The Girls' Book of Famous Queens

by Lydia Hoyt Farmer

Preparations had been made for an immediate flight; for all alike were anxious to escape the infectious air of the petits appartements and grande galerie, whose deadly atmosphere claimed yet a hecatomb of victims. Three hours after the king’s death Versailles was a desert; for the young king and the queen, with the whole court in retinue, had set out in their carriages for Choisy. A few under-servants and priests of the “inferior clergy” remained to pray beside the body, which was ultimately placed in a coffin filled with lime, thrust into a hunting-carriage, and, followed by a few attendants, with no signs of mourning, the cortège set out, “au grand trot” for St. Denis.

There were none to mourn the departed monarch; and in an hour Louis the Well-Beloved was forgotten, or remembered but to be despised. But a single Fontenoy veteran, inspired by the memories of other days, rushed forward and presented arms as the scanty funeral cortège of the once vaunted hero of a brilliant fight passed through the gates of Versailles, in the dead of night, on the 13th of May, 1774. “What matters it,” murmured the old soldier, regretfully; “he was at Fontenoy!”

“It was a momentous crisis in the history of the nation when Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette ascended the throne of France. The time had arrived when the abuses of the Old Régime could no longer be tolerated, and sweeping reforms were demanded. The nation, hitherto politically a nullity, had awakened to a sense of its rights; while absolute sovereignty, with its arbitrary dictum, ‘L’état c’est moi,’ and its right divine to govern wrong, had lost its prestige, and had apparently no prospect of regaining it.”

The people, indeed, regarded the young monarch as the “hope of the nation,” and named him “Louis le Desire,”—a testimony to the ardor with which they had looked forward to his accession. And it is probable that, had a more able pilot—“a king more a king” than that feeblest of monarchs, Louis XVI.—been called to the helm at that period, “the vessel of state might have been safely guided through the shoals and quicksands surrounding her, and escaped the eddies of that devastating whirlpool in which she was eventually engulfed.” Indeed, if sincerely wishing to see his people prosperous and happy could have made them so, France would have had no more beneficent ruler than Louis XVI. But his good wishes and intentions were rendered of no avail by his utter want of energy and ability to carry them out. Infirm of purpose at the first, he remained so to the end. The decree, “Let there be light,” unfortunately, never went forth to quicken his mental faculties. The queen, on the other hand, possessed all the courage and resolution of her imperial mother, Maria Theresa; and, had she been able to control affairs, the revolution would have been crushed in its infancy with an iron hand. Again, had the king been able to hold to his milder measures, to maintain on the following day that which he had declared the day before, it is possible that France might have passed quietly from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy. But the self-will and determination of the one, and the weakness and instability of the other, rendered a union of ideas impossible and the revolution inevitable.

Little was known by the nation at large of the mental qualities of the young king. He was now in his twentieth year; and it had been noised among the people that he had inherited all the virtues of his father, “Le Grand Dauphin” to which were added the frugal tastes, the genial temper, and the air of bonhomie to which the gallant Henry IV. owed so much of his popularity.

“No wonder, then, that the accession of Louis XVI. was hailed throughout France with general delight, or that the enthusiastic people—their many expected reforms already conceded in imagination—should have written in conspicuous characters, ‘RESURREXIT,’ beneath the statue of the gallant Henry, whose jovial humor and pliant conscience enabled him to gratify his Catholic subjects with his presence at a Te Deum.”

When the king made his public entry into the capital, the joyous demonstrations of the Parisians affected him deeply. “What have I done,” he exclaimed, “that they should love me so much?” Ah, Louis! you have as yet done nothing; but much, very much, is expected from you!

But Louis XVI. possessed no energy; and the torpid action of his mind was but too plainly evinced by the sluggish inactivity of his heavy frame, as, stolid in his immense corpulence, he sat lolling in his chariot.

Perhaps, in their eagerness for reforms, the Parisians displayed unreasonable impatience. But when, a few weeks later, the young monarch again passed through Paris, he remarked—though unfortunately the lesson was lost on him—that the acclamations of the people were far less frequent and fervid than on the former occasion. And his eyes were filled with tears when he perceived that the conspicuously displayed “RESURREXIT” was transferred from the statue of the gallant Henry to that of the slothful Louis XV. Still, with all his vices, Louis the Well-Beloved, on those rare occasions when he appeared in public, had always commanded the respectful homage of his subjects, simply by the dignity of his bearing. By the same means he imposed silence on his courtiers, when, in license of speech, they infringed the limits within which it was sometimes his bon plaisir to restrain them. Occasionally, too, when the parliament opposed his edicts, or the dissentient opinion of a minister roused him from his habitual indolence, he could at once assume the arbitrary tone, the “je le veux” of the absolute monarch, and carry out his purposes with all the hauteur of his royal ancestor, the Grand Monarque. “And it is probable that his handsome person and majestic air—for, whatever may have been his shortcomings in other and more essential qualities, in appearance he was every inch a king—may have gone far in preventing the utter extinction of the enthusiastic affection which on several occasions during his reign the people so singularly, yet so generally, expressed towards the royal débauché. A lingering spark of that once ardent feeling must have smouldered on in their hearts to the end; for, grievously oppressed though they were, and vicious as they knew him to be, they still toiled on under their burdens, not exactly uncomplainingly, yet in a spirit of toleration towards him; while the yearned-for relief was, as if by the tacit consent of his subjects, to be claimed only from his successor.” Truly, indications were not wanting of the approaching storm. But “Après nous le deluge!” cried Madame de Pompadour, gayly; and the king and the court echoed the cry. Madame la Marquise was right. The deluge came; and the royal authority which Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV. had raised to such gigantic heights, and which Louis XV. had so shamefully abused, was hurled prostrate in the dust.

Bright shines the sun on this 10th day of June, 1775; and, heavy in its massive architecture, the grand old cathedral of Rheims looms up against the clear blue sky. The interior is hung with crimson cloth of gold. On the right of the altar, arrayed in their red and violet robes, point lace, gold crosses, chains, and mitres, sit the great grandees of the church. On the left, in their mantles of state, stand the temporal peers of the realm, and a brilliant crowd of gold-embroidered naval and military uniforms surrounds them; while above, in the lofty galleries of the nave, in the midst of pearls and diamonds, gold, and precious stones, and lofty, waving plumes, is Marie Antoinette, proud and radiant, surrounded by the ladies of her retinue.