Marie Antoinette and Her Son

by L. Mühlbach

"Your boundless frivolity, your culpable short-sightedness, your foolish pleasures, your extravagance, your love of finery, your mixing with politics, your excessive jovialness, your entertainments, your—"

Marie Antoinette interrupted this series of charges with loud, merry laughter, which more enraged the princess than the most stinging words would have done.

"Yes," she continued, "you are frivolous, for you suppose the life of a queen is one clear summer's day, to be devoted to nothing but singing and laughing. You are short-sighted, for you do not see that the flowers of this summer's day in which you rejoice, only bloom above an abyss into which you, with your wanton dancing, are about to plunge. You indulge in foolish pleasures, instead of, as becomes a Queen of France, passing your life in seclusion, in devout meditation, in the exercise of beneficence, in pious deeds. You are a spendthrift, for you give the income of France to your favorites, to this Polignac family, which it has been reckoned receives alone a twentieth part of the whole income of the state; to these gracious lords and ladies of your so-called 'society,' supporting them in their frivolity, allowing them to make golden gain out of you. You are a lover of finery, not holding it beneath your dignity to spend whole hours with a poor milliner; allowing a man to dress your hair, and afterward to go into the toilet chambers of the Parisian dames, that their hair may be dressed by the same hands which have arranged the hair of a queen, and to imitate the coiffure which the Queen of France wears. And what kind of a coiffure is that which, invented by a queen, is baptized with a fantastic name, and carried through Paris, France, and all Europe?"

"But," said Marie Antoinette, with comical pathos, "these coiffures have, some of them, horrid names. We have, for example, the 'hog's bristles coiffure,' the 'flea-bite coiffure,' the 'dying dog,' the 'flame of love,' 'modesty's cap,' a—"

"A queen's levee," interrupted the princess; "a love's nest of Marie Antoinette. Yes, we have come to that pass that the fashions are named after the queen, and all acquire a certain frivolous character, so that all the men and all the honorable women of Paris are in despair because the thoughts of their daughters, infected with the millinery tastes of the queen and the court, shun all noble thoughts, and only busy themselves with mere affairs of taste. I have shown you, and you will not be able to deny it, madame, that this decline in manners, which has been engendered by this love of finery, proceeds from you, and from you alone; that not only your love of finery is to blame, but also your coquetry, your joviality, and these unheard-of indescribable orgies to which the Queen of France surrenders herself, and to which she even allures her own husband, the King of France, the oldest son of the Church."

"What does your highness mean?" asked the queen.

"Of what entertainments are you speaking?"

"I am speaking of the entertainments which are celebrated in Trianon, to the perversion of all usage and all good manners. Of those orgies in which the queen transforms herself into a shepherdess, and permits the ladies of her court, who ought to appear before her with bended knee and with downcast eyes, to clothe themselves like her, and to put on the same bearing as the queen's! I speak of those orgies where the king, enchanted by the charms of his wife, and allured by her coquetry, so far forgets his royal rank as even to take part himself in this stupid frivolity, and to bear a share in this trivial masquerading. And this queen, whose loud laughter fills the groves of Trianon, and who sometimes finds her pleasure in imitating the lowing of cows or the bleating of goats— this queen will afterward put on the bearing of a statesman, and will, with those hands which have just got through arranging an 'allegorical head-dress,' dip into the machinery of state, interrupting the arrangements of her entertainments to busy herself with politics, to set aside old, cherished ministers, to bring her friends and favorites into their places, and to make the king the mere executor of her will."

"Madame," said the queen, as glowing with anger and with eyes of flame she rose from her seat—"madame, this is going too far, this oversteps the bounds that every one, even the princesses of the royal house, owe to their sovereign. I have allowed you to subject to your biting criticism my outer life, my pleasures, and my dress, but I do not allow you to take in hand my inner life—my relations to my husband and my personal honor. You presume to speak of my favorites. I demand of you to name them, and if you can show that there is one man to whom I show any other favor than a gracious queen may show to a servant, a subject whom she can honor and trust, I desire that you would give his name to the king, and that a close investigation be made into the case. I have friends; yes, thank Heaven! I have friends who prize me highly, and who are every hour prepared to give their life for their queen. I have true and faithful servants; but no one will appear and give evidence that Marie Antoinette has ever had an illicit lover. My only lover has been the king, my husband, and I hope before God that he will always remain so, so long as I live. But this is exactly what the noble princesses my aunts, what the Count de Provence, and the whole party of the old court, never will forgive me for. I have had the good fortune to win the love of my husband. The king, despite all calumnies and all intrigues, lowered his glance to the poor young woman who stood solitary near him, and whom he had been taught to prize lightly and to despise, and then he found that she was not so simple, stupid, and ugly, as she had been painted. He began to take some notice of her, and then, God be thanked, he overlooked the fact that she was of Austrian blood, and that the policy of his predecessor had urged her upon him; his heart warmed to her in love, and Marie Antoinette received this love as a gracious gift of God, as the happiness of her life. Yes, madame, I may say it with pride and joy, the king loves me, he trusts me, and therefore his wife stands nearer to him than even his exalted aunts, and I am the one whom he most trusts and whom he selects to be his chief adviser. But this is just the offence which will never be forgiven me: it has fallen to my lot to take from my enemies and opponents their influence over my husband. The time has gone by when Madame Adelaide could gain an attentive ear when she came to the king, and in her passionate rage charged me with unheard of crimes, which had no basis excepting that in some little matters I had loosened the ancient chains of etiquette; the time is past when Madame Louise could presume to drive me with her flashing anger from her pious cell and make me kneel in the dust; and when it was permitted to the Count de la Morch to accuse the queen before the king of having risen in time to behold the rising of the sun at Versailles, in company with her whole court. The king loves me, and Madame Adelaide is no longer the political counsellor of the king; the ministers will no longer be appointed according to her dictate, and the great questions of the cabinet are decided without appealing to her! I know that this is a new offence which you lay to my charge, and that by your calumniations and suspicions you make me suffer the penalty for it. I know that the Count de Provence stoops to direct epigrams and pamphlets against his sister-in-law, his sovereign, and through the agency of his creatures to scatter them through Paris. I know that in his saloons all the enemies of the queen are welcome, and that charges against me are made without rebuke, and that there the weapons are forged with which I am assailed. But take care lest some day these weapons be turned against you! It is you who are imperilling the kingdom, and undermining the throne, for you do not hesitate setting before the people an example that nothing is sacred to you; that the dignity of the throne no longer has an existence, but that it may be denied with vile insinuations, and the most poisonous arrows directed against those who wear the crown of St. Louis on their head. But all you, the aunts, the brothers of the king, and the whole swarm of their intimates and dependents, you are all undermining the monarchy, for you forget that the foreigner, the Austrian, as you call her—that she is Queen of France, your sovereign, your lord, and that you are nothing better than her subjects. You are criminals, you are high traitors!"

"Madame," cried the Princess Adelaide, "Madame, what language is this that—"