Much worse than all of these, the constant jar upon her nerves broke down a certain decent reticence, the barrier of silence, which should, always in a woman of her age, and doubly in a woman of her position, be absolutely immovable. She publicly ridiculed the painful infirmity of the King. Her sneers at his incapacity were repeated; they crept into malicious, unprinted songs; she permitted herself similar confidences, or rather publicities, in her correspondence; she wrote them with her own hand, and there is little doubt that others besides those to whom they were addressed saw that writing. He, poor man, went on painfully with his duty, hour by hour in his councils, considering the realm, distantly fond of her, but necessarily feeling in her presence that mixture of timidity, generosity and shame, the secret of which was no longer private to his wife and him, but, through her lack of elementary discipline, spreading grotesquely abroad in an exaggerated and false rumour to the world.
So much had been accomplished by her own character and destiny when a full year had passed after the old King’s death. She had made the Crown a subject of jest, her character suspect, her husband, that is, the foundation of her own title, ridiculous, when the date had arrived in the summer of ’75 for the solemn coronation of Louis at Rheims.
Mercy, with an inspiration sharper than that which diplomats commonly enjoy, had suggested her coronation side by side with that of the King. Such a ceremony might have retrieved much. Precedent was against it, but after so very long an interval precedent was weak; at best it could but have afforded a spiteful and small handle for the enmities which Marie Antoinette had already aroused. She had but to insist, or rather only to understand, and her fate would have halted. She was indifferent. The miraculous moment when high ceremonial and the subtle effect of historic time combined to impress and to transform the French nation, the moment of the unction of the King, found her nothing more than the chief spectator in the gallery of the Cathedral transept looking down upon all that crowd of peers and officers whose position in the ceremony was exactly fixed.
She had come in to Rheims the night before under a brilliant moon, driving in her carriage as might any private lady. The “chic” of such an entry pleased her. She had allowed the King to precede her by some days, and whatever magic attached to the ritual descended upon him alone, and left her unsupported for the future. Her letter to her mother, written upon the morrow of the occasion, shows how little she knew what she had missed. The Court returned to Versailles, the careless vigour of her life was renewed, the thread of her exaggerated friendships and her exaggerated repulsions was caught up again.
When her young sister-in-law was married a few weeks later to the heir of Piedmont and Savoy, she did not conceal her relief at the departure from her Court of this child, with whom, for some reason or another, she could not hit it off. When Madame de Dillon, with her Irish beauty, passed through the Court, that lady moved Marie Antoinette to yet another violent friendship—luckily of short duration. As for the Princesse de Lamballe, she had already revived for her the post of Superintendente of the Queen’s Household (a post that had not existed for thirty years), and later she insisted upon there being attached to it the salary (which France imagined enormous) of £6000 a year.
It is of great interest to note that public dissipation or abandon of this kind, glowing familiarities, long-lit and brilliant nights, an ardent pursuit of what had become to her a very necessity of change—all, in a word, that was beginning to fix her subjects’ eyes upon her doubtfully, and not a little to offend the mass of the nobility around her, all that was found in her insufficient to the niceties and balance of the French temper, was easily excused by foreign opinion. Just that something which separates the French from their neighbours was lacking to the foreign observance of this foreign woman. Her carriage, which to the French was a trifle theatrical, seemed to foreigners queenly; her lively temper, which the French had begun to find forward, was for the foreigner an added charm.
There is no need to recall the rhetoric of Burke, for Burke was not by birth or training competent to judge; but Horace Walpole, who was present that very summer at the Court of Versailles, and saw the Queen in all her young active presence at her sister-in-law’s wedding-feast, writes with something of sincerity, and, what is more, with something for once of heart in his words. He thinks there never was so gracious or so lovely a being.
One judgment I, at least, would rather have recovered than any of theirs. It has not been communicated. I mean that of Doctor Johnson. For Doctor Johnson some months later stood by the side of his young girl friend, behind the balustrade at Fontainebleau, watching curiously with his aged and imperfect eyes this young Queen at the public ceremony of the Sunday Feast. The old, fat, wheezy man, who now seems to us England incarnate, stood there in the midst of the public crowd behind the railing, blocking its shuffling way as it defiled before royalty dining, and took in all the scene. The impression upon a man of such philosophy must have been very deep. I believe we have no record of that impression remaining.[[2]]
[2]. The life of Doctor Johnson has become an object of such wide national study that more than one reader may be acquainted with his judgment of the scene. If it exists, it should be published to the advantage of history.
Though Marie Antoinette’s carriage and her manner had founded of her so beneficent a legend abroad and had begun in her new home so much of her future disaster, with those who knew her most intimately and who were of her own blood, with the Hapsburgs of Vienna, her conduct, certainly not queenly, seemed not even tragic. They scolded sharply, and the Emperor, her brother, crowned a series of violent notes by one so violent that Maria Theresa kept it back. To her childlessness (which was for them a fault in her), to her conduct (which her own family who had known her as a child exaggerated at such a distance) was added the exasperation of remembering that with some elementary caution she might have acted as the agent of the allied Austrian Court whose daughter she was; they were angered in Vienna to see that, instead of so acting, she wasted her position in private spites and private choices.