And the Queen meanwhile, quite lost, pushed the pace of all the throng about her, despairing of any remedy to that evil which her brother was posting to reform.
If Fersen had been there!
Upon Friday evening, the 18th of April, the Emperor Joseph drove past the barrier of St. Denis and entered Paris. It was already dark, but the stoic was in time for dinner. He was in strict incognito, that he might be the more admired, and had given out the arrival of “Count Falkenstein” to all the world. He slept in the humblest way at his Embassy; he had hired two plain rooms in Versailles by letter—at a hotel called “the Hotel of the Just,” presumably Huguenot; next day he paraded as The Early Riser and was off to Versailles before the gentry were out of bed: the whole thing was as theatrical as could be. He wished to meet his sister alone—but he let everybody know it. He came up to her room by a private stair—and spoke of it as an act of simplicity and virtue. The man was of the kind to whom—most unhappily for them and their founder—Marcus Aurelius provides a model. His certitudes were in words or negations; his pride in things facile and dry; his judgments, vapid, determined, superficial, and false—in a manner Prussian without the Prussian minuteness; in a manner French, but with none of the French clear depth and breadth. Of hearty Germany he had nothing; and among all the instruments of action designed in Gaul he could choose out only one, the trick of sharp command, which the accident of despotic power permitted him to use over a hotch-potch of cities and tongues.
The task before him, which was the re-establishment at Versailles of the interests of Austria, comprised two parts: first, he must counsel or compel the Queen—who stood for Austria at Versailles—to such conduct and dignity as would permit her to exercise permanent political power; secondly, and much more important, he must force the King to that operation from which he so shrank and yet by which alone the succession of the Crown through Marie Antoinette could be assured.
For the first of these tasks, the reform of his sister’s conduct, Joseph’s empty character, without humour and without religion, was wholly insufficient—nay, it provoked the opposite of its intention. The obvious truth of his harsh criticism moved the Queen, but his bad manners, his public rebuke, offended her more. His precise (and written!) instructions forced upon her one irksome and priggish month of affected rigidity; she did but react with the more violence from the absurd restraint.
With the second and more positive task he was more fortunate. His brutal questions, his direct affirmation and counsel, his precise instructions, all conveyed in the sergeant-major manner which is of such effect upon the doubtful or the lethargic, accomplished their end. Louis inclined to the advice which had for now three years urged medical interference; he submitted to an operation, and the principal question at issue for two great States was in this secret manner accomplished: it was the one success, the only one, of Joseph’s tactless and unwise career. It was of the highest consequence to him and his house and all Europe; for, his counsels once obeyed, the maternity of Marie Antoinette was ultimately sure. When the Queen should have borne a child there could but follow the rage of disappointed successors, a secure and increasing influence upon her part over her husband, through this the antagonism of the Monarchy to the nation, and at last the Revolution and all its wars.
The reader may inquire the precise date of so momentous a detail. It is impossible to fix it until (if it still exist) the document once in the hands of Lassone be published; but we can fix limits within which the operation must have taken place. It must have been within that summer of 1777 in one of three months, June, July, or August; probably in late August or the very beginning of September. It was certainly later than the 14th of May, when, according to Mercy, the private interviews upon the matter between Joseph and Louis were still unfinished. Marie Antoinette’s letter of June 16th makes it probably later than that date. A phrase of Maria Theresa’s on the 31st of July, referring to news of the 15th (the last news from Mercy), makes it possible that she thought all accomplished by 15th of July. A phrase of Mercy’s on the 15th of August makes it more probable still. By the 10th of September a phrase used by Marie Antoinette in her correspondence with Maria Theresa makes it certain.[[5]]
[5]. See [Appendix A].
Compared with this capital consequence of his journey the rest of Joseph’s actions, opinions, and posings in France are indeed of slight importance. His affectation of retirement and simplicity, his common cabs, his perpetual appearance in public and as perpetual pretence of complaint at his popularity are the tedious trappings of such men. In some things he was real enough; in his acute annoyance with the Queen’s set, for instance—especially with Madame de Guémenée, and her late hours, high play and familiar, disrespectful tones. He was sincere, too, in his astounding superficiality of judgment; he was keen on science, eager for the Academies, and in that scientific world of Paris which boasted Lavoisier and the immortal Lamarck discovered that “when one looks close, nothing profound or useful is being done.”