Antonia Fraser - Marie Antoinette: The Journey

NAN A. TALESE
Doubleday
NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO
SYDNEY AUCKLAND

CONTENTS

FOR HAROLD
THE FIRST READER

AUTHORS NOTE

Et in Arcadia Ego: even in Arcadia death is lurking. Madame de Stal, thinking of the brilliance and gaiety of Marie Antoinettes early life in contrast to her later sufferings, was reminded of Poussins great picture on the theme of the omnipresence of death: the revelling shepherds in the forest glade brought up short by the sight of a tomb with this menacing inscription. Yet hindsight can make bad history. In writing this biography, I have tried not to allow the sombre tomb to make its presence felt too early. The elegiac should have its place as well as the tragic, flowers and music as well as revolution and counter-revolution. Above all, I have attempted, at least so far as is humanly possible, to tell Marie Antoinettes dramatic story without anticipating its terrible ending.

My concern, as the subtitle of the book indicates, has been to trace the twofold journey of the Austrian-born French Queen. On the one hand, this was an important political journey from her homeland to act as an ambassadressor agentin a predominantly hostile country where she was nicknamed in advance LAutrichienne. On the other hand, there was her journey of personal development from the inadequate fourteen-year-old bride to a very different mature woman, twenty odd years later.

In the course of tracing this journey, I have hoped to unravel the cruel myths and salacious distortions surrounding her name. Principal among them must be the notorious incident which has Marie Antoinette urging the poor, being without bread, to eat cake. This story was first told about the Spanish Princess who married Louis XIV a hundred years before the arrival of Marie Antoinette in France; it continued to be repeated about a series of other Princesses throughout the eighteenth century. As a handy journalistic clich, it may never die. Yet, not only was the story wrongly ascribed to Marie Antoinette in the first place, but such ignorant behaviour would have been quite out of character. The unfashionably philanthropic Marie Antoinette would have been far more likely to bestow her own cake (or brioche) impulsively upon the starving people before her. On the subject of the Queens sex lifeinsatiable lover? voracious lesbian? heroine of a single romantic passion?I have similarly tried to exert common sense in an area which must remain forever speculative (as indeed it was in her own day).

Biographers have their small private moments of perception, the importance of which was recognized by the Goncourt brothers, admiring biographers of the Queen in 1858: a time of which one does not have a dress sample and a dinner menu, is a time dead to us, an irrecoverable time. Lafont dAussone, author of an early post-Restoration study (1824), found an ear of wheat made out of silver thread on the floor of the Queens former bedroom at Saint Cloud during a sale and pocketed it. Two hundred years after the death of Marie Antoinette, I found the experience of being asked to don white gloves to inspect the tiny swatches in her Wardrobe Book at the Archives Nationales both appropriate and affecting, the pinpricks made by the Queen to indicate her choice of the days costume being still visible. I had, however, no desire to emulate Lafont dAussones act of pious theftif only because two gendarmes stood close behind my chair.

The Baronne dOberkirch, writing her memoirs just before the deluge, gave an unforgettable vignette of the aristocrats returning from an all-night ball at Versailles in their carriages, with the peasants already doing their rounds in the bright morning sunshine: What a contrast between their calm and satisfied visages and our exhausted appearance! The rouge had fallen from our cheeks, the powder from our hair... not a pretty sight. Such a vision seems to sum up the contrasts of the ancien rgime in Franceincluding the Baronnes innocent assumption that the peasants were calm and satisfied. Certainly the wealth of female testimonies to the period and to the life of Marie Antoinette gave special immediacy to my researches. The women who survived felt an urgent need to relive the trauma and record the truth, a compulsion often modestly disguised as a little gift to their descendants: cest pour vous, mes enfants... wrote Pauline de Tourzel, an eye-witness to some of the horrific incidents of the early Revolution, at the start of her reminiscences. Probably no queen in history has been so well served by her female chroniclers.

In a book written in English about a French (and Austrian) subject, there is an obvious problem to do with translation. Nor does it have an easy solution. What is tiresomely obscure for one reader may be gratingly obvious to another. On the whole I have preferred to translate rather than not in the interests of clarity. With names and titles I have also placed the need for clarity above consistency; even if some decisions may seem arbitrary in consequence, intelligibility has been the aim. Where eighteenth-century money is concerned, it is notoriously difficult to provide any idea of the modern equivalent so on the whole I have avoided doing so. However, one recent estimate equated a pound sterling in 1790 to 45 in 1996; there were roughly 24 livres to the pound in the reign of Louis XVI.1 As ever, it has been my pleasure and privilege to do my own research, except where individuals are specifically and most gratefully acknowledged. The references are, with equal gratitude, listed in the Notes and Sources.

I wish to thank H.M. the Queen for permission to use and quote from the Royal Archives, and also Lady de Bellaigue, Keeper of the Royal Archives, Windsor. I thank the Duke of Devonshire for permission to quote from the Devonshire Collections and Mr. Peter Day, Keeper of the Collection, Chatsworth; also Dr. Amanda Foreman and Ms. Caroline Chapman who supplied me with references to the 5th Dukes Collection. Ms. Jane Dormer gave permission for me to quote from Lady Elizabeth Fosters (unpublished) Journal; Dr. Robin Eagles let me read his D.Phil. thesis Francophilia and Francophobia in English Society 17481783, Oxford, 1996 (since published). Jessica Beer was invaluable in helping me to set up research in the Hofburg, Vienna, and accompanied me on expeditions into the scenes of Marie Antoinettes childhood; Christina Burton did useful Fersen research in Sweden; Fr. Francis Edwards S.J. directed me towards canonical references; Professor Dan Jacobson supplied material about the early Judaic history of the Scapegoat; Cynthia Liebow was at all times a highly able enabler in Paris; Katie Mitchell pointed me towards Genets feelings for Marie Antoinette; Mrs. Bernadette Peters, former Archivist, Coutts Bank, researched their archives there for me; Mlle. Ccile Coutin, Vice Prsidente de lAssociation Marie-Antoinette, supplied information about Marie Antoinettes compositions and the 1993 commemoration; Mr. J. E. A. Wickham, M.S., M.D., B. Sc., F.R.C.S., F.R.C.P., F.R.C.R., gave advice on phimosis. I am much indebted for conversations, advice and critical comments to Dr. Philip Mansel, M. Bernard Minoret, Dr. Robert Oresko and Dr. John Rogister. Professor T. C. W. Blanning read the manuscript for errors, the remaining ones being, of course, my own.