Marie Leczinska was not less happy in her son than in her daughters. The bad examples of the court had not spoiled the upright and honest nature of the Dauphin. As is said by Baron de Gleichen in his Memoirs, the piety of the young prince was enlightened, and his policy foresaw the dangers of irreligion. As son and father, as brother and husband, he never ceased to display the qualities of a good and virtuous heart. He had deeply mourned his first wife, that sympathetic Spanish Infanta, who died in 1746, when hardly twenty years old. Reasons of State demanded that, in spite of his great sorrow, he should promptly contract a second marriage.
Louis XV. selected for his son a princess of the house of Saxony, after Austria and Prussia the most powerful of the Empire. He intended thus to consolidate his German alliances. Marshal Saxe, natural son of Augustus II., King of Saxony, Elector of Poland, and of the beautiful Countess Aurora of Königsmark, was the principal agent of the negotiation which was to form a pact of union between his new country and his old one. A learned Saxon diplomatist, now in the service of Austria, Count Vitzthum, published some years ago an excellent work, based on unpublished documents and letters in the archives of Dresden, on the Marshal and the princess who espoused the Dauphin.
Marie Josèphe of Saxony, daughter of Augustus III., was at this time fifteen years old. She was an agreeable young person, with large blue eyes that were at once keen and gentle. Her countenance was intelligent, her character excellent, her education complete. Marshal Saxe wrote to his brother, Augustus III.: “Sire, what shall I say to you? I find this affair advantageous at all points for your family, and I shall descend without regret to the empire of the shades after I have seen it terminated; I shall have accomplished my career. I have enjoyed the delights of this world; glory has covered me with its benefits; nothing more remained to me but to be useful to you, and all my destiny will have been fulfilled in a most satisfactory manner.”
Marshal Saxe wrote to the wife of Augustus III., mother of the future Dauphiness:—
“Madame, the Most Christian King sent me word yesterday, that he had requested Your Majesty for the hand of the Princess Marie Josèphe for Monseigneur the Dauphin. I flatter myself that this proposition will not displease either the Princess or Your Majesty, for, in truth, Monseigneur the Dauphin is a very good match, and I should like to live long enough to see our divine Princess Queen of France. I think that would suit her very well. She has always been my inclination, and it is long since I destined her for the crown of France, which is a fine enough morsel, and the Prince who will some day wear it is fine also. The Princess Josèphe will have no reason to be bored while she is waiting for it. The kingly father-in-law is charming; he loves his children, and from the caresses he gave the late Dauphiness, I infer those which our Princess will have to endure. This is word for word what the King wrote me in a letter I received yesterday, written by his own hand from one end to the other. ‘You will not be vexed with this marriage, my dear Marshal? Let your Princess be sure that it depends on her alone to make our happiness and the felicity of my people.’”
In the same letter the Marshal gave some very sensible and prudent counsels: “I will say another word to the Princess. To succeed here, neither hauteur nor familiarity is required; hauteur, however, pertaining to dignity, she can more easily incline to that side. The women of the court all have minds like diamonds, and are wicked withal. No one will fail in respect towards her, but they will try to entangle her in their continual quarrels, and at these she must do nothing but laugh and amuse herself. This is what the King does; and if anything displeases her, she must address herself directly to the King: he will advise and conduct her very well. This confidence will please him. He is the only person at court with whom she should have no reserve. She should regard him as her refuge, her father, and tell him everything, good or bad, just as it happens, without disguising anything. With everybody else, reserve. If she does that, he will adore her.”
The formal demand in marriage was made at Dresden, January 7, 1747, by two ambassadors, one extraordinary, the Duke de Richelieu, the other ordinary, the Marquis des Issart. Richelieu wrote to the Count de Loss, apropos of the future Dauphiness: “I find her really charming; nevertheless, she is not a beauty, but she has all the graces imaginable; a large nose, thick, fresh lips, the brightest and most intelligent eyes in the world, and, in fine, I assure that if there were any such at the Opera, they would soon be put up at auction. I do not say too much to you, but I do not say so much to others.”
Marie Josèphe of Saxony left Dresden, January 14, 1747. She saw her betrothed for the first time between Nangis and Corbeil. The nuptial benediction was given to the pair in the chapel of Versailles, February 8, 1747. Four days afterward, Marshal Saxe wrote to Augustus III.: “Sire, I shall have no difficulty in saying agreeable things to Your Majesty about Madame the Dauphiness, and renown will serve as my guaranty. No one could succeed better than this Princess; she is adored by everybody, and the Queen loves her as if she were her own child; the King is enchanted with her, and M. the Dauphin loves her passionately. She has steered her way through all this with all imaginable address; I could not but admire her. At fifteen, according to what they say, there is no such thing as childhood in this society; and, in truth, she has astonished me. Your Majesty could hardly believe with what nobility, what presence of mind, Madame the Dauphiness has conducted herself. M. the Dauphin seems a schoolboy beside her.”
The married pair were installed on the ground floor, in the south wing of the central portion of the palace, under the Queen’s apartments. (The Dauphin’s bedroom, where the Regent died, is now the third hall of the Marshals, No. 46 of M. Eudore Soulié’s Notice du Musée. That of the Dauphiness is now the second hall of the Marshals, No. 41 of the Notice.) It was in the latter chamber that, according to usage, the ceremonial of the putting to bed took place. In the letter we are about to quote, Marshal Saxe gives his brother an account of this strange custom:—
“Certainly,” he says, “there are moments which call for all the assurance of a person formed to sustain his part with dignity. Among others there is one, that of the bed, whose curtains are opened when the husband and wife have been put into the nuptial bed, which is terrible, because the whole court is in the room; and the King told me to remain near Madame the Dauphiness in order to reassure her. She endured this with a tranquillity which astonished me. The Dauphin drew the coverings over his face; but my Princess never stopped talking to me with a charming ease, paying no more attention to the people of the court than if there had been no one in the chamber. On approaching her, I said the King had ordered me to do so to keep her in countenance, and that all this would only last a moment. She told me I gave her pleasure; and I did not leave her until her women had closed the curtains, and the crowd had gone away. They departed with a sort of sadness, for it looked like a sacrifice, and she has continued to interest everybody in her. Your Majesty will laugh, perhaps, at what I have just said; but the blessing of the bed, the priests, the candles, the brilliant pomp, the beauty and youth of the Princess, in fine, the desire one has that she may be happy,—all these things taken together provoke more thought than laughter.”
This etiquette which weighed upon royal families was a heavy burden, an excessive fatigue. For two days the Dauphiness had eaten nothing. “Her great fatigue is the cause of this,” the Marshal wrote again to Augustus III.; “and I have told the King that if she could not have some rest she would fall ill. Indeed, I don’t know how she can avoid it. I am completely knocked up with following her. It is so hot in all the apartments, what with the quantity of people and the candles in the evening, that it is enough to kill one. And besides that, her clothes are so heavy that I don’t know how she has been able to carry them. What is still more fatiguing are all these endless presentations; and she wishes to remember all the names, which is a terrible task to a mind incessantly occupied, moreover, in trying to please and show attentions. The other day the King made me take up her skirt which lay on a sofa. It weighed, at least, sixty pounds; not one of our cuirasses weighs as much. I don’t know how the Princess could have remained on her feet eight or nine hours with that enormous weight.”
Marie Josèphe knew how to make herself esteemed and loved. A courtier, who admired the graces and virtues of this good and beautiful Dauphiness, said: “Nobody ought to take a wife anywhere but in Saxony; and rather than dispense with a Saxon wife, when there are no more, I will make one out of porcelain.” Marie Leczinska forgot the quarrels that had existed between the house of Saxony and her father for the throne of Poland. She became tenderly attached to her daughter-in-law, and showed her an almost maternal love.
The Dauphiness was delivered, September 13, 1751, of a son, who bore the title of Duke of Burgundy, and who died when nine years old, after long and horrible sufferings which he endured, a precocious Christian, with admirable courage. The Marquis de Pompignan wrote a biography of the little prince. Some years later, another child, likewise fated to undergo tortures, learned to read in this book: it was that most innocent of victims, the future Louis XVII. “How did my little uncle manage to have already so much knowledge and goodness?” cried the compassionate child.
The Duke of Berry was born August 23, 1754; the Count of Provence, November 17, 1755; the Count of Artois, November 9, 1757. These three princes were to be called Louis XVI., Louis XVIII., and Charles X.,—three names which on their first appearance affect the imagination with a nameless trouble, and transport it into an unprecedented world of revolutions and catastrophes.
Marie Josèphe of Saxony had eight children, five only of whom survived her; the three sons, who were all to reign, and two daughters, Madame Clotilde, who was Queen of Sardinia, and another whose mere name evokes the memory of the purest virtues, the profoundest piety, the most sublime sacrifices, the most heroic courage in sufferings, in prisons, on the scaffold: Madame Elisabeth.
The Dauphiness was a perfect wife and mother. Her goodness, sweetness, and charity rendered her at once lovable and worthy of veneration.... One finds consolation for the scandals of the court in contemplating a united household, a Christian household which set an example to France. Unhappily death was soon to break up this virtuous and holy life. The Dauphin, at the age of thirty-six, fell ill in November, 1765.
Had we not good reason to say, at the beginning of this study, that epochs in appearance most scandalous and corrupt contain, like every other, treasures of edification? The admirable death of the son of Louis XV. is a proof of this verity. The agony of the Dauphin was about to commence.
“Thanks be to God,” he said to his confessor, the Jesuit Callet, as soon as he saw him enter, “I have never been dazzled by the splendor of the throne to which I was summoned by my birth; I saw it only from the side of formidable duties by which it is accompanied, and the perils that surround it; I would desire to have a better soul, but I hope in the infinite mercy.” Then, turning towards his sisters and his wife, the good Prince exclaimed: “I cannot tell you how glad I am to be the first to go; I shall be sorry to leave you, but I am well pleased not to remain behind you.” The next day, November 13, the Archbishop of Rheims came to bring the sacraments. Louis XV. was kneeling at the threshold of the chamber, while the Duke of Orleans and the Prince of Condé approached the bed to hold the communion cloth. After the Mass the Dauphin said: “God has made me taste at this moment so sweet a consolation that I have never known one like it.” And as the Queen was speaking of his recovery: “Ah, mamma!” he exclaimed with vivacity, “keep that hope for yourself, for my part I do not desire it at all.”
The Prince, who had one day said, while looking at Paris from the terrace of the Château of Bellevue: “I am thinking of the delight that ought to be experienced by a sovereign in causing the happiness of so many people;” this truly exemplary Prince was taken, December 20, 1765, from the affection of a people, who honored his virtues and his sincere devotion. Nine days afterward, the Dauphiness wrote to her brother, Prince Xavier of Saxony: “The good God has willed that I should survive him for whom I would have given a thousand lives; I hope He will grant me the grace to employ the rest of my pilgrimage in preparing, by sincere penitence, to rejoin his soul in heaven, where I doubt not he is asking the same grace for me.”
Marie Leczinska mourned bitterly for her son, who had always been so good, so tender, and respectful to her. The pious Queen was to undergo new trials. She surrounded her aged father with the most touching attentions, and though far away, busied herself with him as though she were by his side. He was at Nancy, and she had just sent him a wadded dressing-gown for the coming winter. It caught fire while Stanislas was sleeping in his armchair; always amiable and affectionate, he attempted to tranquillize his daughter by a note in which he wrote pleasantly: “What consoles me, daughter, is that I burn for you.” This was the last letter Marie Leczinska was to receive from a father whom she cherished. King Stanislas breathed his last February 24, 1766. His death brought about, according to treaty stipulations, the definitive reunion of the duchies of Lorraine and Bar to France. As the Countess d’Armaillé has said, this was Queen Marie’s last gift to the land of her adoption.
Afflictions succeeded each other with deplorable rapidity. Marie Josèphe of Saxony died fifteen months after her husband, March 12, 1767, recommending her family to Marie Leczinska, who regretted her as much as if she had been her daughter. The Queen bowed to the decrees of Providence. Her soul remained strong, but her body was crushed by sorrow. “Give me back my children,” she said, “and you will cure me.”