The Lost King of France: The Tragic Story of Marie-Antoinette's Favourite Son. Deborah Cadbury
King’s Household Troops, Swiss Guards, Musketeers, Gendarmes and countless other staff and visitors.
Marie-Antoinette was taken to the ground-floor apartments where her ladies-in-waiting were to get her ready for her wedding. Nothing can have prepared the princess for the lavishness of the palace; the Hofburg in Austria was modest by comparison. The reception rooms were of an unbelievable richness and elegance, and the draped and canopied beds of the royal apartments had more in common with Cleopatra’s silken barge than the planks and straw of the common lot. Then there were the endless mirrored panels of the vast Galerie des Glaces where courtiers were assembling to greet her. This famous Hall of Mirrors was the talk of Europe, with its four hundred thousand reflected candles, gold and more gold, the sparkle of diamonds and the finest crystal – and, beyond the tall western windows, the perfect view with its enchanted blue distance held for ever in mirrors. It could not fail to seduce the senses and beguile the emperor’s daughter as to her assured prospects at Versailles.
The marriage ceremony took place later that day in the gilt and white chapel at Versailles. In this regal setting, Bourbon kings were traditionally christened and married, secure in the knowledge of their ‘divine right’ as monarch. Standing before the carved marble altar, the Dauphin, dressed in cloth of gold studded with diamonds, found the whole procedure something of an ordeal. ‘He trembled excessively during the service,’ wrote one eyewitness. ‘He appeared to have more timidity than his little wife and blushed up to his eyes when he gave [her] the ring.’ Marie-Antoinette, her slender figure seeming lost in her voluminous white brocade gown, was sufficiently nervous that when she signed the register, she spilt some ink.
The ceremony was followed by a grand reception in the Galerie des Glaces for over six thousand guests and a sumptuous wedding feast in the Opera House, which was inaugurated in their honour. Afterwards, following customary French etiquette, the bride and groom were prepared for bed in a very public ritual where the king himself gave the nightshirt to his grandson. Yet for all the weeks of imposing preparations in anticipation of this happy moment, when the sheets were checked in the morning, there was no evidence that the marriage had been consummated.
While the ageing king ‘was enchanted with the young Dauphine’, observed her First Lady of the Bedchamber, Henriette Campan – ‘all his conversation was about her graces, her vivacity, and the aptness of her repartees’ – her new husband was not so appreciative. Rumours soon began to circulate that the Dauphin was impotent or had difficulty making love. He showed only ‘the most mortifying indifference, and a coldness which frequently degenerated into rudeness’, continues Madame Campan, whose memoirs as the queen’s maid convey many intimate details of Marie-Antoinette’s early years in France. ‘Not even all her charms could gain upon his senses; he threw himself as a matter of duty upon the bed of the Dauphine, and often fell asleep without saying a single word to her!’ When Marie-Antoinette expressed her concerns in a letter to her mother, the empress advised her not to be too impatient with her husband, since increasing his uneasiness would only make matters worse. None the less, Marie-Antoinette was worried and ‘deeply hurt’ by his lack of physical interest in her.
The Dauphin was, in fact, a serious, well-intentioned young man who suffered from a chronic lack of confidence and self-assertiveness. As a child, Louis had felt himself to be in the shadow of his brothers; first his brilliant older brother, who had died at the age of ten, and then his younger brothers, the clever and calculating Comte de Provence – who wanted the throne for himself – and the handsome Comte d’Artois. To add to his sense of insecurity, when Louis was eleven his father had died of tuberculosis, to be followed soon afterwards by his mother – a loss which he felt deeply. Increasingly anxious about whether he was equal to his future role, he withdrew, absorbing himself in his studies, especially history, or pursuing his passion for the hunt. Somewhat incongruously for a future king, he also loved lock-making and had a smithy and forge installed next to his library. Marie-Antoinette did not share his interest in history or reading and thought his smithying quite ridiculous. ‘You must agree that I wouldn’t look very beautiful standing in a forge,’ she told a friend. Her mother, the empress, was increasingly concerned about their apparent incompatibility.
For the public, however, the fortunate young couple symbolised all the promise of new age. When Louis and Marie-Antoinette made their first ceremonial entrance into Paris on 8 June 1773, there was jubilant cheering. Their cortège clattered across the streets of the capital, which had been strewn with flowers. ‘There was such a great crowd,’ wrote Marie-Antoinette, ‘that we remained for three-quarters of an hour without being able to go forwards or backwards.’ When they finally appeared on the balcony of the palace of the Tuileries, the crowds were ecstatic and their cheers increased as the Dauphine smiled. Hats were thrown in the air with abandon, handkerchiefs were waving and everyone was enthusiastic. ‘Madame, they are two hundred thousand of your lovers,’ murmured the governor of Paris, the Duc de Brissac, as he saw the sea of admiring faces.
The following year, their protected lives were to change dramatically. On 27 April 1774, Louis XV was dining with his mistress when he became feverish with a severe headache. The next day, at Versailles, he broke out in a rash. The diagnosis was serious: smallpox. Within a few days, as his body became covered with foul-smelling sores, it was apparent that the king was suffering from a most virulent form of the disease. Louis and Marie-Antoinette had no chance to pay their last respects; they were forbidden to visit him. In less than two weeks the once handsome body in his exquisite gilded bed festooned in gold brocade appeared to be covered in one huge, unending black scab.
For those who could not come near the sick room, a candle had been placed near the window, which was to be extinguished the instant the king died. Louis and Marie-Antoinette were waiting together, watching the flickering light at the window with growing apprehension. When the flame went out, ‘suddenly a dreadful noise, absolutely like thunder’, wrote Madame Campan, was heard in the outer apartment. ‘This extraordinary tumult … was the crowd of courtiers who were deserting the dead sovereign’s antechamber to come and bow to the new power of Louis XVI.’ The courtiers threw themselves on their knees with cries of ‘Le roi est mort: vive le roi!’ The whole scene was overwhelming for the nineteen-year-old king and his eighteen-year-old queen. ‘Pouring forth a flood of tears, [they] exclaimed: “God guide and protect us! We are too young to govern.”’
The coronation ceremony was held on a very hot day in June 1775. Louis-Auguste walked up the aisle of Rheims cathedral dressed in stately splendour and bearing the sword of Charlemagne. He was anointed with oil and the crown of France was solemnly lowered onto his head. Such was the magnificence of the occasion and the jubilation of the crowds that Marie-Antoinette was overwhelmed and had to leave the gallery to wipe away her tears. When she returned the spectators in the packed cathedral cheered once again and the king’s eyes were full of appreciation for his young wife. ‘Even if I were to live for two hundred years,’ Marie-Antoinette wrote ecstatically to her mother, she would never forget the wonderful day. ‘I can only be amazed by the will of Providence that I, the youngest of your children, should have become queen of the finest kingdom in Europe.’
However, ‘the finest kingdom in Europe’ that Louis-Auguste and Marie-Antoinette had inherited was not all that it appeared. The visible outward signs of great wealth that greeted them every day in the sheer size and opulence of Versailles disguised a huge national debt. Their predecessors, Louis XIV and Louis XV, had pursued policies that had driven France to the verge of bankruptcy. A succession of expensive wars had aggravated the problem. In the War of Austrian Succession, spanning 1740 to 1748, France had fought as an ally of Prussia against Austria, the Netherlands and Britain. Eight years later, between 1756 and 1763, Louis XV reversed France’s historic hostility to Austria by allying with them against Britain and Prussia in the Seven Years’ War. These two wars alone cost France 2.8 billion livres (around twenty-four livres to the pound), much of which could only be paid by borrowing.
These problems were compounded by an ancient system of taxation that exacted more from the poor than the rich. The fast-growing population of France was divided into three ‘estates’. The First Estate consisted of around one hundred thousand clergy. The Second Estate comprised almost half a million nobility. The Third Estate were the commoners, the vast majority of the population, consisting of the peasants, wage earners