The Queen's Necklace (19 page)

(No less pleasing is what Vestris said when he heard that his son had incurred a debt: “Auguste! I want no Rohan-Guéménées in my family!”)

Naturally Count Haga, like the whole of Europe and especially the French, was greatly intrigued by the ‘Aerostatics’, or aeronautical experiments, of the brothers Montgolfier and their followers. The Montgolfiers, as is well known, had realised that warm air rises more readily than cold, so that if we take a strong balloon and fill it with hot air it will rise into the sky. Later they attached a basket underneath the balloon and flew in it. The notion of people flying drove the entire nation into ecstasies of amazement, and the general miracle-hungry mood of the times produced the suitably fairytale name for this—‘the conquest of the air’—to the great amusement of those of a more sober disposition.

The strange thing is, how many of those charming fairytales have since come true. For example, Grimm made great fun of the coffee house politicians who had already started to calculate how much more it would cost the state if they had to maintain a fleet of these machines. The time would come, joked Grimm, when people could fly off to China in the evening and be back
the next morning. The King’s high-spirited younger brother the Comte de Provence composed an epigram on the subject:

Before the Montgolfiers, a canon named Desforges had designed a gondola fitted out with wings, in which he sat and threw himself off a height, in the hope that it would swim through the air. Apart from some minor damage, no harm was done, but he was very thoroughly bruised.

An almost equal degree of interest was provoked by our own countryman Farkas Kempelen, with his famous chess-playing automaton. In September 1783 Grimm quotes from a book which described the device in detail. The machinery consisted of two parts: a low chest of drawers covered by a chessboard, and the figure of a Turk with a pipe in his mouth, who lifted the pieces and set them up in their correct positions. There was no question of trickery: both the cupboard and the pipe-smoking Turk could be opened up to show the wheels and springs inside, so there was no one hiding there: after a few moves the Turk had to be wound up again. Nowadays it is impossible to believe that it was making the moves by its own volition and playing to win; that in some automatic way it was calculating the moves for itself. No, it was being operated by Kempelen, standing there just a short distance away but too far to be able actually to touch it. In his hand he held a strange device with which he was obviously manoeuvring it from where he stood, but he refused to reveal the secret to anyone.

There were other, more comical, inventions. A watchmaker, for example, caused a great sensation when he conceived the ‘flexible wooden shoe’, with the aid of which you could walk on water. At first people thought it was a fraud, but when they looked into it, it proved to be nothing of the sort—but nor was it very interesting. The worthy inventor had designed two little rafts, one for the left foot and the other for the right, and that was how you could travel on water. The people of Paris had expected more. It was a time when anything was thought probable. In London, for example, a vast crowd gathered when someone announced that he was going to squeeze himself into an empty wine bottle—and when he declined to do so on the pretext of a temporary indisposition, they smashed up the whole area around the theatre.

During his stay in Paris, Count Haga became involved in a purely private matter, which neither he nor any of the others involved suspected for a moment would feature in world history. This was the marriage of Baron Staël, Secretary to the Swedish legation.

The young Erik Magnus Staël-Holstein was not distinguished for any particular talent, but his good manners and sympathetic exterior had charmed the ladies at the Paris Court, and had even earned the goodwill of Marie-Antoinette, who was already well-disposed towards Swedes. Whatever she and her little circle, in their sophisticated flippancy, thought of the institution of marriage, they enjoyed matchmaking every bit as much as the women of the bourgeoisie, and were therefore much exercised by the question of who should marry the young Germaine Necker, daughter of the great banker and Finance Minister and one of the wealthiest heiresses in France. Since her family were Protestant, the French aristocracy were out of the running, so the plan was that she would be paired off with the handsome Count Alex Fersen. Although his father, one of the leaders of the Hats in Sweden, was extremely keen on the idea, Fersen himself gave it a very cool reception, and Marie-Antoinette
felt somehow unable to press him with the required conviction. Nonetheless she stuck with the Swedes, and suggested the girl marry Baron Staël-Holstein instead.

The idea of giving his daughter away to a Scandinavian Baron pleased Necker, who was infinitely vain and a parvenu, but he was unimpressed by Staël-Holstein’s position and made it a condition of his consent that the young man should be made Ambassador. Marie-Antoinette asked Gustav to nominate him to replace Creutz, who had gone back home to become Chancellor, but the King, knowing Staël-Holstein’s lack of substance, dragged his heels for a considerable time.

The question was clearly much discussed at the garden festivity at the Le Petit Trianon. In due course Gustav did promote Staël, and in 1786 he married Germaine Necker. The marriage was not a particularly successful one: the feckless Baron cost his father-in-law and his wife (who became famous as Mme de Staël) a great deal of money. As Marie-Antoinette and Gustav strolled in the grounds of Le Petit Trianon they cannot for a moment have thought that in time the girl would become Napoleon’s feared antagonist, France’s ‘foremost exile’, and one of the best known figures of the romantic age of European literature.

On 5th June 1784 King Gustav attended a meeting of the Académie Française, where he was given an enthusiastic reception and eloquent speeches were read out in his praise. The actual agenda was somewhat less delightful. The new member, M de Montesquieu, eulogised the man he was replacing, Bishop Coetlosquet of Limoges, whose only achievement was to have lived to a ripe old age. Then the Director, M Suard, rose to reply. To inject an element of topicality into the discussion, he gave a spirited defence of the greatest success of the day, Beaumarchais’s
Marriage of Figaro
. After that, La Harpe, that arid, sterile critic of his age, read out the second part of his didactic ode on women. According to Grimm, it was received very coldly—if it had to be something instructive, they would
much rather have heard the Abbé Delille, La Harpe’s chief opponent in the ferocious row between followers of Gluck and Piccini that caused such dreadful civil war among the Immortals. (This was the war between French and Italian music, in which, for some strange reason, the French was represented by the German-born Gluck, Marie-Antoinette’s former music teacher, who had grown up with Italian music and was a wonderful example of the international spirit of the age. According to Grimm, Gluck was to music what Corneille had been to the theatre, and Piccini was its Racine. Perhaps it might be argued that Piccini was also what Verdi later became, while Gluck was a forerunner of Wagner. For the ‘Italians’, all that mattered in opera was the music, while Gluck wanted to subordinate the music to the drama, or rather, argued that it needed both music and text working together to raise the effect above mediocrity.) Finally, the Duc de Nivernois read out some of his simple and informal fairy stories. When the session was over, the King had a few private words with Suard. Grimm believed he knew what they were discussing: Gustav was telling Suard that he did not agree with him about
The Marriage of Figaro
, adding that he wanted to see it again.

From this account one might conclude that this was not one of the more interesting sessions of the Academy, but few of the others can have been much better. Some months later, Grimm tells us, a certain M Gaillard so spectacularly bored his audience with a performance so very unworthy of his immortal name that the Academicians met and decided that something needed to be done. At the following session the Abbé Boismont set about lecturing his listeners, whereupon they whistled like an audience in a theatre. From then on, they decided, fewer invitations would be issued, and only to reliable elements.

But the fact that the same sort of audience went to the Academy as did to the theatre shows that the great institution had lost none of its prestige during these years, and was by no means isolated from the literary life of the day. Earlier, in the middle of the
century, far from being a conservative, traditionalist body, it had been a meeting place for revolutionary spirits, entirely under the control of the
philosophes
, the collaborators on the great
Encyclopédie
, at war with the Church and the Sorbonne. Since all the Encyclopedists were also members of the salons, the world of women followed the Academy’s elections and proceedings with the greatest of interest. It was genuinely part of the
monde
, of aristocratic society, as were the Comédie Française and the Comédie Italienne.

By the end of the century the Academy had lost none of its relevance, but the original group of
philosophes
were no longer in the vanguard. As with all sects, persecution (imprisonment, the burning of their books and banishment) had simply made them stronger. But although official harassment continued until the end of the century, it had by then become something of a game, final proof of the saying that “the monarchy forbade everything and could prevent nothing”. For example, Brissot would be forewarned by the official responsible that his current pamphlet was to be confiscated; the copies would then be seized and sold on the black market by the same official’s wife. The Abbé Morelle, imprisoned in the Bastille for his writings, was comforted by his supporters with the thought that he should regard it as a welcome form of publicity. Morelle thought so too, and the calculation proved correct. Even the Church could no longer stand up to the
philosophes
in the decisive way it once had done. Fashionable preachers such as the Academician the Abbé Boismont did not try to refute their teachings—they merely insisted that the God of the Christian religion was rather more likely to inspire benevolent feelings in the human heart than the cold and distant Supreme Being of the
philosophes
. When the Spanish translation of the
Encyclopédie
appeared, its first purchaser was Don Bertram, the Archbishop of Salamanca and Head of the Inquisition.

The Marquis de Condorcet, the man chosen to succeed D’Alembert as leader of the
philosophes
, made his speech of
acceptance into the Academy in January 1782. He began: “The eighteenth century has so thoroughly perfected the system of human knowledge that there is no means whereby the new enlightenment could be extinguished, unless some universal catastrophe covered the human race once again in darkness.” The
philosophes
had won.

But, year by year, the great generation of the French Enlightenment were dying out. Voltaire went in 1778, after his triumphal return to the Paris from which he had been exiled for so many years. Two months later, his great adversary Rousseau died. In 1780 it was Condillac, in 1784 Diderot. In 1783 it was the leader of the
philosophes
, the director of the
Encyclopédie
and the Permanent Secretary of the Academy, D’Alembert himself.

It happens very rarely in literary history that one great generation is followed by another. The void left by the death of the great Encyclopedists could not be filled by their heirs. D’Alembert’s successor at the Academy was the hardworking, many-sided and inconsequential Marmontel, the literary populariser of the
philosophes
’ ideas. Its greatest lyric poet was considered to be the Abbé Delille—perhaps because he behaved as a poet was expected to, was permanently distracted and dreamy and “was forever letting himself go at the feet of some pretty girl”, as we might colloquially but faithfully translate Grimm’s phrase, so expressive as it is of the times. His great rival, as we have mentioned, was the leading critic of the age, La Harpe. La Harpe was a timid conservative who extolled everything from the past and pronounced everything that was antiquated in classical French literature to be ‘correct’. He was an outstanding example of the French literary pedant, a proponent of that schoolmasterly deference to the bookish ‘rules’ that foreigners always find so surprising. La Harpe had been a French tutor to Grand Prince Paul Petrovics, the son of Catherine the Great. When the Grand Prince was in Paris, La Harpe would pay his respects every time the Grand
Prince showed an inclination to receive him. Finally La Harpe announced:

“I have discussed the art of ruling with him on two separate occasions, and I can assure you that I found him most satisfactory.” (There were a great many reasons why this could not have been true: Paul I, as he became, was the stupidest and most timid of all the stupid and timid Russian Tsars.)

Although the most severe of critics, La Harpe could not bear to be criticised himself. After the press had savaged his play
Les brames
, he petitioned the Keeper of the Seal to ban the newspapers from commenting on his new plays before a certain number of performances had taken place, to stop the audiences from staying away—a playwright’s dream that has never yet come to pass.

La Harpe was not a great poet, but he was one of the most representative people of his time. There was only one great poet alive in France in this period, and he was certainly not typical of his age, nor had anyone heard of him. This was André Chénier, who was to die young on the revolutionary scaffold. In Chénier the
chrysea phormix Apolonos
was heard again: the golden lute of Apollo, the glory of Ancient Greece. The oldest voice is always the newest, and Chénier is much more modern to our ears than any other poet of his century. We feel instantly at home in his verses. They are the lyre that will sound again in the work of Baudelaire and Verlaine. We cannot refrain from quoting a few lines to show how very fine his voice is, and how little dated. The extract is from an allegorical poem about a queen—perhaps he was thinking of Marie-Antoinette, so the passage is not unconnected with our theme: