How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair by Jonathan Beckman
Authors: Jonathan Beckman
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beyond Marie Antoinette. Irrespective of whether they slept with each other, their mutual ardour was beyond doubt.
In 1775, Louis gave Marie Antoinette the Petit Trianon, a small, clean-lined caramel-coloured palace at the far end of the gardens of Versailles, which Louis XV had commissioned for Madame du Pompadour. Here, with the painter Hubert Robert, Marie Antoinette planted a jardin anglais – artificial arcadian landscapes of undulating terrain, studiedly haphazard planting and the odd neoclassical temple – that repudiated the trimness of Versailles’s classical horticulture. She also built a hameau – a hamlet – containing twelve cottages, a mill, a dovecot, an aviary, a henhouse and a farm with a working dairy. The village was quilted in flowers that filled hundreds of faience pots stamped in blue with the figure of the queen, along with bushes and trees stooping with apricots, gooseberries, raspberries and strawberries. The hameau was another of the fandangles for which Marie Antoinette was taxed. But it should also be seen as an attempt, however remote and patronising, to understand something of the lives of her more lowly subjects,to whom she had shown sympathy and affection on the occasions she had encountered them (for example, when 130 people had been killed in a stampede in Paris at a fireworks display to mark her marriage, she had given generously to the bereaved). In a similar vein, Louis XVI had, as a child, been taught how to plough a field.
The queen’s retreat into a Shangri-La of her own fashioning was accompanied by a turn in public opinion against her. She had been genuinely adored on her arrival in France; in 1773, she and Louis were mobbed by so many well-wishers at the Tuileries that their progress was stalled for forty-five minutes. When the chorus in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide sang ‘Let us sing now, let us celebrate our Queen’ there was vigorous clapping and cries of ‘Vive la Reine’. Marie Antoinette knew how fickle such adulation was: ‘How fortunate we are’, she wrote, ‘given our rank, to have gained the love of a wholepeople with such ease.’ She was aware that her privileges might as easily breed resentment.
Little in her conduct, however, seemed directed at preserving the respect of her subjects, and her disavowal of much of her public role led to malicious speculation about what went on behind closed doors. When her first child was born, numerous potential fathers were listed by the satirists. These libels were not necessarily being produced by fervent republicans (who, at this point, existed only in tiny numbers); they were commissioned and distributed by courtiers who felt excluded from the queen’s coterie. She was also accused of acting as a fifth columnist for Austrian interests – during the Bavarian crisis, sporadic applause for her at the opera was stifled by other spectators. And her extravagant expenditure caused consternation; it was believed, for instance, that Trianon contained a wall of diamonds. In 1784 the king bought for her the chateau of Saint-Cloud for 6 million livres from his cousin the duc d’Orléans; the palace was to be the queen’s personal property and all orders there were given in her name. There was suspicion about the purchase – objections were raised in the parlement of Paris, where the king’s edicts needed to be ratified – much of which was justified; the deal had been orchestrated by the baron de Breteuil, a ministerial supporter of Marie Antoinette, against the objectionsof the finance minister, Calonne, as a staging post in his project to let the queen rule (‘ faire regner la Reine ’). Saint-Cloud marked the confluence of disgust at the queen’s excess and distrust of her political aspirations. From then on, both would fret harder and deeper.
5
In My Lady’s Chamber
A T MIDDAY, SPECTATORS , drily whispering, gather as the king and queen make their way to Mass. The queen strides down the gallery, ringed by her
In 1775, Louis gave Marie Antoinette the Petit Trianon, a small, clean-lined caramel-coloured palace at the far end of the gardens of Versailles, which Louis XV had commissioned for Madame du Pompadour. Here, with the painter Hubert Robert, Marie Antoinette planted a jardin anglais – artificial arcadian landscapes of undulating terrain, studiedly haphazard planting and the odd neoclassical temple – that repudiated the trimness of Versailles’s classical horticulture. She also built a hameau – a hamlet – containing twelve cottages, a mill, a dovecot, an aviary, a henhouse and a farm with a working dairy. The village was quilted in flowers that filled hundreds of faience pots stamped in blue with the figure of the queen, along with bushes and trees stooping with apricots, gooseberries, raspberries and strawberries. The hameau was another of the fandangles for which Marie Antoinette was taxed. But it should also be seen as an attempt, however remote and patronising, to understand something of the lives of her more lowly subjects,to whom she had shown sympathy and affection on the occasions she had encountered them (for example, when 130 people had been killed in a stampede in Paris at a fireworks display to mark her marriage, she had given generously to the bereaved). In a similar vein, Louis XVI had, as a child, been taught how to plough a field.
The queen’s retreat into a Shangri-La of her own fashioning was accompanied by a turn in public opinion against her. She had been genuinely adored on her arrival in France; in 1773, she and Louis were mobbed by so many well-wishers at the Tuileries that their progress was stalled for forty-five minutes. When the chorus in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide sang ‘Let us sing now, let us celebrate our Queen’ there was vigorous clapping and cries of ‘Vive la Reine’. Marie Antoinette knew how fickle such adulation was: ‘How fortunate we are’, she wrote, ‘given our rank, to have gained the love of a wholepeople with such ease.’ She was aware that her privileges might as easily breed resentment.
Little in her conduct, however, seemed directed at preserving the respect of her subjects, and her disavowal of much of her public role led to malicious speculation about what went on behind closed doors. When her first child was born, numerous potential fathers were listed by the satirists. These libels were not necessarily being produced by fervent republicans (who, at this point, existed only in tiny numbers); they were commissioned and distributed by courtiers who felt excluded from the queen’s coterie. She was also accused of acting as a fifth columnist for Austrian interests – during the Bavarian crisis, sporadic applause for her at the opera was stifled by other spectators. And her extravagant expenditure caused consternation; it was believed, for instance, that Trianon contained a wall of diamonds. In 1784 the king bought for her the chateau of Saint-Cloud for 6 million livres from his cousin the duc d’Orléans; the palace was to be the queen’s personal property and all orders there were given in her name. There was suspicion about the purchase – objections were raised in the parlement of Paris, where the king’s edicts needed to be ratified – much of which was justified; the deal had been orchestrated by the baron de Breteuil, a ministerial supporter of Marie Antoinette, against the objectionsof the finance minister, Calonne, as a staging post in his project to let the queen rule (‘ faire regner la Reine ’). Saint-Cloud marked the confluence of disgust at the queen’s excess and distrust of her political aspirations. From then on, both would fret harder and deeper.
5
In My Lady’s Chamber
A T MIDDAY, SPECTATORS , drily whispering, gather as the king and queen make their way to Mass. The queen strides down the gallery, ringed by her
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