Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

The little girl who thus was born alone survived. Her brothers perished—the heir in prison; her father and her mother both were publicly destroyed. She lived. The country house of her old age I well remember, a solemn and lonely place, small and grey and deep in the woods—long empty. It fell into ruins, was sold for stone, and a road driven over it; but after nightfall horses refused to pass the place, and legends of darkness clung to the last blood of the Bourbons.

It was but the close of January when the Queen returned from La Muette and her churching to Versailles and the disappointment of Versailles. It was just a year from the ball-room scene that had meant war with the English. That year had done nothing but maintain the struggle, to the surprise and encouragement of the French Ministry; it had done no more, but even that was much. The naval actions had been at the worst indecisive, the English communications along the rebel coast were now in perpetual jeopardy, and would so remain until a French fleet was destroyed: none was destroyed. Even an attempt to blockade the French in Boston harbour had failed, and in November D’Estaing had slipped away from Byron under the advantage of a storm. Of all the operations of that year perhaps the most momentous to history was the chance and inconclusive fight of July in the Atlantic, for it gave the Queen occasion to doubt the courage of Chartres and to ridicule it: and Chartres, soon to be Orleans, found his growing hatred of her fixed for ever.

As for her, she kept her carnival, the carnival of 1779. Her less light purpose now earned her reproaches far more deep than those which had pursued her first childless years; but in her new hopes she could forget them, and her much rarer omissions did not remain in her mind. She did not see how solidly the foundations of her fate were being laid in the dark, and how every trivial folly was her foe; no act of hers proved great enough to destroy the last effect of these trivial follies.

She went to the Opera-ball on Shrove Tuesday with the King—it was a folly (they said) to leave Versailles so soon. She went without him a week later—it was a folly to go alone. That night, her coach breaking down, she must take a public fly—a piece of common sense. She spoke of the adventure, and it pleased her hugely, but the populace twisted it into I know not what adventures, repeated and enlarged in a thousand ways.

When in April the measles incommoded her, she must retire to Trianon for a month—it was common sense; but it was “breaking roof” with the King, and therefore a lesion in the constant etiquette of the Crown. She took with her her young sister-in-law, Madame Elizabeth, whom she had once petulantly avoided, and now, saner, loved; and Madame de Lamballe was there too. It was common sense; but her absence from the Court was hateful, was an insult to the courtiers, and the presence at Trianon during the day of four gentlemen, her friends, was more hateful still. The lies poured out in a printed stream from London; and the Paris coffee-shops, and the drawing-rooms too, had now woven round her an enduring legend of debauchery more real than things witnessed or heard. The calumny was fixed.

If a moment must be chosen of which one can say that it was the decisive moment in her public ill-repute, the moment before which that repute was yet fluid, the moment after which it was set, then that moment must be found in this summer of her twenty-fourth year, 1779. It was an effect coming well after its cause: the high tide of a wave that the first reckless three years had raised.

It may be asked whether, had some shock or some necessity wholly changed her, had she given up every lightness as she had already given up most excesses, she might not yet have warded off the approaches of a distant judgment. No, she could not. The character of the attack upon her she could have modified; but she could only have diminished its volume by increasing its intensity, or its rapidity by extending its already almost universal vogue: she could not have escaped it. The most sober actions of that enthusiastic nature would now for ever be criticised. Had no money gone on slight pleasures, the money spent in every error of foreign policy would have been put down to her; every unpopular dismissal she was to be guilty of, innocent or no, and her name was to be, in every story of intrigue, however incredible, pre-judged. She was destined henceforward to be forgotten in victory and remembered in defeat, nor could anything have saved her save a sudden comprehension of France. No God revealed it to her, and to the general protest that was rising beneath her came accident after accident, some hardly of her doing, some not at all, but every one pointing towards the single issue of her fate, not one in aid of her.

The nights of August were hot and the early autumn also. The customary tours of the Court had been countermanded to save money. The princesses walked at evening and mingled with the crowd on the terrace of the palace, where was the band. It gave scandal. It gave scandal that the Queen should walk later with Artois. It gave most scandal that Madame de Polignac, with her refined and silent face, her gentle deep-blue eyes under that dark hair—a type not national—should so entirely possess the Queen.

The Polignac clique demanded and obtained on every side. It was a double evil: a proof to the Court that the aristocracy as a whole were excluded from favour and that a faction ruled; a proof to the nation that, at a time when finance was the known burden, and when, in the midst of prosperity, a permanent crisis weighed on the impatient poor and the public forces alike, the executive, the King, could blindly spend money and endow every Polignac claim. The sums involved in this patronage of the Polignacs, as in every other public extravagance of the French, were small. The debts of a Pitt or a Fox were far larger, the luxuries of our modern money-dealers are mountainous compared to them; but they fell on a nation wholly egalitarian, unused to and intolerant of government by the wealthy, and a nation which regarded (and regards) its government as the principal engine to use against the rich, not in their aid.

Trianon, not enormous in its cost, grew to be yet another legend, and that legend was not diminished when, in the summer of 1780, a little theatre was opened there, a little stage for the Queen.