You may not recognize the woman in this portrait. She’s long been known by the infamous words she never spoke:
“If they have no bread, let them eat cake.”
If those words were ever spoken at all, they were uttered by a predecessor—the Spanish-born consort of the Sun King, Marie Thérѐse—long before this Queen ever entered France. Of course, whether Marie Thérѐse voiced this sentiment either is debatable; since it was Rousseau who put them in her mouth as a way of suggesting the callousness of the nobility in general.
But couldn’t our Queen—known for her hedonism and self-absorption—have been similarly callous, even if she never actually suggested the starving peasantry eat cake, or brioche, to be more precise?
Actually, no.
To her attendants and all who came into contact with her, Queen Marie Antoinette—born Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria—was a woman of great warmth and kindness, one whose compassion was easily aroused, manifesting itself not merely in kindly words but in deeds.
For instance, learning that her portrait painter, Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, was excluded from the prestigious Academy of Painting simply because her husband was an art dealer, the Queen petitioned her husband, the King, to make an exception in Madame Lebrun’s case. Louis XVI, equally compassionate, agreed, making Madame Lebrun the first female painter to join the Academy.
On another occasion, while out hunting, the Queen found a wheat field between herself and the stag she was hunting. Rather than let the wheels of her calѐche and the thundering hooves of her horses destroy the peasant’s field, she immediately instructed her driver to turn aside, preferring to forego the kill rather than cause any loss to the peasant.
On yet another occasion when a peasant found himself injured during the hunt, it was the Queen who got out of her carriage and tended to the man and his wife.
These acts of kindness often made the Queen the target of vicious gossip. When an Englishman, Edward Dillon, fell off his horse, breaking his arm in the process, the Queen offered him the use of her royal coach, while she herself rode with her husband. Seeing the handsome young man in the Queen’s equipage, the gossips maliciously spread the word that she was having an affair with him!
A woman devoted to children, Marie Antoinette remained childless for eight long years after her marriage. At first, it was because Louis (later King Louis XVI) couldn’t bring himself to trust her. Brought up by a strict, almost puritanical father—the Dauphin had died when Louis was eleven—tended, thanks to his upbringing, to be suspicious of women, in particular beautiful women.
Louis had seen how his grandfather, Louis XV, was easily manipulated by his mistresses and was determined not to let his own wife have such sway over him. His tutor and aunts, adamantly against the Austrian alliance, had also convinced Louis that through his wife, Austria might come to control France.
So it took Louis quite some time to trust Marie Antoinette. But even after they’d become close and the marriage had been consummated, pregnancy continued to elude them. There’s some suggestion that this was due to a physical impediment in Louis, which was later corrected by surgery. Whatever the case, it was only in 1778 that their first child was born—the only one of their four children to make it to adulthood.
Even in this tragic childlessness, the malicious pamphleteers found fodder for scurrilous gossip and slander. The Queen’s childlessness was attributed to the unnatural lesbian relations she enjoyed with her close companions, Madame Polignac and Madame de Lamballe.
But even if she were to have a child, the true father, the pamphleteers suggested, would have to be one of the handsome young courtiers around her. They even insinuated that she was having an affair with her brother-in-law, the Comte de Artois—later Charles X.
Outwardly, the Queen bore these rumors with great fortitude, seeming to be completely unaffected by them. Yet Madame Campan, her lady-in-waiting, reports that in private she was frequently reduced to tears by the hatred and viciousness directed at her.
There was more to come. The year 1789, remembered for the storming of the Bastille—actually there were only seven prisoners guarded by about 30 Swiss soldiers—was for Marie Antoinette and Louis, a time of mourning. On June 4 that year, they lost their first-born son, Louis Joseph, to rickets.
While the Estates General was assembling and the Third Estate—quite a few members of which actually belonged to the First Estate, the clergy, and the Second Estate, the nobility—was plotting its takeover of government, the King and Queen were grappling with the loss of their son while yet attempting to tackle the grave problems that had necessitated the calling of the Estates General to begin with.
But the worst insult of all, the vilest and basest of slanders, came during the show trial that condemned the Queen to death in 1793. A so-called journalist, Jacques René Hébert, known for his indecent writings, accused her of having an incestuous relation with her son, Louis Charles.
Repeatedly badgered to respond to the charges and taken to task for not doing so, the Queen replied: “If I have not answered, it was because Nature refuses to answer such a charge against a mother.”
It was understood that the trial was a mere formality; the Queen had already been condemned to death. But Hébert’s willingness to stoop to such despicable levels to attack the Queen disgusted even those in the crowd who had no sympathy for the royals. The Queen’s response turned the crowd’s sympathies toward her, although it would not be enough to save her from the guillotine.
In his play, The Barber of Seville, Beaumarchais tells us that the best way to destroy a person is through slander: “(T)here’s no downright lie, no tissue of horrors, no tittle-tattle so absurd that you can’t get the crass, nosy population of any city to swallow if you set about it the right way. . .”
Unfortunately for the Queen, the eighteenth-century slander machine worked so well, the ill-repute concocted for her has survived to this day. I’m working to correct that in the next Joseph Haydn Mystery, The Ill-Fated Queen, and to present you with the woman I’ve come to know.