So August went by and most of September, when, one morning at the close of that month, Monsieur de Guémenée very suddenly declared that he could not so much as attempt to pay his debts, and threw himself upon his creditors.
It was a shock. I have repeatedly insisted in this book upon the insignificance of French extravagance in the close of the eighteenth century, in comparison with the modern figures of our Plutocracy, and on the modesty of the sums the historian has to deal with—£5000 a year was a princely fortune; the Cardinal de Rohan’s £30,000 a year seemed almost the revenue of a State, an income beyond computation. Well, in such a world, accustomed to such a scale of wealth, the Guémenées went bankrupt for a solid million of our English pounds. It opened a whirlpool in the finances of the time, and the creditors, to make matters worse, were of every rank and spread throughout the kingdom; there were peasants among them, prelates, farmers-general, and—most clamorous of all—a few large and many small shopkeepers of Paris. To these last—especially to the smaller ones—delay would be fatal. Delay was precisely the expedient chosen.
There exists a little, ill-written scrawl addressed to the Princess; it is ill-spelt, with words omitted in its haste. It runs: “You have heard that my daughter’s vaccination has gone off well—I breathe again!... The King will see you get those letters all right.” That scrawl was written by Marie Antoinette, and the “letters” mentioned were the Moratorium which a French King could of his own free will impose as might the caprice of a judge upon the process of law. It was a royal decree forbidding during the King’s pleasure the recovery of a debt. The creditors must wait till it was lifted.
That little scrap of paper was not known to the populace—it was not discovered till a few years ago—but the populace, with an instinct that rarely failed them during the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary time, guessed by what influence had been granted this privilege of delay, with all its fatal consequences to the smaller folk, who spread their anger until Paris was humming with it; and even the remoter provinces (notably Brittany), wherever there was a wretched unpaid creditor to be found, whispered the name of the Queen.
She, upon her part, felt she had done next to nothing—an obvious and small act of courtesy for a dear friend. She had chosen that very moment to be at La Muette with the Court—not at Versailles, to which such things were native, but right at the gates of Paris, and there thought fit to do something more for her friend than the trifle already effected. She went to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Fleury—at a time when the Treasury in its deep embarrassment was expecting the counter-shock of the American War, at a time when the last additional taxes could hardly be paid—to ask him if (irony of ignorance!) “something could not be done” for the Guémenées. Fleury could do nothing, and it was as well.
All this while and all that summer and autumn the little active, furtive woman, De La Motte, the Valois with the well-arched foot and the shifty but provocative eye, was pecking at De Rohan: now knocking discreetly at his palace doors in Paris, now travelling, as cheaply as could be, to his great château in the Vosges—borrowing a few pounds, and again a few pounds. It was a very little thing, like a drifting rag in a great city—but a rag infected with the plague.
In such a commotion as the crash of the Guémenées made, no one noticed that the Queen procured for her chief friend, for one who hardly desired it and who was ill fitted for it, for Madame de Polignac, the high post which Madame de Guémenée had been compelled to resign. The new charges such an appointment involved were forgotten in the torrent of feeling that followed the great bankruptcy. It came just as the excitement upon America had thoroughly died down, just as the bills for that war had to be met, and just as winter was upon the populace. The new taxes were collecting, the whole financial system was at a breaking-point, when, early in ’83, Fleury resigned the finances. His fall was furthered by the Queen, who remembered his refusal.
If, a year before, the satire of Beaumarchais had been wisely suppressed by the King, and if, nine months before, even the reading by heirs apparent of so fierce a piece of wit was thought hazardous, now it was plainly a peril. To extend the fame of that solvent of society, even by discreet recitations within the palace, was unwise; to act it, to add to its native force of aggression gesture, life, and publicity of the stage, would be a piece of madness. Most ardently was that amusing piece of madness desired by the lassitude of the Court and by those amateurs in changing pastime who surrounded the Queen. It is said that she pleaded again for her friends, and begged, as she had before, for the piece to be licensed. If she did so, she failed; for leave to act the “Mariage de Figaro,” even upon the private stage of a courtier, was again refused.
Side by side with such details went the growth of yet another great European conflict, and with it once again the pressure of Austria upon Marie Antoinette.