He and it were little things to Marie Antoinette, but the rumour of them was considerable, for, a few months before, at the end of the past year, the King had heard that this “Mariage de Figaro” was not tolerable: it was a satire upon all established things. The play was already ordered for the Théâtre Français. Louis had it read to him privately, and for once made a rapid decision. As literature he could not judge its considerable merits; as politics he put his foot down: such laughter at such an expense to government and all tradition was not to be borne—and the licence was withdrawn. The public rumour rose and grew.
Every witty lady about the Court and in the capital, many more who desired a reputation for wit, insisted upon reading the play; upon hearing it read aloud; upon having Beaumarchais come and read it aloud. All the Polignac world was mad on it. Loménie de Brienne boasted that he had heard it oftenest. The Princess de Lamballe moved heaven and earth to have it read by the author in her very rooms.
The “Mariage de Figaro” was, therefore, to the Queen a perpetual phrase on the lips of the smart, literary and unliterary: it is doubtful if she read a line of it, but she heard of it and heard of it again. She forgot it for the moment; later she remembered it again—not to her good.
Meanwhile a much larger matter vexed her. In the midst of her active and interested life, of promotions, personal successes and habitual pleasures, the insistence of her brother Joseph continually pursued her, and a mixed anxiety, an anxiety to be political, an anxiety to escape responsibility, came to her almost daily—from Mercy immediately, ultimately from Vienna: she felt upon her the uneasy burden of the Hapsburgs.
While her mother still lived there had at least been between her and Marie Antoinette an unbroken habit of command upon the one side, obedience and protest upon the other. The pressure of Vienna had been a natural one then. Maria Theresa possessed, moreover, the tact not only of a woman, and of a religious woman, but the large vision of a careful and perilous diplomacy brought to success. Joseph lacked all these: religion, honour, tact, acquaintance, experience. His commands to Mercy were as crude as any of his judgments upon the world: “Had Mercy seen the Queen?” “Was she doing her duty by the House of Austria?” “Would Mercy suggest this, that?” “Since the Queen was so powerful with the King, why had this, that detail of French policy not exactly suited the demands of the Empire?” Broken by the buffer of Mercy’s long experience these arid and unfruitful hastes came less brutally to the ears of Marie Antoinette. She never felt herself the servant of her family, nor in direct antagonism to the Crown of her husband; she felt only that she was perpetually required to be doing—she hardly knew what—much as in her mother’s time, but without the aid of her mother’s handwriting and remembered voice—certainly without her mother’s wisdom to control.
The pressure from Joseph II. continued; it was to be two years before it took effect in a great matter, but when that matter arose the Queen’s plain service to Vienna—something far in excess of what she had done in the Bavarian affair—showed how much that irksome and long pressure had effected. She came to act as an Austrian army would have acted, and quite understanding all she did, she came very near to betraying her allegiance to the French throne.
For the rest these early months of ’82 were filled, among her pleasures and her rising power, with other annoyances; notably that from time to time her friends in that excessive society of hers spoke to her of their debts, and she knew well that in the matter of money grants at that moment of increasing embarrassment in public finance the King himself was slow to listen to her.
There were many such friends. The greatest and the nearest perhaps of those whom Marie Antoinette knew to be embarrassed were the Guémenées, and the Duchesse de Guémenée, the titular governess of the Dauphin, a woman whom she met most constantly and cherished, closely concerned her.
She further suffered the ceaseless and recurrent advances of the Cardinal de Rohan.
It had become enough for her to see his handwriting upon a note to make her burn the thing unread. Her dislikes were now often reasoned, always steady: it was enough that she had to meet the Grand Almoner upon State occasions of religion or ceremonial; her society she forbade him. Had the Cardinal wanted proof of that stupidity which he was later to plead in Court as the excuse of his follies, he could have given none better, nor any of more weight with posterity, than his complete ignorance of such a woman as was this daughter of Maria Theresa, and his absurd pretensions to gain her intimacy, her support, and possibly her heart. Had he known women even vaguely, by types, this florid and handsome man would have abandoned at fifty the attempt to interest a vital, impetuous woman of twenty-seven, loving swift pleasure, but superior to him in rank, chaste, a mother, and carrying against him in particular a traditional grudge for the loose jests which, during a brief embassy at Vienna, he was wont to pass at the expense of her own people. But the Cardinal de Rohan did not know women even in the mass, and it was necessary, as he thought, that he should play cards with her and be from time to time one of the fifty or so who eat supper with her at Trianon. He had the weakness of stupid men when they are well born and have attained office—I mean the ambition for political titles.