All the world did such things! None could blame her—yet all did. After all, one great house after another had put up its show—most of them more costly than hers: but there was in her gradual extension of the amusement something that aggrandised it and made it a public talk; her invitation to the great Paris companies of actors, her very seclusion at first, with its opportunity for rumour, later her open doors, swelled the comment and the offence of Paris. Paris detested this private theatre from the first. There was in it a mixture of carelessness for the State and of personal abasement which Paris could not tolerate in a French Queen; yet how simple was the distraction to her, and how could the subtleties of these Paris critics, themselves the best actors in the world, deriding acting and despising it, be comprehensible to her? She played on.
The King came often. He applauded. She permitted—in this year 1780 at least—no one but the royal family to witness her from the audience ... but the parts were many and needed many players. She made dull Campan, her librarian, manage for her; she gave no place in the distraction to those who thought their presence about her to be a most solemn right and duty. In the autumn to the acting she must add singing, though her voice was not always in tune and was often displeasing in its lack of volume. Stage parts demanded stage lovers, and, learning this, Mercy in his turn opposed. He came at her invitation (but he insisted on being hidden behind the lattice of a box), he applauded her acting somewhat, was courtier-like to her singing—but he disapproved.
Silent, a little bent, low-voiced, a man of but fifty-three—though seeming older—Mercy was now at the height of that long career during which for twenty-two years he was Austria itself permanently present before Marie Antoinette, a spy over her for her mother’s sake and for her own, a devoted servant of the Hapsburgs and Lorraine.
His nobility was of the Empire: a Belgian from Liège, a man without nationality, and with no comprehension of the rising religion of patriotism, he had from his childhood formed part of that cosmopolitan soldiery which was the shield of Maria Theresa; he lived for that Great Lady who maintained him in his embassy, and in his manner and tradition he maintained the character it had had under his master, Kaunitz.
He had passed all his early manhood in that splendid river-side house in Paris which the dandyism of the great diplomatist his teacher had demanded. His youth—reserved, awkward and probably laborious—had left him very observant. He had adopted for life all the externals of the Parisians, but—with the narrowness of his profession—he had failed to see that inmost part of them which was so soon to launch a tempest of wars against all that bunch of private interests on which he depended, and to destroy it. The French Crown was nothing to him, and whether in Paris, at Versailles, or down river in his great country house at Conflans, the French nation left him careless. He was lord of a French manor in Lorraine, of another near his château on the river. His wines were French, and marvellous, and cellared in 15,000 bottles, which the peasants of the Oise drank for him joyfully in ’92—nothing more saddened the old man in his exile when the Revolution was on.
His horses were superb. Even of coachmen he boasted two—each beautiful and large; each equal in domestic rank.
Unmarried, he maintained with dignity an opera-singer of some fame and of the refinement customary in that trade; at the close of his life he left upon record their “close and rooted friendship.”
Such was the man who for nine years had watched his Princess as she grew to womanhood and at last to motherhood at the French Court, and for nine years had sent those long, regular, and careful letters to Maria Theresa which are now our source for quite half the history of the place and time. His life also was at a crisis and a change in this year of 1780, for in the autumn of it his great sovereign died.
Maria Theresa was sixty-three. She was still vigorous in body, powerful in voice, alert in brain, but for many years a great melancholy had not abandoned her. She had continually contemplated her husband’s tomb; her letters to her children, and especially to the Queen of France, were full at the last of an approaching silence. The Bavarian trouble had broken her; in the long expectation of a grandson to the French throne she had been disappointed; the future of her daughter had terrified her—for she saw the gulf. It was upon the 24th of November that she felt her fatal illness; until the 29th she wrote and dictated her affairs of State, and on that very date wrote at length to the Queen. Then she saw Death coming visibly; she staggered into a chair, and with words of rational charity upon her lips she died.
It was a week—Wednesday, the 6th of December—before the news could reach Versailles. It came at evening. Marie Antoinette saw suddenly receding, as the sea had receded from Lisbon at her birth, the principal aspect of her life. The memory of her mother, and the constant letters—scolding, anxious, loving, or imperious—had been her only homely things where everything around her had been alien and increasingly alien. Her mother for nine years, her mother and Mercy’s voice, had been tangible: all the rest was strange. That deep and inner part which she did not or could not show, which she herself perhaps did not know, and which appeared but three times upon the surface of her life, rose through its eager and not profound levels of sense. Her whole frame was broken; she spat blood. She put herself that hour in black of every kind disordered, and she met the coming year charged with a sorrow that could now never wholly leave her. But that year was to give her the two chief things of that phase in her life—the news of a successful battle, and the birth of a son; and a third—the woman La Motte, through whom the chief of her evils were to come upon her.