Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

In fine, when the Day of the Dead came round and the leaves of ’75 were falling, she could look back from her twentieth birthday to her accession, and the view was one of eighteen months of mental chaos wherein one emotion rapidly succeeded another, each sought for the purposes of distraction and oblivion, and of feeding in some sort of firework way that appetite for life which Louis could not nourish with a steady flame. With the next year further elements were to be added to those existing elements of dissipation. The foundations of the future which she had already levelled out were to be strengthened. The public judgment of her was to become more apparent, and the legend which at last destroyed her was to take a firmer root.

The year 1776, for ever famous in the general history of the world, was the climax and the turning-point of this early exuberance and excess. In its first days, during the hard winter which marked the turn of the year, she had begun amusements which for the first time permitted her to cross the barrier which divides the reproach of one’s intimates from public scandal. Her play had grown from mere extravagant gambling to dangerous indebtedness, and she had been bitten by the love of jewels, especially of diamonds. In this year, too, the simple and somewhat empty friendship which she still slightly bore to Madame de Lamballe was finally replaced by more violent caprices; she began to associate with the powerful Guémenées, with the gentle but subtle and intriguing Countess of Polignac.

Her indiscretion rose continually. In February she was seen with the Princesse de Lamballe whirling over the snow into Paris, without an escort, as a private woman might, to the disgust and the hatred of the crowd.

The exhilaration of the cold—for her who was from Vienna—the exhilaration of her twentieth year, her love of merry domination over the timid little tall companion, whom she was so soon to abandon, drove her from audacity to audacity. Her sledges, which had been but a domestic scandal at Versailles, dared to reach Sèvres, St. Cloud; they crossed the river, because the hunting wood of Boulogne invited them. Upon one fatal morning she traversed that last screen and shot through Paris on her shining toy.

The sledge was daringly, impudently alone. There was no guard, no decent covering for royalty, no dignity of pace or even of ornament; its pace was a flash, and its high gilding a theatrical décor; mixing with that flash and that gilding was the jangling of a hundred little bells.

The streets were all aghast at such a sight. Sèvres and the villages round Versailles had stared, bewildered, to see a Queen go by in such a fashion; but Paris was too great to be merely bewildered, and Paris grew angry, as might an individual at a personal insult offered.

The next month saw her first reckless purchase of gems; she pledged her name for £16,000, and acquired in exchange of that debt diamonds not only expensive beyond the means of her purse, but unworthy of her rank and of the traditions of her office.

To such follies she added her personal interference in the matter of Turgot. That bright-eyed, narrow, intelligent, and most un-Christian man had missed the problem ready to his hands. In time of war, with a good army and a soldier behind him, he might have solved it; in a time of luxury, misery, and peace he could not. In the very days when he was propounding his theories of unfettered exchange and of direct taxation for the salvation of the Monarchy, the harvest of ’75 had failed. In the one exceptional moment of famine when interference with trade was certainly necessary to French markets, his free trade doctrine was imposed. A popular hatred rose against him, and he was hated not only by the populace, who felt the practical effects of his economic idealism, but by the rich handful who were still devout and who could not tolerate his contempt for the Faith, by the corrupt who could not tolerate his economy, and by the vivacious who could not tolerate his sobriety. His rapid and fundamental reforms, moreover, were opposed by the Parlement of Paris[^[3]] as by a wall. They refused to register the edicts. He had still great influence with the King, though hardly with any other effective power in the State, and in the month of March the King in a Bed of Justice compelled the Parlement to register Turgot’s decrees and give them the force of law. It registered them; but none the less Turgot was doomed.

[3]. It should be made clear, though it is elementary, that the Parlement of Paris, by nature a supreme court of law, exercised also the anomalous but traditional function of registrar of royal decrees. Nor was a law a law until this body had consented to enroll it or had been overcome by a grave, rare and solemn public ritual of the King’s called “a Bed of Justice.”

Mercy, who saw very clearly that the man must go, but who also saw clearly the extreme danger that the Queen ran in taking upon herself any part in his going, did all that his influence could command to prevent her interference. He spent his energy and his considerable persuasion in vain. The one motive force and the only one that could persuade her to public action had already stirred the Queen; she believed herself to have received a personal affront; the Cabinet had recalled a favourite in her set from the Embassy of St. James’s. The girl was determined upon revenge, and because Turgot as Comptroller-General showed most prominently in the Cabinet, it was upon Turgot that her wrath fell, or rather it was Turgot falling from power whom she precipitated by her final influence. Upon the 10th of May, Guines, whom the Cabinet had recalled from London, was raised to a Duchy in a public note; by the 12th, Maurepas had told the Comptroller-General that his office was vacant, and Marie Antoinette talked wildly of sending him to the Bastille.