleague, when the Empress came up and said to this last boldly: “You see my daughter, sir? I trust her marriage will go well; we can talk of it the more freely that the French ambassador here does not open his lips.”
The child’s new governess was next turned on to the embarrassed man to pester him with the recital of her charge’s virtues. The approaching marriage of her elder sister Caroline with the Bourbons of Naples was dangled before Dufort.
The play continued for a year. Louis XV. bade his ambassador get the girl’s portrait, but “not show himself too eager.” He is reprimanded even for his courtesies, and all the while Dufort must stand the fire of the Court of Vienna and its exaggerated deference to him and its occasional reproaches! Choiseul was anxious to see the business ended. Dufort was as ready (and as weary) as could have been the Empress herself, but the slow balance of Louis XV. stood between them all and their goal.
In the summer of the next year, 1768, the Empress’s eldest son, Joseph, now associated with her upon the throne, determined to press home and conclude. It was the first time that this man’s narrow energy pressed the Bourbons to determine and to act; it was not to be the last. He was destined so to initiate action in the future upon two critical occasions and largely to determine the fortunes of his sister’s married life and final tragedy.
He wrote to Louis XV. a rambling letter, chiefly upon the marriage of yet another sister with the Duke of Parma. It wandered to the Bourbon marriage of Caroline; he mentioned his own child, the great-granddaughter of the King. It was a letter demanding and attracting a familiar answer. It drew its quarry. Louis, answering with his own hand and without emphasis, in a manner equally domestic and familiar, threw in a chance phrase: “... These marriages, your sister’s with the Infante, that of the Dauphin....” In these casual four words a document had passed and the last obstacle was removed.
The Empress turned from her major preoccupation to a minor one. This child of hers was to rule in France; she was now assured of the throne; she was near her thirteenth birthday—and she had been taught nothing.
CHAPTER III
THE ESPOUSALS
THE fortnightly despatches from France customarily arrived at Vienna together in one bag and in the charge of one courier. The Empress would receive at once the letters of Mercy, the official correspondence, perhaps the note of a friend, and the very rare communications of royalty. In this same batch which brought that decisive letter of Louis XV. to her son, on the same day, therefore, in which she was first secure in her daughter’s future, there also arrived the usual secret report from Mercy. This document contained a phrase too insignificant to detain her attention; it mentioned the rumour of a new intrigue: the King showed attachment to a woman of low origin about him; it was an attachment that might be permanent. This news was immediately forgotten by Maria Theresa; it was a detail that passed from her mind. She perhaps remembered the name, which was “Du Barry.”