The Lost King of France: The Tragic Story of Marie-Antoinette's Favourite Son. Deborah Cadbury
of knowing that her daughter had finally provided two male heirs. After a short illness, she had died of inflammation of the lungs. Marie-Antoinette was inconsolable, reported Madame Campan. ‘She kept herself shut up in her closet for several days … saw none but the royal family, and received none but the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Polignac.’ Even at a distance, her mother had been a powerful influence in her life, constantly providing shrewd and critical guidance. She felt her isolation now, in a foreign court, with all the responsibilities of queen, wife and mother.
Marie-Antoinette did have one treasured memento of her mother, a lock of her hair, which she wore close to her skin. And in Austria, concealed in the empress’s rosary, there was a small token of her distant daughter. The delicate chain of black rosary beads was entwined with sixteen gold medallions encasing locks of hair from her children. After her death, the rosary passed to her oldest daughter, the invalid, Maria-Anna, who lived in the Elisabethinen convent in Klagenfurt. These small symbols of the empress’s children were all but forgotten. In time, they would assume great significance.
‘This is a revolt?’ asked the king, hearing of the fall of the Bastille.
‘No sire, it is a revolution,’ came the reply.
Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt (July 1789)
At Versailles, Louis-Charles, the Duc de Normandie, lived a charmed life, well protected from the ‘trifling disturbances’ – as they were sometimes known at court – beyond the palace gates. In the royal nursery, under the sensitive administration of the Governess of the Children of France, the Duchesse de Polignac, his little empire was well endowed with servants. Apart from Cecile, his wet nurse, there was a cradle rocker, Madame Rambaud, and his personal rocker, Madame Rousseau, otherwise known as ‘Rocker to the Children of France’, whose sister, Madame Campan, worked in the Queen’s Household. Valets were appointed such as Hanet Cléry, a particularly loyal and discreet servant who had been in service to the royal family since 1782. In addition, the Duc de Normandie had two room boys, four ushers, a porter, a silver cleaner, a laundress, a hairdresser, two first chamber women, eight ordinary women and a periphery of minor staff all vying for importance.
The nursery on the ground floor of Versailles opened out onto the large terraces and acres of ornamental gardens beyond; rows of orange trees and neatly trimmed box bushes receded into the distance, geometrically arranged around circular pools with tall fountains cascading onto statues, gilded each year. Any infant tumble from the prince as he took his first steps would bring a kaleidoscope of riches to view; wherever he looked, his soft and silken world was perfect. His mother watched his excellent progress with delight. Louis-Charles was glowing with vitality, ‘a real peasant boy, big, rosy and plump’, she wrote. This contrasted sharply with his brother, Monsieur le Dauphin, who although more than three years older was constantly prone to infections.
Monsieur le Dauphin was eventually moved out of the nursery and established in his own official suite on the ground floor of Versailles, ousting his Uncle Provence. His older sister, Madame Royale, also had her own apartment near Marie-Antoinette, under the Hall of Mirrors. Apart from occasional state duties, such as the grand couvert, where they would dine in public – Madame Royale with her hair powdered and wearing a stiff panniered gown, the Duc de Normandie usually sitting on his mother’s lap – their lives were shielded from the public. The Duc de Normandie was taken on carriage trips around the park and visits to the farm at the Trianon, or he could play in his little garden on the terrace. Occasionally there would be trips to nearby palaces at Marly, Saint Cloud or Fontainebleau.
None the less, the ‘gilded youth’ of Versailles, in the words of one nobleman, the Comte de Ségur, walked ‘upon a carpet of flowers which covered an abyss’. France’s deepening financial crisis was beginning to dominate public life. In 1787 interest on the national debt alone had risen to almost half of all state expenditure. Louis and his finance minister, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, were fast approaching a point where it was no longer possible to borrow more money except at excessive interest rates. They faced no alternative but to raise taxes.
Calonne, like his predecessors, urged the king to reform the tax system and abolish the partial exemption from direct taxation enjoyed by the nobility and clergy. The king, always anxious to create a consensus for change rather than appear to act as autocratic leader, wanted to introduce Calonne’s reforms without confrontation. Consequently, rather than present his proposals to the parlements – which he knew would be hostile – he decided to take a chance and call a special ‘Assembly of Notables’ composed of leading figures in society, hand-picked for the occasion.
However, when the Assembly of Notables gathered in Versailles in February 1787, far from accepting and popularising the tax reforms as the king had hoped, they were suspicious. The clergy and nobles, who owned most of the land, were largely exempt from the principal land tax, the taille, yet under the new measures they would pay up to five per cent of their own income. As news spread of the proposed tax reforms and soaring deficit, Calonne became the focus of the passionate criticism. In Paris his effigy was burned in the streets. By April 1787 the king was forced to dismiss his unpopular minister, and the following month he dissolved the Assembly of Notables.
His new finance minister, Loménie de Brienne, prepared a revised package of tax reforms and boldly decided he would try to win approval directly from the Parlement of Paris. However, the Parlement, like the Assembly of Notables, rejected the equalisation of taxation. Ironically, this revolutionary measure, which would have benefited the vast majority of people, was perceived to be an act of despotism by the monarchy. Since the king had to raise money somehow, to pay staff and honour debts, he was becoming increasingly desperate. In August 1787 he exiled the entire Parlement of Paris to the country at Troyes. This caused uproar; there were demonstrations in Paris and crowds gathered outside Parlement crying for ‘liberty’. Although Louis had reduced court spending, the proposed increases in taxes for the nobles and clergy were inextricably linked in the public’s mind with the demands made by the royal family on the public purse to fund their extravagant lifestyle. The public’s growing hostility began to focus on Louis and, inevitably, his Austrian wife, Marie-Antoinette.
A large diamond necklace would prove the queen’s undoing: 647 brilliants, 2,800 carats, arranged in glittering layer upon layer, a piece of jewellery to dazzle the eye and empty the purse. It was the dream creation of the court jewellers, Böhmer and Bassenge, and they hoped to sell this diamond fantasy to Marie-Antoinette. To their disappointment, by the late 1780s the ‘Queen of the Rococo’ was now much more restrained; she repeatedly refused to buy the necklace.
Böhmer would not give up. He offered his 1.6 million livres ‘superb necklace’ to the king, hoping he would buy it for Marie-Antoinette. The king, it seems, was not in a necklace-buying mood. Faced with constant if polite refusals, the worried Böhmer, increasingly looking bankruptcy in the eye, decided on a rather theatrical appeal to the queen and waylaid her at court. ‘Madame, I am ruined and disgraced if you do not purchase my necklace,’ he cried as he threw himself on his knees. ‘I shall throw myself into the river.’ The queen spoke to him severely: ‘Rise, Böhmer. I do not like these rhapsodies.’ She urged him to break up the necklace and sell the stones separately.
It was the queen’s misfortune that the grand almoner of France, one Cardinal de Rohan, had long dreamed of enhancing his standing with the royal family. The cardinal fell prey to a con artist posing as a friend of the queen, a certain charming Comtesse Jeanne de La Motte-Valois. Knowing that the cardinal wished to ingratiate himself and be part of the queen’s elite circle, Jeanne de La Motte hired a woman to dress like Marie-Antoinette and meet him secretly one night in the palace grounds. This false queen pressed a rose into the cardinal’s hand and hurried away, leaving him under the delightful impression that he had indeed met with the queen’s favour.
Encouraged by this, when Jeanne de La Motte told the cardinal that the queen wished him to purchase Böhmer’s famous