Marie Antoinette

THE eighteenth century, which had lost the appetite for tragedy and almost the comprehension of it, was granted, before it closed, the most perfect subject of tragedy which history affords.

The Queen of France whose end is but an episode in the story of the Revolution stands apart in this: that while all around her were achieved the principal miracles of the human will, she alone suffered, by an unique exception, a fixed destiny against which the will seemed powerless. In person she was not considerable, in temperament not exalted; but her fate was enormous.

It is profitable, therefore, to abandon for a moment the contemplation of those great men who recreated in Europe the well-ordered State, and to admire the exact convergence of such accidents as drew around Marie Antoinette an increasing pressure of doom. These accidents united at last: they drove her with a precision that was more than human, right to her predestined end.

In all the extensive record of her actions there is nothing beyond the ordinary kind. She was petulant or gay, impulsive or collected, according to the mood of the moment: acting in everything as a woman of her temper—red-headed, intelligent and arduous—will always do: she was moved by changing circumstance to this or that as many million of her sort had been moved before her. But her chance friendships failed not in mere disappointments but in ruin; her lapses of judgment betrayed her not to stumbling but to an abyss; her small, neglected actions matured unseen and reappeared prodigious in the catastrophe of her life as torturers to drag her to the scaffold. Behind such causes of misfortune as can at least be traced in some appalling order there appear, as we read her history, causes more dreadful because they are mysterious and unreasoned: ill-omened dates, fortunes quite unaccountable, and continually a dark coincidence, reawaken in us that native dread of Destiny which the Faith, after centuries of power, has hardly exorcised.

The business, then, of this book is not to recount from yet another aspect that decisive battle whereby political justice was recovered for us all, nor to print once more in accurate sequence the life of a Queen whose actions have been preserved in the minutest detail, but to show a Lady whose hands—for all the freedom of their gesture—were moved by influences other than her own, and whose feet, though their steps seemed wayward and self-determined, were ordered for her in one path that led inexorably to its certain goal.

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CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE I. THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION 1

II. BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 17

III. THE ESPOUSALS 32

IV. THE DU BARRY 45

V. THE DAUPHINE 52

VI. THE THREE YEARS 73

VII. THE CHILDREN 116

VIII. FIGARO 130

IX. THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 154

X. THE NOTABLES 170

XI. THE BASTILLE 193

XII. OCTOBER 215

XIII. MIRABEAU 240

XIV. VARENNES 263

XV. THE WAR 292

XVI. THE FALL OF THE PALACE 307

XVII. THE TEMPLE 324

XVIII. THE HOSTAGE 348

XIX. THE HUNGER OF MAUBEUGE 365

XX. WATTIGNIES 377

APPENDICES 402

INDEX 419

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE LAST ACT OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY. Frontispiece ORDER GIVEN ON 10TH AUGUST, 1792, TO THE GUARD AT THE TUILERIES TO CEASE FIRE AND RETURN TO BARRACKS

MARIA THERESA - From the tapestry 13 portrait woven for Marie Antoinette and recently restored to Versailles

MADAME DE POMPADOUR - From the Portrait 18 by Boucher in the National Gallery, Edinburgh. From a photo by T. R. Annan & Sons

THE FIRST DAUPHIN (THE FATHER OF LOUIS 26 XVI.)

LOUIS XVI. - From the principal bust at 70 Versailles

THE EMPEROR JOSEPH II. - From the 103 tapestry portrait woven for Marie Antoinette and recently restored to Versailles

MARIE ANTOINETTE - From the principal 117 bust at Versailles

THE COUNTESS OF PROVENCE - From the bust 129 at Versailles

MARIE ANTOINETTE - After the painting by 154 Madame Vigée Le Brun. From photo kindly lent by Duveen Bros., Old Bond Street

PORTRAIT BUST OF THE DUKE OF NORMANDY, 163 THE SECOND DAUPHIN, SOMETIMES CALLED LOUIS XVII., WHO DIED IN THE TEMPLE

AUTOGRAPH NOTE OF LOUIS XVI. RECALLING 213 NECKER, ON THE 16TH OF JULY, AFTER THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE

THE TUILERIES, FROM THE GARDEN OR WEST 231 SIDE, IN 1789