The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

MARIE ANTOINETTE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Pyrenees

Paris

Hills and the Sea

On Nothing and Kindred Subjects

On Everything

Emmanuel Burden, Merchant

The Change in the Cabinet

THE LAST ACT OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY
Order given on 10th August, 1792, to the Guard at the Tuileries to Cease Fire and return to Barracks
On the authenticity of this document see [Appendix C]

MARIE

ANTOINETTE

BY

H. BELLOC

πολυ κρεισσων ἡ αναγκη

WITH THIRTY-ONE ILLUSTRATIONS AND FIVE MAPS

THIRD EDITION

METHUEN & CO.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

First Published - October 14th, 1909

Second Edition - January 1910

Third Edition - 1910

TO

GEORGE WYNDHAM

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

THE eighteenth century, which had lost the appetite for tragedy and almost the comprehension of it, was granted, before it closed, the most perfect subject of tragedy which history affords.

The Queen of France whose end is but an episode in the story of the Revolution stands apart in this: that while all around her were achieved the principal miracles of the human will, she alone suffered, by an unique exception, a fixed destiny against which the will seemed powerless. In person she was not considerable, in temperament not exalted; but her fate was enormous.

It is profitable, therefore, to abandon for a moment the contemplation of those great men who recreated in Europe the well-ordered State, and to admire the exact convergence of such accidents as drew around Marie Antoinette an increasing pressure of doom. These accidents united at last: they drove her with a precision that was more than human, right to her predestined end.

In all the extensive record of her actions there is nothing beyond the ordinary kind. She was petulant or gay, impulsive or collected, according to the mood of the moment: acting in everything as a woman of her temper—red-headed, intelligent and arduous—will always do: she was moved by changing circumstance to this or that as many million of her sort had been moved before her. But her chance friendships failed not in mere disappointments but in ruin; her lapses of judgment betrayed her not to stumbling but to an abyss; her small, neglected actions matured unseen and reappeared prodigious in the catastrophe of her life as torturers to drag her to the scaffold. Behind such causes of misfortune as can at least be traced in some appalling order there appear, as we read her history, causes more dreadful because they are mysterious and unreasoned: ill-omened dates, fortunes quite unaccountable, and continually a dark coincidence, reawaken in us that native dread of Destiny which the Faith, after centuries of power, has hardly exorcised.

The business, then, of this book is not to recount from yet another aspect that decisive battle whereby political justice was recovered for us all, nor to print once more in accurate sequence the life of a Queen whose actions have been preserved in the minutest detail, but to show a Lady whose hands—for all the freedom of their gesture—were moved by influences other than her own, and whose feet, though their steps seemed wayward and self-determined, were ordered for her in one path that led inexorably to its certain goal.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

LIST OF MAPS AND PLANS

MARIE ANTOINETTE

CHAPTER I
THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION

EUROPE, which carries the fate of the whole world, lives by a life which is in contrast to that of every other region, because that life, though intense, is inexhaustible. There is present, therefore, in her united history a dual function of maintenance and of change such as can be discovered neither in any one of her component parts nor in civilisations exterior to her own. Europe alone of all human groups is capable of transforming herself ceaselessly, not by the copying of foreign models, but in some creative way from within. She alone has the gift of moderating all this violent energy, of preserving her ancient life, and by an instinct whose action is now abrupt, now imperceptibly slow, of dissolving whatever products of her own energy may not be normal to her being.

These dual forces are not equally conspicuous: the force that preserves us is general, popular, slow, silent, and beneath us all; the force that makes us diversified and full of life shines out in peaks of action.

The agents and the manifestations of the conserving force do not commonly present themselves as the chief personalities and the most remarkable events of our long record. The agents and the manifestations of the force that perpetually transform us are arresting figures, and catastrophic actions. Those who keep us what we are, for the most part will never be known—they are millions. Those, on the other hand, who have brought upon our race its great novelties of mood or of vesture, the battles they have won, the philosophies they have framed and imposed, the polities they have called into existence, they and their works fill history. That power which has forbidden us to perish uses servants often impersonal or obscure; it is mostly to be discovered at work in the permanent traditions of the populace, and its effects are but rarely visible until they appear solid and established by a process which is rather that of growth than of construction. That power which keeps the mass moving glitters upon the surface of it and is seen.

There are, nevertheless, in this perennial and hidden task of maintaining Europe certain exceptional events of which the date is clear, the result immediate, and the authors conspicuous. Of early examples the victory of Constantine in the fourth century, the defeat of Abdul Rhaman in the eighth, may be cited. Among the lesser ones of later times is a decision which was taken in the middle of the eighteenth century by the French and Austrian Governments, and to which historians have given the name of the Diplomatic Revolution.

To comprehend or even to follow the career of Marie Antoinette it is essential to seize the nature and the gravity of that rearrangement of national forces, for it determined all her life. To the great alliance between France and Austria by which such a rearrangement was effected she owed every episode of her drama. Her marriage, her eminence, her sufferings, and her death were each directly the consequence of that compact: its conclusion coincided with her birth; from childhood she was dedicated to it as a pledge, a bond, and, at last, a victim. Though, therefore, that treaty can occupy but little place in pages which deal with her vivid life—a life lived after the signing of the document and after its most noisy consequences had disappeared—yet the instrument must be grasped at the outset and must remain permanently in the mind of all who would understand the Queen of France and her disaster; for it was her mother who made the alliance; the statesman who presided over all her fortunes planned and achieved it. It stands throughout her forty years like a fixed horoscope drawn at birth, or a sentence pronounced and sure to be fulfilled.

The Diplomatic Revolution of the eighteenth century sprang, like every other major thing in modern history, from the religious schism of the sixteenth.

If that vast disturbance of the Reformation which threatened so grievously the culture of Europe, which maimed for ever the life of the Renaissance, and which is only now beginning to subside, had broken the national tradition of Gaul as it did that of Britain, it may confidently be asserted that European civilisation would have perished. There was not left on the shores of the Mediterranean a sufficient reserve of energy to re-indoctrinate the West. A welter of small States hopelessly separated by the violence and self-sufficience of the new philosophy would each have gone down the roads an individual goes when he forgets or learns to despise traditional rules of living and the corporate sense of mankind. That interaction which is the life of Europe would have disappeared. A short period of intense local activities would have been followed by a general repose. The unity of the Western world would have failed, and the spirit of Rome would have vanished as utterly from her deserted provinces as has that of Assyria from hers.

If, on the other hand, the French had chosen the earliest moment of the Reformation to lead the popular instinct of Europe against the Reformers and to re-establish unity, if as early as the reign of Francis I. (who saw the peril) they had imagined a species of crusade, why, then, the schism would have been healed by the sword, the humanity of the Renaissance would have become a permanent influence in our lives rather than an heroic episode whose vigour we regret but cannot hope to restore, and the discovery of antiquity, the thorough awakening of the mind, would have impelled Europe towards new and glorious fortunes the nature of which we cannot even conjecture, so differently did the course of history turn. For it so happened that the French—whose temperament, whose unbroken Roman legend, and whose geographical position made them the decisive centre of the struggle—the French hesitated for two hundred years.

Their religion indeed they preserved. The attempt to force upon the French doctrines convenient, in France as in England, to the wealthy merchants, the intellectuals and the squires, was met by popular risings; those of the French, as they were the more sanguinary so were also the more successful. The first massacre of St. Bartholomew, when the Catholic leaders were killed in the south, was not forgotten by the north; and after the second massacre of St. Bartholomew in Paris had avenged it, the Reformation could never establish in France that oligarchic polity which it ultimately imposed upon England and Holland. In a word, the Catholic reaction in France was sufficiently violent to recover the tradition of the State; but the full consequences of that reaction did not follow, nor did France support the general Catholic instinct of Europe outside the French boundaries, because, allied with the Faith to which the nation was so profoundly attached and had barely preserved, was the political power of the Spanish-Austrian Empire, which the French nation and its leaders detested and feared.

It is difficult for us to-day to comprehend the might of Spain during the century of the Reformation, and still more difficult to grasp that external appearance of overwhelming strength which, as the years proceeded, tended more and more to exceed her actual (and declining) power.

The supremacy of Spain over Europe resided in a dynasty and not in a national idea. It did not take the form of over-riding treaties or of attempting the partition of weaker States, for it was profoundly Christian, and it was military; in twenty ways the position of Spain differed from the hegemony which some modern European State might attempt to exercise over its fellows. But it is possible to arrive at some conception of what that Empire was if we remember that it reposed upon a vast colonial system which Spain alone seemed capable of conducting with success, that it monopolised the production of gold, and that it depended upon a command of the sea which was secured to it by an invincible fleet. To such advantages there must further be added an armed force not only by far the largest and best trained in Europe, but mainly composed of the best fighters as well, and—a circumstance more important than all the rest—an extent of dominion, due to the union of the Austrian and Spanish houses, which gave to Charles V. and his successors the whole background, as it were, upon which the map of Europe was painted: in the sea of that Emperor’s continental possessions, apart from a few insignificant principalities, France alone survived—an intact island with ragged boundaries, menaced upon every side. For the Emperor, then master of the Peninsula, of the Germanies, and of the New World, was everywhere by sea and almost everywhere by land a pressing foe.

However much this Spanish-Austrian power might stand (as it did stand) for European traditions and for the Faith of civilisation which France had elected to preserve, it was impossible for the French crown and nation not to be opposed to its political power if that crown and that nation were to survive. The smaller nations of the North—the English, the Low Countries, &c.—were in less peril than the French; for these were now the only considerable exception to, and were soon to be the rivals of, the Spanish-Austrian State. Had the Armada found fair weather, Philip might have been crowned at Westminster; but the English—united, isolated, and already organised as a commercial oligarchy—would have fought their way out from foreign domination as thoroughly as did the Dutch. The duty of the French was other; their independence was not threatened: it was rather their dignity and special soul which were in peril and which had to be preserved from digestion into this all-surrounding influence of Spain. To preserve her soul, France gave—unconsciously, perhaps, as a people, but with acute consciousness as a government—her whole energies during four generations. The defence succeeded. Through a dozen such civil tumults as are native to the French blood, and through a long eclipse of their national power, they treasured and built up their reserves. After a century of peril they emerged, under Louis XIV., not only the masters, but for a moment the very tyrants of Europe.

The French did not achieve this object of theirs without a compromise odious to their clear spirit. In their secular opposition to the Spanish-Austrian power, it was the business of their diplomatists to spare the little Protestant States and to use them as a pack for the worrying of great Austria, whom they dreaded and would break down. The constant policy of Henri IV., of Richelieu, of Mazarin, was to strengthen the Protestant principalities of North Germany, to meet half-way the rising Puritanism of England, and even at home to tolerate an organised opulent and numerous body of Huguenots who formed a State within the State. At a time when it was death to say Mass in England, the wealthy Calvinist just beyond the Channel—at Dieppe, for instance—was protected with all the force of the law from the fanaticism or indignation of his fellow-citizens; he could convene his synods openly, could hold office at law or in municipal affairs, and was even granted a special form of representation and a place in the advisory bodies of the State. All this was done, not to secure internal order—which would perhaps have been better affirmed in France, as it was in England, by the vigorous persecution of the minority—but to create a Protestant make-weight to what appeared till nearly the close of the seventeenth century the overwhelming menace of the Spanish and Austrian Houses.

Such was the policy which the French Court wisely pursued during so long a period that it finally acquired the force of a fixed tradition and threatened to last on into an era of new conditions, when it would prove useless or, later, harmful to the State. The general framework of that Anti-Austrian diplomacy did indeed survive from the latter seventeenth till the middle of the eighteenth century; but from the time when Louis XIV. in 1661 began to rule alone, to that final rearrangement of European forces in the Diplomatic Revolution, which it is my business to describe, the Catholic powers tended more and more to be conscious of a common fate and of a common duty. One after another the portions of the old French diplomatic work fell to pieces as the strength of Spain diminished and as the small Protestant States advanced in their cycle of rapid commercial expansion, increasing population and military power; until, a generation after Louis XIV.’s death, Protestant Europe as a whole had formed in line against what was left of Rome.

It would not be germane to my subject were I to enter at any length into the gradual transformation of Europe between 1668 and 1741. That first date is that of the treaty which closed the last clear struggle between France and Spain; the second date is that of the first great battle, Mollwitz, in which Prussia under Frederick the Great appeared as a triumphant and equal opponent against the Catholic forces of the Empire. It is enough to say that during that period the results of the great struggle were solidified. Europe was now hopelessly, and, as it seemed, finally riven asunder; and those who proposed to continue, those who proposed to disperse the stream of European tradition, gravitated into two camps armed for a struggle which is not even yet decided.

The transition may be expressed as the long life of a man—nay, it may be exactly expressed in the life of one man, Fleury, for he stood on the threshold of manhood at its commencement and in sight of death at its close: what such a long life witnessed, between its eighteenth and its ninetieth year, was—if the vast confusion of detail be eliminated and the large result be grasped—the confirmation of the great schism and the final decision of France to stand wholly against the North. There appeared at last, fixed and consolidated, a Protestant and a Catholic division in Europe whose opposing philosophies, seen or unseen, denied, ridiculed or ignored, even by those most steeped in either atmosphere, were henceforward to affect inwardly every detail of individual life as outwardly they were to affect every great event in the history of our race, and every general judgment which has been passed upon its actions.

The Spanish Power, based as it had been not on internal resources but on a mere naval and colonial supremacy, could not but rapidly decline; it had long been separated from the German Empire; it was destined to fall into the orbit of France. On the other hand, the England of the early eighteenth century was no longer a small community absorbed in theological discussion; she had become a nation of the first rank, one that was developing its industries, its wealth, and its armed strength. She boasted in Marlborough the chief military genius of the age; she was already the leader in physics; she was about to be the leader in mechanical science (with all the riches such a leadership would bring), and she was upon the eve of acquiring a new colonial empire.

In France the privileges of the Huguenots had been withdrawn as the situation grew precise and clear, and the breach between them and the nation was made final by their active and zealous treason in whatever foreign fleets or armies were attempting the ruin of their country. In England it had been made plain that the oligarchy, and the nation upon which it reposed, would admit neither a strong central government nor the presence of the Catholic Church near any seat of power: the Stuart dynasty had been exiled; its first attempt at a restoration had been crushed.

Meanwhile there was preparing a final argument which should compel men to recognise the clean and fixed division of Europe: that argument was the astonishing rise of Prussia, for with the appearance upon the field of this new and strange force—an own child of the Reform—it was evident that something had changed in the very morals of war.

When Austria was at her weakest, when the French Court, bewildered but weakly constant to a now meaningless diplomatic habit, was watching the apparent dissolution of the Empire and was ready to urge its armies against Vienna, when England remained, and that only from opposition to the Bourbons, the only support of the Hapsburgs, there was established within five years the permanent strength of Frederick the Great and the new factor of Prussian Power: a complete contempt for the old rules of honour in negotiation and for the old rules of contract in dynastic relations had been crowned by a complete success.

This advent, when every exception and cross-influence is forgotten, will remain the chief moral and, therefore, the chief political fact of the eighteenth century. By the end of the year 1745, Silesia was finally abandoned by Austria; the Prussian soldier and his atheist theory had compassed the first mere conquest of European territory which had been achieved by any European Power since first Europe had been organised into a family of Christian communities. It had been advanced for the first time that Europe was not one, but that some unit of it might overbear and rule another by arms alone; that there was no common standard nor any unseen avenger upon appeal. That theory had appealed to arms and had conquered.

Within three years the international turmoil, of which this catastrophe was immeasurably the greatest result, was subjected to a sort of settlement. One of those general committees of all Europe with which our own time is so familiar was summoned to Aix-la-Chapelle; representatives of the various Powers confirmed or modified the results of a group of wars, and in the autumn of 1748 affixed their signatures to a complete arrangement which was well known to be unstable, ephemeral, and insincere, but which was yet of tremendous import, for it marked (though in no dramatic manner) the end of an old world.

As the plenipotentiaries left their accomplished work and strolled out of the room which had received them, they were still grouped together by such weak and complex ties as the interests of individual governments might decide. When they met again after the next brief cycle of war, these men were arranged in a true order and sat opposing: for England, Prussia, and experiment of schism on the one side; for the belt of endurance on the other. Since that cleavage these two prime bodies, disguised under a hundred forms and hidden and confused by a welter of incidental and secondary forces, have remained opposing, attempting with fluctuating success each to determine the general fortunes of the world. They will so continue balanced and opposing until perhaps—by the action of some power neither of war nor of diplomacy—unity may be re-established and Europe again may live.

Of the men who so strolled out of the room at Aix one only, still young, had grasped in silence the necessity of the great change; he saw that Vienna and Paris must in the next struggle stand together and defend together their common civilisation and their resisting Faith. He not only perceived the advent of this great reversal in the traditions of the chanceries; he designed to aid it himself, to mould it and to determine its character. That he could then perceive of how large a movement his action was to be a part no historian can pretend, for at the time no one could grasp more than the momentary issue, and this man’s very profession made it necessary for him, as for every other diplomat, to see clearly immediate things and to abandon distant speculation. But though his work was greater than himself and far greater than his intention, yet he deserves a very particular attention; for this young man of thirty-six was Kaunitz, and he, for a whole generation, was Austria.

In so determining to effect an alliance between the Hapsburgs and their secular enemy, Kaunitz equally determined, unknown to himself, the whole fortunes of Marie Antoinette; she, years later, when she came to be born to the Imperial house, was, even in childhood, the pledge he needed. It is Kaunitz who stands forever behind the life of Marie Antoinette, like a writer behind the creature in his book. It is he who designs her marriage, who uses her without mercy for the purposes of his policy at Versailles; he is the author of her magnificence and of her intrigue; he is then also indirectly the author of her fall, which, in his obscure and failing old age, he heard of far away, partially comprehended, and just survived.

Kaunitz was the original of our modern diplomatists. In that epoch of governing families not a few nobles were flattered to be called “the Coachmen of Europe”: he alone merited the cant term. He served a sovereign whose armies were constantly defeated; he was the adviser of a mere crown—and that crown worn by a woman; in a time when the divergent races of the Danube were first astir, he had at his command or for his support neither a national tradition nor any strong instrument of war, yet, by personal genius, by tenacity, and by a wide lucidity of vision, he discovered and completed a method of “government through foreign relations” which was almost independent of national feeling or of armed strength.

An absence of natural violence, as of all common emotions, was characteristic of Kaunitz. He disdained the vulgar pomp of silence; he talked continually; he knew the strength and secrecy of men who can be at once verbose and deliberate. Nor could his fluency have deceived any careful observer into a suspicion of weakness, for his curved thin nose and prominent peaked chin, his arched eyebrows, his Sclavonic type, ready and courageous, his hard, pale eyes, showed nothing but purpose and execution; and as his tall figure stalked round the billiard tables at evening, his very recreation seemed instinct with plans.

The abounding energy which drove him to success revealed itself in a thousand ways, and chiefly in this, that in the career of diplomacy, where all individuality is regarded with dread, he pushed his personal tastes beyond the eccentric. Thus he had a mania against all gesticulation, and he would present at every conference the singular spectacle of a man chattering and disputing unceasingly and eagerly, yet keeping his hands quite motionless all the while. Again, when he entered the great houses of Europe and dined with men to influence whom was to conduct the world, he did not hesitate to bring with him his own dessert, which when he had eaten he would, to the great disgust of embassies, elaborately wash his teeth at table. In the midst of the hardest toil he was so foppish as to wear various wigs—now brown, now white, now auburn. He was a constant traveller, familiar with every capital in Western Europe, yet he so loathed fresh air that he would not pass from his carriage to a palace door unless his mouth were covered. He was a dandy who, in drawing-rooms loaded with scent and flowers, loudly protested against all perfume; a gentleman who, when cards were the only pastime of the rich, expressed a detestation of all hazard; a courtier who, amidst all the extravagancies of etiquette of the eighteenth century, barely bowed to the greatest sovereigns, and who, on the stroke of eleven, would abruptly leave the Emperor without a word.

Such marks of an intense initiative, detachment, and pride were tolerated in the earlier part of his life with amusement on account of the affection he could inspire; later they were regarded with ill ease, and at last with a sort of awe, when it was known that his intelligence could entrap no matter what combination of antagonists. This intelligence, and the single devotion by which such natures are invariably compelled, were both laid at the feet of Maria Theresa.

He was older than his Empress by some seven years; there lay between them just that space which makes for equality and comprehension between a man and a woman. The year of her marriage had coincided with that of his own; he had come at twenty-five to the court of this young sovereign of eighteen. She had recognised—with a wisdom that never failed her long and active life—how just and general was his view of Europe, and it was from this moment that her interests and her career were entrusted to his genius. He had already studied in three universities, had refused the clerical profession to which his Canonry of Munster introduced him, and had travelled in the Netherlands, in France, in England, and in Italy, where he was made Aulic Councillor, and enfeoffed, as it were, to the palace.

His abilities had not long to await their opportunity. It was but four years after Maria Theresa’s marriage and his own that she succeeded to the throne and possessions of the Hapsburgs: then it was the sudden advent of Prussia, to which I have alluded, began the great change.

Maria Theresa’s succession was in doubt, not in point of right, but because her sex and the condition in which her father had left his army and his treasury gave an opportunity to the rivals of Austria, and notably to France.

Europe was thus passing through one of those crises of instability during which every chancery discounts and yet dreads a universal war, when the magazine was fired by one who had nothing to lose but honour. Frederick of Prussia was the warmest in acknowledging the title of Maria Theresa; he accepted her claims, guaranteed the integrity of her possessions, and suddenly invaded them.

From the ordering of that march of Frederick’s into Silesia—from the close, that is, of the year 1740—Kaunitz, a man not yet in his thirtieth year, was at work to repair the Empire and to restore the equilibrium of Europe. Upon the whole he succeeded; for though the magnitude of the Revolutionary Wars has dwarfed his period, and though the complete modern transformation of society has made such causes seem remote, yet (as it is the thesis of these pages to maintain) Kaunitz unconsciously preserved the unity of Europe.

In the beginning of the struggle he had already saved the interests of Maria Theresa in the petty Italian courts. At Florence, at Rome, at Turin, at Brussels, his mastery continued to increase. In his thirty-sixth year he was ambassador to London—he concluded, as we have seen, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle; by his fortieth he had been appointed to Paris, and that action by which he will chiefly be remembered had begun. He had seen, as I have said, the necessity for an alliance between the two great Catholic Powers. Within the two years of his residence in Paris he had successfully raised the principle of such a revolution in policy and as successfully maintained its secrecy. A task which would have seemed wholly vain had he communicated it to others, one which would have seemed impossible even to those whom he might have convinced, was achieved. To his lucid and tenacious intellect the matter in hand was but the bringing forth of a tendency already in existence; he saw the Austro-French alliance lying potentially in the circumstances of his time; his business was but to define and realise it.

In such a mood did he take up the Austrian Embassy in Paris. He was well fitted for the work he had conceived. The magnificence which he displayed in his palace in the French capital was calculated indeed to impress rather than to attract the formal court of Versailles; that magnificence was the product of his personal tastes rather than of his power of intrigue, but the details of his over-ostentatious household were well suited to those whom he had designed to capture. The French language was his own; Italian, though he spoke it well, was foreign to him; the German dialects he knew but ill and hardly used at all. His habits were French, to the end of his long life French literature was his only reading, and his clothes, to their least part, must come from the hands of the French.

MARIA THERESA
FROM THE TAPESTRY PORTRAIT WOVEN FOR MARIE ANTOINETTE AND RECENTLY RESTORED
TO VERSAILLES

He moved, therefore, in that world of Paris and Versailles (as did, later, his pupil, Mercy-d’Argenteau) rather as a native than a foreigner. Even if the alliance had been as artificial as it was natural, he would have carried his point. As it was, he left Paris in 1753 to assume the Prime Ministry at Vienna with the certitude that, when next Frederick of Prussia had occasion to break his word, the wealth and the arms of the Bourbons would be ranged upon the Austrian side.

Upon that major pivot all the schemes of Vienna must turn at his dictation. Every marriage must be contrived so as to fall in with the projected alliance; every action must be subordinated to the arrangement which would prove, as he trusted, the supreme hope of the dynasty. To this one project he directed every power within him or beneath his hand, and to this he was ready, when the time should come, to sacrifice the fortunes of any member of the Royal House save its sovereign or its heir. To this aspect of Europe, long before the termination of his mission in Paris, he had not so much persuaded as formed the mind of Maria Theresa.

The great and salutary soul of that woman explains in part what were to be the fortunes of her youngest child. Not that Marie Antoinette inherited either the opportunities or the full excellence of her mother, but that there ran through the impatient energy and unfruitful graciousness of the Queen of France a flavour of that which had lent a disciplined power and a conscious dignity to the middle age of Maria Theresa.

The body of the Empress was strong. Its strength enabled her to bear without fatigue the ceaseless work of her office, and in the midst of child-bearing to direct with exactitude the affairs of a troubled State. That strength of hers was evident in her equal temper, her rapid judgment, her fixed choice of men; it was evident also in her firm tread and in her carriage, and even as she sat upon a chair at evening she seemed to be governing from a throne.

A growing but uniform capacity informed her life. She had known the value not only of industry but also of enthusiasm, and had saved her throne in its greatest peril by her sudden and passionate appeal to the Hungarians. It was this instinctive science of hers that had disarmed Kaunitz. If he allowed her to suggest what he had already determined, if he permitted her to be the first to write down the scheme of the Diplomatic Revolution he had conceived, and to send it down to history as her creation rather than his own, it was not the desire to flatter her that moved him but a recognition of her due. She it was that sent him to Paris and she that superintended the weaving of the loom he had arranged.

Her dark and pleasing eyes, sparkling and strong, controlled him in so far as he was controlled by any outer influence, for he recognised in them the Cæsarian spirit.

Her largeness pleased him. When she played at cards, she played for fortunes; when she rode, she rode with magnificence; when she sang, her voice, though high, was loud, untrammelled, and full; when she drove abroad, it was with splendour and at a noble turn of speed.

All this was greatly to the humour of Kaunitz, and he continued to serve his Empress with a zeal he would never have given to a mere ambition. In deference to her, all that he could control of his idiosyncrasies he controlled. His great bull-dog, which followed him to every other door, was kept from her palace. His abrupt speech, his failure to reply, his sudden and brief commands—all his manner—were modified in consultation with his Queen. She, on her part, knew what were the limits to which so singular a nature could proceed in the matter of self-denial. She respected half his follies, and her servants often saw her from the courtyard shutting the windows, smiling, as he ran from his carriage, his mouth covered to screen it from the outer air. Her common sense and poise forgave in him alone extravagances she had little inclination to support in others. He respected in her those depths of emotion, of simplicity, and of faith which in others he would have regarded as imbecilities ready for his high intelligence to use at will.

It was neither incomprehensible to him nor displeasing that her temper should be warmer than his intelligence demanded. The increasing strength of her religion, the personal affections and personal distastes which she conceived, above all, the closeness of her devotion to her husband, completed, in the eyes of Kaunitz, a character whose dominions and dynasty he chose to serve and to confirm; for he perceived that what others imagined to be impediments to her policy were but the reflection of her sex and of her health therein.

Kaunitz saw in Frederick of Prussia a player of worthy skill. It was upon the death of that soldier that he gave vent to the one emotional display of his life; yet he permitted Maria Theresa to hate her rival with a hatred which was not directed against his campaigning so much as against the narrow intrigue and bitterness of his evil mind.

To Kaunitz, again, Catherine of Russia was nothing but a powerful rival or ally; yet he approved that Maria Theresa should speak of her as one speaks of the women of the streets, despising her not for her ambition but for her licence.

To Kaunitz, Francis of Lorraine, the husband of the Empress, was a thing without weight in the international game; yet he saw with a general understanding, and was glad to see in detail, the security of the imperial marriage.

The singular happiness of Maria Theresa’s wedded life was due to no greatness in Francis of Lorraine, but to his vivacity and good breeding, to his courtesy, to his refinement, and especially to his devotion. It suited her that he should ride and shoot so well. She loved the restrained intonation of his voice and the frankness of his face. She easily forgave his numerous and passing infidelities. The simplicity of his religion was her own, for her goodness was all German as his sincerity was all Western and French; upon these two facets the opposing races touch when the common faith introduces the one to the other. Their household, therefore, was something familiar and domestic. Its language was French, of a sort, because French was the language of Francis; but while he brought the clarity of Lorraine under that good roof, which covered what Goethe called “the chief bourgeois family of Germany,” he brought to it none of the French hardness and precision, nor any of that cold French parade which was later to exasperate his daughter when she reigned at Versailles. He was a man who delighted in visits to his country-side, and who would have his carriage in town wait its turn with others at the opera doors.

Maria Theresa was so wedded, served by such a Minister, in possession of and in authority over such a household during those seven years between the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle and the French Alliance, between 1748 and 1755. These seven years were years of patience and of diplomacy, which were used to retrieve the disasters of her first bewildered struggle against Prussia and the new forces of Europe. They were the seven years of profound, if precarious, international peace, when England was preparing her maritime supremacy, Prussia her full military tradition, the French monarchy, in the person of Louis XV., its rapid dissolution through excess and through fatigue. They were the seven years which seemed to the superficial but acute observation of Voltaire to be the happiest of his age: a brief “Antonine” repose in which the arts flourish and ideas might flower and even grow to seeding. They were the seven years in which the voice of Rousseau began to be heard and in which was written the Essay upon Human Inequality.

For the purposes of this story they were in particular the seven years during which Kaunitz, now widowed, working first as ambassador in Paris, then as Prime Minister by the side of Maria Theresa at Vienna, achieved that compact with the Bourbons which was to restore the general traditions of the Continent and the fortunes of the House of Hapsburg.

The period drew to a close: the plans for the alliance were laid, the last discussions were about to be engaged, when it was known, in the early summer of 1755, that the Empress was again with child.

CHAPTER II
BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD

2nd November 1755 to the Autumn of 1768

ALL that summer of 1755 the intrigue—and its success—proceeded.

I have said that the design of Kaunitz was not so much to impose upon his time a new plan as to further a climax to which that time was tending. Accidents in Europe, in America, and upon the high seas conspired to mature the alliance.

Fighting broke out between the French and English outposts in the backwoods of the colonies. Two French ships had been engaged in a fog off the banks and captured; later, a sharp panic had led the Cabinet in London to order a general Act of Piracy throughout the Atlantic against French commerce. It was a wild stroke, but it proved the first success of what was to become the one fundamentally successful war in the annals of Great Britain.

In Versailles an isolated and mournful man, fatigued and silent, who was in the last resort the governing power of France, delayed and delayed the inevitable struggle between his forces and the rising power of England. Louis XV. looked upon the world with an eye too experienced and too careless to consider honour. His clear and informed intelligence would contemplate—though it could not remedy—the effects of his own decline and of his failing will. He felt about him in the society he ruled, and within himself also, something moribund. France at this moment gave the impression of a great palace, old and in part ruined. That impression of France had seized not only upon her own central power, but upon foreign observers as well; the English squires had received it, and the new Prussian soldiers. In Vienna it was proposed to use the declining French monarchy as a great prop, and in using it to strengthen and to revivify the Austrian Empire until the older order of Europe should be restored. Louis XV., sitting apart and watching the dissolution of the national vigour and of his own, put aside the approach of arms with such a gesture as might use a man of breeding whom in some illness violence had disturbed. Thus as late as August, when his sailors had captured an English ship of the line, he ordered its release. The war was well ablaze, and yet he would consent to no formal declaration of it: Austria watched his necessities.

It was in September that Maria Theresa sent word to her ambassador in Paris—the old and grumbling but pliant Stahremberg—that the match might be set to the train: in a little house under the terrace at Bellevue, a house from whose windows all Paris may be seen far away below, the secret work went on.

It has been asserted that the Empress in her anxiety wrote to the Pompadour and attempted, by descending to so direct a flattery of Louis XV.’s mistress, to hasten that King’s adhesion to her design. The accusation is false, and the document upon which it is based a forgery; but the Austrian ambassador was Maria Theresa’s mouthpiece with that kindly, quiet, and all-powerful woman. It was she who met him day after day in the little house, and when she retired to give place to the Cardinal de Bernis, that Minister found the alliance already fully planned between Stahremberg and the Pompadour. Louis XV. alone was still reluctant. Great change, great action of any sort was harsh to him. He would not believe the growing rumour that Frederick of Prussia was about to desert his alliance and to throw his forces on to the side of the English Power. Louis XV. attempted, not without a sad and patient skill, to obtain equilibrium rather than defence. He would consider an arrangement with Vienna only if it might include a peaceful understanding with Berlin.

MADAME DE POMPADOUR
FROM THE PORTRAIT BY BOUCHER IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY AT EDINBURGH

As, during October, these negotiations matured so slowly in France, in Vienna the Empress awaited through that month the birth of her child. She jested upon it with a Catholic freedom, laid wagers upon its sex (and later won them), discussed what sponsors should be bidden, and decided at last upon the King and Queen of Portugal; to these, in the last days of October, her messengers brought the request, and it was gladly accepted in their capital of Lisbon. Under such influences was the child to be born.

The town of Lisbon had risen, in the first colonial efforts of Portugal, to a vast importance. True, the Portuguese did not, as others have done, attach their whole policy to possessions over-sea, nor rely for existence upon the supremacy of their fleet, but the evils necessarily attendant upon a scattered commercial empire decayed their military power, and therefore at last their commerce itself. The capital was no longer, in the Arab phrase, “the city of the Christians”; it was long fallen from its place as the chief port of the Atlantic when, in these last days of October 1755, the messengers of the Empress entered it and were received; but it was still great, overlooking the superb anchorage which brought it into being, and presenting to the traveller perhaps half the population which it had boasted in the height of its prosperity. It was a site famous for shocks of earthquake, which (by a coincidence) had visited it since the decline of its ancient power; but of these no more affair had been made than is common with natural adventures. Its narrow streets and splendid, if not majestic, churches still stood uninjured.

The valley upon which stood the commercial centre of Lisbon is formed of loose clay; the citadel and the portion which to this day recalls the older city, of limestone; and the line which limits the two systems is a sharp one. But though the diversity of such a soil lent to these tremors an added danger, they had passed without serious attention for three or four generations; they had not affected the architecture of the city nor marred its history. In this year, 1755, they had already been repeated, but in so mild a fashion that no heed was taken of them.

By All-Hallow’een the heralds had accomplished their mission, the Court had retired to the palace of Belem, which overlooks the harbour, and the suburbs built high beyond that Roman bridge which has bequeathed to its valley the Moorish name of Alcantara. The city, as the ambassadors of Maria Theresa and the heralds of her daughter’s birth were leaving it, was awaiting under the warm and easy sun of autumn the feast of the morrow.

In the morning of that All Saints, a little after eight, the altars stood prepared; the populace had thronged into the churches; the streets also were already noisy with the opening of a holiday; the ships’ crews were ashore; only the quays were deserted. Everywhere High Mass had begun. But just at nine—at the hour when the pressure of the crowds, both within the open doors of the churches and without them, was at its fullest—the earth shook.... The awful business lasted perhaps ten seconds. When its crash was over an immense multitude of the populace and a third of the material city had perished.

The great mass of the survivors ran to the deserted quays, where an open sky and broad spaces seemed to afford safety from the fall of walls. They saw the sea withdrawn from the shore of the wide harbour; they saw next a wave form and rise far out in the land-locked gulf, and immediately it returned in an advancing heap of water straight and high—as high and as straight as the houses of the sea front. It moved with the pace of a gust or of a beam of light towards the shore. The thousands crammed upon the quays had barely begun their confused rush for the heights when this thing was upon them; it swirled into the narrow streets, tearing down the shaken walls and utterly sweeping out the maimed, the dying, and the dead whom the earthquake had left in the city. Then, when it had surged up and broken against the higher land, it dragged back again into the bay, carrying with it the wreck of the town and leaving, strewn on the mud of its retirement, small marbles, carven wood, stuffs, fuel, provisions, and everywhere the drowned corpses of animals and of men. During these moments perhaps twenty, perhaps thirty thousand were destroyed.

Two hours passed: they were occupied in part by pillage, in part by stupefaction, to some extent by repression and organisation. But before noon the accompaniment of such disasters appeared. Fire was discovered, first in one quarter of the city, then in another, till the whole threatened to be consumed. The disorder increased. Pombal, an atheist of rapid and decided thought, dominated the chaos and controlled it. He held the hesitating Court to the ruins of the city; he organised a police; as the early evening fell over the rising conflagration he had gibbets raised at one point after another, and hung upon them scores of those who had begun to loot the ruins and the dead.

The night was filled with the light and the roar of the flames until, at the approach of morning, when the fires had partly spent themselves and the cracked and charred walls yet standing could be seen more clearly in the dawn, some in that exhausted crowd remembered that it was the Day of the Dead, and how throughout Catholic Europe the requiems would be singing and the populace of all the cities but this would be crowding to the graves of those whom they remembered.

That same day, which in Lisbon overlooked the clouds of smoke still pouring from broken shells of houses, saw in Vienna, as the black processions returned from their cemeteries, the birth of the child.

Maria Theresa, whose vigour had been constant through so many trials, suffered grievously in this last child-bed of hers. She was in her thirty-seventh year. The anxiety and the plotting of the past months, the fear of an approaching conflict, had worn her. It was six weeks before she could hear Mass in her chapel; and meanwhile, in spite of the official, and especially the popular, rejoicing which followed the birth of the princess, a sort of hesitation hung over the Court. Francis of Lorraine was oppressed by premonitions. With that taint of superstition which his Faith condemned, but which the rich can never wholly escape, he caused the baby’s horoscope to be drawn. The customary banquet was foregone. The dreadful news from Lisbon added to the gloom, and something silent surrounded the palace as the days shortened into winter.

With the New Year a more usual order was re-established. The life of the Court had returned; the first fortnight of January passed in open festivities, beneath the surface of which the steady diplomatic pressure for the French alliance continued. It reached an unexpectedly rapid conclusion. Upon the 16th of January the King of Prussia suddenly admitted to the French ambassador at Berlin that he had broken faith with Louis and that the Prussian Minister in London had signed a treaty with England. For a month a desperate attempt continued to prevent the enormous consequences which must follow the public knowledge of the betrayal. The aversion of Louis to all new action, his mixture of apathy and of judgment, led him, through his ambassador, to forget the insult and to cling to the illusion of peace; but Frederick himself destroyed that illusion. His calculation had been the calculation of a soldier in whom the clear appreciation of a strategical moment, the resolution and courage necessary to use it, and an impotence of the chivalric functions combined to make such decisions absolute. It was the second manifestation of that moral perversion which has lent for two hundred years such nervous energy to Prussia, and of which the occupation of Silesia was the first, Bismarck’s forgery at Ems the latest—and probably the final—example: for Europe can always at last expel a poison.

Frederick, I say, was resolved upon war. He met every proposal for reconciliation with German jests somewhat decadent and expressed in imperfect French, which was his daily language. By the end of February 1756 the attempt to keep the peace of Europe had failed, and Louis XV., driven by circumstances and necessity, had at last accepted the design of Maria Theresa and of Kaunitz. The treaty would have been signed in March had not the illness of the French Minister, the Cardinal De Bernis, intervened; as it was, the signatures were affixed to the document on the 1st of May. By summer all Europe was in arms. The little Archduchess, who was later to lay down her life in the chain of consequence which proceeded from that signing, was six months old.

The first seven years of Marie Antoinette’s life were, therefore, those of the Seven Years’ War.

As her mind emerged into consciousness, the rumours she heard around her, magnified by the gossip of the servants to whom she was entrusted, were rumours of sterile victories and of malignant defeats; in the recital of either there mingled perpetually the name of the Empire and the name of Bourbon which she was to bear. She could just walk when the whole of Cumberland’s army broke down before the French advance and accepted terms at Kloster-Seven. Her second birthday cake was hardly eaten before Frederick had neutralised this capitulation by destroying the French at Rosbach. The year which saw the fall of Quebec and the French disasters in India was that with which her earliest memories were associated. She could remember Kunersdorf, the rejoicings and the confident belief that the Protestant aggression was repelled. Her fifth, her sixth, her seventh years—the years, that is, during which the first clear experience of life begins—proved the folly of that confidence; her eighth was not far advanced when the whole of this noisy business was concluded by the Peace of Paris and the Treaty of Herbertsburg.

The war appeared indecisive or a failure. The original theft of Silesia was confirmed to Prussia, the conquest of the French colonies to England. In their defensive against the menace to which all European traditions were exposed, the Courts of Vienna and Versailles had succeeded; in their aggressive, which had the object of destroying that menace for ever, they had failed. In failing in their aggressive, as a by-product of that failure, they had permitted the establishment of an English colonial system which at the time seemed of no great moment, but which was destined ultimately to estrange this country from the politics of Europe and to submit it to fantastic changes; to make its population urban and proletariat, to increase immensely the wealth of its oligarchy, and gravely to obscure its military ideals. In the success of their defensive, as by-products of that success, they had achieved two things equally unexpected: they had preserved for ever the South-German spirit, and had thus checked in a remote future the organisation of the whole German race by Prussia and the triumph over it of Prussian materialism; they had preserved to France an intensive domestic energy which was shortly to transform the world.

The period of innocence then and of growth, which succeeds a child’s first approach to the Sacraments, corresponded in the life of Marie Antoinette with the peace that followed these victories and these defeats. The space between her seventh and her fourteenth years might have been filled, in the leisure of the Austrian Court, with every advantage and every grace. By an accident, not unconnected with her general fate, she was allowed to run wild.

That her early childhood should have been neglected is easier to understand. The war occupied all her mother’s energies. She and her elder sister Caroline were the babies whose elder brother Joseph was already admitted to affairs of State. It was natural that no great anxiety upon their education should have been felt in such times. The child had been put out to nurse with the wife of a small lawyer of sorts, one Weber, whose son—the foster-brother of the Queen—has left a pious and inaccurate memorial of her to posterity. Here she first learnt the German tongue, which was to be her only idiom during her childhood; here also she first heard her name under the form of “Maria Antonietta,” a form which was to be preserved until her marriage was planned.

Such neglect, or rather such domesticity, would have done her character small hurt if it had ceased with her earliest years and with the conclusion of the peace; it was no better and no worse than that which the children of all the wealthy enjoy in the company of inferiors until their education begins. But the little Archduchess, even when she had reached the age when character forms, was still undisciplined and at large. There was found for her and Caroline a worthy and easy-going governess in the Countess of Brandweiss, an amiable and careless woman, who perhaps could neither teach nor choose teachers and who certainly did not do so.

All the warmer part of the year the children spent at Schoenbrünn; it was only in the depth of winter that they visited the capital. But whether at Court or in the country they were continually remote from the presence and the strong guidance of Maria Theresa.

The Empress saw them formally once a week; a doctor daily reported upon their health; for the rest all control was abandoned. The natural German of Marie Antoinette’s babyhood continued (perhaps in the very accent of her domestics) to be the medium of her speech in her teens, and—what was of more importance for the future—not only of her speech but of her thought also. In womanhood and after a long residence abroad the mechanical part of this habit was forgotten; its spirit remained. What she read—if she read anything—we cannot tell. Her music alone was watched. Her deportment was naturally as graceful as her breeding was good; but the seeds of no culture were sown in her, nor so much as the elements of self-control. Her sprightliness was allowed an indulgence in every whim, especially in a talent for mockery. She acquired, and she desired to acquire, nothing. No healthy child is fitted by nature for application and study; upon all such must continuous habits be enforced—to her they were not so much as suggested. A perpetual instability became part of her, and unhappily this permanent weakness was so veiled by an inherited poise and by a happy heart that her mother, in her rare observations, passed it by. Before Marie Antoinette was grown a woman that inner instability had come to colour all her mind; it remained in her till the eve of her disasters.

It is often discovered, when an eager childhood is left too much to its own ruling, that the mind will, of its own energy, turn to the cultivation of some one thing. Thus in Versailles the boyhood of the lonely child, who was later to be her husband, had turned for an interest to maps and had made them a passion. With her it was not so. The whole of her active and over-nourished life lacked the ballast of so much as a hobby. She was precisely of that kind to whom a wide, careful, and a conventional training is most useful; precisely that training was denied her.

The disasters and, what was worse, the unfruitfulness of the war had not daunted Maria Theresa, but her plans were in disarray. The two years that succeeded the peace produced no definite policy. No step was taken to confirm the bond with France or to secure the future, when there fell upon the Empress the blow of her husband’s death; he had fallen under a sudden stroke at Innsbruck, during the wedding feast of his son, leaving to her and to his children not only the memory of his peculiar charm, but also a sort of testament or rule of life which remains a very noble fragment of Christian piety.

Before he set out he remembered his youngest daughter; he asked repeatedly for the child and she was brought to him. He embraced her closely, with some presentiment of evil, and he touched her hair; then as he rode away among his gentlemen he said, with that clear candour which inhabits both the blood and the wine of Lorraine, “Gentlemen, God knows how much I desired to kiss that child!” She had been his favourite; there was a close affinity between them. She was left to her mother, therefore, as a pledge and an inheritance, and Maria Theresa, whose mourning became passionate and remained so, was ready to procure for this daughter the chief advantages of the world.

The loss of her husband, while it filled her with an enduring sorrow, also did something to rouse and to inspire the Empress with the force that comes to such natures when they find themselves suddenly alone. The little girl upon whom her ambitions were already fixed, the French alliance which had been, as it were, the greatest part of herself, mixed in her mind. Maria Theresa had long connected in some vague manner the confirmation of the alliance with some Bourbon marriage—in what way precisely or by what plan we cannot tell; her ambassador has credited her with many plans. It is probable that none were developed when, a few weeks after the Emperor’s death, there happened something to decide her. The son of Louis XV., the Dauphin, was taken ill and died before the end of the year 1765. He left heir to the first throne in Europe his son, a lanky, silent, nervous lad of eleven, and that lad was heir to a man nearer sixty than fifty, worn with pleasures of a fastidious kind, and with the despair that accompanies the satisfaction of the flesh. A great eagerness was apparent at Versailles to plan at once a future marriage for this boy and to secure succession. Maria Theresa determined that this succession should reside in children of her own blood.

Nationality was a conception somewhat foreign to her, and as yet of no great strength in her mixed and varied dominions. How powerful it had ever been in France, what a menace it provided for the future of the French Monarchy, she could not perceive. Of the silent boy himself, the new heir, she knew only what her ambassador told her, and she cared little what he might be; but she saw clearly the Bourbons, a family as the Hapsburgs were a family, a bond in Catholic Europe with this boy the heir to their headship. She saw Versailles as the pinnacle still of whatever was regal (and therefore serious) in Europe. She determined to complete by a marriage the alliance already effected between that Court and her own.

THE FIRST DAUPHIN: (THE FATHER OF LOUIS XVI)

She knew the material with which she had to deal: Louis XV., clear sighted, a great gentleman, sensual, almost lethargic, loyal. She had understood the old nonentity of a Queen keeping her little place apart; the King’s spinster-daughters struggling against the influence of mistresses. She understood the power of the Prime Minister Choiseul, with whose active policy the King had so long allowed his power to be merged; she knew how and why he was Austrian in policy, and she forgave him his attack upon the Church. Though Choiseul had not made the alliance he so used it, and above all so maintained it after the doubtful peace, that he almost seemed its author, as later he seemed—though he took so little action—the author of her daughter’s marriage. She did not grudge the French Minister such honours. She weighed the historic grandeur of the royal house, and what she believed to be its certain future. She sketched in her mind, with Kaunitz at her side, the marriage of the two children as, years before, she had sketched the alliance.

It was certain that Versailles would yield, because Versailles was a man who, for all his lucidity and high training, never now stood long to one effort of the will; but just because Louis XV. had grown into a nature of that kind, it needed as active, as tenacious, and as subtle a mind as Maria Theresa’s to bring him to write or to speak. Writing or speaking in so grave a matter meant direct action and consequence; he feared such responsibilities as others fear disaster.

It is in the spirit of comedy to see this dignified and ample woman—perhaps the only worthy sovereign of her sex whom modern Europe has known—piloting through so critical a pass the long-determined fortunes of her daughter. There is the mother in all of it. That daughter had imperilled her life. The child was the last of nine which she had borne to a husband whose light infidelities she now the more forgave, whose clear gentility had charmed her life, whose religion was her own, and in respect to whose memory she was rapidly passing from a devotion to an adoration. The day was not far distant when she would brood in the vault beside his grave.

The old man Stahremberg was yielding his place (with some grumbling) to Mercy. He was still the Austrian ambassador at Paris; but his term was ending. Maria Theresa would perhaps in other times have spared his pride, and would not have given him a task upon which he must labour but which his successor would enjoy; but in the matter of her little Archduchess she would spare no one. She had hinted her business to Stahremberg before the Dauphin’s death; the spring had hardly broken before she was pressing him to conclude it. Up to his very departure her importunity pursued him. When Mercy was on the point of entering his office (in the May of 1766), Stahremberg, in the last letter sent to the Empress from Paris before his return, told her that her ship was launched. “She might,” he wrote, “accept her project as assured, from the tone in which the King had spoken of it.”

Maria Theresa had too firm and too smiling and too luminous an acquaintance with the world to build upon such vague assurance. The dignity of the French throne was too great a thing to be grasped at. It must be achieved. When old Mme. Geoffrin passed through Vienna in that year, Maria Antonietta was kept in the background off the stage—but France was cultivated. The baby, who was Louis XV.’s great-grand-daughter, Theresa, Leopold’s daughter, was presented to that old and wonderful bourgeoise and made much of. They joked about taking her to France; another baby, after all not much older, only eight years older, was going to that place in her time.

And, meanwhile, the common arts by which women of birth perfect their plans for their family were practised in the habitual round. The little girl’s personality, all gilded and framed, was put in the window of the Hapsburgs. She was wild perhaps, but so good-hearted! In the cold winter you heard of (all winters are cold in Vienna) she came up in the drawing-room, where the family sat together, and begged her mother to accept of all her savings for the poor—fifty-five ducats.

Little Mozart had come in to play one night; he had slipped upon the unaccustomed polish of the floor. The little Archduchess, when all others smiled, had alone pitied and lifted him! Maria Theresa met the French ambassador and told him in the most indifferent way how her youngest, when she was asked whom (among so many nations) she would like to rule, had said, “The French, for they had Henri IV. the Good and Louis XIV. the Great.” Weary though he was of such conventionalities, the ambassador was bound by the honour of his place to repeat them.

There still stood, however, in this summer of 1766, between the Empress’s plan and its fruition a power as feminine, as perspicuous, and as exact in calculation as her own. The widow of the Dauphin, the mother of the new heir at Versailles, opposed the match.

She would not retire, as the Queen, her mother-in-law, had done, into dignity and nothingness, nor would she admit—so tenacious of the past are crowns—that the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs had all the negotiations between them. She was of the Saxon House, and though it was but small—a northern bastion, as it were, of the Catholic Houses—yet she had inherited the tradition of monarchy, and she might, but for her husband’s sudden death, have inherited Versailles itself. She was still young, vigorous, and German. She had determined not only that her son, the new heir, should marry into her house—should marry his own cousin, her niece—but that he should marry as she his mother chose, and not as the Hapsburgs chose. He was at that moment (in 1766) not quite twelve; the bride whom she would disappoint not quite eleven years old! But her plan was active and tenacious, her readiness alive, when in the beginning of the following year, in March 1767, she in her turn died, and with her death that obstacle to the fate of the little Archduchess also failed.

With every date, as you mark each, it will be the more apparent that the barriers which opposed Marie Antoinette’s approach to the French throne failed each in turn at the climax of its resistance, and that her way to such eminence and such an end was opened by a number of peculiar chances, all adjutants of doom.

The House of Hapsburg was never a crowned nationality; it was and is a crowned family and nothing more. Its states were and are attached to it by no common bond. There is no such thing as Austria: the Hapsburgs are the reality of that Empire. The French Bourbons were, upon the contrary, the chiefs of a nation peculiarly conscious of its unity and jealous of its past. Their greatness lay only in the greatness of the compact quadrilateral they governed and of the finished language of their subjects, and in the achievements of the national temper. Such conditions favoured to the utmost the scheme of Maria Theresa, not only in the detail of this marriage, but in all that successful management of the French alliance which survived her own death and was the chief business of her reign. She could be direct in every plan, unhampered, considering only the fortunes of her House; Louis XV. and his Ministers, as later his grandson, were trammelled by the complexity of a national life of which they were themselves a part.

Versailles had not declared itself: Vienna pressed. It was in March that active opposition within the Court had died with the mother of the heir. Within a month the French ambassador at Vienna wrote home that “the marriage was in the air”: but the King had not spoken.

In that summer, as though sure of her final success, the Empress threw a sort of prescience of France and of high fortunes over the nursery at Schoenbrünn. The amiable Brandweiss disappeared; the severe and unhealthy Lorchenfeld replaced her.

The French (and baptismal form) of the child’s name, “Antoinette,” was ordered to be used: still Versailles remained dumb.

In the autumn the parallels of the siege were so far advanced that a direct assault could be made on poor Dufort, the advanced work of the Bourbons, their ambassador at Vienna.

Dufort had been told very strictly to keep silent. He suffered a persecution. Thus he was standing one evening by the card-tables talking to his Spanish colleague, when the Empress came up and said to this last boldly: “You see my daughter, sir? I trust her marriage will go well; we can talk of it the more freely that the French ambassador here does not open his lips.”

The child’s new governess was next turned on to the embarrassed man to pester him with the recital of her charge’s virtues. The approaching marriage of her elder sister Caroline with the Bourbons of Naples was dangled before Dufort.

The play continued for a year. Louis XV. bade his ambassador get the girl’s portrait, but “not show himself too eager.” He is reprimanded even for his courtesies, and all the while Dufort must stand the fire of the Court of Vienna and its exaggerated deference to him and its occasional reproaches! Choiseul was anxious to see the business ended. Dufort was as ready (and as weary) as could have been the Empress herself, but the slow balance of Louis XV. stood between them all and their goal.

In the summer of the next year, 1768, the Empress’s eldest son, Joseph, now associated with her upon the throne, determined to press home and conclude. It was the first time that this man’s narrow energy pressed the Bourbons to determine and to act; it was not to be the last. He was destined so to initiate action in the future upon two critical occasions and largely to determine the fortunes of his sister’s married life and final tragedy.

He wrote to Louis XV. a rambling letter, chiefly upon the marriage of yet another sister with the Duke of Parma. It wandered to the Bourbon marriage of Caroline; he mentioned his own child, the great-granddaughter of the King. It was a letter demanding and attracting a familiar answer. It drew its quarry. Louis, answering with his own hand and without emphasis, in a manner equally domestic and familiar, threw in a chance phrase: “... These marriages, your sister’s with the Infante, that of the Dauphin....” In these casual four words a document had passed and the last obstacle was removed.

The Empress turned from her major preoccupation to a minor one. This child of hers was to rule in France; she was now assured of the throne; she was near her thirteenth birthday—and she had been taught nothing.

CHAPTER III
THE ESPOUSALS

THE fortnightly despatches from France customarily arrived at Vienna together in one bag and in the charge of one courier. The Empress would receive at once the letters of Mercy, the official correspondence, perhaps the note of a friend, and the very rare communications of royalty. In this same batch which brought that decisive letter of Louis XV. to her son, on the same day, therefore, in which she was first secure in her daughter’s future, there also arrived the usual secret report from Mercy. This document contained a phrase too insignificant to detain her attention; it mentioned the rumour of a new intrigue: the King showed attachment to a woman of low origin about him; it was an attachment that might be permanent. This news was immediately forgotten by Maria Theresa; it was a detail that passed from her mind. She perhaps remembered the name, which was “Du Barry.”

The Court of Vienna, permeated (as was then every wealthy society) with French culture, was yet wholly German in character. The insufficiency which had marked the training of the imperial children—especially of the youngest—was easily accepted by those to whom a happy domestic spirit made up for every other lack in the family. Of those who surrounded the little Archduchess two alone, perhaps, understood the grave difference of standard between such education as Maria Antonietta had as yet received and the conversation of Versailles; but these two were Kaunitz and Maria Theresa, and short as was the time before them, they did determine to fit the child, in superficial things at least, for the world she was to enter and in a few years to govern. They failed.

Mercy, the ambassador, was instructed to find in France a tutor who should come to Vienna and could accomplish the task. He applied to Choiseul. Choiseul in turn referred the matter to the best critic of such things, an expert in the things of this world, the Archbishop of Toulouse. That prelate, Loménie de Brienne, whose unscrupulous strength had judged men rightly upon so many occasions and had exactly chosen them for political tasks, had in this case no personal appetite to gratify and was free to choose. A post was offered. His first thought was to obtain it for one who was bound to him, a protégé and a dependant. He at once recommended a priest for whom he had already procured the Librarianship of the Mazarin Collection, one Vermond. The choice was not questioned, and Vermond left to assume functions which he could hardly fulfil.

There was needed here a man who should have been appalled by the ignorance he might discover in his charge, who should be little affected by grandeur, who should be self-willed, assertive, and rapid in method; one whom the Empress might have ridiculed or even disliked, but whom she would soon have discovered to be indispensable to her plan. Such a man would have tackled his business with an appreciation of its magnitude, would have insisted upon a full control, would have communicated by his vigour the atmosphere of French thought, careless of the German shrinking from the rigidity of the French mind. He would have worked long hours with little Marie Antoinette, he would have filled the days with his one object, he would have shocked and offended all, his pupil especially, and in a year he would have left her with a good grounding in the literature of his country, with an elementary but a clear scheme of the history and the political forces which she was later to learn in full, with an enlarged vocabulary, a good accent, and at least the ability to write clearly and to work a simple sum. His pupil would have been compelled to application; her impulse would have been permanently harnessed; she would have learnt for life the value of a plan. Such a tutor would hardly have desired and would certainly not have acquired a lasting influence later on at Versailles. His work would have been done in those critical years of childhood, once and for all. He would probably have fallen into poverty. In later years he might have appeared among the revolutionaries, but he would have found, face to face with the Revolution, a trained Queen who, thanks to him, could have dealt with circumstance.

In the place of such a man, Vermond arrived.

He was a sober, tall, industrious priest of low birth; his father had let blood and perhaps pulled teeth for the needy. His reserve and quiet manners reposed upon a spirit that was incapable of ambition, but careful to secure ample means and to establish his family and himself in the secure favour of his employers. He was of middle age, a state into which he had entered early and in which he was likely long to remain. His mind within was active and disciplined; its exterior effect was small. He thought to accomplish his mission if he was but regular in his reports, laborious in his own study, and, above all, tactful and subtle in handling the problem before him.

To such a character was presented an exuberant child, growing rapidly, vivacious, somewhat proud, and hitherto unaccustomed to effort of any kind, a monkey for mimicry, clever at picking up a tune upon the keys, a tomboy shouting her German phrases down the corridors of Schoenbrünn, a fine little lady at Vienna—acting either part well. The light russet of her hair and her thick eyebrows gave promise of her future energy; she had already acquired the tricks of rank, the carriage of the head and the ready mechanical interest in inferiors—for the rest she was empty. In this critical fourteenth year of hers, during which it was proposed to fashion out of such happy German childhood a strict and delicate French princess, she did not read and she could barely write. The big round letters, as she painfully fashioned them in her occasional lessons, were those of a baby. Her drawing was infantile; and while she rapidly learnt a phrase in a foreign language by ear, a complete revolution in her education would have been needed to make her accurate in the use of words or to make her understand a Latin sentence or parse a French one.

To cultivate such a soil, exactly one hour a day was spared when the Court was at Vienna—somewhat more when it was in the country—and these few minutes were consumed in nothing more methodical than a dialogue, little talks in which Vermond was fatally anxious to bring before his pupil (with her head full of those new French head-dresses of hers, the prospect of Versailles, and every other distraction of mind) only such subjects as might amuse her inattention.

The early months of 1769 were full of this inanity, Vermond regularly reporting progress to the Austrian Embassy in France, regularly complaining of the difficulty of his task, regularly insisting upon his rules and as regularly failing in his object. In the autumn the Empress was at the pains of asking her daughter a few questions, notably upon history. The result did not dissatisfy her, but meanwhile Maria Antonietta could hardly write her name.

Side by side with this continued negligence in set training, and in the discipline that accompanies it, went a very rapid development in manner. The child was admitted to the Court; she was even permitted the experiment of presiding at small gatherings of her own. The experiment succeeded. She acquired with an amazing rapidity what little remained to be learnt of the externals of rank. The alternate phrases addressed to one’s neighbours round a table, the affectation of satiety and of repose, the gait in which the feet are hardly lifted; the few steps forward to meet a magnate, the fewer to greet a lesser man, and that smiling immobility before men of the ordinary sort which is still a living tradition in great drawing-rooms; the power of putting on an air in the very moment between privacy and a public appearance—all these came to her so naturally and by so strongly inherited an instinct, that she not only charmed the genial elders of the Austrian capital but satisfied experienced courtiers, even those visitors from France, who examined it all with the eyes of connoisseurs and watched her deportment as a work of art, whose slight errors in technique they could at once discover but whose general excellence they were able to appreciate and willing to proclaim.

She did indeed preserve beneath that conventional surface a fire of vigorous life that was apparent in every hour. Once in the foreign atmosphere of France and subject to exasperation and contrast that heat would burst forth. She became, as her future showed, capable of violent scenes in public and of the natural gestures of anger—it is to her honour that she was on the whole so often herself. Here at Vienna in this last year her young energy did no more than lend spirit and grace to the conventions she so quickly acquired.

The opening of the year 1770 found her thus, her German half forgotten, her French (though imperfect) habitual, her acquaintance with the air of a Court considerable. Though she was still growing rapidly she was now dressed as a woman and taught to walk on her high heels as did the ladies her seniors. Her hair was brushed off her high forehead in the French manner, the stuff of her frocks and the cut of them were French, her name was now permanently Frenchified for her, and she heard herself called everywhere “Marie Antoinette”; none but old servants were left to give her the names she had first known.

March passed and the moment of her departure approached. The child had never travelled. To her vivacious and eager temper the prospect of so great a journey with so splendid an ending was an absorbing pleasure. It filled her mind even during the retreat which, under Vermond’s guidance, she entered during Holy Week, and every sign of her approaching progress excited in her a vivid curiosity and expectation, as it did in her mother a mixture of foreboding and of pride.

The official comedy which the Court played during April heightened the charm: the heralds, the receptions, that quaint but gorgeous ceremony of renunciation, the mock marriage, the white silver braid and the white satin of her wedding-clothes, the salvoes of artillery and the feasts were all a fine great play for her, with but one interlude of boredom, when her mother dictated, and she wrote (heaven knows with what a careful guidance of the pen) a letter which she was to deliver to the King of France. With that letter Maria Theresa enclosed a note of her own, familiar, almost domestic, imploring Louis XV., her contemporary, to see to the child as “one that had a good heart,” ... but was ardent and a trifle wild.

These words were written upon the 20th of the month; on the morning of the 21st of April 1770 the line of coaches left the palace, and the Archduchess took the western road.

There was no sudden severance. Her eldest brother, Joseph, he who was associated with her mother in the Empire, accompanied her during the whole of the first day. Of an active, narrow, and formal intelligence, grossly self-sufficient, arithmetical in temper, and with a sort of native atheism in him such as stagnates in minds whose development is early arrested, a philosopher therefore and a prig, earnest, lean, and an early riser, he was of all companions the one who could most easily help Marie Antoinette to forget Vienna and to desire Versailles. The long hours of the drive were filled with platitudes and admonitions that must easily have extinguished all her regrets for his Court and have bred in her a natural impatience for the new horizons that were before her. He left her at Melk. She continued her way with her household, hearing for the last time upon every side the German tongue, not knowing that she heard also, for the last time, the accents of sincere affection and sincere servility: the French temper with its concealed edges of sharpness was to find her soon enough.

Her journey was not slow for the times. She took but little more than a week to reach the Rhine from Augsburg—a French army on the march has done no better. It was on the evening of the 6th of May that she could see, far off against the sunset, the astonishing spire of Strasburg and was prepared to enter France; only the Rhine was now between her and her new life.

She bore upon her person during this last night on German soil a last letter of her mother’s which had reached her but the day before yesterday. It was the most intimate and the most searching she was to receive in all the long correspondence which was to pass between them for ten years, and it contained a phrase which the child could hardly understand, but which, if texts and single phrases were of the least advantage to conduct, might have deflected her history and that of Europe. “The one felicity of this world is a happy marriage: I can say so with knowledge; and the whole hangs upon the woman, that she should be willing, gentle, and able to amuse.”

Next day at noon she crossed in great pomp to an island in mid-river, where a temporary building of wood had been raised upon the exact frontier for the ceremony of her livery.

It is possible that the long ritual of her position—she was to endure it for twenty years—was already a burden upon her versatility, even after these short weeks. Here, on this island, the true extent of the French parade first met her. It was sufficient to teach her what etiquette was to mean. The poor child had to take off every stitch of her clothes and to dress, to a ribbon or a hair-pin, with an order strictly ordained and in things all brought from Versailles for the occasion. Once so dressed she was conducted to a central room where her German household gave her to her French one, at the head of which the kindly and sometimes foolish Countess de Noailles performed the accustomed rites, and the Archduchess entered for ever the million formalities of her new world. They had not yet fatigued her. She was taken to Mass at the Cathedral; she received the courtesy of the old bishop, a Rohan, in whose great family Strasburg was almost an appanage.

There was a figure standing by the Bishop’s side. She saw, clothed in that mature majesty which a man of thirty may have for a child of fifteen, the bishop’s coadjutor, a nephew and a Rohan too. She noted his pomposity and perhaps his good looks, but he meant nothing to her; he was but one of the Rohans to be remembered. He noted her well.

Next day and for six more her journey proceeded amid perpetual deputations, Latin, flowers, bad verses, stage peasantry, fireworks, feasts and addresses, until, a week after she had crossed the Rhine, she slept at Soissons and knew that on the morrow she would see the King.

The pavement of the long road out from Soissons, the great royal road, had sounded under the wheels of her carriage for now the best part of the day. She had already found Choiseul awaiting her in state, and had exchanged with this old friend of her mother’s those ceremonial compliments of which the child was now well weary, when, through the left-hand window of her coach, which was open to the warm spring day, she saw before her a thing of greater interest—the league-long line of trees that ends abruptly against the bare plain and marks the forest of Compiègne.

Into this wood the road plunged, straight and grand, until after a declivity, where a little stream is crossed (near the place where the railway lines join to-day), there appeared awaiting her, as Choiseul had awaited her some miles before, a great and orderly group of people, of carriages, and horses; but this company was far larger and was ranked with more solemnity than others that had met her upon her progress. She knew that it was the King.

The splendour which a history full of trumpets had lent to the French name, the lineage of the Kings, the imagined glories of Versailles—all these had penetrated the nursery and the schoolroom of the Princess. As she came down from her carriage, with either hand reposing in the hands of her escort, an awe of the Capetian monarchy came upon her, and she knelt upon the roadway in the midst of the Court, of the Princesses who now first saw the little heiress of their lives, of the gilded carriages and the men-at-arms.

The King raised her up and kissed her forehead; he motioned forward a heavy, shambling, frowning boy, his grandson, for whom all this pomp existed. The lad shuffled forward, bent a little perhaps, and kissed her in his turn with due ceremony—for he was to be her husband. When this little ritual and its sharp emotions were over she had a moment, before her introductions to the Blood, to the King’s mature daughters, to the Orleans and the rest, in which to seize with that bright glance, which was always so ready for exterior things, the manner of the King.

Louis XV. was at that moment a man just past his sixtieth year. Long habit had given him, as it gives to all but the greatest of those educated to power, an attitude constrained though erect. His age had told on him, he had grown somewhat fat, he moved without alertness and—a weakness which had appeared but lately—his rare and uncompleted gestures expressed the weight of his body; but his muscles were firm, his command of them perfect, and he still had, especially in repose, so far as age can have it, grace.

The united pallor of his complexion, which had been remarkable in youth, seemed now more consonant to his years. The steady indifference to which he had reduced his features was now more dignified than when its rigidity had seemed unnatural and new. His expression had even acquired a certain strength from the immobility and firmness of his mouth, whose lines displayed a talent for exact language and a capacity for continued dignity; but his eyes betrayed him.

They were warm in spite of a habit of command, but the sadness in them (which was profound and permanent) was of a sort which sprang from physical appetites always excessive and now surviving abnormally beyond their time. There was also in those eyes the memory of considerable but uprooted affections, and, deeper, of a fixed despair, and deeper far—a veil as it were behind their brightness—the mortal tedium, to escape from which this human soul had sacrificed the national traditions and the ancient honour of the crown.

This great Monarch, whom no one since his boyhood had approached without a certain fear, received his grandson’s betrothed with an air almost paternal. It was a relaxation upon his part to which he owed, during the remainder of his life, the strongly affectionate respect which Marie Antoinette, vivacious and ungoverned, paid to him alone in the palace.

He presented the rest in turn. She heard names which were to mix so intimately with her own destiny, and when they set out again upon the road she could discreetly watch during the long ten miles to Compiègne, Chartres who would soon be Orleans, the faded faces of the King’s spinster-daughters, the old Duke of Ponthièvre; and she watched with a greater care that daughter of his whose foolish, dainty, and sentimental face, insecure upon its long thin neck, was that of a young, unhappy widow: the Princesse de Lamballe.

When they had slept at Compiègne in state, the whole pageant moved on next morning down the Paris road upon the last day’s march of that journey, and the child thought that she was now upon the threshold of nothing but an easy glory. She was nearing—amid great mobs and a whole populace come out to greet her, not only Paris and Versailles, but much more—she was nearing that woman whose name her mother had heard and half forgotten, whose name she herself had never heard. It was a name whose influence was to deflect the first current of her life: the name of Du Barry.

There is but one instrument efficacious to the government of men, which is Persuasion, and Persuasion sickens when its agent fails in dignity.

Dignity is the exterior one of the many qualities necessary to commandment; these in some cases touch closely upon virtue, so that, in some situations of authority, a dignified man is presumably a good one. But in the particular case of national government it is not so. The audience is so vast, the actor so distant and removed, that in this matter dignity resides mainly in the observance of whatever ritual the national temper and the national form of the executive demand. Such functions of ritual endanger rather than strengthen the soul of him who is called upon to assume them. To his intimates they appear as mummeries. It is often a sign of personal excellence in a ruler when he is himself disgusted with them and even casts them aside; but they are necessary to the State. For if such ritual is ill-observed, dignity fails; in its failure persuasion, I say, sickens, and when persuasion sickens, government, upon which depends the cohesion of a nation and the co-ordination of its faculties, breaks down.

The method of government in France at this time was a true personal monarchy.

The institution had increased in consciousness and in executive power down the long avenue of fourteen hundred years. Its roots were in Rome. It stood up in the seventh century as a memory of the Roman Peace, in the eighth as a promise to restore the Roman order. From the ninth onwards it was vested in a Gaulish family and already had begun to express the Gaulish unities; by the thirteenth its mission was ardent and victorious. When the religious wars of the sixteenth century were resolved in a national settlement and the Bourbon branch was finally acknowledged, the crown was supreme and the whole people held to and were summed up in the Monarchy. It had made a yeoman of the serf, it had welded the nation together, it had established the frontiers, it had repressed the treason of the wealthy Huguenots: it was France.

The person of the Monarch was public and publicly worshipped. His spoken words were actually law: he could impose a peace; his private decision could suspend a debt, imprison a transgressor, ruin or create an industry. Into such a mould had the French energy forced the executive when the genius of Richelieu and the cunning of Mazarin confirmed the powers of the throne, and left them in legacy to the virile sense of Louis XIV.

This King was very great and cast accurately also to the part he should fill. The conventions and the trappings of the part delighted him; he played it royally, and when he died, though he left the crown to an infant great-grandson, yet its security seemed as permanent as does to-day the security in similar powers of our English rich. But that great-grandson, at first gradually and at last rapidly, undermined the stable seat he had inherited. Louis XV., by his good qualities as well as by his evil, tended more and more to reject the ritual necessary to his kingship. His good breeding and his active physical appetites, his idleness and his sincerity, all combined to weary him of the game, so that at the end of his long reign he had almost ceased in the eyes of the populace to be a King at all.

The Monarchy therefore perished, and mainly through Louis XV.’s incapacity to maintain its essential livery. Its collapse, its replacement (with consequences enormous to the whole of Europe) by that other French formula which we call “The Revolution” or “The Republic,” was so exactly contemporaneous with Marie Antoinette’s marriage and with her presence at Versailles, that far too great a part in the catastrophe is assigned to her own misjudgments and misfortunes. No error or disaster of hers gave the death shock to the institution with which her life was mingled; that stroke had been delivered before the child crossed the Rhine, and the moment when the blow was struck was that in which Mercy had penned the name “Du Barry,” which Maria Theresa had read so carelessly in Vienna on the same day that brought the letter sealing her daughter’s marriage.

The public appearance of Madame Du Barry was the turning-point in the history of Versailles, and the little Archduchess, when she came upon French earth, did not bring a curse to her new country, for the destiny of that country was already determined; rather this France which she had entered had prepared a tragedy for her and a fate expected by her own unhappy stars.

Those who have watched the destruction of an old and strong wall will remember that it seemed at first to resist with ease every battery of the assault. At last there came one effort, more violent than the rest, which broke long, zig-zag lines throughout the fabric. The work was done. A few succeeding impacts visibly disintegrated the now loosened stones until the whole fell rapidly into ruin. So it was with the French Monarchy. The Regency, the floating theories of public criticism, the indeterminate foreign policy, the military reverses of the Seven Years’ War, the careless lethargy of Louis XV. in State affairs, had impaired the fabric of tradition, but that fabric still stood. It might yet have been restored and made whole had not the King in his last years chosen the particular mistress and presented her in a particular manner, which threw chaos into the scheme that every Frenchman took for granted when he considered his sovereign. This last thud, coming after so many accumulated tremors, loosened all the wall. The trials and distractions of the next reign did but pull apart, and that easily, the loosened stones. The imposing posture which the French demand of their symbols had been dropped by the old King; the new one could not restore it. Choose at random any man or woman of your acquaintance in history, put them upon the throne after the death of Louis XV., and though the succeeding quarter of a century would have varied somewhat with various individualities in power, the doom of the Monarchy would by none have been averted.

Let us see what happened when that fatal news of Madame Du Barry’s advent spread through the Court and the capital of France and reached, like the ripple of a wave, the shores of Vienna.

The King (as has almost every other King in history) had indulged his body; he had also indulged his desire for intimate companionship, his man’s whim for an expression, a tone of voice, or a gesture. This licence, which to their bane is granted to privileged and symbolic men, had led him into every distraction. His amours were many, but middle age had fixed his routine, if not his constancy, upon one woman of remarkable character.

Madame de Pompadour, as she came later to be called, was not of the nobility. To have taken a mistress publicly from the rank of business people was a serious reproach to the King; but though the mass condemned such an alliance, and though the wealthy, both of the middle class and of the courtiers, found an added blame in the financial reputation of her father and the notorious lightness of her mother, yet there was about this young, vigorous, and commanding hostess something that could prevent too violent a reaction of opinion.

She was extremely rich; her drawing-room had held all the famous men of her day; her education was wide and liberal, her judgment excellent. She played and sang with exceptional charm. She had good manners; she rode, spoke, read, and entertained as might the principal of her contemporaries.

The acknowledged position of such a woman at Court, though a new degradation, was a tolerable one. It was easy for the most reserved to understand how, in those years between thirty and forty when the strongest affections take root, the King had found in her company a sort of home. Her character was, moreover, comprehensible and secretly sympathetic to that vast proprietary body, the Bourgeoisie, which then were and are now the stuff of the nation.

She was prudent, she could choose a friend or a servant; her vivacity did not lack restraint. She was decent, fond of quiet silk, of good taste in decoration and of management. Her position at Versailles was a sort of conquest effected by the middle classes over the Court. Such a mistress, ruling for many years, the nation received at last with far more calm than could the buzzing nobles of the palace. As she (and the King) grew older, as her power became absolute and his individual presence grew remote, the situation was acceptable to Paris even more than to those who immediately surrounded the throne.

She died. There was an interval of puzzled silence about the person of the King. No one dreamt of a new power at Court. A nullity of action in the King himself, a few more stories, obscure and scandalous, the end of the reign and the accession of the heir who should bring with him such reforms as all the intellect of the country demanded: these were the expectations which followed her death, and especially were they the hope or the certitude of that group of men, mostly not noble, who had long managed both law and finance.

This prospect had, however, omitted one capital factor in the calculation. Louis XV., during these long years of regular habit, had grown old, and age in such a character, thus isolated, thus re-entrant, and yet hungry for whatever might tempt the senses, could only lead to some appalling error. In years he was, when Madame de Pompadour died, but little past fifty, but that blindness to exterior opinion and that carelessness for the future which properly belong to an age much more advanced, had already spread like a mist over his mind. After an interval of less than four years from the Pompadour’s death, the nation and the capital and those leaders of opinion who awaited a mere negative decline full of petty rumours but controlled as to great affairs by that Choiseul whom the Pompadour herself had chosen for Minister, were presented with the Du Barry: the scandal and its effect were overwhelming.

This woman was a prostitute.

CHAPTER IV
THE DU BARRY

THE presence of the Du Barry at the Court of Versailles, the fact that this presence preceded the Austrian child’s arrival, that it was first publicly admitted at the first public appearance of the Dauphiness, and that the four years of her tutelage were overshadowed by the new Royal Mistress was the initial and irretrievable disaster of Marie Antoinette’s life. It moulded her view of the nation and of the family with whom she had now to mingle; it deeply affected the populace she was to attempt to rule; it cloistered, warped and distracted her vision of France at a moment in adolescence when vision is most acute and the judgment formed upon it most permanent. All the Queen’s tragedy is furnished by the early spell of this insignificant and licentious woman.

With her advent was introduced for the first time into the Court that insolent and calculated disregard for rule in gesture and vocabulary wherein which the rich will often secretly relax their ordered lives, but which, when it appears publicly amidst their daily furniture, is as shocking as nakedness or as blood.

Judged in the pure light of human morals the position of the Du Barry was surely less offensive to God than that of any mistress any King has ever chosen. Louis wronged no one by this whim. He wrecked no remains of chastity—the woman had never known the meaning of the word. He wronged no subject (as has and does almost every royal lover in every amour)—her marriage had been but a hurried form run through to satisfy etiquette, “that she might be presented at Court.” He provided himself with a companion too inferior to make political intrigue her main ambition, and with one that could and did surround him with an abject but constant, familiar, and comfortable affection. It was such a vagary of old age as those in which have terminated countless lives, when old gentlemen of breeding but of enfeebled will surround their last years with youth and with the vigour, tainted vigour, that is inseparable from vulgarity. There is not one of us but has come upon a dozen such unions: they are often confirmed by a tardy marriage.

But in the case of Louis and this scandal of his a necessary element to such disgrace, the element of retirement, was lacking. Those symbols which, if they are insisted upon, are mere hypocrisies, but which, taken normally, are the guardians of a tolerable life, were outraged. The eyes of the noble-women at Versailles were full, some of a real or affected timidity, others of a real or affected dignity. Such ladies as chose to be sprightly or even to advertise their loose habit with over-brilliant and vivacious looks, retained, considered, and could always assume refinement; but the beautiful eyes of the Du Barry were brazen. The mignardises, which are always ill-suited to a woman, might be deliberately affected by the less subtle of the more elderly beauties: with the Du Barry, despite her evident youth, they had already become native and ineradicable. She lisped alarmingly; she lolled, or, when it was necessary for her to sit erect, was awkward. Her entry into a room was conscious; her assertions loud, her amiability oiled, her animosities superficially violent. It is upon solemn occasions that such deficiencies are most glaring, and solemn occasions were of continual recurrence at Versailles. In a word, she was most desperately out of place, and therefore produced an effect as of dirt, jarring against whatever was palatine and splendid in the evil of the Court by her parade of the loose good-nature and the looser spites of the Parisian brothels.

Yet it is not difficult to see what had brought the King into so fixed a relation with her. Whoever will compare any of the portraits of her by Drouais with any by Boucher of the Pompadour will see, not the same character indeed, but the same brows and forehead.

Louis could not continue in those early and familiar relations with her which had become a necessity to him, unless in some way her place were publicly acknowledged; but to force such a personality upon the Court, to give it precedence and to see that its position should be permanent, was an effort he had avoided for months. A scene was intolerable to him. He suffered from the most common defect attaching to men of lineage and wealth in that he feared, or rather could not endure, the prospect of violence. Orders even and debate, if they were of a personal and verbal kind, he shrank from as do some men from loud noises. The more important and decisive of his actions were effected in short notes, every line of which, as we read them to-day, manifest his urgent need of isolation: of getting the business done without the friction of another presence, and once done, put aside for ever.

For the public presentation of the Du Barry the marriage of his grandson, and especially the presence of the little Archduchess, offered a fatal opportunity. It would be impossible for the malicious to allude to the office of the Mistress in the presence of the child; the occasion would compel the princes and princesses of the blood to attend, and would equally forbid any general revolt. He determined to give the Archduchess a formal banquet on the journey before the Court and its company had reached Versailles, to summon to it the chief members of the Court, and to let them find at table, without warning, the woman whose existence had hitherto not been spoken of in his presence.

The official limit of Paris upon the west—in those days—a line drawn far beyond the houses and enclosing many fields, gardens, and suburbs, ran from what is now the Trocadero to what is now the Arc de Triomphe. Outside the gate or barrier was an empty space of land but partially cultivated and with no more than a scattered house or two upon it, save where, along the waterside and on the hill above it, clustered the village of Passy. This empty space merged gradually into what were then the wild and unfrequented Boulogne woods. Just on the edge of these, in a situation which was close to the town and yet upon one side accessible to the forest, stood a royal hunting-box called “La Muette,” which had gradually developed into a little palace. Here, on the evening of the day after Compiègne, the long and splendid train of the Court arrived, bearing in the chief coach the King, the Dauphin, and this new Austrian girl for whom Louis had already shown so much respect and tenderness, and whose entry into her rank he was yet to distort.

The day had been long for the child, but her curiosity and the vitality of her years had forbidden her to feel fatigue.

Dense mobs of people, cheering and running by the side of the carriages, had indeed been familiar to her since her babyhood, but the vivacity and the shrillness and the surprising contrasts of this active civilisation—its solemn roads, its simple architecture, broken by an occasional and unexpected magnificence, the long lines of ordered trees which here seemed as native as in her own country they had seemed artificial and foreign; the half-hour’s glimpse of an austere French convent which she had had when she visited at St. Denis (in passing); the King’s daughter, veiled among the Carmelites; the outskirts of a gigantic city such as she had never known—all these sufficed to distract her until the fall of the cold spring evening, when the line of carriages clattered into the paved courtyard of La Muette.

As though such experiences were not sufficient to bewilder her with the new world, the girl found when she came to her room, attended by Madame de Noailles and the ladies of her suite, such a parade of diamonds upon her table as to-day one will see only in the vulgar surroundings of a public show.

The instinct for gems which was latent in her, but which the extreme simplicity of the Austrian Court had not permitted to arise, awoke at once. They were the diamonds of the woman who would have been her mother-in-law had she lived, or rather who, had she lived, would never have permitted this marriage. They had reverted to the Crown upon her death, and Louis XV. had had them placed there upon Marie Antoinette’s table in readiness for her appearance; he had so sent them partly from a sort of paternal kindness, partly from a desire typical in him to exceed even in giving pleasure; but also, perhaps, partly to atone for the harm he was about to do her. For when the child came down, some two hours later, and was led in the strict etiquette of the Court procession into the dining-hall of the little palace, she could not but notice throughout the meal that followed a constraint less natural than that regular constraint of the French Court life which, in twenty-four hours of experience, had already struck her quick apprehension. It was not that men and women waited for the King to speak, but that their answers were given without vivacity, and with that curious mixture of restraint and purpose which she had already perhaps noticed, in her brief acquaintance with the French, to be the mark of their conversation in anger. She saw also that the old King looked straight before him with something of sullenness in his dignity, and she saw sitting next to him a woman whose presence there must have perpetually intrigued her imagination. That woman was the Du Barry.

To whatever adventures and novelties the children of gentle-folk are exposed, there is always one note of vulgarity which they can make nothing of and which, while it offends them, disturbs and astonishes them much more than it offends. In the midst of that curiously silent, erect, and very splendid table, where forty of her sex and of her rank were present, the presence of this one woman was in its nervous effect like the intolerable reiteration of a mechanical sound interrupting a tragic strain of music. The Du Barry had not the art, so common to the poorest members of the nobility or of the middle class, when they would slip in among the wealthy, of remaining silent and of affecting a reverence for her new surroundings. She held herself with a loose ease before them all, was perhaps the only one to laugh, and permitted herself an authority that was the more effective because it hardly concealed her very great hesitation in this first public recognition of her place.

What the child Marie Antoinette made of such an apparition will never be known. Her first letters to her mother upon the matter come later, when she had fully understood the insult or at least the indignity which had been done her. The only record we possess of her emotion is this: that when just after supper some courtier was at the pains to ask her, with infinite respect and a peculiar irony, what she had thought of Madame Du Barry, she said, “Charming,” and nothing more.

Next day in the early morning the coaches took on again the last steps of the journey to Versailles. Twelve miles which were a repetition of those scenes, those crowds, and those cheers of which the little Archduchess was now sufficiently weary, but which were leading up to that event toward which her childhood had been directed, and which could not but drive out of her mind the doubts of the evening before.

By ten o’clock the procession had passed the great gates of Versailles; three hours were spent in the long, distressing, and rigid ceremonies of the Court in whose centre she was now placed and whose magnificence now first enveloped her. It was one before the procession formed for the marriage ceremony, and had placed at the head of it the girl, and the boy whom, in this long trial of two days, she had but little regarded.

She came under the high vault of the new, gilded chapel as full of life as the music that greeted her entry. On her left the boy, to whom so much publicity was a torture, went awkwardly and with the nervous sadness of his eyes intensified; his gold braid and his diamonds heightened his ill-ease. He managed to give her the ring and the coins proper to the ceremony, to kneel and stand when he was told; but she went royally, playing, as girl children so easily play, at womanhood, and smiling upon all around.

The contrast was gravely apparent when they passed together down the aisle with the Quête, and when they sat—he effaced, she triumphant—during the little sermon which the Grand Almoner was bound to deliver. The heir was not relieved till the Mass was over and the book was brought wherein the signature of the witnesses and principals to a marriage are inscribed.

It is natural to the extreme of privilege that it should affect occasional and absurd simplicities. The last generation of Versailles was eager for such things, and it had become the custom that a royal marriage should be registered not in any grand and parchment manner but in the common book of a parish church, the church to whose parish the palace was nominally attached. Father Allart, the rector of this, in whose hard and unimportant life such days were set, came in to give the book. The Grand Almoner set it before them and they signed—the King first, with his large and practised name; the Dauphin next in a writing that was thin, accurate, and null. He passed the pen to this little new wife of his, who was to sign third. At so practical a test her womanhood dropped off her, her exceedingly ignorant childhood returned. She got through the “Marie” with no mistake of spelling, but the letters were a trifle uncertain and the word askew. Why had not some one ruled a line as lines are ruled in copy-books? “Antoinette,” the second word, was larger and gave more trouble; the last letters fell away deplorably. And when it came to the third name, “Josepha,” it was too much for her altogether. She did her best with the “J”—it ended in a huge blot, and she became so flurried that she spelt her last name anyhow, without the “e,” and let it go to pieces. She was relieved to give the pen to Provence, who, though he was yet so young, wrote his name strongly like a man. Artois, Mesdames, the Orleans followed. Each as they signed could see at the head of the page that deplorable and dirty scrawl which the child, whose advent each of them feared, had left as a record of her fifteenth year.

The Court left the chapel. As they passed into the outer galleries of the palace before the enormous and increasing crowd which thronged the stairways and the landing-floors, the air seemed much darker than when they had passed in an hour before. Through the great windows the sky could be seen lowering for a storm. As she entered the private apartments to receive homage the darkness increased; the ceremony was not over before a first loud clap of thunder startled them; the rain fell with violence upon the populace that had crowded the gardens, the fireworks set out for that evening were drenched, the fine dresses of the Paris shop-women were spoiled: all the grandeur in front of the palace was lost in umbrellas. It cleared, and they crushed in, with their muddy boots well scraped, to file in thousands, a long procession urged on by the Guards and passing, behind a barrier, down the immense hall, where the tables were set for cards. The King and his Court played solemnly like actors who must pretend to see no audience, sitting thus as a public symbol of the nation.

The crowd passed thus, company after company, staring at Monarchy and at the dresses and the gems till the West grew dark, and the myriads of candles, reflected on a wall that was all mirrors, lent that evening its true colours. When the last reluctant sightseer had looked his last over his shoulder and had felt the tapestry drop behind him, the ceremony ceased, the tables were cleared, the King rose and conducted the bride to her room. A full ceremonial of etiquette was wearily and thoroughly performed, the Grand Almoner (once again) blessed the children’s bed, and that was the end of the marriage.

Outside, the crowd went back through the May night to their lodgings or to Paris, full of feasting, damp, surrounded by the fresh air that follows rain. They carried with them a confused memory of a great outing—music, grandeur, diamonds, innumerable lights, no fireworks, and a storm.

CHAPTER V
THE DAUPHINE

Wednesday, 16th of May 1770 to Tuesday, 10th of May 1774

WHEN the mock-marriage was over and the night passed, and when, with the Thursday morning, the long routine that was to be her life opened upon her, the child could watch with less excitement and with less illusion the nature of that new world. Her vivacity was not diminished, but her spirit immediately adopted a permanent attitude of astonished observation towards emotions and conventions whose general scheme she could not grasp at all. Daily the incidents which passed before her while they violently moved also repelled her senses; she was reconciled to them only by their repetition.

Versailles was the more bewildering to her because, in all its externals, it was the world she had known from her birth. The French cooking, architecture, dress, and social manner had for a century imposed themselves upon the palaces of Europe; but the French mind, now first in contact with her own, remained to her a marvellous and unpleasing revelation, which, even after years of regarding its energy, still shocked her.

There was a ball that night. She danced with her bright-eyed and tall young brother-in-law. At what he was sneering she could not understand, nor even if the boy’s expression was a sneer: she knew that it was strange. She did not notice the absence of half the Court; she did not know that her mother’s request for Precedence to be given to the Princesses of Lorraine had raised this silent French storm; had she been told she would not have comprehended. The extreme and individual French jealousies, the furious discussions that underlie the united formality of French etiquette, were alien and inhuman to her German breeding; for active and living, almost Southern, as was this Viennese girl, she enjoyed to the end the good simplicity of her mother’s race. She danced with young Chartres. If something in him chilled her, she could not divine what it was in that character which even then seemed closed, and which later was to make him vote her husband’s death, and sit at wine in his palace while she sat a prisoner and widowed in her prison at hand.

For days the feasts continued and for days her unexpected experiences of persons and of a strange nationality were relieved by pageants and popular clamours which, at her age, could distract her from weary questions. It was at one of these that there sounded once more that note of disaster which came at rhythmic intervals across her life and continued to come until a climax closed it. She had leave to go with her aunts, the King’s daughters, by night with a small escort to see the public holiday in Paris which celebrated her marriage. She was to go without ceremony, not to be recognised, merely to satisfy a child’s curiosity for a spectacle in her own honour. As the coach came up the river road towards what is now the Trocadero hill she could already see far off the flash of the rockets, and she heard with increasing pleasure the roar of a great crowd met to do her honour. As she neared the great square which is called to-day the Place de la Concorde she was disappointed, as children are, to see that the coach was late; the great scaffolding and final set-piece in which her initials were interlaced with those of the Dauphin was sputtering out in the inglorious end of fireworks—but something more intimate to her (had she known herself) and worse than her childish disappointment had marked the moment of her arrival. The coach was stopped abruptly, the guards closed round it, and it was turned back at once towards Versailles. As it rumbled through the darkness more quickly than it had come, she seemed to hear in the distant clamour both fierceness and terror. It was a sound of panic. She heard the news whispered respectfully and fearfully to her aunts during a halt upon the way. Perhaps they thought her too young to be told. She complained as she went that the truth was concealed from her, and when they reached the palace late that night she was crying. Next day the news was public, and she learned that after this first rejoicing, in what was to be her capital city, there had been crushed and maimed and killed many hundreds of her people; it proved one of those misfortunes which, as much from their circumstance as from their magnitude, remain fixed for years in the memory of a nation, and the day on which she learned it was the last of the month of her wedding.

During the summer that followed this presage she learnt the whole lesson of Versailles. She was still a child. Mercy still wrote of her to her mother in a tone which, for all its conventional respect, was a tone now of irritation against, now of amused admiration for, a child. She had her daily childish lessons with the Abbé Vermond and daily exasperated him by her distractions. She still wrote painfully her childish letters to Maria Theresa, took her little childish donkey-rides, and was strongly impressed, as a child would be, by those of her elders who alone could show some authority over her—Mesdames, her husband’s aunts. She was growing fast; and there is nothing more touching in the minute record of her life than the notes of her increasing stature during this year, so oddly does the nursery detail contrast with the splendour of her place in Europe and the titles of her rôle.

She was still a child; but as her fifteenth birthday approached and was passed she had learnt (while it wearied her) the full etiquette of her part, and she had begun, though imperfectly, to recognise what were the politics of a Court and in what manner intrigue would approach her: how to avoid or master it she discovered neither then nor at any later time throughout her adolescence and maturity.

With the advent of winter and its long and brilliant festivals, another thing which she had begun to comprehend in the palace became for her a fixed object of hatred: the position and influence of the Du Barry.

She knew now what this official place was which the Favourite held. Her disgust for so much regulation and pomp in such an office would in any case have been strong, for Marie Antoinette came from a Court where the sovereign was herself a woman and where all this side of men’s lives was left to the suburbs: that disgust would in any case have been sharp, for she was too young and too utterly inexperienced to be indulgent; it would in any case have been increased by a sense of isolation, for all around this German child were the French gentry taking for granted that everything touching a King of France, from his vices to his foibles, must be dressed up in a national and symbolic magnificence. Her disgust would, I say, in any case have risen against so much complexity allied to so much strength, but that disgust turned into an active and violent repulsion when she saw the Du Barry not only, as it were, official but also exercising power. This to her very young and passionate instincts, whether of sex, of rank, or of policy, was intolerable; it was the more intolerable in that the Du Barry’s first exercise of power happened to go counter to interests which the Dauphine regarded rather too emphatically as those of Austria and of her family.

The chief Minister of the Crown, the Duc de Choiseul, kindly, sceptical, well-bred and rather hollow, had been, if not the mere creation or discovery, at any rate the ally of Madame de Pompadour. Madame de Pompadour had been a statesman herself: Choiseul had perpetually supported her and she him, more especially when he ran in the rut of the time, showed himself conventionally anti-Christian, and (having been educated by the Jesuits) was drawn into the intrigue by which that order was suppressed. He had been ambassador at Vienna, though that in a year when Marie Antoinette was a baby, so that she had no early memories of his snub-nose and happy, round face; but she had known his name all her life from the talk of the palace in Vienna, and she had known it under the title which he had assumed just after her birth. The Duc de Choiseul was for her, as for every foreigner, a name now permanently associated with French policy and a Minister who was identical with Versailles. Maria Theresa was grateful to him for having permitted the marriage of her daughter: that daughter after some months of the French Court very probably imagined that he had not only permitted but helped to design the alliance. It was against this man that the Du Barry stumbled.

It would not be just to accuse the young woman Du Barry of design. The State was a very vague thing to her. She held good fellowship with many, owed her advancement to Choiseul’s enemies, and was, in general, the creature of the clique opposed to him, while for D’Aiguillon, who already posed as the rival of the elder man, she felt perhaps a personal affection. She was very vain and full of that domestic ambition which comes in floods upon women of her sort when they attain a position of some regularity. She loved to feel herself possessed of what she had learned in the old days to call (in the jargon of her lovers) “office,” “power”; to feel that she could “make” people. As for the pleasure of an applauded judgment, or the satisfaction of that appetite for choice which inspires women of Madame de Pompadour’s sort in history, the Du Barry would not have understood the existence of such an emotion. The most inept and the most base received the advantage of her patronage, not because she believed them capable of administration, but simply because they had shown least scruple in receiving her, or later, amid the general coldness of the Court, had been the first to pay her an exaggerated respect. As for those with whom she could recall familiarities in the past, she was willing to make the fortunes of them all.

Though such an attitude could easily have been played upon by the courtiers of her set, it could never have supplied a motive force for her demands nor have nourished the tenacity with which she pressed them; that force and that tenacity were supplied to her by her own acute sensitiveness upon her new position. The angry pique to which all her kind can be moved in the day of their highly imperfect success was aflame at every incident which recalled to her the truth of her origin and the incongruity of her situation: in her convulsive desire to revenge against every slight, real or imagined, she found an ally in the old King, her lover. He also knew that he was in a posture of humiliation, and under his calm and tired bearing he suffered a continual irritation from that knowledge. As he pottered about his frying-pans, cooking some late dish to his liking, or went alone and almost furtively down the hidden stair between her little, low, luxurious rooms and his own rooms of state, his silent mind was even less at ease than in the days, now so long past, when an utter weariness with the things of the flesh and a despair of discovering other emotions had first put into his eyes the tragedy that still shines from them upon the walls of Versailles.

All, therefore, that the Du Barry did through Louis XV. as her power increased was not for this or that person whom she feared or loved; it was rather against this or that person whose presence she found intolerable. All that she suggested, so far as persons were concerned, the King was ready to achieve.

Had some married woman of force and subtlety formed the centre of opposition to the Favourite, the reign would have ended easily. Mary of Saxony, the Dauphin’s mother, had been such a woman, and would, had she lived, have conducted affairs to a decent close. Fate put in the place of such a woman first three old maids—the King’s daughters—and next this little girl, the Dauphine.

The origins were slight, but in its course the quarrel gathered impetus. At first came that silent great supper-party at La Muette and the instinctive repulsion which the child felt and which this woman from the streets as instinctively resented. Next, in the summer, one of the Dauphine’s women had a sharp quarrel with the Favourite in the stalls of the Court theatre. The Favourite had her exiled from Court, and the Dauphine, crying secretly with anger in her rooms, could obtain no redress. During the summer absences of the Court in the country palaces a perpetual travel and larger room to move prevented an open battle; in the following winter that very grave event, the exile of Choiseul, sealed the difference.

It was the error of Choiseul not that he had opposed the Favourite’s entry—on the contrary, he had thought it a useful whim that would amuse and occupy his sovereign—but that he could not take her seriously. His “world,” his relatives, his intimates, those whom he had placed and salaried during twelve years of power, were outspoken in their contempt for the Du Barry. Her own simple spite lumped all together and made the Minister the cause of her difficulties and their victim. For months she had half amused, half frightened Louis by an increasing insolence to De Choiseul at cards and at table. He had met this insolence at first with the ironic courtesy that he must have shown during his life to a hundred such women; later, by a careful and veiled defence; last of all by a resigned and somewhat dignified expectation of what he saw would be the end.

When a society approaches some convulsion the pace of change increases enormously with every step towards the catastrophe. “This at least no one dreams of. That at least cannot happen!” But this and that do happen, and at last all feel themselves to be impotent spectators of a process so forcible and swift that no wisdom can arrest it. Political literature in such moments turns to mere criticism and speculation; it no longer pleads, still less directs. So it is to-day with more than one society of Western Europe; so it was with the close of Louis XV.’s reign.

In May 1770, when the Austrian alliance was consummated by the arrival of Marie Antoinette and by the wedding at Versailles, the revocation of the one conspicuous statesman in France would have seemed impossible. He had no more capacity than have the most of politicians, but he did at least read the rough standard demanded in that trade, and his name was rooted in the mind of his own public and of Europe. If the dismissal of Choiseul had been proposed in the summer, there still remained enough active force opposed to this new Du Barry woman to have prevented the folly; but at the rate things were going every month weakened that force; by the end of the year it was too late to act in his defence.

On Christmas Eve fat Hilliers came lurching out of the Favourite’s room and brought Choiseul a note in Louis’ hand. It was a short note exiling him to his place at Chanteloup and relieving him of office.

There was no one to replace the Minister: the action was that of a common woman who exercised a private vengeance and could conceive no reasons of State. Yet no one was astonished—save perhaps the child to whom so vast a change was the climax of all that had bewildered her since she had first spoken to the French Court.

Maria Theresa and Mercy, her ambassador to Versailles, had that knowledge of the world which permitted each to find footing, even in such a welter. Each from a long experience knew well that the depth of political life moves slowly for all the violent changes of machinery or of names. Each felt the alliance—the object of all their solicitude—to be still standing, in spite of Choiseul’s fall; and each divined that their little Princess, who was the pledge of that alliance at the French Court, and whom they destined, when she was Queen, to be its perpetuator, might at this moment weaken and ruin it: her probable indiscretion and her simplicity were the points of danger. Her plain-spoken anger might ruin their plans for a recovery of Austrian influence. Each therefore concentrated upon a special effort—Mercy by repeated visits from the Austrian Embassy in Paris to the Court at Versailles and by repeated admonitions; Maria Theresa (in whom the fear for her daughter’s future and position was even greater than her solicitude for the Austrian policy) by repeated letters, too insistent perhaps and too personal wholly to effect their object.

Marie Antoinette was persuaded to a certain restraint, but she was neither convinced nor instructed. She saw the whole situation as a girl would see it, in black and white: Madame du Barry was of the gutter, and had yet been able to destroy a name she had always heard associated with the fortunes of her own family and the dignity of the French Crown. The complexity of the situation, the short years it was likely to last, the necessity during those years of weighing the intricate and changing attachments of the great families in their interlacing groups—all this escaped her.

So little did she see the intricate pattern of politics that, when Louis XV., less than two months later, exiled the higher courts of law and all but roused a rebellion, she did not connect with the reign of her enemy this act of violence which isolated and imperilled the Crown; she thought it royal, immediate, and just, still seeing mere kingship, as children see it in a fairy tale, beneficent and paternal.

The six months of administrative anarchy that followed meant nothing to her. When in July, D’Aiguillon—inept, a mere servitor of the Favourite’s—was at last appointed to the vacant post of Prime Minister, this act—in its way more astounding than the dismissal of Choiseul—was only remarkable to her because it was the Du Barry’s doing. And during the whole of her sixteenth year she represented at Court a fixed indignation which, in her alone, steadily increased as the powers of the Favourite became absolute; for as Marie Antoinette approached womanhood she developed a quality of resistance which was the one element of strength of her early character, but from which was fatally absent any power to design. That obstinate power of resistance was to raise around her multiplying and enduring enmities; it was to mature her in her first severe trials, but was also to bring her to the tragedy which has lent her name enduring and exaggerated nobility.

This opposition which the Dauphine offered to Madame du Barry, an opposition which did but rise as that woman (during 1771) opened, one after the other, all the avenues of power to her lowest or least capable courtiers, took on no form of violence.

Marie Antoinette, as the pale auburn of her hair and her thick eyebrows darkened, as her frame strengthened and her voice took on a fuller tone, added to the vivacity of her childhood a new note of passionate emphasis which was ill-suited to her part, and which in any circumstances but those of luxury would have approached vulgarity. In many minor matters she forbore to put the least restraint upon a momentary annoyance; she would have some design she disapproved destroyed; a bookcase, though it was Gabriel’s, she had broken before her eyes to appease her discontent. But in the major matter of this quarrel she put on a sort of solemnity, and her resistance took the simple but unconquerable form of silence. She would not recognise the Favourite, though she were to meet her five times a day, and she would not address one word to her.

That silence, which kept open at Court a sharp wound and which stood a permanent and a most powerful menace to all that had power at Versailles, became for Mesdames the King’s daughters (who had first given this example) and for all the defeated parties a welcome symbol—though for the Princess herself it was a most perilous one. To break that silence was the effort of every converging force about her. Her mother in repeated warnings; Mercy, the King, and most of all the Favourite herself, came to think it a first point of policy that what might have been pardoned in the child should not remain a cause of acute offence in the woman. She was now nearly eighteen months at Versailles; she had entered her seventeenth year. But whenever the Du Barry crossed her in the receptions or met her eyes at table, whatever beginnings of a salute may have escaped the loose manner of the Favourite, she suffered the mortification of a complete refusal. The feminine comedy was admirably played, and for the Dauphine the King’s mistress remained a picture or an empty chair—sometimes to be blankly gazed at; never to be recognised or addressed.

There was indeed a moment in August when the Dauphine’s resolution wavered. Mercy had visited the Du Barry; he had spoken to her intimately and with gallantry. He had probably promised her the graces of the Dauphine; he returned to Marie Antoinette to press his advice. So pressed she promised her mother’s ambassador that she would speak, but when the moment came and the meeting had been carefully arranged, after cards at evening, she remembered too much: she remembered perhaps most keenly a recent thing, the choice of one of this woman’s friends, in spite of her protests, for one of her ladies-in-waiting. She strolled to the table where Mercy and the Favourite were talking together. As she came up Madame du Barry put on an air of expectation which invited her approach. The girl hesitated and turned back. A scene not consonant to that society was avoided only by Madame Adelaide, who had the presence of mind to summon her niece at the critical moment of the insult; but the fiasco led to further and more peremptory orders from her mother, to a long and troubled interview between Mercy and the King, and at last to the conclusion which they all desired. The Dauphine recognised the Du Barry; but the recognition came in a manner so characteristic of Marie Antoinette that it would have been better for her and for them if they had not won their battle.

Upon the New Year’s Day of 1772 at Versailles, on which day it was agreed (and this time most solemnly vowed) that a greeting should be given, and during the formal reception held at Court that day, there came a moment when, in an uneasy silence, the moving crowd of the Court saw the Dauphine approach the Favourite, pass before her, and say as she passed—not so directly nor so loudly as might be wished, but still so that the Du Barry might have taken the words as addressed to herself: “There are very many people at Versailles to-day.” Before a reply could be given her she had passed on. Next day she said to Mercy: “I shall not let that woman hear the sound of my voice again.”

The moment of time during which this quarrel reached its height was one of extreme anxiety to Maria Theresa, and indeed to all. It was that during which the first public renunciation of the international morality which had hitherto ruled in Christendom was in negotiation at the instance of Prussia. It was secretly proposed that an European government should be disregarded without treaty and subjected to mere force without the sanction of our general civilisation. Frederick had suggested to Russia long before with deference, recently to Catholic Austria with a sneer, the partition of Poland.

It is characteristic of the more deplorable forms of insurgence against civilised morals that they originate either in a race permanently alien to (though present in) the unity of the Roman Empire, or in those barbaric provinces which were admitted to the European scheme after the fall of Rome, and which for the most part enjoyed but a brief and precarious vision of the Faith between their tardy conversion and the schism of the sixteenth century. Prussia was of this latter kind, and with Prussia Frederick. To-day his successors and their advisers, when they attempt to justify the man, are compelled still to ignore the European tradition of honour. But this crime of his, the partition of Poland, the germ of all that international distrust which has ended in the intolerable armed strain of our time, has another character attached to it: a character which attaches invariably to ill-doing when that ill-doing is also uncivilised. It was a folly. The same folly attached to it as has attached to every revolt against the historic conscience of Europe: such blindnesses can only destroy; they possess no permanent creative spirit, and the partition of Poland has remained a peculiar and increasing curse to its promoters in Prussia; to their mere accomplices in St. Petersburg it has caused and is causing less weakness and peril; while it has left but a slight inheritance of suffering to the Hapsburgs, whose chief was at the moment of the crime but a most reluctant party to it.

There is not in Christian history, though it abounds in coincidence or design, a more striking example of sin suitably rewarded than the menace which is presented to the Hohenzollerns to-day by the Polish race. Not even their hereditary disease, which has reached its climax in the present generation, has proved so sure a chastisement to the lineage of Frederick as have proved the descendants of those whose country he destroyed. An economic accident has scattered them throughout the dominions of the Prussian dynasty; they are a source everywhere of increasing danger and ill-will. They grow largely in representative power. They compel the government to abominable barbarities which are already arousing the mind of Europe. They will in the near future prove the ruin of that family to which was originally due the partition of Poland.

Enormous as was the event, however, both in its quality of evil and in its consequences to mankind, it must not detain the reader of these pages. Its interest here lies only in the first and principal example which it affords of Marie Antoinette’s direct and therefore unpolitical temper. She was indeed only upon the verge of womanhood—she had but completed her sixteenth year—but her failure to understand the critical, and, above all, the complex necessities of the Hapsburgs at that moment was characteristic of all the further miscalculations that were to mark her continual interference with diplomacy for twenty years. It was imperative that Austria should find support in the grave issue to which Maria Theresa had been compelled against her conscience and her reason. Berlin and St. Petersburg suddenly having agreed to a mutual aggrandisement, help was imperative, and help could only come from her ally at Versailles. Upon this one occasion, if upon no other, the young daughter of the Empress was justified in working for her family, and that could only be done through the woman whose influence was now the one avenue of approach to Louis XV. A recognition of the Du Barry was essential to Vienna in that new year of 1772. The Dauphine made it, but she made it in such a way that it was a worse insult even than had been her former silence. Had war broken out that spring, at the melting of the snow, it is possible or probable that Versailles would not have supported Vienna against Prussia and Russia in arms.

There was almost a quarrel between the growing girl and the Empress her mother. To that mother she still remained the child who had left Vienna two years before; but then, in Versailles and to those who saw her, this year made her a woman.

That she had passed the boundary of adolescence was apparent in many ways. She was more and more enfranchised from the influence of elder women—notably of her husband’s aunts, her intimacy with whom faded throughout 1772 and disappeared in 1773. Her step had acquired that firm and rather conscious poise which was to distinguish her throughout her life. The growth of her stature was now accomplished, and she was tall, and though her shoulders had not the grace and amplitude which they later assumed, her figure had, in general, achieved maturity. Her hair, now a trifle darker and browner in its red, her eyebrows, always pronounced but now thicker and more prominent, announced the same change. Her motives also, though insufficient in judgment, were deeper in origin. Her resistance to her mother’s and to Mercy’s most pressing insistence in the matter of the Favourite was a resistance no longer even partially suggested to her by others; it was due now to a full comprehension of the old King’s degradation, and to a formed abhorrence of the Du Barry. Moreover, when she yielded for a moment—as she did perhaps three times in the course of two years—it was with some measure of thought: she consented to approach the King’s mistress at moments when the ambassador or her mother had convinced her by speech or letter of an acute necessity; but already, in her excuses when she refused, she began to use the argument of a woman, not of a child—she pleaded the “authority of her husband”: it was a phrase in which she, least of all, put faith!

With this advent of womanhood there came, of necessity to a character so ardent, fixed enmities. She was no longer despised as a child; she was hated as an adult. Mesdames the King’s daughters, whose influence over her had disappeared, joined, in their disappointment, the over-large group of her detractors. The fatal name of “Autrichienne,” the foreign label that clung to her at the scaffold, originated in the drawing-rooms of the three old maids, and all around her, as her power to order or to fascinate increased, there increased also new hatreds which attained to permanence, because her German memories, her eager action, her crude and single aspect of the multitudinous and subtle French character, her rapid turning from this pleasure to that, her ignorance of books and of things, lent her no power to wear these courtiers down or to play a skilful game against them.

Forgetfulness was easy to her. To help her to forget she had the intoxication of that moment which comes once in life and is the powerful blossoming of our humanity. Her eighteenth year, the last year before she ascended the throne, was the great moment of her youth.

She had not been beautiful as a child, she was not destined to real beauty in her womanhood; but at this moment, with the spring of 1773 and on to that of 1774, there radiated from her the irresistible appeal of youth.

Paris, which had learnt to despise and half to hate the Crown, which had felt itself widowed and abandoned by the emigration of the Bourbons to Versailles, caught her charm for a day. When she made with the Dauphin her first official entry into the city, great crowds acclaimed her perpetually; she had that emotion, so dear to women that it will drive them on to the stage itself, of a public applause directed towards their persons: the general applause of Paris was almost an applause of lovers. For just these passing hours on a sweet day in early June she saw and loved the city wherein her doom was written upon every stone, and for these hours the Tuileries which she inhabited were faëry and so full of delight that she could not tell whether the air was magical or owed its fragrance only to the early flowers.

In such a mood, daily drinking in happiness and a certain sense of power, admired almost openly by distant men and—very likely—by Artois, her young brother-in-law, who had known her all these years, she passed the high tide of the summer and autumn, and found in the ensuing winter for the first time that lively and absorbing interest in social pleasure which very largely determined her life.

Of the balls in which she danced, of the masked balls that were her special delight, one stands out in history—and stood out in her own memories, even to her last hour, a night unlike all others.

The reader has divined that the marriage of May 1770 had been no marriage. It was contracted between children; and years must pass—years which were those of the school-room for both of them—before Maria Theresa could expect an heir with Hapsburg blood for the French throne. But those years passed; the child was now a woman, and still the marriage remained a form.

From an accident to which I will return in its proper place, the Dauphin and herself were not wife and husband; and to this grave historical fact must largely be attributed the disasters that were to follow. For the moment, however, this misfortune did little but accentuate her isolation and perhaps her pride. In her childish advent to the Court it could mean nothing to her. Lately she had understood a little more clearly; but she was pure; her training was in admirable conformity to her faith; she was not yet troubled—until the opening of that last year ’74, with its gaiety and pride. This season of vigour, radiance and youth lacked the emotion which has been so wisely and so justly fitted by God to that one moment through which we make our entry into a full life. She was married to the heir of France: her virtue and her pride forbade her to be loved. Yet was she also not married to that heir, and her life now lacked, and continued to lack, not only love, but the ardent regard that was her due.

No Frenchman could have turned her gaze. Between her temperament and that of her husband’s nation the gulf was far too deep. But one night, late, as she moved, masked in her domino, through the crowd of a Paris ball-room, she saw, among so many faces whose surface only was revealed to her, another face of another kind—a boy’s. It arrested her. The simple and sincere expression which Versailles had never shown her, the quiet manliness which, in Northerners, is so often allied to courage and which stands in such contrast to the active virility of Gaul—all that which, in the secret places of her German heart, unknown to herself, she thought proper to a man, all that whose lack (though she could not analyse it) had disturbed and wounded her in the French palace, was apparent in the face before her. She asked his name, and heard that it was Fersen. He was a Swede, the son of a considerable political noble, sent here on his travels with a tutor. She went up and spoke to him.

She could look into his eyes and see their chivalry. His low, handsome forehead, his dark brows, his refined, firm lips, his large and gentle eyes completed in detail the profound impression with which that first glance had struck her. Once she had begun to speak to him, so masked, she continued to speak continually. A boy of eighteen is far younger than a girl of his age—they were born within six weeks of each other, and he was a child compared with her; he desired her, she consenting, and he became hers in that moment. When they had separated and he reached his rooms at morning there was ready in his heart what later he wrote down, that the Dauphine was delightful, and that she was the most charming Princess he ever had known. She upon her side had followed him with her eyes to the door of the great assembly. She was not to see him again for four years, but during all those years she remembered him.

This was the way in which Marie Antoinette entered life, and almost simultaneously with that entry came her ascent of the throne: the old King was changing.

He suffered: his digestion failed; from time to time he would abandon his hunting. It was in the January of 1774 that the Dauphine had met Axel de Fersen. Before the spring of that year Louis XV.’s increasing infirmities were to reach their end.

Gusts of strong faith swept over him in these failing years, as strong winds, filled with a memory of autumn, will sweep the dead reeds of December. His fear of death, and that hunger for the Sacraments which accompanies the fear, came to him in dreadful moments. For thirty-eight years he had neither communicated nor confessed. All his life he had avoided the terrace of St. Germain’s, because a little lump far off against the Eastern sky was St. Denis, the mausoleum of the Kings, and he had not dared to look on it. But, with no such memorial before him, Death now appeared and reappeared.

Once in his little private room—it was late at night and November—he played at cards with the Du Barry. They were alone, save for an old crony of his pleasures, Chauvelin, which well-bred and aged fellow stood behind the woman’s chair, leaning upon it and watching the woman’s cards in silence, his rapacious features strongly marked in the mellow light of the candles. Something impelled the woman to glance up at him over her shoulder. “Oh, Lord! M. de Chauvelin, what a face!” It was the face of a dead man. She leapt and started from it, and the body fell to the floor.

The King, his age and apathy all shaken from him, shouted down the empty corridors: “A priest! a priest!” They came, and in the presence of the King absolved what lay immovable upon the shining floor, in a hope or wish that some life lingered there. But Chauvelin was quite dead.

Now, in his last Easter, the dread came back for ever and inhabited the King. Upon the Maundy Thursday of ’74 (it was the last day of March) the Court were all at Mass, and the sermon was ending. The priest, strong in that tradition of Bossuet which had not perished, turned to the royal chair and related for his peroration the legend of an ancient curse: “Forty days, and Nineveh shall be no more.” All the Court heard it and forgot it before the chanting of the creed was done—but the King was troubled. He reckoned in his mind; he counted dates and was troubled.

The liturgical times went by; he abandoned his mistress; he lived apart and gloomy: but his Easter duties were not accomplished, nor did he communicate or confess, nor was he absolved. Then the cloud lifted and he began to forget, and the tie which held him to the Du Barry, and which had in it now something of maturity and routine, was very strong upon him. He yielded and returned to her where she waited for him down the park at the little Trianon. His domesticity returned—but not for long.