Marie Antoinette

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.

It was upon Tuesday the 26th of April that he came in from hunting changed. He would not eat. He wandered a little and was cherished by his companion, but his fever grew. Next day he woke to suffering. He attempted to hunt, but his knees were weakened and he could not ride his horse; and coming back to Trianon, he groaned with his head in torment. His dread increased; but his doctors, who had been long familiar with his moody interludes, thought little of the thing. They carried him back through the trees to the palace, to his own room in the northern wing, and that day and the next, as the fever grew, rumours went louder and louder in the palace. On the Friday, at eventide, as a candle chanced near the face of the sick man, the doctor looked closer; and in the next hour, before midnight, the Princess Clothilde, talking in Madame de Marin’s room in whispers to the Duke of Crois, opened a note from the Dauphine. She cried aloud: “They say it is the small-pox!”

They dared not tell him. He had the assurance to demand the truth, and when he heard it he said, “At my age a man does not recover.” He maintained from that moment, through the increasing torment and disfigurement of his disease, a complete mastery over himself and even to some extent the powder of ordering the Court. He saw to it that his grandson the Dauphin should not come near his room, for of all the royal families in Europe the French Bourbons alone had not been vaccinated. He accepted the services of his daughters.

One thing alone he hesitated on, and that was to relinquish the society of his Favourite.

He was too proud and too silent a man for his contemporaries or for ourselves to know the full cause of his hesitation. Passion at that moment it could not have been. The possibility of his recovery he had himself denied, and his every phrase and act showed how clearly he felt the approach of death. He himself had drawn the secret of his malady from the reluctant Cardinal whose duty it was, as Grand Almoner, first to inform him of his danger, but whose worldly fear of consequence had kept him from speaking—though he was urged to his duty by every other prelate at Court. The King was in no doubt as to the nature of the soul, nor as to the scandal which, under the special conditions of his throne, his one great frailty had given. He knew the Church; he could not, as might a philosopher, take refuge in the memory of good deeds to outweigh the evil, or (as might a monarch of a different civilisation) in the deep hypocrisies which there shield birth and wealth from self-knowledge. His Christian faith was strong and clean. Yet he hesitated. If he still clung to the Du Barry, it was perhaps because nothing was left him in the visible world but the gaiety and the assiduous care which had endeared this woman to him.

She kept near him throughout the first hours of his malady, and every evening, when the Princesses had left their father’s room, she would come in by a private further door and sit beside the little camp-bed on which he lay. She overcame all repugnance; she soothed his pustuled forehead with her hand. He felt, perhaps, as though to abandon her was a first breaking with life.

The aged Archbishop of Paris, himself suffering grievously from the stone, bore, not without groaning, the jolting journey to Versailles; he came to undertake himself what the Grand Almoner dared not do—to demand the dismissal of the Favourite. He was not allowed into the King’s room. The group of courtiers continually present in the outer chamber, the Œil de Bœuf, could watch with much amusement the gestures of command and of refusal that passed between the Archbishop and the Duke of Richelieu in the antechamber beyond. At last he was admitted, but it was arranged that others should be present, and nothing passed between him and the King save a word of condolence from each for the other’s suffering.

It was by no stimulation from without but by his own act that the King took the last step in his penance. Upon Tuesday the 3rd of May, towards midnight, Madame du Barry being with him, as was her custom, to tend him through the night, he said to her, in those brief sentences of his which had for years forbidden discussion or reply, that he must prepare for his end and that she must leave him; he told her that a refuge was prepared, and that she should want for nothing. She stumbled half fainting from the room to the Minister whose career she had made, the Duke of Aiguillon, believing with justice that he was not ungrateful, and in his rooms she cried and lamented through what remained of darkness.

With the morning the King gave D’Aiguillon his orders, and that afternoon the Duke, worthily loyal although his career was ended, sent his own wife to take her in a hired carriage, without circumstance and therefore without disgrace, to their country house some miles away. It was the thirty-fourth of the forty days.

That evening the King asked Laborde, his valet, for Madame du Barry. The servant answered that she was gone. “Already?” he sighed, and her name was not heard again.

Thursday and Friday passed: the first with a rally which the more foolish hoped would save the life of the King; the second with the disappointment of all that corrupt and intriguing clique which depended upon his recovery.

Meanwhile the Dauphine kept her rooms. She knew what desperate court would be pressed upon her husband and herself were the doors to be opened; nor did the Dauphin give a single order of the hundred that were already solicited of him, save that all should be ready for the whole Court to leave for Choisy. Early upon the morning of Saturday this seclusion was broken: long before the common hour of the palace, at half-past five, a roll of drums awakened its people, and the Princess came down with all her ladies to see the Sacrament carried through Versailles.

Between a double row of the Guard, under the great canopy that was reserved for such solemnities, the priests carried the Viaticum, and about It in a long procession as It passed were the torches and the candles. She stood with her sister-in-law at the head of the crowd in the great hall outside the bedroom door; she endured the stench of corruption that filled the air, though every window was open to the morning; she caught, by her tall stature and straight carriage, the scene that was acting within.

Between the purple robes and the surplices, in the ring of waxen lights, she saw the old man whom alone she had respected and indeed loved in her new home attempt to raise himself, calling: “My great God has come to me.... My great God!” She saw him with what strength he had plucking the cotton cap from his head and failing in his effort to kneel. His face was no longer the face she had known, but crusted dark and hideous, swollen, horrible. She heard the Grand Almoner repeat the King’s strong phrase of repentance, passionately solemn, and she knew the voice so well that perhaps she also heard the mumble in which he urged its repetition. Then the doors closed; the Court dispersed. She regained her apartments, and the isolation and the strain returned. They told her of his increasing delirium, of the crowds that came from Paris daily, of the certain approach of death. So Sunday and Monday went by—the thirty-eighth, the thirty-ninth day.

The dawn of Tuesday broke upon a clear sky. It was the fortieth day.

The spring on that fine morning turned to summer, and before noon the Park was full of a crowd which moved as though on holiday. The Parisians had come increasingly since Sunday into Versailles. The inns were full, and at all the tables outside the eating-houses of the town the people eat their mid-day meal with merriment in the open air. Between the Park and the town, huge and isolated, already old, the palace alone was silent. There, each group shut close in its own rooms, awaited—the one dismissal, another the fruit of long intrigue, another, in a mixture of eagerness and dread, the new weight of royalty. It was the 10th of May, and still the agony endured. A candle burnt in a window above the courtyard. Passing groups looked up at it furtively; grooms, with bridles ready in their hands, glanced at it from beneath the distant doors of the guard-room, and saw it twice renewed, as one o’clock and two struck through the afternoon from the chimes of St. Louis. Three struck. They looked again and it was still shining.

Within, his head supported by Laborde the valet, his mind still clear, the old King still attempted with his distorted lips the answers to the prayers for the dying. He heard them faintly and more faintly in that increasing darkness which each of us must face. When the priest at last came to those loud words, “Go forth, thou Christian soul,” his murmuring ceased. The candle at the window was extinguished. The clatter of horse-hoofs rose from the marble court and the jangling of stirrups against mounting spurs. The Duke of Bouillon came to the door of the room, stood before the silent crowd in the Œil de Bœuf, and said with ritual solemnity: “Gentlemen, the King is dead!”

At that same hour on that same day a British man-of-war sailed into Boston harbour: she bore orders to impose the tax on tea which ultimately raised America.