Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

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.