CHAPTER VI
THE THREE YEARS
Tuesday, the 10th of May 1774 to Easter Sunday, April 19, 1778
FROM the death of Louis XV. to the close of the summer of 1777 is a period of somewhat over three years. In those three years the fates of the French monarchy and of the Queen were decided. For though no great catastrophe marked them nor even any considerable fruit of policy, and though an onlooker would have said no more than that something a little disappointing had, in the process of these years, chilled the first enthusiasm for the new reign, yet we can to-day discover within their limits most of those origins from which the ruin of the future was to come.
For the Queen especially, whom hitherto her minority, her seclusion and the deliberate silence of her childhood had guarded, the opportunities for action which her husband’s accession suddenly offered were opportunities of fate, and the three years with which this chapter has to deal were for her young and exalted innocence of eighteen like that short week of spring when seeds are sown in a garden: they were a brief season of warmth, of vigour, and of clarity during which circumstance sowed for her in every variety the seeds of misfortune and of death. All is there: the advent of an uneasy gaiety; the solace of gems, of cards, of excessive friendships; the vivid but wholly personal, erratic and capricious intervention in matters of State; the simple confidence in the policy of her mother’s Austrian government and the continual support of it; the enmities which all active natures provoke, but which hers had a talent for confirming; the friction of such an activity against the hard and, to her, the alien qualities of the French mind—all these, which the Princess could try to ignore when her husband was but heir and she in her retirement, appear with the first months of her liberty as Queen, strike root, and are seen above ground before she has completed her twenty-second year. And with these positive irritants their negative reactions also come: the Court assumes its divisions; the stories and the songs and the nicknames begin against her; the popular legend concerning her is conceived; the trend of the Orleans faction in antagonism to her is established, and a new generation contemporary with, or but slightly senior to, her own has become fixed within the same three years in a direction which—though none then saw it—could not but destroy her in the progress of years.
To understand in what way the common accidents of that brief three years’ term moved to their great effects it is necessary to know two things: first, the physical infirmity under which Louis XVI. suffered, and, secondly, the nature of the Bourbon Crown he wore; for it is the conjunction of such an infirmity with such an office that lends to the first years of his reign and to the first errors of his wife their capital importance in the history of that one woman and of the world.
Louis, it had first been whispered, and was now upon his accession commonly asserted, could have no heir.
When first the mere form of marriage between him in his boyhood and Marie Antoinette (a child) had been solemnised, no public and no familiar regard was paid to the relations between them. The great ceremony was necessarily esteemed a solemn and irrevocable betrothal rather than a wedlock, and (as I have already said) it was taken for granted that in some two or three years the process of nature would continue the royal line.
But as the Princess advanced to her sixteenth, to her seventeenth year; as her upstanding and vigorous youth achieved first a full growth, then ripeness, then maturity, and yet provoked no issue, the common explanation of such an accident could not but be generally given, and the impotence of the Dauphin was universally accepted. At eighteen, in the last autumn of the old King’s reign, the young wife had stood apparent and triumphant, clothed with a charm which, if it was not that of beauty, was certainly that of exuberant life; a whole ball-room had been arrested at her entrance; the crowds of Paris had quickened at her approach; the lively look, the deep brows, and the full hair tender and vaguely red, which Fersen had seen suddenly revealed, were those of a woman informed with an accumulated and expectant vitality. It was not in her that the defect could lie. Louis, so it plainly seemed, was deficient and was in title only her husband.
A conjunction of this kind is not uncommon even in an active, healthy, and laborious lineage of the middle rank; among the wealthy it is frequent; in the genealogy of families which carry a public function, such as those of monarchs or of an oligarchy, for all the careful choice which their marriages involve, it is often present. Such accidents are provided for. In many cases probably, in some certainly, a supposititious child is introduced. When that course is difficult or repugnant the situation is acknowledged; the consort chooses between her devotions and a lover; all the planning and all the necessary preparation which attach to the succession regard the brother or cousin, who is henceforward accepted as the heir, and his position is the more highly established from the contrast his vigour may afford to the defect in the reigning incumbent.