CHAPTER IV
THE DU BARRY
THE presence of the Du Barry at the Court of Versailles, the fact that this presence preceded the Austrian child’s arrival, that it was first publicly admitted at the first public appearance of the Dauphiness, and that the four years of her tutelage were overshadowed by the new Royal Mistress was the initial and irretrievable disaster of Marie Antoinette’s life. It moulded her view of the nation and of the family with whom she had now to mingle; it deeply affected the populace she was to attempt to rule; it cloistered, warped and distracted her vision of France at a moment in adolescence when vision is most acute and the judgment formed upon it most permanent. All the Queen’s tragedy is furnished by the early spell of this insignificant and licentious woman.
With her advent was introduced for the first time into the Court that insolent and calculated disregard for rule in gesture and vocabulary wherein which the rich will often secretly relax their ordered lives, but which, when it appears publicly amidst their daily furniture, is as shocking as nakedness or as blood.
Judged in the pure light of human morals the position of the Du Barry was surely less offensive to God than that of any mistress any King has ever chosen. Louis wronged no one by this whim. He wrecked no remains of chastity—the woman had never known the meaning of the word. He wronged no subject (as has and does almost every royal lover in every amour)—her marriage had been but a hurried form run through to satisfy etiquette, “that she might be presented at Court.” He provided himself with a companion too inferior to make political intrigue her main ambition, and with one that could and did surround him with an abject but constant, familiar, and comfortable affection. It was such a vagary of old age as those in which have terminated countless lives, when old gentlemen of breeding but of enfeebled will surround their last years with youth and with the vigour, tainted vigour, that is inseparable from vulgarity. There is not one of us but has come upon a dozen such unions: they are often confirmed by a tardy marriage.
But in the case of Louis and this scandal of his a necessary element to such disgrace, the element of retirement, was lacking. Those symbols which, if they are insisted upon, are mere hypocrisies, but which, taken normally, are the guardians of a tolerable life, were outraged. The eyes of the noble-women at Versailles were full, some of a real or affected timidity, others of a real or affected dignity. Such ladies as chose to be sprightly or even to advertise their loose habit with over-brilliant and vivacious looks, retained, considered, and could always assume refinement; but the beautiful eyes of the Du Barry were brazen. The mignardises, which are always ill-suited to a woman, might be deliberately affected by the less subtle of the more elderly beauties: with the Du Barry, despite her evident youth, they had already become native and ineradicable. She lisped alarmingly; she lolled, or, when it was necessary for her to sit erect, was awkward. Her entry into a room was conscious; her assertions loud, her amiability oiled, her animosities superficially violent. It is upon solemn occasions that such deficiencies are most glaring, and solemn occasions were of continual recurrence at Versailles. In a word, she was most desperately out of place, and therefore produced an effect as of dirt, jarring against whatever was palatine and splendid in the evil of the Court by her parade of the loose good-nature and the looser spites of the Parisian brothels.
Yet it is not difficult to see what had brought the King into so fixed a relation with her. Whoever will compare any of the portraits of her by Drouais with any by Boucher of the Pompadour will see, not the same character indeed, but the same brows and forehead.
Louis could not continue in those early and familiar relations with her which had become a necessity to him, unless in some way her place were publicly acknowledged; but to force such a personality upon the Court, to give it precedence and to see that its position should be permanent, was an effort he had avoided for months. A scene was intolerable to him. He suffered from the most common defect attaching to men of lineage and wealth in that he feared, or rather could not endure, the prospect of violence. Orders even and debate, if they were of a personal and verbal kind, he shrank from as do some men from loud noises. The more important and decisive of his actions were effected in short notes, every line of which, as we read them to-day, manifest his urgent need of isolation: of getting the business done without the friction of another presence, and once done, put aside for ever.
For the public presentation of the Du Barry the marriage of his grandson, and especially the presence of the little Archduchess, offered a fatal opportunity. It would be impossible for the malicious to allude to the office of the Mistress in the presence of the child; the occasion would compel the princes and princesses of the blood to attend, and would equally forbid any general revolt. He determined to give the Archduchess a formal banquet on the journey before the Court and its company had reached Versailles, to summon to it the chief members of the Court, and to let them find at table, without warning, the woman whose existence had hitherto not been spoken of in his presence.
The official limit of Paris upon the west—in those days—a line drawn far beyond the houses and enclosing many fields, gardens, and suburbs, ran from what is now the Trocadero to what is now the Arc de Triomphe. Outside the gate or barrier was an empty space of land but partially cultivated and with no more than a scattered house or two upon it, save where, along the waterside and on the hill above it, clustered the village of Passy. This empty space merged gradually into what were then the wild and unfrequented Boulogne woods. Just on the edge of these, in a situation which was close to the town and yet upon one side accessible to the forest, stood a royal hunting-box called “La Muette,” which had gradually developed into a little palace. Here, on the evening of the day after Compiègne, the long and splendid train of the Court arrived, bearing in the chief coach the King, the Dauphin, and this new Austrian girl for whom Louis had already shown so much respect and tenderness, and whose entry into her rank he was yet to distort.