Marie Antoinette

FROM the death of Louis XV. to the close of the summer of 1777 is a period of somewhat over three years. In those three years the fates of the French monarchy and of the Queen were decided. For though no great catastrophe marked them nor even any considerable fruit of policy, and though an onlooker would have said no more than that something a little disappointing had, in the process of these years, chilled the first enthusiasm for the new reign, yet we can to-day discover within their limits most of those origins from which the ruin of the future was to come.

For the Queen especially, whom hitherto her minority, her seclusion and the deliberate silence of her childhood had guarded, the opportunities for action which her husband’s accession suddenly offered were opportunities of fate, and the three years with which this chapter has to deal were for her young and exalted innocence of eighteen like that short week of spring when seeds are sown in a garden: they were a brief season of warmth, of vigour, and of clarity during which circumstance sowed for her in every variety the seeds of misfortune and of death. All is there: the advent of an uneasy gaiety; the solace of gems, of cards, of excessive friendships; the vivid but wholly personal, erratic and capricious intervention in matters of State; the simple confidence in the policy of her mother’s Austrian government and the continual support of it; the enmities which all active natures provoke, but which hers had a talent for confirming; the friction of such an activity against the hard and, to her, the alien qualities of the French mind—all these, which the Princess could try to ignore when her husband was but heir and she in her retirement, appear with the first months of her liberty as Queen, strike root, and are seen above ground before she has completed her twenty-second year. And with these positive irritants their negative reactions also come: the Court assumes its divisions; the stories and the songs and the nicknames begin against her; the popular legend concerning her is conceived; the trend of the Orleans faction in antagonism to her is established, and a new generation contemporary with, or but slightly senior to, her own has become fixed within the same three years in a direction which—though none then saw it—could not but destroy her in the progress of years.

To understand in what way the common accidents of that brief three years’ term moved to their great effects it is necessary to know two things: first, the physical infirmity under which Louis XVI. suffered, and, secondly, the nature of the Bourbon Crown he wore; for it is the conjunction of such an infirmity with such an office that lends to the first years of his reign and to the first errors of his wife their capital importance in the history of that one woman and of the world.

Louis, it had first been whispered, and was now upon his accession commonly asserted, could have no heir.

When first the mere form of marriage between him in his boyhood and Marie Antoinette (a child) had been solemnised, no public and no familiar regard was paid to the relations between them. The great ceremony was necessarily esteemed a solemn and irrevocable betrothal rather than a wedlock, and (as I have already said) it was taken for granted that in some two or three years the process of nature would continue the royal line.

But as the Princess advanced to her sixteenth, to her seventeenth year; as her upstanding and vigorous youth achieved first a full growth, then ripeness, then maturity, and yet provoked no issue, the common explanation of such an accident could not but be generally given, and the impotence of the Dauphin was universally accepted. At eighteen, in the last autumn of the old King’s reign, the young wife had stood apparent and triumphant, clothed with a charm which, if it was not that of beauty, was certainly that of exuberant life; a whole ball-room had been arrested at her entrance; the crowds of Paris had quickened at her approach; the lively look, the deep brows, and the full hair tender and vaguely red, which Fersen had seen suddenly revealed, were those of a woman informed with an accumulated and expectant vitality. It was not in her that the defect could lie. Louis, so it plainly seemed, was deficient and was in title only her husband.

A conjunction of this kind is not uncommon even in an active, healthy, and laborious lineage of the middle rank; among the wealthy it is frequent; in the genealogy of families which carry a public function, such as those of monarchs or of an oligarchy, for all the careful choice which their marriages involve, it is often present. Such accidents are provided for. In many cases probably, in some certainly, a supposititious child is introduced. When that course is difficult or repugnant the situation is acknowledged; the consort chooses between her devotions and a lover; all the planning and all the necessary preparation which attach to the succession regard the brother or cousin, who is henceforward accepted as the heir, and his position is the more highly established from the contrast his vigour may afford to the defect in the reigning incumbent.

I say such a conjunction is of a known type in history; there were precedents for action and a certain course to be pursued. Monsieur, the King’s brother, would have attracted the service and respect to which his then vigorous intellect was fitted. The Queen’s vagaries would have been contemptuously excused, for she would have stood apart from the line of succession, and her character would have been indifferent to her husband’s subjects. The Crown as an institution would have suffered little, though its immediate holder would have lost personal prestige, had the conjecture of Louis’ impotence, which was, upon the King’s accession, common to the Court and the populace, been confirmed.

Now that conjecture was, as the future showed, erroneous. A very careful, sceptical, and universal observer might have discovered, even as early as this year of Louis’ accession, that it was erroneous.

In the first place the gestures, habits, and character of the King were not such as should be associated with this kind of imbecility. His body was indeed unhealthy and diseased; it was the body of a nervous, overgrown, loose-limbed child, inherited from a nervous father and from an exhausted race; a body which nature would have removed as it removed his son’s, had not the doctors built up upon its doomed frame an artificial bulk of flesh. I say he was diseased, but not in the manner then believed. The febrile attachment to violence, the lack of humour, the weary eye, which betray an insufficiency of sex and which we so frequently suffer in political life and at the university, were quite absent in Louis. Contrariwise he was good-humoured and kindly (saving to cats), very fond of hard riding and capable in that exercise; he was further of an even though astonishingly slow judgment, and possessed that desire to make (to file, saw, fit, design, ply a trade of hand and eye) which is an invariable accompaniment of virility. He loved and practised mechanical arts, such as the locksmith’s or the watch-maker’s. There was nothing in him of what is nowadays called (by a French euphemism) “The Intellectual.”

Were positive evidence lacking such general contrasts between what he was supposed to be and what he was would still have great weight; but evidence more exact can be discovered. The letters written by Marie Antoinette to her mother afford it.

Maria Theresa was in an increasing torment, as each passing month excited her bewilderment, lest her daughter should furnish no heir to the French throne and the object at once of her strong motherly affection and of her political scheme should fail. Her questions were frequent, urgent and clear: her daughter replied to them in terms which a very little reading will suffice to illumine. Marie Antoinette was young and, as I have said, essentially pure; she did not fully comprehend the nature of a situation which was undermining her serenity and gravely marring her entry into life, but she was able both to express her dissatisfaction and yet to assure the Empress upon more than one occasion that she had at last a reasonable hope of maternity. These hopes were in each case disappointed. That such hopes, on the one hand, certainly existed, and that the whole atmosphere of her married life was, upon the other, false and almost intolerable, depended upon the fact that Louis suffered from a partial—and only a partial—mechanical impediment. This impediment a painful operation would suffice to remove; but the knowledge that it was but partial, the divergent advice of doctors and the lethargy which invariably deferred his decisions, all impelled the young man towards procrastination, with the result that in a few months—the brief period immediately and before his accession—his wife had learnt that fever of the mind which accompanies alternations of nervous incertitude; she had weighing upon her a perpetual and acute anxiety which was the more corroding in that it contained so considerable an element of physical ill-ease.

The detail is highly intimate and would merit no place in any biography but this. It must be fixed, and has been fixed here, first because to neglect it is to ignore the misfortune from which (if from one origin) flowed the destruction certainly of the Queen, and very probably of the French monarchy itself—a matter of moment to every European; secondly, because history has never yet given it its true place nor fully set forth its nature and importance.

In such a situation Marie Antoinette’s quick nature took refuge in every stimulant; wine she disliked—it was among her few but marked eccentricities that throughout her life she would taste nothing but water—but gaming, jewels, doubtful books, many and new voices about her, violent contrasts, caprice upon caprice, unexpected visits, sudden passions for this or that new friend, excessive laughter (and excessive pique), emotions seized wherever they could be found—watching in merry vigils for summer dawns, masked balls that took up all the winter nights, escapades: in a word, a swirl of the fantastic and the new became for her a necessity that—had it taken some one form—would have been called a vice. Her dissipation was driven, as vice is driven, with a spur; it was compatible, as vice is compatible, with her original virtues; it produced, as vice produces, a progressive interior ill-ease. She was a tortured woman in those years.

Children became a craving to her.

One day as she went with the lady who was supposed to control the etiquette of her life, as she went sadly in her coach along the western road, she turned off it along a by-lane for her pleasure, and reached that village of St. Michel which lies upon the slope of the hill above Bougival. As she passed through the village in her grandeur and took the Louveciennes road, she saw a peasant child and, by a sudden but most intense and profound impulse, caught it up and said she would make it hers. It was a little tiny boy, still a baby, toddling upon the road; it had been christened James; the name of its parents was Amand. The freak was good news for them; they blessed her, and she went away. And the child was to be adopted and brought up at her expense, and she was to watch it in Versailles.

Very many years later his name came up again, obscure, but fixed, in the roll-call of a battle, and we shall read it once more, stamped across the strange sequence of her life.

If any one desires to see, in a very modern and tawdry mirror, what evil had possessed the mind of this well-born lady, let him watch (from some distance) a certain financial world in London and that cosmopolitan gang in Paris to which that world is allied by blood and in whose support—whenever it is endangered—they are to be found, for in Paris and London they are one. With far more refinement and with infinitely greater variety, she (like those modern money-dealers) sought in a rush of fantastic and novel experience to assuage a thirst. They have no plea save the coarseness of their lineage. She had for excuse the gnawing of a position which none about her comprehended, and which she herself, though her body resented it, saw but dimly with her young mind, and which disturbed her as a confused, intolerable thing.

From within, therefore, she is amply to be excused; but consider the effect of her fever upon those who saw her. Consider the effect of this new manner of hers upon the public function of the French monarchy.

The French have, with their own hands, destroyed the conception of “a king”: in Europe to-day we look around and find nothing of monarchy remaining. A few impoverished symbols, a few indebted, a few insufficiently salaried men, of whose true character the public knows nothing, afford or do not afford unifying titles for a bureaucracy there, an oligarchy here: in Italy a national name, in Spain a moribund tradition. But that monarchy which the Gaulish energy had drawn out of the stuff of old Rome was another matter; it was a sacramental alliance between an idea and a thing.

The Idea was that of the Gallic formula “without Authority there is no life”—for Authority is Authorship: this Gallic formula also sustains the Faith.

The Thing was one lineage of actual and living men: devoted, from father to son—sacrificed almost as in a public sacrifice—condemned to the perpetual burden of being mixed into this Idea and of supporting the burden of its intensity and power.

There had descended from the Merovingian and the Carolingian families to the Capetian, bearing a power that increased with every century, the conception of a creative executive made flesh; an executive that should reside in the living matter of a family of men who should be seen, known, touched, loved, or hated; who should rapidly pronounce new and necessary laws, actively preserve the yet more necessary body of ancient and fundamental custom, observe in public the religion of the community, and, above all, lead in battle. That was the rôle; that was the mould. The bond of heredity forced many an incongruity into that mould (a child sometimes and sometimes a madman), yet—so short is one human life in the general story of a nation—the gap thus formed was rapidly filled by a successor, and the permanent impression remained of a soldier incarnating a community of soldiers.

This institution had now endured for much more than a thousand years. This Gallic institution had impressed itself (here, as in Germany, by imitation; there, as in Britain, by direct importation) upon all the civilisation of the West. It had grown old, as must all human institutions that have no direct sustenance from forces outside time; but even so it maintained a mysterious vitality. Its kings were anointed. It held a sort of compact with the Divine, and in this its old age was still alive with a salutary if a grotesque publicity.

The King and Queen of France were the least protected of any in the realm from insult, satire, and gibe; even where their own law protected them, a general conspiracy, as it were, the instinct of all society, defended the pamphleteer.

The King and Queen were publicly owned: all they had was public money; all they did they did before a crowd. Every week they dined at a table in a vast hall. Their nobles stood by but did not eat—before them a thousand or (according to the weather) ten thousand of the populace defiled curiously and unceasingly. They prayed in public. They were expected to receive in public the applause or the condemnation of all. They were public for the destruction of secret things, conspiracies, masonries, Templars, trusts, rings. They were publicly approached by any at random and publicly claimed as the public redressers of wrong—always in theory and often in actual fact. Nay, their physical acts were public. They dressed and undressed before an audience—or rather were dressed and undressed by these. The birth of every royal child was witnessed by a mob crowding the Queen’s chamber.

The vast inconvenience of such a part was but one aspect of its sanctity, and the Crown united, as in the heart of a mystery, the functions of Victim and of Lord.

Amid the great new wealth of the eighteenth century, and in the glare of its brilliant new intelligence, it may be imagined with what a fence of tradition and precedent public opinion and its own nature insisted on defending this national centre. Anecdotes of that rigid, minute, and often inhuman etiquette are too well known to need repetition here. Two instances may suffice.

The Queen could drink nothing by night or by day but from the hand of the highest in rank of the women present, nor could this last accept the glass and the water save from the hand of a page. The King must not eat at all until he had performed an ablution like a priest: the vessels of this and the napkin were sacred; rather than put them to a profane use, when they had once done their service they were destroyed by fire.

Such extravagances in the old age of an institution lend themselves to ridicule, as do (for instance) the fantastic ceremonies of the House of Commons or the comic-opera costumes of court officials and of peers. But though, isolated, they present this weakness, collectively, and seen in relation to the function they serve, such survivals have a meaning, and a consideration of such ceremonial helps men to a comprehension of the institution it surrounds.

Conceive, then—for it is the note of all this chapter—the impact of such a mood as that of the distracted Queen upon such a Court, stiff with such traditions and living under such a bright beam of publicity, the mark of a million eyes all keen to discern whatever trifle was done between mid-day and dawn. Marie Antoinette chafed impatiently against this central national institution. The fever now upon her caused her always to despise and sometimes to neglect the rules that were of the essence of her position. The moral and internal constraint which tortured her inflamed her to “live her life”; but for those of great wealth and opportunity such a mood is and must be dissipation; dissipation in its fullest sense: the dispersion not only of character and of self-discipline, but of responsibility, of externals even, and at last of power. It meant, and necessarily meant, the patronage of those far below her and their consequent estrangement; the contempt of those immediately beneath her and their consequent enmity.

Just after the old King’s death the Court was at La Muette. She must needs, to prove her liberty, go up and talk familiarly to an old gardener like any Lady Bountiful. The old gardener’s annoyance is not recorded; that of her ladies is. They complained to the King, who was troubled, but who, knowing the truth, answered, “Let her be.”

That same day, when a deputation of the Burgesses’ wives paid her their court, coming from the city at her gate and full of ceremony, she could do nothing more dignified than giggle at their awkwardness and at their dress. In the intervals of, according to each, a pompous greeting, she must whisper to one or other of her ladies most unpompously; the very servants were rendered uneasy by her manner.

In how many ways and how rapidly this mood (this physical, fatal, necessary mood) was to wear down her position immediately after her accession to the throne many examples will show. The best and the most general aspect from which one may first regard it is her attempted immixture in public affairs, for that also was a fretful and personal thing, part of her mood.

The first six or seven months of the new reign cover the period which was officially that of mourning for Louis XV. and are for the general historian of this importance: that in them was fixed the new ministerial tradition which culminated in the summoning of the States-General.

This new tradition owed nothing to the Queen. She was hardly aware of its presence. For her the choice of new Ministers was a personal and almost a domestic business in which she somehow had a right (and could find it entertaining) to play a part—she knew not what nor how. That part of hers turned out, as a fact, a small part and indecisive, utterly without plan; but such as it was it marks her necessity for action and change, and exhibits her place beside the King. In the intervals of choosing a new hairdresser and a new dressmaker, she paused now half-an-hour, now an hour, in the cabinet, hearing names which she hardly knew, and giving random advice which must have strained her audience to the very limits of toleration.

It was not mere Austrian action. Her brother the Emperor would often beg her not to meddle; the Austrian ambassador Mercy deplored her innocence of affairs and her inability to follow any one interest for one hour. Her mother wrote affectionately and worriedly, giving her the stale old advice of supporting Vienna—but fearing her capacity to do so. Meanwhile the Queen herself acted from the simple motive of being seen about, and added to this the equally simple motives of private tastes. Thus she would have restored Choiseul to some office. He came up a month after the accession, and she greeted him very kindly. He had helped to make her Queen, he was the traditional ally of Vienna, and though Vienna certainly did not want him now, Marie Antoinette went by the name and its associations alone: she judged as a child would judge. The King, who had no intention of accepting Choiseul, made a little awkward conversation with him, the opening of which turned pleasantly upon the old man’s baldness, and next day Choiseul went back home, “to see to the tedding of his hay.”

Again, the choice of Maurepas for chief Minister, four weeks before, was not—as has been represented—hers. The King chose his father’s old friend rather for permanent adviser and companion than as a first Minister—which title indeed he never received, and that Maurepas entered at all was the work not even of the King himself but of his aunt, Madame Adelaide. In the confusion of the first two days, when Sartines, Choiseul, Machault were all possible as Prime Ministers and all discussed, Madame Adelaide repeatedly suggested Maurepas’ name. To her and her sisters he was a tradition, part of a time which these old maids looked back to with regret as the last time of dignity, before mistresses had destroyed their father’s Court and half exiled them to their apartments.

Maurepas was seventy-three; he had left office between forty and fifty, and had done so from a quarrel with the Pompadour. This alone recommended him to Louis XV.’s daughter; that he should have been untouched by the vile interregnum of the Du Barry recommended him still more. Madame Adelaide had known him in power when, as a girl of seventeen, the eldest of the sisters, she was certain of life, in tune with her great position, and pleased with all she saw. Now after twenty-five years, which had been increasingly marred by a distant and bitter isolation from the Court, his name recurred to her as that of a fellow-sufferer and a memory of her youth. Madame Adelaide’s devoted service in her father’s last illness (she had caught the small-pox herself in attending him) gravely increased the weight of her advice. It was through her that Louis XVI. received the old man, and, once received, he remained. True, Marie Antoinette had carried the message to the King from his aunt, but she had done no more than this.

If it is asked why, with so little influence, the Queen’s perpetual interference was none the less permitted, and why this girl of eighteen, vivacious as she was ignorant, might ceaselessly bustle in and out of the council chamber, the answer is not that she was Queen—for no Queen had yet acted thus at Versailles, nor would any woman conscious of power have done so—but first that her whole self was now restless beyond bearing, and next that the King was ashamed to withstand her whom, afflicted as he was, he could hardly propose to command or regulate. With every fresh opening of the council door she made an enemy, with none a friend; but Louis all the while could only answer “Let her be.”

In one thing only during these months had she a clear object—and that was not a policy: she was determined to be rid of the Du Barry’s name. That woman was far away, exiled to Burgundy from the moment of the accession, to return afterwards to Louveciennes, but some of her clique remained, hated by all the populace and half the Court as much as by the Queen. With so much support Marie Antoinette succeeded. Three weeks after the death of Louis XV., D’Aiguillon was relieved of the department of Foreign Affairs: the grant of public money which he received on his resignation—it was but £20,000—would seem to us in modern England pitifully small, for we take it for granted that public officials should have a share in the public funds. But it is significant of the time and of the French temper that the grant was vigorously opposed and was obtained only on the personal demand of old Maurepas, who (by one of those coincidences so frequent in aristocracies) happened to be the uncle of this his chief political opponent.

Here was Marie Antoinette’s one success. The Austrian Court and Embassy had desired to keep D’Aiguillon—he could be played upon. Marie Antoinette had rejected their advice; she had gone, day after day, to the King, until he had consented to deprive D’Aiguillon of his post—and immediately her deficiency was apparent. To deprive D’Aiguillon was, in politics, not necessary, and, if accomplished, not final. To find some one for the Foreign Office who should at once be able and yet work contentedly under old Maurepas was of both immediate and of weighty importance. She refused to interest herself in the matter!

Luckily for France, Vergennes, then the representative of Louis at the Court of Stockholm, was chosen by the good judgment of the King, in spite of an impossible oriental wife.

Vergennes, approaching his sixtieth year, tenacious, silent, industrious, highly experienced, and microscopic, as it were, in the detail of diplomacy, was just such an one as the French needed to conserve the forces of their nation, to balance the smaller States against the rivals of Versailles, and to choose the very moment for the attack on England which, later, was to establish the United States. It is probable that, but for him, in the embarrassment of French finance and the consequent weakness of French arms, the nation would have fallen into some German conflict or have been abused before some German contention. As it was, the French owe in great part to Vergennes that peaceful accumulation of energy which permitted the Revolution to triumph.

In the nomination of this considerable diplomatic force the Queen had no part at all.

She had no part in the nomination of Turgot.

It is difficult to write the name of “Turgot” without admitting a digression, though such a digression adapts itself but ill to any account of the Queen.

Turgot is the name that dominates the first two years of the reign for every historian. The time has hardly come to criticise him. Criticism of his faults is easy; a full appreciation is difficult, so near are we still to his time, and so exactly did he represent the spirit which was at that moment germinating in every intellect, so active was he in its expression. The over-simple economies, the plain egalitarian political theory, the positive scepticism (the Faith was then at its lowest throughout the world), the glorious self-possession, the rectitude, yes, and the interior glow of the “Philosophers,” all the Genius of the Republic was incarnate in this man. When upon that singular date (it was the 14th of July) he entered the Ministry, there entered with him the figure, winged for victory yet austere, whose mission it was to create the great and perilous Europe we now know. I mean the Republic. Already Napoleon was born.

Marie Antoinette had no knowledge of this spirit. It had not approached her. She knew vaguely that it was indifferent to her religion (to which the very young woman was already sensibly though slightly attached). She knew much more clearly from current talk that it (and Turgot) stood at that moment especially for Retrenchment; and that word Retrenchment she approved, for she had no conception of the sensations that might ensue upon it to her own life if from a word it should become a policy. And Turgot himself had spared her sensibilities by doubling her pin-money.

I say she had no part in the nominating of Turgot—in his fall she was to have too great a part.

By the end of August the new Ministry and its policy were complete. All the Du Barry gang and all the memories of Louis XV.’s end were gone—burnt and hanged in effigy by the populace as well. In their place sat a Council whose actual head and principal figure was the young King, slow, large, assiduous, freckled, pale, in a perpetual obese anxiety, ardently seeking an issue to the entanglement of his realm; whose senior was the chiselled old Maurepas, intensely national, witty, experienced in men, but neither instructed nor of a recent practice in affairs; whose foreign affairs were dealt with by the methodical gravity of Vergennes; whose navy was in the honest hands of Sartines, and whose finance—the pivot of every policy, but in France of ’74 life and death—lay under the complete control of Turgot.

I have said that finance had become for the French in 1774 a matter of life and death; and the point is of such capital importance to the Queen’s story that I must beg the reader to consider it here, at the outset of her reign.

What was the economic entanglement of the French Crown at this moment? The reply to that question is not part of Marie Antoinette’s character and conduct, but it so persistently and gravely affected her life and it is so dominating a feature of revolutionary history that a clear conception of it must be entertained before any general understanding of the period can be achieved. Not that the financial difficulty was the main cause of the Revolution—to assert as much would be to fall into the puerile inversion which makes of history an economic phenomenon—but that the financial difficulty was a limiting condition which perpetually checked and warped the political thought of the time whenever that thought attempted to express itself in action.

The clearest background against which to appreciate the finance of old monarchical France is that of the England which was its triumphant rival.

The United Kingdom had at that time less than half the population of France. The territory of England was in much the same proportion—at least, her arable and industrial territory. Her white colonial population was larger then, in proportion to her home population, than it is now, but she had not then the full wealth of India to tax nor the vast revenues now drawn, both in usury and in true profit,^[1] from Australasia, Southern America, and Africa. In other words, the prosperity of England at that time was domestic and real; it contained no parasitic or perilous element which a war could interrupt and a defeat destroy. This England bore with ease a national debt of over 130 million pounds. She was about to engage in a struggle which would nearly double that debt, and yet to feel no weakness. She raised a revenue of ten to eleven millions, which in a few years rose without effort to fifteen—then at the end of it all she was free to triple her debt during the great European war against Napoleon, and yet triumphantly to increase, and, when the war was over, to survive, the only nation with a credit, and at once the bank and the workshop of Europe.

France, so much larger in area and population and inheriting so superior a tradition of magnitude, had all but failed. With citizens double the English in number, and with an arable soil in proportion, the French Crown could only with the utmost difficulty attract to the exchequer a sum of barely twelve—at the most, and counting every expedient, thirteen—million pounds from the national income. Briefly, England could support with ease a larger debt than could this neighbouring nation twice her size; England could spend with prodigality as much as that nation was compelled to spend with parsimony; and England could raise without effort a revenue already equal, soon to be superior, to that which the rival government could but barely extract from its subjects.

Nor does this comparison exhaust the contrast between financial health and disease upon either side of the Channel. England thus prosperous was increasingly at ease. France thus exhausted was increasingly embarrassed. Deficit followed deficit; that expenditure should exceed revenue had become a normal annual incident publicly discounted, nay, a sort of fixed ratio appeared between what should be and what was the income of the government, and the expenditure exceeded revenue with a solemn regularity much in the proportion of forty-four to thirty-seven. In the American War, which either nation was approaching, England, defeated, was to incur 170 million of debt and yet to emerge, a few years after the defeat, financially stronger than ever in the Wars of the Revolution. France, victorious, was to incur but a third of that liability, and yet in the Revolution France was compelled to declare herself insolvent.

Why did so startling a contrast appear? To us to-day it is almost inconceivable. The French are now somewhat less in population than the English, they pretend to no serious empire beyond the Mediterranean, yet they raise for national purposes a larger revenue, and they raise it with far greater facility; they support a debt double our own, without troubling the least gullible and most thrifty investing public in Europe. Considerable additions to their total liability hardly affect their credit, when ours falls by a fifth of its index upon the issue of 150 millions. The value of their agricultural land rises rapidly as does that of their urban; they find public money for enterprises which we starve or neglect. Their universities, though dependent on public funds, abound; their national church, deprived of official assistance, flourishes on but a fraction of their surplus wealth; their historical buildings are kept up in magnificence upon public funds. It is difficult, I say, for an Englishman to try to appreciate the overwhelming economic advantage which, under George III., England enjoyed over the Bourbons, who were her rivals; because in the course of a century, and especially of the present generation, the tables have been turned. It is England now that is in doubt as to her financial position and her fiscal methods. It is in England that money is lacking for necessary social reforms. It is English credit which fluctuates with violence, and English direct taxation which is strained to breaking-point.

In the time of which I write all these perils and disadvantages attached to France and to France alone. The France which England faced in the great struggle was a France labouring in anxiety for money, and the cause of that increasing pressure is apparent to History: the method of public economics had failed in France then as perhaps it is now failing here in England.

Men inherit, and of necessity every generation is shut in with custom. Who would in England to-day dream of taxing the mass of Englishmen—or rather, of taxing them directly and to their own knowledge? The very idea is laughable! There may be coming into a coal-miner’s cottage in Durham twice the income of a clerk, but who would dare send in an assessment or talk of a shilling in the pound? The clerk must pay; the miner go free—for such is the tradition of the Fisc. Who would rate the houses of the wealthiest class as the houses of the middle class are rated? It would seem madness. So, but in a more acute fashion, did the financial system of France suffer at the end of the eighteenth century. Its data, its conventions were those of an older state of society long departed. It presupposed the manor, and the manor was dead; it presupposed the self-contained country-side at a moment when the various provinces of the whole State had long been intimately bound together by commerce and when strong international links of exchange had already begun to arise. The evil was a fiscal system out of touch with the realities of the time. The remedy was a violent and rapid remodelling of that system. All could perceive the evil, many the remedy; but custom and the collective force of private avarice in the individual minds checked, and checked sharply, with the blind control of a natural force, all reform that attempted to act and to do. The attempt at reform was baulked, as a natural force baulks human purpose, by a million atomic actions. The million separate interests refused it.

For such an attempt, for such audacity, Turgot with his austere, convinced, and isolated mind was better suited than any other man; yet even he in a very few months had refused to level the hard-grained social knots which blunted every tool of the reformer who would level the inequalities of the State. Within two years his attempt had failed and he had resigned—but while the resistance of the tax-payer counted for much in his resignation, the increasing ill-balance of his young Queen counted for more.

During the first part of his administration of finance Marie Antoinette’s ill-balance was not so marked as to give promise of what was to come. No folly, no conspicuous extravagance marred the first weeks of her reign—her inchoate and girlish irruptions into the Council were alone of ill-omen; but as the new Court settled down into its stride, accumulated its first traditions and began to take on a character of its own, her aspect in the public eye was daily fixed with greater clearness, and the impression so conveyed to a nation already in rapid transition was a further element of irritation and confusion.

For the permanently present threat of poverty and embarrassment, which with every year corroded more and more deeply the public service and rendered less and less stable the general equilibrium of the State, lent to the habits the Queen was about to form, and still more to the public exaggeration of those habits, a gravity they could never otherwise have assumed. It was part of her lot that she could not, from the very nature of her position, understand the relationship between her petty extravagances and the popular ill-ease.

She was right. Her extravagance, such as it was, came slowly—nay, though that extravagance was a proof of excess in her character, it was never really excessive in amount; the sums we mention when we speak of it are trifling when we compare them with the financial debauchery of our own age. Why, that whole annual increase in her allowance which Turgot has been blamed for making would not have paid for one night’s riot in the house of some one of our London Jews. Even when her expenses did exceed the limit she should have set upon them; even when, as month followed month, the love of jewellery and the distraction of cards involved her in private debt, the sums so wasted in a whole year were not what some of our moderns have scattered in a few days. Her total debts after two years were less than £20,000! Moreover, careless and wasteful as the girl was for those well-ordered times, her excesses never bore an appreciable proportion to the scale of the public embarrassment. Her difficulties were never so great but that the sale of a farm or two could meet them. Had the Bourbon Crown enjoyed private as well as a public revenue, her lack of economy and of order would perhaps never have been heard of.

But it is the characteristic of any morbid condition that the slightest irritant produces an effect vastly beyond its due consequence. The financial embarrassment from which the Kingdom suffered may or may not have been relievable by the plain and harsh methods of Turgot—it is a question to which I will return—but even if they were so relievable, their immediate application could not but be an aggravation of popular suffering; and just in the years when increasing economic difficulty and sharp economic remedies for it were catching the public between two millstones of poverty below and retrenchment above, the populace had presented to them, upon a pinnacle whence she could be observed on every side, a young woman who in some sense summed up the State, and yet who, in mere externals at least, showed a growing disregard for method and a pursuit of every emotion that might distract her from what the French thought the duty, but what she knew to be the tragedy, of her marriage.

The mourning of the Court forbade display until the autumn of 1774, and though with the autumn and the winter there was some relaxation of ancient rules and some revolt already observable upon Marie Antoinette’s part against the fixed and inherited rules of her station, yet there was nothing which had yet seized the popular imagination nor even gravely affected her position within the narrow circle of her equals. It was not until the next year, 1775, that the error and the misfortune began.

It had long been intended that her brother, the Emperor Joseph, should visit France, and by his more active character persuade Louis XVI. to an operation which he perpetually postponed. The repeated adjournment of this visit (which was to resolve so many doubts) was among the fatal elements of the Queen’s early life. In the place of that sovereign, the youngest child of the Hapsburgs, Maximilian, little more than a boy, fat, and what would have been called in a lower rank of society deficient, waddled into the astonished Court at La Muette in the opening of February.

The accident of his arrival did neither the Queen nor the Court any great hurt among the crowds of the capital. His startling ignorance and heavy lack of breeding amused the crowd; they were glad to repeat the amusing anecdotes of his awkwardness as later in their Republican armies they were glad to caricature his obesity when he had achieved the ecclesiastical dignity of a princely archbishopric. But among her intimate equals the visit was disastrous. The Princes of the Blood insisted upon receiving his call before they paid their court to him, since he was travelling incognito. It was a point (to them) of grave moment. The Queen rubbed it in with spirit. She would not let him pay such a call. She told them that her brother “had other sights to see in Paris and could put off seeing the Princes of the Blood.” The King stood by during the quarrel, irresolute, upon the whole supporting his wife. The King’s brothers for the moment supported her also; but the kernel of the affair lay in her disregard of inherited tradition, in her contempt for those fine shades of mutual influence and deference which to the French are all important indications of authority, but which to her were meaningless extravaganzas of parade. Chartres, during the progress of what he thought an insult, she a piece of common sense, deliberately left the Court, publicly showed himself in Paris, and was applauded for his spirit.

This wilfulness, this picked quarrel, sprang from the same root as, and was similar to, whatever other fevers disturbed her entry into her twentieth year.

The Queen had conceived a violent affection for the Princesse de Lamballe, a young woman of the Blood, but Piedmontese, the widow of a debauchee—a simpering, faithful, stupid, sentimental and most unfortunate young woman, often gushing in her joy, next, in grief, wringing her enormous hands. It was an attachment almost hysterical and subject to extreme fluctuations. The Queen had conceived a second attachment, with the opening of this year 1775, for another woman, as good-natured indeed, but more solid and more capable of intrigue than Madame de Lamballe, the Comtesse de Polignac. In the empty society of the one, in the full and babbling coterie of the other, Marie Antoinette expended the greater part of her energy. Finding to hand, as it were, the Guémenées (and Madame de Guémenée constitutionally fixed as “Governess to the children of France”—children that did not exist), she plunged also into the Guémenée set, and there she discovered, for the first time in her young life, a powerful drug for the stimulation of whatever in adventurous youth has been wounded by disappointment and youth’s hot despair—gambling. The gambling took root quickly in this girl who hated wine and had desired so much of life. It was large in ’75; in ’76 it was to be ruinous to her watched and doled allowance.

Meanwhile the tailors and the milliners and all the ruck of parasites were taking advantage of the new reign to play extravagant experiments in fashion, to build fantastic head-dresses and to load humanity with comic feathers. She did not create such novelties, but she was willing to follow them.

The young bloods, in one of those recurrent fits of Anglomania to which the wealthy among the French are subject, must introduce horse-racing. She passionately approved. It gave her gambling the familiarity or lack of restraint which she was determined to breathe for the solution of her ills; it gave her the feeling of crowds about her, of pulse and of the flesh.

Young Artois, the youngest of the King’s brothers, because he was the most vivacious of those nearest her, must be her constant companion. Mercy noted his “shocking familiarity”; he feared that scandals would arise.... They did.

Again, as the new reign advanced, her unpolitical and most unwise concern for personalities showed more vividly than ever. Because the ambassador in London was in her set she must take up his cause with a sort of fury, when he was accused of abusing his position for the purposes of commerce. He was acquitted, but, much more than the trial or any of its incidents, the open and passionate attitude of the Queen struck the society of the time. So in the very moment of the coronation she again openly received Choiseul, though she knew that he could never return to Court, that her mother and all Austria disapproved.

Much worse than all of these, the constant jar upon her nerves broke down a certain decent reticence, the barrier of silence, which should, always in a woman of her age, and doubly in a woman of her position, be absolutely immovable. She publicly ridiculed the painful infirmity of the King. Her sneers at his incapacity were repeated; they crept into malicious, unprinted songs; she permitted herself similar confidences, or rather publicities, in her correspondence; she wrote them with her own hand, and there is little doubt that others besides those to whom they were addressed saw that writing. He, poor man, went on painfully with his duty, hour by hour in his councils, considering the realm, distantly fond of her, but necessarily feeling in her presence that mixture of timidity, generosity and shame, the secret of which was no longer private to his wife and him, but, through her lack of elementary discipline, spreading grotesquely abroad in an exaggerated and false rumour to the world.

So much had been accomplished by her own character and destiny when a full year had passed after the old King’s death. She had made the Crown a subject of jest, her character suspect, her husband, that is, the foundation of her own title, ridiculous, when the date had arrived in the summer of ’75 for the solemn coronation of Louis at Rheims.

Mercy, with an inspiration sharper than that which diplomats commonly enjoy, had suggested her coronation side by side with that of the King. Such a ceremony might have retrieved much. Precedent was against it, but after so very long an interval precedent was weak; at best it could but have afforded a spiteful and small handle for the enmities which Marie Antoinette had already aroused. She had but to insist, or rather only to understand, and her fate would have halted. She was indifferent. The miraculous moment when high ceremonial and the subtle effect of historic time combined to impress and to transform the French nation, the moment of the unction of the King, found her nothing more than the chief spectator in the gallery of the Cathedral transept looking down upon all that crowd of peers and officers whose position in the ceremony was exactly fixed.

She had come in to Rheims the night before under a brilliant moon, driving in her carriage as might any private lady. The “chic” of such an entry pleased her. She had allowed the King to precede her by some days, and whatever magic attached to the ritual descended upon him alone, and left her unsupported for the future. Her letter to her mother, written upon the morrow of the occasion, shows how little she knew what she had missed. The Court returned to Versailles, the careless vigour of her life was renewed, the thread of her exaggerated friendships and her exaggerated repulsions was caught up again.

When her young sister-in-law was married a few weeks later to the heir of Piedmont and Savoy, she did not conceal her relief at the departure from her Court of this child, with whom, for some reason or another, she could not hit it off. When Madame de Dillon, with her Irish beauty, passed through the Court, that lady moved Marie Antoinette to yet another violent friendship—luckily of short duration. As for the Princesse de Lamballe, she had already revived for her the post of Superintendente of the Queen’s Household (a post that had not existed for thirty years), and later she insisted upon there being attached to it the salary (which France imagined enormous) of £6000 a year.

It is of great interest to note that public dissipation or abandon of this kind, glowing familiarities, long-lit and brilliant nights, an ardent pursuit of what had become to her a very necessity of change—all, in a word, that was beginning to fix her subjects’ eyes upon her doubtfully, and not a little to offend the mass of the nobility around her, all that was found in her insufficient to the niceties and balance of the French temper, was easily excused by foreign opinion. Just that something which separates the French from their neighbours was lacking to the foreign observance of this foreign woman. Her carriage, which to the French was a trifle theatrical, seemed to foreigners queenly; her lively temper, which the French had begun to find forward, was for the foreigner an added charm.

There is no need to recall the rhetoric of Burke, for Burke was not by birth or training competent to judge; but Horace Walpole, who was present that very summer at the Court of Versailles, and saw the Queen in all her young active presence at her sister-in-law’s wedding-feast, writes with something of sincerity, and, what is more, with something for once of heart in his words. He thinks there never was so gracious or so lovely a being.

One judgment I, at least, would rather have recovered than any of theirs. It has not been communicated. I mean that of Doctor Johnson. For Doctor Johnson some months later stood by the side of his young girl friend, behind the balustrade at Fontainebleau, watching curiously with his aged and imperfect eyes this young Queen at the public ceremony of the Sunday Feast. The old, fat, wheezy man, who now seems to us England incarnate, stood there in the midst of the public crowd behind the railing, blocking its shuffling way as it defiled before royalty dining, and took in all the scene. The impression upon a man of such philosophy must have been very deep. I believe we have no record of that impression remaining.^[2]