THE expectation of an heir, the Queen’s ascendency over her husband, the promise of adventurous war, proceeded with the year. Meanwhile the little business of Bavaria somewhat marred the hopes of the now renewed and invigorated Monarchy. It is a business history should make little of; hardly a combat—rather a diplomatic rupture soon arranged. It covered the year exactly—it was settled with the close of it; but it had its significance in the Queen’s life, for her political action in it confirmed and extended the popular idea that Marie Antoinette was treasonable to French interests in the department of foreign affairs.

The most apparent thing of that moment was the new certitude and strength of the Queen now that she was to be a mother. Her love of change became less frivolous, more mixed with character; her old passionate friendships, her appetite for colour of every kind—in jewels, in fantasies, in voices—took on some depth and permanence. Even her interference with public affairs was no longer the mere whim that had been the bane of Turgot: it had objects; those objects were pursued, though they were personal and unwise. Unfortunately her mother and Mercy persuaded her, just as her strength appeared, not to the aggrandisement of her husband’s throne, but to the mere fending off of Prussia from Maria Theresa’s land in the Bavarian quarrel. There arose concerning her action a swarm of whispers, voices not yet of moment, though numerous in the taverns and clear at Court.

The Elector of Bavaria had died while Versailles and all the Court were in the height of their absorption in the American Rebellion; just in that last December which had been full of the first active approach of Vergennes towards the American envoys. The passing of the Electorate to another branch of the family, and that branch childless, or rather lacking direct legitimate issue, threw the musty anarchy of German archives open to the lawyers; they were rummaged, and a dust arose. The various fragments out of which the old Duchy and the newer Electorate were pieced together found claimants everywhere, and the two heads of antagonism were necessarily Vienna and Berlin: Berlin, which would support the heir to the old Duchy—at a price; Vienna, which would protect the reigning Elector for the reversion—on doubtful pleas of inheritance—to some half of the mosaic over which he ruled.

There was here no plain conscience of civilised right against a northern and blundering atheism such as had earlier supported the defence of Maria Theresa against the too successful cynicism of Frederick the Great. The ambitions of Joseph were the ambitions of a philosopher; they were at least as empty and by no means as thorough as the soldierly ambitions of his opponent the King of Prussia: the injury was mutual, the contempt of justice equal, for Joseph was a pupil of Frederick’s in wrong-doing. To each, however, the complex little territorial quarrel seemed of secular magnitude. Maria Theresa was maddened with anxiety, and wrote, so maddened, despairing appeals to her daughter at Versailles. Mercy moved all his persuasion to persuade the intervention of France. Vergennes as resolutely refused to be involved. England was approaching Austria, to the detriment, it was hoped, of the Bourbons, the whole weight of diplomatic thought was at work, and Europe was warned and threatened with incredible futures as one or the other of the two enemies armed for the acquisition of a titular sovereignty over the tortuous and overlapping boundaries of a feudal ruin. Such were the petty concerns of statesmen and even of demagogues in a year when the young men who were to fight at Valmy were already boys. The politicians wrangled over the Bavarian succession as we to-day wrangle over colonial things, imagining them to contain the future fate of Europe.

The Queen at first did little. Mercy complained of her detachment. She was occupied in the greater matter of her maternity, passing all the time of the first leaves and the early summer rains in quietude at Marly; she would have no Court about her, and when she wrote to Maria Theresa it was perpetually of the child. That seclusion and that hope so much attached to her the new affections and the new pride of Louis that when at last she spoke to him, and spoke with increasing violence, for her family and for Vienna, she largely accomplished her aim. She did not intend to involve the Foreign Office—Vergennes was apparently immovable—but so great was now her influence with Louis that by autumn she did obtain a tardy intervention, and until she obtained it she showed in every way her determination to be heard. The first acts of war in July moved her to countermand a feast at Trianon; during August she frequently disturbed the Council by her presence. In September she put forward an uncertain proposal for mediation. It was refused, and her anger added to the difficulties of the French Crown. But she did obtain—the forgotten act was to re-arise, enormous, at her scaffold—she did obtain a subsidy. Treaty demanded it: it had been refused: the whole duty of the Bourbon Crown was to watch finance—yet fifteen million went to Austria. The taverns made it a whole convoy of gold; there were songs against the Queen, accusing her of “paying out French gold.” Older and worse stories about her were revived. The printed obscenities from London and Amsterdam began to flow. The set at Court which had called her openly “the Austrian” before her accession, and since her accession had in secret still so called her, passed on the term to the street, and the nickname was common in Paris before the end of the year.

All these things she had forgotten before the winter closed upon her and her hour approached. They were indeed little things, seedlings. Much greater was the coming of an heir—and Fersen’s return.

He had come back late in August. The moment she had seen him, with his tall, upstanding gait and serious eyes, she came forward and reminded him (and those about her) of his old acquaintance—he was a friend. The lad was still quite young; here was she now a woman, and the effect of four years, changing her so greatly in body had less changed him in body; it had less changed her in heart. For as the days fell shorter and autumn lapsed into winter, his rare and brief notes betray the growing charm of the woman who perpetually remembered him. All through the months of the cold, through the time of her approaching childbirth, and through the gaieties of the new year that succeeded, he remained. Many noted her visage and her tone, once especially when she sang and looked at him during her singing. At last he also—when in April he left the Court, bitten with the gallant adventure of America, like so many of his rank—he also had understood. She followed him perpetually with her eyes; she followed him as he left her rooms again for the last time, and it was noted that there were tears in her eyes.... A wealthy woman rallied Fersen, as he left, upon his conquest; he was now old enough to deny gravely that any woman of that Court had deigned to consider him: having so denied it, he was gone.

As for the Queen, she wrote or spoke of him in public as a young nobleman only, now known and worthy of advancement, and since she kept the rest strictly in her heart no emphasis here of that which lay at the root of her life would give it dignity or value in these pages. Yet throughout these pages the name of Fersen should be the chief name.

He was gone for five more years after so brief a sight of new things.

Meanwhile the Court awaited the birth of an heir.

There was a murmur all around. Monsieur had written frankly enough to the King of Sweden that his hope of the succession was gone. The Court was transformed, and Marie Antoinette especially was a new power: the light calumnies were grown heavy now; the revenge for personal touches was becoming a State affair; a weight of office was upon her, for she was now to be half the Crown and the true wife of a King who governed, and the mother of a King after him.

It was on the 19th of December, in the very early hours long before dawn, that her husband was warned: in the forenoon her travail began.

I have said that the French Monarchy was a sacramental and therefore a public thing. The last act of its public ritual was about to be accomplished; for the last time it rose to the mystical duties of its office and dared to mix with the nation, not as a person, but as an Institution for whom, being immortal, peril was nothing, and, being impersonal, decency and comfort nothing. Could it have so dared again it would have been saved, but it did not dare.

The populace demanded admittance to the birth, and were admitted in the ancient way. The square room in which the Queen lay, upon a low little camp-bed before the fire, was crowded in a moment; upon the carved marble of the chimney-piece two street arabs were seen climbing. The market-women were there, mixed with the ladies of the Court, and a great press of the poor from the streets had found an entry and were packed also upon the great stairs outside. Everything was a-buzz and a-tiptoe, questioning, craning for the news; the market-women commiserated and complained; the ladies-in-waiting stood silent, each estimating the event—the change there would be at Court, the strong place the King would now hold, and, above all, the new power of the mother—the little heir, the boy who should dispossess Monsieur, exile Artois perhaps, and recapture the heart of the crowds to the Bourbon name.

For some critical moments there was a silence.

Vermond (the tutor’s brother), who was her doctor, or her midwife, had ordered every crevice to be closed. Even the chinks of the window had paper gummed to them. In such an air and under such an ordeal the Queen fainted. Louis in a passion of sense thrust his arm through a pane of glass and let in the winter cold; Vermond lanced a vein, and with the bleeding and the fresh draught of air the Queen returned to life. They told her that the child was a girl.

There were great crowds at her churching and some eagerness. The Latin Quarter was impassable with folk as her coach crawled up the hill towards the shrine of Ste. Genevieve. The square in front of the Cathedral was very full—but they lacked a Dauphin. The King was glad enough. When, upon Christmas Eve, the child had grasped his finger, he had told his pleasure to all. Her name and godparents, her household and her future were discussed as solemn things. But in Versailles the air was dull with anti-climax; they had depended upon, or braced themselves for, or begun their intrigue against, a son of France—and none was there.

The little girl who thus was born alone survived. Her brothers perished—the heir in prison; her father and her mother both were publicly destroyed. She lived. The country house of her old age I well remember, a solemn and lonely place, small and grey and deep in the woods—long empty. It fell into ruins, was sold for stone, and a road driven over it; but after nightfall horses refused to pass the place, and legends of darkness clung to the last blood of the Bourbons.

It was but the close of January when the Queen returned from La Muette and her churching to Versailles and the disappointment of Versailles. It was just a year from the ball-room scene that had meant war with the English. That year had done nothing but maintain the struggle, to the surprise and encouragement of the French Ministry; it had done no more, but even that was much. The naval actions had been at the worst indecisive, the English communications along the rebel coast were now in perpetual jeopardy, and would so remain until a French fleet was destroyed: none was destroyed. Even an attempt to blockade the French in Boston harbour had failed, and in November D’Estaing had slipped away from Byron under the advantage of a storm. Of all the operations of that year perhaps the most momentous to history was the chance and inconclusive fight of July in the Atlantic, for it gave the Queen occasion to doubt the courage of Chartres and to ridicule it: and Chartres, soon to be Orleans, found his growing hatred of her fixed for ever.

As for her, she kept her carnival, the carnival of 1779. Her less light purpose now earned her reproaches far more deep than those which had pursued her first childless years; but in her new hopes she could forget them, and her much rarer omissions did not remain in her mind. She did not see how solidly the foundations of her fate were being laid in the dark, and how every trivial folly was her foe; no act of hers proved great enough to destroy the last effect of these trivial follies.

She went to the Opera-ball on Shrove Tuesday with the King—it was a folly (they said) to leave Versailles so soon. She went without him a week later—it was a folly to go alone. That night, her coach breaking down, she must take a public fly—a piece of common sense. She spoke of the adventure, and it pleased her hugely, but the populace twisted it into I know not what adventures, repeated and enlarged in a thousand ways.

When in April the measles incommoded her, she must retire to Trianon for a month—it was common sense; but it was “breaking roof” with the King, and therefore a lesion in the constant etiquette of the Crown. She took with her her young sister-in-law, Madame Elizabeth, whom she had once petulantly avoided, and now, saner, loved; and Madame de Lamballe was there too. It was common sense; but her absence from the Court was hateful, was an insult to the courtiers, and the presence at Trianon during the day of four gentlemen, her friends, was more hateful still. The lies poured out in a printed stream from London; and the Paris coffee-shops, and the drawing-rooms too, had now woven round her an enduring legend of debauchery more real than things witnessed or heard. The calumny was fixed.

If a moment must be chosen of which one can say that it was the decisive moment in her public ill-repute, the moment before which that repute was yet fluid, the moment after which it was set, then that moment must be found in this summer of her twenty-fourth year, 1779. It was an effect coming well after its cause: the high tide of a wave that the first reckless three years had raised.

It may be asked whether, had some shock or some necessity wholly changed her, had she given up every lightness as she had already given up most excesses, she might not yet have warded off the approaches of a distant judgment. No, she could not. The character of the attack upon her she could have modified; but she could only have diminished its volume by increasing its intensity, or its rapidity by extending its already almost universal vogue: she could not have escaped it. The most sober actions of that enthusiastic nature would now for ever be criticised. Had no money gone on slight pleasures, the money spent in every error of foreign policy would have been put down to her; every unpopular dismissal she was to be guilty of, innocent or no, and her name was to be, in every story of intrigue, however incredible, pre-judged. She was destined henceforward to be forgotten in victory and remembered in defeat, nor could anything have saved her save a sudden comprehension of France. No God revealed it to her, and to the general protest that was rising beneath her came accident after accident, some hardly of her doing, some not at all, but every one pointing towards the single issue of her fate, not one in aid of her.

The nights of August were hot and the early autumn also. The customary tours of the Court had been countermanded to save money. The princesses walked at evening and mingled with the crowd on the terrace of the palace, where was the band. It gave scandal. It gave scandal that the Queen should walk later with Artois. It gave most scandal that Madame de Polignac, with her refined and silent face, her gentle deep-blue eyes under that dark hair—a type not national—should so entirely possess the Queen.

The Polignac clique demanded and obtained on every side. It was a double evil: a proof to the Court that the aristocracy as a whole were excluded from favour and that a faction ruled; a proof to the nation that, at a time when finance was the known burden, and when, in the midst of prosperity, a permanent crisis weighed on the impatient poor and the public forces alike, the executive, the King, could blindly spend money and endow every Polignac claim. The sums involved in this patronage of the Polignacs, as in every other public extravagance of the French, were small. The debts of a Pitt or a Fox were far larger, the luxuries of our modern money-dealers are mountainous compared to them; but they fell on a nation wholly egalitarian, unused to and intolerant of government by the wealthy, and a nation which regarded (and regards) its government as the principal engine to use against the rich, not in their aid.

Trianon, not enormous in its cost, grew to be yet another legend, and that legend was not diminished when, in the summer of 1780, a little theatre was opened there, a little stage for the Queen.

All the world did such things! None could blame her—yet all did. After all, one great house after another had put up its show—most of them more costly than hers: but there was in her gradual extension of the amusement something that aggrandised it and made it a public talk; her invitation to the great Paris companies of actors, her very seclusion at first, with its opportunity for rumour, later her open doors, swelled the comment and the offence of Paris. Paris detested this private theatre from the first. There was in it a mixture of carelessness for the State and of personal abasement which Paris could not tolerate in a French Queen; yet how simple was the distraction to her, and how could the subtleties of these Paris critics, themselves the best actors in the world, deriding acting and despising it, be comprehensible to her? She played on.

The King came often. He applauded. She permitted—in this year 1780 at least—no one but the royal family to witness her from the audience ... but the parts were many and needed many players. She made dull Campan, her librarian, manage for her; she gave no place in the distraction to those who thought their presence about her to be a most solemn right and duty. In the autumn to the acting she must add singing, though her voice was not always in tune and was often displeasing in its lack of volume. Stage parts demanded stage lovers, and, learning this, Mercy in his turn opposed. He came at her invitation (but he insisted on being hidden behind the lattice of a box), he applauded her acting somewhat, was courtier-like to her singing—but he disapproved.

Silent, a little bent, low-voiced, a man of but fifty-three—though seeming older—Mercy was now at the height of that long career during which for twenty-two years he was Austria itself permanently present before Marie Antoinette, a spy over her for her mother’s sake and for her own, a devoted servant of the Hapsburgs and Lorraine.

His nobility was of the Empire: a Belgian from Liège, a man without nationality, and with no comprehension of the rising religion of patriotism, he had from his childhood formed part of that cosmopolitan soldiery which was the shield of Maria Theresa; he lived for that Great Lady who maintained him in his embassy, and in his manner and tradition he maintained the character it had had under his master, Kaunitz.

He had passed all his early manhood in that splendid river-side house in Paris which the dandyism of the great diplomatist his teacher had demanded. His youth—reserved, awkward and probably laborious—had left him very observant. He had adopted for life all the externals of the Parisians, but—with the narrowness of his profession—he had failed to see that inmost part of them which was so soon to launch a tempest of wars against all that bunch of private interests on which he depended, and to destroy it. The French Crown was nothing to him, and whether in Paris, at Versailles, or down river in his great country house at Conflans, the French nation left him careless. He was lord of a French manor in Lorraine, of another near his château on the river. His wines were French, and marvellous, and cellared in 15,000 bottles, which the peasants of the Oise drank for him joyfully in ’92—nothing more saddened the old man in his exile when the Revolution was on.

His horses were superb. Even of coachmen he boasted two—each beautiful and large; each equal in domestic rank.

Unmarried, he maintained with dignity an opera-singer of some fame and of the refinement customary in that trade; at the close of his life he left upon record their “close and rooted friendship.”

Such was the man who for nine years had watched his Princess as she grew to womanhood and at last to motherhood at the French Court, and for nine years had sent those long, regular, and careful letters to Maria Theresa which are now our source for quite half the history of the place and time. His life also was at a crisis and a change in this year of 1780, for in the autumn of it his great sovereign died.

Maria Theresa was sixty-three. She was still vigorous in body, powerful in voice, alert in brain, but for many years a great melancholy had not abandoned her. She had continually contemplated her husband’s tomb; her letters to her children, and especially to the Queen of France, were full at the last of an approaching silence. The Bavarian trouble had broken her; in the long expectation of a grandson to the French throne she had been disappointed; the future of her daughter had terrified her—for she saw the gulf. It was upon the 24th of November that she felt her fatal illness; until the 29th she wrote and dictated her affairs of State, and on that very date wrote at length to the Queen. Then she saw Death coming visibly; she staggered into a chair, and with words of rational charity upon her lips she died.

It was a week—Wednesday, the 6th of December—before the news could reach Versailles. It came at evening. Marie Antoinette saw suddenly receding, as the sea had receded from Lisbon at her birth, the principal aspect of her life. The memory of her mother, and the constant letters—scolding, anxious, loving, or imperious—had been her only homely things where everything around her had been alien and increasingly alien. Her mother for nine years, her mother and Mercy’s voice, had been tangible: all the rest was strange. That deep and inner part which she did not or could not show, which she herself perhaps did not know, and which appeared but three times upon the surface of her life, rose through its eager and not profound levels of sense. Her whole frame was broken; she spat blood. She put herself that hour in black of every kind disordered, and she met the coming year charged with a sorrow that could now never wholly leave her. But that year was to give her the two chief things of that phase in her life—the news of a successful battle, and the birth of a son; and a third—the woman La Motte, through whom the chief of her evils were to come upon her.

Far off in Virginia, La Fayette lay at Richmond with a handful of men. Cornwallis made a dash for him and failed, marched back, burning and plundering, to the coast, received a confused tangle of orders, entered Yorktown and awaited the English fleet. Washington had heard how Grasse in the West Indies would sail with the French fleet; he marched southward to join the French commanders. With him was young Fersen, who for so long had not seen France and who was there volunteered for America; with him also was Rochambeau and all his men, and they hurried to victory together through the wet, heavy summer of 1781 along the Atlantic plain.

Meanwhile in Versailles nothing was toward. The Court had lost its old gaiety in the stress of the war and of the “economies.” The Queen awaited and implored a son. The Emperor, coming in July 1781 for the second time to a country he despised, “found much improvement,” was entertained at Trianon, and went away. It was August, hot, drowsy, and silent; it was September, and an intense anxiety for the birth—now at last, if it might be—of an heir.

And as that September passed, two things came into this strange life upon which so many varied things arose and joined darkly in their dates; each accident was quite unknown to the Queen.

The first was this, that the British fleet coming up to save Cornwallis found Grasse already within the bay, was beaten off, and with it the chance of succour; so that La Fayette and Washington meeting could and did, just as the month ended, lay siege.

The second was this: that up in the mountains of Alsace a lady, a friend, introduced a younger lady and a poor one to the notice of the Bishop of Strasburg. He was that coadjutor to the see, now succeeded to it, whom Marie Antoinette had seen as a child—the first to meet her in France after her crossing of the Rhine. He was now the Grand Almoner, and was spending the end of the hot season in his palace of Saverne. It was thus that the woman La Motte first touched her victim, the Cardinal de Rohan. And it so happened that the Cardinal de Rohan, who had been the first to greet the Queen on her passage of the Rhine as a child, now aspired to be her lover, or—as his fatuous misconception of her would have put it—“one of her lovers.” She for her part had resolutely avoided him. He was odious to her. Upon his ambition and credulity this woman La Motte was to play.

It had been upon April 25 that Cornwallis in the Carolinas had broken camp and started northward, to conquer and to hold the central seaports of the rebels as he had conquered and held Charlestown. On the 20th of May his two hundred miles were marched, and he had joined the troops in Virginia.

That march was not followed in Versailles—and even had it been followed, nothing would have been thought of its progress. The war had lingered so long, the issue had so dragged, that no chance could be foreseen, and the tangle of those wildernesses without roads, hardly with towns, was beyond European imagining. They knew that young La Fayette was still desolate somewhere there—they knew no more. Fersen—if more than his bright image came to her, if rumours of his letters home could come to her—must have given the woman who remembered him something of his own lassitude: cooped up as was that Swede in New England, without supplies, without money, cursing the Americans, telling the French Cabinet they were masters of folly, saying the Southern States were conquered by the British, and complaining with a Northern complaint of the indiscipline of the French. But there was greater business to engage attention at Versailles: the Queen was again with child; and Necker, failing at the vast financial tangle, had fallen.

Just as Cornwallis and the army in Virginia met to complete the war, Necker had been sent back from his command of the exchequer to those private and less reputable dealings with which the Puritan was more familiar and at which he was more successful than in the financing of a military nation. The Queen, who had not driven him forth at all, who would have had him remain, was blamed because she did not save him. The rising democratic opinion of Paris had already vaguely begun to favour Necker’s ineptitude: he was a foreigner; he had no faith (save the Genevese mask); but he was novel, he was a change—he was therefore demanded, and his dishonesty was not comprehended; yet that dishonesty was even then about to cost some price to the French State, for by his counsel and after his dismissal appeared that first sham Exchequer Statement to deceive the nation, to cajole it into a loan, to embitter it for the future; and the blame of the trick was to fall on the Crown and not on him, its author.

It was October 1781: Cornwallis was surrounded in Yorktown: the British fleet had failed to relieve him and the siege advanced; the parallels were opened; they were firing at six hundred yards, and Cornwallis still held on. The third week, and they were firing at three hundred: two redoubts still forbade a nearer approach. On the 14th the two redoubts were carried by the French, and next day came the storming.

The river lay near a mile broad behind Yorktown: Cornwallis might yet cross to Gloucester; his guns were dismantled and his force shattered, more by sickness than by fire, but he made the attempt, and the wind defeated him. Upon that ominous Friday, the 19th, he laid down his arms, and England had lost the war. By an accident native to lingering campaigns a series of chances and one coincidence at the end—the entry of the French fleet—had suddenly determined the issue: the young Boys of the French Court, heretofore grumbling and themselves disliked, were suddenly become heroes; the colonists, “half savages,” “mostly traitors to the English,” were suddenly become “the athletes of Liberty”; many in England and all the Rivals of England made up their minds that the business of England in the history of the world was at an end.

It was Fersen, with his command of French and English, who had negotiated that surrender. Soon he would return.

At Versailles that October Friday and the week-end following it were still. For the few days the Court was silent. The issue of the expected childbirth had been debated or feared; it was now not mentioned in an intensity of expectation. The morning of the Monday that silence continued. The King had ordered his hunt; four of the carriages had already started, when he bethought him before he left to see the Queen again. He thought her to be in pain, and though she denied the pain, he ordered the Hunt to return, and an unusual rumour and press at once filled the great galleries. It was a little after eleven o’clock when the passages and halls were full of a gathering crowd, and the cold and splendid staircase which made the royal life at Versailles a public thing, a thing of the open air, were already crammed before noon by a mob of the populace; but this time custom was disdained and the doors were shut fast. Within, the Queen lay groaning on her pallet-bed before the fireplace, but there was air around her: no such press as had all but killed her three years before. Yet that exclusion of the populace helped to kill the Monarchy.

At one o’clock a Swedish noble, chancing to be at the Queen’s door, was told the news. He was caught and electrified by it as though he had been of the French blood. He turned to the first woman he met and said: “We have an heir!” Now that woman happened to be Provence’s wife, and the scene—her red anger and her disdain, his bewilderment—were taken up at once into the laughter of the moment. All the world laughed or cried: it was like the excitement of a great victory turning the tide of a disastrous war.

The Queen, when she could speak, noting the silence round her pallet and hearing the noise without, said faintly and smiling: “I have been a good patient.... Tell me the truth.” They were still silent, and she was sure that another daughter had been born, till the King came in and said to her:—

“The Dauphin begs leave to come in.”