Meanwhile the Court awaited the birth of an heir.
There was a murmur all around. Monsieur had written frankly enough to the King of Sweden that his hope of the succession was gone. The Court was transformed, and Marie Antoinette especially was a new power: the light calumnies were grown heavy now; the revenge for personal touches was becoming a State affair; a weight of office was upon her, for she was now to be half the Crown and the true wife of a King who governed, and the mother of a King after him.
It was on the 19th of December, in the very early hours long before dawn, that her husband was warned: in the forenoon her travail began.
I have said that the French Monarchy was a sacramental and therefore a public thing. The last act of its public ritual was about to be accomplished; for the last time it rose to the mystical duties of its office and dared to mix with the nation, not as a person, but as an Institution for whom, being immortal, peril was nothing, and, being impersonal, decency and comfort nothing. Could it have so dared again it would have been saved, but it did not dare.
The populace demanded admittance to the birth, and were admitted in the ancient way. The square room in which the Queen lay, upon a low little camp-bed before the fire, was crowded in a moment; upon the carved marble of the chimney-piece two street arabs were seen climbing. The market-women were there, mixed with the ladies of the Court, and a great press of the poor from the streets had found an entry and were packed also upon the great stairs outside. Everything was a-buzz and a-tiptoe, questioning, craning for the news; the market-women commiserated and complained; the ladies-in-waiting stood silent, each estimating the event—the change there would be at Court, the strong place the King would now hold, and, above all, the new power of the mother—the little heir, the boy who should dispossess Monsieur, exile Artois perhaps, and recapture the heart of the crowds to the Bourbon name.
For some critical moments there was a silence.
Vermond (the tutor’s brother), who was her doctor, or her midwife, had ordered every crevice to be closed. Even the chinks of the window had paper gummed to them. In such an air and under such an ordeal the Queen fainted. Louis in a passion of sense thrust his arm through a pane of glass and let in the winter cold; Vermond lanced a vein, and with the bleeding and the fresh draught of air the Queen returned to life. They told her that the child was a girl.
There were great crowds at her churching and some eagerness. The Latin Quarter was impassable with folk as her coach crawled up the hill towards the shrine of Ste. Genevieve. The square in front of the Cathedral was very full—but they lacked a Dauphin. The King was glad enough. When, upon Christmas Eve, the child had grasped his finger, he had told his pleasure to all. Her name and godparents, her household and her future were discussed as solemn things. But in Versailles the air was dull with anti-climax; they had depended upon, or braced themselves for, or begun their intrigue against, a son of France—and none was there.