Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

But it is the characteristic of any morbid condition that the slightest irritant produces an effect vastly beyond its due consequence. The financial embarrassment from which the Kingdom suffered may or may not have been relievable by the plain and harsh methods of Turgot—it is a question to which I will return—but even if they were so relievable, their immediate application could not but be an aggravation of popular suffering; and just in the years when increasing economic difficulty and sharp economic remedies for it were catching the public between two millstones of poverty below and retrenchment above, the populace had presented to them, upon a pinnacle whence she could be observed on every side, a young woman who in some sense summed up the State, and yet who, in mere externals at least, showed a growing disregard for method and a pursuit of every emotion that might distract her from what the French thought the duty, but what she knew to be the tragedy, of her marriage.

The mourning of the Court forbade display until the autumn of 1774, and though with the autumn and the winter there was some relaxation of ancient rules and some revolt already observable upon Marie Antoinette’s part against the fixed and inherited rules of her station, yet there was nothing which had yet seized the popular imagination nor even gravely affected her position within the narrow circle of her equals. It was not until the next year, 1775, that the error and the misfortune began.

It had long been intended that her brother, the Emperor Joseph, should visit France, and by his more active character persuade Louis XVI. to an operation which he perpetually postponed. The repeated adjournment of this visit (which was to resolve so many doubts) was among the fatal elements of the Queen’s early life. In the place of that sovereign, the youngest child of the Hapsburgs, Maximilian, little more than a boy, fat, and what would have been called in a lower rank of society deficient, waddled into the astonished Court at La Muette in the opening of February.

The accident of his arrival did neither the Queen nor the Court any great hurt among the crowds of the capital. His startling ignorance and heavy lack of breeding amused the crowd; they were glad to repeat the amusing anecdotes of his awkwardness as later in their Republican armies they were glad to caricature his obesity when he had achieved the ecclesiastical dignity of a princely archbishopric. But among her intimate equals the visit was disastrous. The Princes of the Blood insisted upon receiving his call before they paid their court to him, since he was travelling incognito. It was a point (to them) of grave moment. The Queen rubbed it in with spirit. She would not let him pay such a call. She told them that her brother “had other sights to see in Paris and could put off seeing the Princes of the Blood.” The King stood by during the quarrel, irresolute, upon the whole supporting his wife. The King’s brothers for the moment supported her also; but the kernel of the affair lay in her disregard of inherited tradition, in her contempt for those fine shades of mutual influence and deference which to the French are all important indications of authority, but which to her were meaningless extravaganzas of parade. Chartres, during the progress of what he thought an insult, she a piece of common sense, deliberately left the Court, publicly showed himself in Paris, and was applauded for his spirit.

This wilfulness, this picked quarrel, sprang from the same root as, and was similar to, whatever other fevers disturbed her entry into her twentieth year.

The Queen had conceived a violent affection for the Princesse de Lamballe, a young woman of the Blood, but Piedmontese, the widow of a debauchee—a simpering, faithful, stupid, sentimental and most unfortunate young woman, often gushing in her joy, next, in grief, wringing her enormous hands. It was an attachment almost hysterical and subject to extreme fluctuations. The Queen had conceived a second attachment, with the opening of this year 1775, for another woman, as good-natured indeed, but more solid and more capable of intrigue than Madame de Lamballe, the Comtesse de Polignac. In the empty society of the one, in the full and babbling coterie of the other, Marie Antoinette expended the greater part of her energy. Finding to hand, as it were, the Guémenées (and Madame de Guémenée constitutionally fixed as “Governess to the children of France”—children that did not exist), she plunged also into the Guémenée set, and there she discovered, for the first time in her young life, a powerful drug for the stimulation of whatever in adventurous youth has been wounded by disappointment and youth’s hot despair—gambling. The gambling took root quickly in this girl who hated wine and had desired so much of life. It was large in ’75; in ’76 it was to be ruinous to her watched and doled allowance.

Meanwhile the tailors and the milliners and all the ruck of parasites were taking advantage of the new reign to play extravagant experiments in fashion, to build fantastic head-dresses and to load humanity with comic feathers. She did not create such novelties, but she was willing to follow them.

The young bloods, in one of those recurrent fits of Anglomania to which the wealthy among the French are subject, must introduce horse-racing. She passionately approved. It gave her gambling the familiarity or lack of restraint which she was determined to breathe for the solution of her ills; it gave her the feeling of crowds about her, of pulse and of the flesh.

Young Artois, the youngest of the King’s brothers, because he was the most vivacious of those nearest her, must be her constant companion. Mercy noted his “shocking familiarity”; he feared that scandals would arise.... They did.

Again, as the new reign advanced, her unpolitical and most unwise concern for personalities showed more vividly than ever. Because the ambassador in London was in her set she must take up his cause with a sort of fury, when he was accused of abusing his position for the purposes of commerce. He was acquitted, but, much more than the trial or any of its incidents, the open and passionate attitude of the Queen struck the society of the time. So in the very moment of the coronation she again openly received Choiseul, though she knew that he could never return to Court, that her mother and all Austria disapproved.