Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette (P.S.) (43 page)

Very troubled,
the King enters my private chambers where I rest in the afternoon and gravely tells me the finance minister, Calonne, believes no bank will extend loans to us. “We are on the verge of national bankruptcy.”

Though the King has never before said such a startling thing to me, I am surprised at my calm suggestion. “Then surely Calonne has some plan that will avert such a disaster.” My private apartment seems too intimate to hold a discourse of such moment to the nation. Rising from my small blue daybed so cunningly tucked in its alcove, I suggest that we retire to his study.

The King has recovered his composure before we begin to pass through the more public rooms. As we walk, he says, “In fact Calonne has given me a document produced over the summer by himself and his assistant Talleyrand.”

“And its title?” I inquire.

“Appropriately enough,
Un Plan pour l’amélioration des finances.
”

As we reach his study, the King rolls back the sliding cover of his large and beautiful desk, one created with all the marquetry of Riesener. Almost as a reflection of my own calm manner, the King now appears quite in control. He lifts the document up to its reading position, dismisses the servants, and begins to share with me some of the features of Calonne’s plan for our salvation.

“It is a bold proposal, and its chief focus is taxation. All landowners, without exception, are to pay at a fair and uniform rate. Not the poor, though.”

“Is the Church to be taxed?”

“For its landholdings, yes. And the nobility will no longer be exempt from tax on their obvious signs of wealth. Those most able to pay—the Church, the nobility—will have to contribute more toward the revenues of the nation. For the first time.”

“How can such an idea be implemented?” I am truly startled now, more by the proposed remedy to the impending disaster than by the disaster itself. Vaguely, I recall that Louis XV had had a plan, constructed with Malesherbes, to tax the nobility.

“Calonne says that we must create an Assembly of Notables—”

“I have never heard of such a convocation.”

“None has occurred for some hundred and sixty years, not since the time of Louis XIII. It was a maneuver instigated by Cardinal Richelieu. The Notables will be as carefully selected as possible. After they approve the reforms, they will be passed on to the various Parlements. I register the reforms as
lit de justice
, laws that I institute from my private chamber.”

“And who selects the Notables?”

“I do.”

Now it is time for the King to calm my nerves. “Reform is necessary,” he replies. “I am not against a reasonable adjustment in our society. It is the nobles who will prove the most resistant to change.”

22 February 1787

I spend this day on my knees in the Royal Chapel, praying for the King as he opens the Assembly of Notables. I picture him, dressed in purple velvet, flanked by his two brothers. But also I pray for the Notables themselves because I can understand their reluctance to let go of their privileges and their exemptions. Their support and loyalty to the King is predicated in part on his protection of their assets and their family wealth.

When I have supper with the King, he is downcast. He tells me that the Notables are in a disobedient mood. They wish to spend a great deal of time debating and discussing the issues. Already the idea of having representation from the Parlements and possibly even convening an Estates General has been mentioned.

The King explains, “The Assembly of the Notables is quite different from the Estates General. The Estates General has not been convened for an even longer period of time. Not since 1614, some one hundred and seventy years ago. The three estates represented in the general assembly are the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners. For that assembly, each estate chooses its own representatives.”

I feel a shudder pass through my body. I do not know the history of Austria so many years ago, but I am quite sure that no such precedent was being set whereby peasants participated in ruling the empire by choosing their own representatives.

“But there is no need now for an Estates General,” I say. “Perhaps they prolong the arguments merely for the sake of deferring decisions unfavorable to themselves.”

The King’s reply is that it is the people—such as those at Cherbourg—who truly love us, and we must work for their good as much as for the good of the nobility.

“I have always worked for the good of the people of France,” I reply. My sentence sounds like an echo from the distant past. Yes, I made such a vow long ago, when I was young, and the new King met the unrest of the Flour Wars with such unexpected firmness.

With sorrow, the King mentions the death of Vergennes, the minister upon whom he has depended for advice for the last three years. Now it is necessary to appoint a new foreign minister, and the King has proposed his boyhood friend Montmorin, who has served as the ambassador to Spain. I know that Mercy wishes otherwise. He has instructed me to advocate the appointment of the Comte de Saint-Priest, who is favorable to Austria, and, as it turns out, a good friend to Axel von Fersen.

When my old friend Count Mercy importuned my intervention, I said to him something I have never said before. “It is not proper that the Court of Vienna should dictate who the ministers of the Court of France are to be.” My heart is with the King in these difficult times, and I feel that it is my place to offer him my quiet support. My children need to inherit a prosperous and well-governed country from their father. The King falls into fits of despondency, and I must try to keep my own wits about me, without so much influence from Austria. All too sadly learned has been the lesson of the diamond necklace: in France one must fight for justice.

I worry too for the King’s health. He is very heavy. In the evening when I drink my mineral water, he takes a good deal of wine. Sometimes he is so weary, especially after a hard day of hunting, which becomes more and more an obsession, that he staggers and loses his balance.

On April 8, Easter Sunday, the King finds it necessary to dismiss Calonne, who is a friend of the Duchesse de Polignac. The Minister Calonne has speculated in land and dealt unwisely with the syndicate under contract to provide water to Paris. The King has discovered that Calonne has misrepresented the national deficit as some thirty-two million less than he reported. He has circulated an inflammatory statement demanding that more taxes must be paid: “By whom? Solely by those privileged classes who have not paid enough. Would it be better to tax the underprivileged, the People of France?” With such public language, Calonne drives a wedge between us and the Notables. He has behaved in a way recklessly dangerous, without solving the financial crisis. We hear that he has purchased with public funds a thousand bottles of wine to be housed for private use in a monastery near his home.

Because she is angry with us for not protecting her friend and keeping him in his position, the Duchesse de Polignac has turned the education of the Dauphin over to a governor, and she has gone to England again. Her coolness has much hurt the King, who has always appreciated her charming manners and friendliness. To try to smooth things, he has agreed to pay the debts of her sister-in-law, Comtesse Diane de Polignac—some 400,000 livres—under the false flag that the money was spent for my entertainment.

I am amazed at the number of our friends among the nobility who bitterly resent our attempt to economize. Besenval, deprived of some of his income, has said, “That kind of dispossession used only to happen in Turkey.” The Assembly of Notables is disbanded. When I appear at the Opera, I am hissed. At the theater, it has long been the custom of the audience to respond to some accidental line in the script as though it were intended to apply to the world beyond the stage. When a line from Racine—“Confound this cruel Queen”—was pronounced, the audience cheered and applauded ferociously. Yet I have done nothing to them. I have cut the positions in my household by 173 people in an attempt to economize.

Still, they call me Madame Déficite.

Of the national budget, 41 percent is allocated simply to pay the interest on the national debt. The new minister of finance, Brienne, whose appointment I very much favored, for he is an old friend of the Abbé de Vermond, who taught me when I was a child, consoles me by pointing out that the expenditure of the entire court is only 6 percent of the annual budget.

W
HEN
I
BEG
my friend Count von Fersen to describe truthfully to me my own position and that of the King as others see it, he asks me, with utmost kindness in his eyes, to withdraw my request, but I insist.

“If you will have it so,” he answers, and he extends his hand to me as he speaks, as though by this means, he offers consolation. “It profoundly grieves me to report that the Queen is quite universally detested. Every evil is attributed to her, and she is given no credit for anything good. People claim that the King is weak and suspicious; the only person he trusts is the Queen. People say that in these days, the Queen must do and is doing everything.”

I know that my loyal friend—his eyes filled with sadness—has spoken truthfully about our miserable reputations. “Promise me,” I say to him, “that you will never repeat those words to the King.”

Though she was born
a big baby, my daughter has not thrived. She has grown very little, and between worrying about her, and the health of the Dauphin, and the deficit, my mood has become pessimistic. I recall how my believing in his future health has often helped Louis Joseph to make amazing recoveries, and I try to do the same for Sophie.

I sit beside her crib and tell her over and over—she is only nine months old this June—she is beautiful and good. I tell her that I love her, and when she grows older I will play tea set with her and teach her to play the harp, but she is too young to understand these promises.

From restlessness and fever, she progresses to convulsions.

Her death is the saddest moment of my life.

Madame Elisabeth stands beside me to view her little corpse at the Grand Trianon and calls her “my little angel.” They say that it was the emergence of three tiny teeth that caused her to suffer convulsions.

“She would have been my friend,” I murmur.

I
SEE THAT
Madame Royale has learned the bitter lesson of death. Her sympathy with my loss moves me to more tears. The child looks lost—as though she had never thought the world capable of such cruelty as the death of an infant. I tell her that in such matters we can do nothing but submit to the will of God, whose wisdom far exceeds our own. We cannot know his reasons.

L
ATER, AFTER CONFERRING
with the King, I instruct my friend to paint Sophie out of the red velvet portrait with my children. In the painting, the crib now appears to be empty. The Dauphin still points at it, as though to remind whoever might gaze at the painting of our poignant loss.

However, when the time comes in August to exhibit the Vigée-Lebrun picture, I am advised by the chief of police not to appear in Paris. The hatred for me has grown more virulent because Jeanne La Motte has escaped from the Salpêtrière prison and fled to England, from which she has authored and autographed a description of her “Sapphic” relationship with none other than the Queen.
Was I ever in her presence at all?
Furthermore, she reinforces the rumors that as a tribade I have also made love to the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Polignac.

In the empty place where my portrait should have appeared, someone has displayed a note which reads “Behold the Deficit!”

I
N THE WAKE
of the failure to receive the approval of the Parlement for the financial reform, the King has simply made the age-old pronouncement “I ordain registration.” Thus, the new law imposing financial reform is legitimately registered. It has long been the right of monarchs to declare from their bedrooms, if need be, what will become the law.

Our cousin Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, has protested the legitimacy of such an utterance. Flouting tradition, he claims that because votes were not counted in the Assembly of Notables, the new law is invalid. The King has been forced to send his cousin into exile.

To the reconvened assembly, the King declared in a fury, “It is the law because I wish it to be.”

A terrifying silence followed.

I hear my own sigh as I write of these troubling events to my brother Joseph II. I take up my pen and add: “I am upset that these repressive measures have had to be taken; unhappily, they have become necessary here in France.” I am ready to drip wax onto my letter and to press my seal into the hot wax, when I remember the most dreadful and dreaded piece of news. I unfold the paper to write again that the King has hoped to quiet the unrest we witness through France and especially in Paris by calling within a time period of not more than five years a meeting of the Estates General.

5 October 1788

Knowing that the fall
season will soon turn to winter, I have taken the opportunity to sit for a while beside the fountain of Ceres. When a messenger brings a request for an audience at the château with the Abbé de Véri, I gather my warm woolen shawl about me and send word that I will meet him in the Peace room. I am glad that I have come into the gardens in an enclosed sedan chair, and I am happy to enter its cozy little space and to have the door closed behind me. Here the fall breeze cannot reach me.

As we progress back toward the château, I wonder what has brought the abbé to call. He is a friend of the King’s, and they often have scholarly conversations together about the course of history. I have never had much reason to converse with him. These are sad days, so it is nice that someone from outside the walls of Versailles has sought out my company.

W
HEN THE
A
BBÉ DE
V
éri
enters the room, I note that he is carrying a large leather-bound journal, stamped with the year 1788 in gold, and that his countenance bears the mark of serious thought.

His complexion is sallow, caused no doubt by his long hours away from the healthy effects of the outdoors. He has a rather knobby nose, but his blue eyes have a straight and piercing gaze. At this moment, he opens the book that I have taken to be a journal and asks if I would like to read something that he has written therein. “Or would Her Majesty prefer that I read aloud to her?”

Noting that his handwriting is tiny and crabbed—the better not to waste paper, I suppose—I invite him to read to me.

“It was intended just as a note to myself,” he says in a humble way, “but as I wrote it, a vision of Her Majesty came to my mind, and I felt that I was being led, perhaps simply through my own imagination, to share my thoughts with Her Majesty.”

“Please be so kind as to read to me,” I repeat encouragingly, but suddenly I have an almost violent craving for chocolate, which I ignore.

“‘The current of opinions tends toward some sort of revolution.’” He pauses to see my response, but I merely nod for him to continue. “‘It is a torrent which is steadily increasing and is beginning to burst the embankments.’”

“I wonder if there is something in particular that you have observed?” I ask.

“It is not so much observation as scholarship that has given me pause,” he answers. “I have also recorded in my journal a conversation that I overheard earlier today between your husband, His Majesty Louis XVI, and his minister Malesherbes. If you will allow me to continue, then your ears will be present, even as mine were.”

“Please do continue,” I say. His tone of voice is so gently coaxing that I do not want in any way to be impolite in the face of his concern for his King. At one time, I would have had grave reservations about Malesherbes because, in the eyes of Louis XV, he wished to weaken the monarchy. But my husband has admired Malesherbes’s willingness to use compromise as a means of preserving the monarchy.

“Malesherbes began by saying, ‘You are a great reader, Sire, and you are more knowledgeable than you are thought to be. But reading counts for nothing if it is not accompanied by reflection. I have recently reread in David Hume’s
History of England
his passage on Charles I.’”

“Yes.” I interrupt the good, eavesdropping abbé with some enthusiasm, for I recognize the reference. “When I first came to France, a girl of fourteen, the Dauphin confided in me his interest in the thought of Hume, whom he had actually met.”

“Yes,” the abbé replied and then continued peering through his lens and reading aloud. “‘Your positions have much in common. That Prince was mild, virtuous, devoted to the law, never insensitive, never taking the initiative, just and beneficent; he died, however, at the hand of the executioner upon the scaffold. He became king at a time when argument was arising about the prerogative of the crown as against those of his subjects, and you are in a similar position. The question has arisen here in France, as it did in England in the last century, between the usual practices of authority and the complaints of the citizens. An important difference is that here in France there is no religious element in the dispute.’

“‘Ah! Yes, very happily,’ the King responded at this point to Malesherbes, even placing his royal hand upon his minister’s arm. ‘There will not be the same atrocities committed in France.’

“‘And besides,’ replied Malesherbes, ‘our gentler manners will set your mind at rest about the bloody excesses of those days. But they
will
strip you by degrees of your prerogatives unless you make a definite plan as to what concessions you can make and on what matters you should never yield. Only your own resoluteness can preserve the monarchy. I would be willing to swear that the unrest will not go so far as taking Your Majesty to the fate of Charles I, but I cannot reassure you that there would not be other excesses.’”

The abbé closes his journal.

“I think it is the matter of resoluteness that has brought me to Her Majesty. Others may have a different opinion of Your Majesty, but I know you are the daughter of Maria Theresa, of Austria. I know that you must have witnessed that august person exercising a certain resoluteness of will, when the occasion called for such measures.

“You know that I am not speaking of any need to strengthen the ties between France and Austria as we now live. But I am asking Your Majesty in the days ahead to embody the spirit of her mother, to remember her courage, her compassion, and her resourcefulness.”

“So it is,” I replied with soft gravity. “Just as Malesherbes would remind my husband of the fate of Charles I of England on the scaffold, so would you remind me of the strength of the Empress of Austria.”

“Just so, Your Majesty.” The Abbé de Véri stood, bowed, and began to take his leave. “And may your gracious Majesty remember that she is always in my prayers.”