The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France - Charles Duke Yonge (ereader that reads to you .TXT) 📗

alliance between France and Austria (which, coinciding with the judgment of his imperial mistress, he regarded as the most important of all political objects), and be most injurious to the welfare of France and to her own personal comfort, if that leader should be any one but the queen.[7]

But, as we have seen, he could not prevent Louis from yielding at times to other influences. Taking the same view of the situation as the empress, if indeed Maria Teresa had not adopted it from him, he had urged Marie Antoinette to prevent any change in the ministry being made at first, in which it is highly probable that she did not coincide with him, though equally likely that Maurepas was not the minister whom she would have preferred. Another piece of advice which he gave was, however, taken, and with the happiest effect The poorer classes in Paris and its neighborhood were suffering from a scarcity which almost amounted to a famine; and, before the death of Louis XV., Mercy had recommended that the first measure of the new reign should be one which should lower the price of bread. That counsel was too entirely in harmony with the active benevolence of the new monarch to be neglected. The necessary edicts were issued. In twenty-four hours the price of the loaf was reduced by two-fifths, and Mercy had the satisfaction of hearing the relief generally attributed to the influence of the new queen.

It can not he supposed that the king knew either the opinion which the empress and the embassador had formed of his capacity and disposition, or the advice which they had consequently given to the queen. But he very early began to show that he himself also appreciated his wife's quickness of intelligence and correctness of judgment. Maria Teresa, in pressing on her daughter her opinion of the general character of the policy which the interest of France required, explained her view of her daughter's position to be that she was "the friend and confidante of the king.[8]" And June had hardly arrived before he began to discuss all his plans and difficulties with her; while she spared his pride and won his further confidence by avoiding all appearances of pressing for it, as if her advice were necessary to him, but at the same time showing with what satisfaction she received it. To those who solicited her intervention, her language was most carefully guarded. "She did not," she said, "interfere in any affair of state; she only coincided in all the wishes and intentions of the king."

There were, however, matters which were strictly and exclusively within her own province; and in them she at once began to exert her authority most beneficially. Her first desire was to purify the court where licentiousness in either sex had long been the surest road to royal favor. She began by making a regulation, that she would receive no lady who was separated from her husband; and she abolished a senseless and inexplicable rule of etiquette which had hitherto prohibited the queen and princesses from dining or supping in company with their husbands.[9] Such an exclusion from the king's table of those who were its most natural and becoming ornaments had notoriously facilitated and augmented the disorders of the last reign; and it was obvious that its maintenance must at least have a tendency to lead to a repetition of the old irregularities. Fortunately, the king was as little inclined to approve of it as the queen. All his tastes were domestic, and he gladly assented to her proposal to abolish the custom. Throughout the reign, at all ordinary meals, at his suppers when he came in late from hunting, when he had perhaps invited some of his fellow-sportsmen to share his repast, and at State banquets, Marie Antoinette took her seat at his side, not only adding grace and liveliness to the entertainment, but effectually preventing license, and even the suspicion of scandal; and, as she desired that her household as well as her family should set an example of regularity and propriety to the nation, she exercised a careful superintendence over the behavior of those who had hitherto been among the least-considered members of the royal establishment. Even the king's confessor had thought the morals of the royal pages either beneath his notice or beyond his control; but Marie Antoinette took a higher view of her duties. She considered her pages[10] as placed under her charge, and herself as bound to extend what one of themselves calls a maternal care and kindness to them, restraining as far as she could, and when she could not restrain, reproving their boyish excesses, softening their hearts and winning their affections by the gentle dignity of her admonitions, and by the condescending and hopeful indulgence with which she accepted their expressions of contrition and their promises of amendment. In one matter, too, which, if not exactly political, was at all events of public interest, she acted in a manner of which none of her predecessors had set an example. By a custom of immemorial antiquity, at the accession of a new sovereign, a tax had been levied on the whole kingdom as an offering to the king, known as "the gift of the happy accession;[11]" when there was a queen, a similar tax was imposed upon the Parisians, to provide what was called "the girdle of the queen.[12]" It has already been mentioned that the distress which existed in Paris at this time was so severe that, just before the death of the late king, Louis and Marie Antoinette had relieved it by a munificent gift from their private purse; and to lay additional burdens on the people at such a time was not only repugnant to their feelings, but seemed especially inconsistent with their recent generosity. Accordingly, the very first edict of the new reign announced that neither tax would be imposed. The people felt the kindness which dictated such a relief more than even the relief itself, and repaid it with expressions of gratitude such as no French sovereign had heard for above a century; but Marie Antoinette, with the humility natural to her on such subjects, made light of her own share in the act of benevolence, turning off the compliments which were paid to her with a playful jest, that it was impossible for a queen to affix a purse to her girdle, now that girdles had gone out of fashion.[13]

On another subject, also, not wholly unconnected with politics, Since the nobleman concerned had once been the chief minister, but in which Marie Antoinette's interest was personal, she broke through her usual rule of not beginning the discussion with the king, and requested the recall from banishment of the Due de Choiseul. An unfounded prejudice based upon calumnies set on foot by the cabal of Madame du Barri, had envenomed Louis's mind against the duke. He bad been led to suspect that his own father, the late dauphin, had been poisoned, and that Choiseul had been accessory to the crime. There was nothing more certain than that the dauphin's death had been natural; but a dislike of the accused duke lingered in the king's mind, and he eluded compliance with his wife's request till she put it on entirely personal grounds, by declaring it to be humiliating to herself that one to whom she was under the deepest obligations as the negotiator of her own happy marriage should be under the king's displeasure without her being able to procure his pardon. Louis felt the force of the appeal thus made to him. "If she used that argument, he could deny her nothing," and the duke's sentence was remitted, though his royal patroness was unable to procure his re-admission to office. Nor did Maria Teresa regret that she failed in that object; since she feared his restless character, and felt the alliance between the two countries safer in the hands of the new foreign secretary, the Count de Vergennes.


CHAPTER IX.

The Comte de Provence intrigues against the Queen.--The King gives her the Little Trianon,--She lays out an English Garden.--Maria Teresa cautions her against Expense.--The King and Queen abolish some of the Old Forms.-- The Queen endeavors to establish Friendships with some of her Younger Ladies.--They abuse her Favor.--Her Eagerness for Amusement.--Louis enters into her Views.--Etiquette is abridged.--Private Parties at Choisy.-- Supper Parties.--Opposition of the Princesses.--Some of the Courtiers are dissatisfied at the Relaxation of Etiquette.--Marie Antoinette is accused of Austrian Preferences.

Her accession to the throne, however, had not entirely delivered Marie Antoinette from intrigues. It had only changed their direction and object, and also the persona of the intriguers. Her chief enemy now was the prince who ought to have been her best friend, the next brother of her husband, the Comte de Provence. Among the papers of Louis XV. the king had found proofs, in letters from both count and countess, that they had both been actively employed in trying to make mischief, and to poison the mind of their grandfather against the dauphiness. They became still more busy now, since each day seemed to diminish the probability of Marie Antoinette becoming a mother; while, if she should leave no children, the Comte de Provence would be heir to the throne. He scarcely made any secret that he was already contemplating the probability of his succession; and, as there were not wanting courtiers to speculate also on the chance, it soon became known that there was no such sure road to the favor of monsieur[1] as that of disparaging and vilifying the queen. There might have been some safety for her in being put on her guard against her enemy; and the king himself, who called his brother Tartuffe, did, in consequence of his discovery, use great caution and circumspection in his behavior toward him; but Marie Antoinette was of a temper as singularly forgiving as it was open: she could not bear to regard with suspicion even those of whose unfriendliness and treachery she had had proofs; and after a few days she resumed her old familiarity with the pair, as if she had no reason to distrust them, slighting on this subject the remonstrances of Mercy, who pointed out to her in vain that she was putting weapons into their hands which they would be sure to turn against herself.

At this moment she was especially happy with a new pastime. Amidst the stately halls of Versailles she had often longed for a villa on a smaller scale, which she might call her own; and the wish was now gratified. On one side of the park of Versailles, and about a mile from the palace, the late king had built an exquisite little pavilion for his mistress, which was known as the Little Trianon. There had been a building of one kind or another on the same spot for above a century. Louis XIV. had erected there a cottage of porcelain for his imperious favorite, Madame de Montespan; and it was the more sumptuous palace with which, after her death, he replaced it, that gave rise to the strange quarrel between the haughty monarch and his equally haughty minister, Louvois, of which St. Simon has left us so curious an account.[2] This had been allowed to fall into a state of decay; and a few years before his death, Louis XV. had pulled down what remained of it, and had built a third on its foundations, which had been the most favorite abode of Madame du Barri during his life, but which was now rendered vacant by her dismissal. The house was decorated with an exquisite delicacy of taste, in which Louis XV. had far surpassed his predecessor; but the chief charm of the place was generally accounted to be the garden, which had been laid out by Le Notre, an artist,