LOUIS XVI AND MARIE ANTOINETTE
THE MOMENT BEFORE THE DELUGE
Part 1
Part 2
The fourteen year old archduchess was blond, blue-eyed, and vivacious.
Her arrival in France was the signal for general rejoicing.
The nation was in the grip of a depression at the time but Louis spared no expense
to make the wedding an occasion that would show the world that France
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could surpass
everyone in public magnificence. A great display of fireworks was given in Paris so
that hundreds of
thousands of ordinary people would be able to celebrate, but 130 people were trampled to death in the
panic and stampede that occurred at the end of the spectacle.
Other things had gone wrong from the beginning. The royal bridegroom suffered from phimosis (contraction of the
orifice of the prepuce), and until the royal surgeon corrected this condition in 1777, he was unable to have intercourse
with his queen.
The frustrated, childless Marie Antoinette indulged her passion for luxuries. She spent a fortune on her favorite
residence, the Petit Trianon; on her stable of three hundred horses; on her sessions at the gaming tables; and on
her clothes, which cost 100,000 livres a year. (Even great titled heads lived for a year on half that sum; fifty
thousand livres per annum was a lavish income for the times.) She loved jewelry: her earrings of clusters of
pearl-shaped diamonds from Charles Boehmer, the crown jeweler, cost 400,000 livres; her diamond bracelets cost 100, 000
livres apiece.
The Austrian ambassador at the French court tried to warn against these extravagances.
"I did not conceal from Her Majesty," he wrote to Maria Theresa, "that under the present economic conditions it
would have been wiser to avoid such a tremendous expenditure. But she could not resist - although she handled the
purchases carefully, keeping them secret from the king. " In any case no one could deny that the new queen looked
utterly radiant in her magnificent clothes and jewels. "No woman ever carried her head better, and it was so set upon
her shoulders that every movement she made was instinct with grace and nobility," wrote a perceptive official who was
also a historian, Senac de Meilhan. "Her gait was stately, yet light... and there was in her person a still rarer
quality-the union of grace and of the most imposing dignity."
She had been brought up in the relative austerity of the Hapsburg household in Vienna, but now she seemed to
be "drunk with the extravagance of this country," as her brother Joseph reported after a visit to Versailles. At
least part of the problem was that she was impulsively generous, rewarding her favorite ladies-in-waiting with immense
sums of money from the royal treasury. The princesse de Lamballe became superintendent of the queen's household at a
salary of 150,000 livres. The impoverished comtesse de Polignac received 400,000 livres to pay her debts
and 800,000 livres as a dowry for her daughter, as well as a dukedom for her husband.
But the queen was also eager to accomplish great projects of her own and to leave her mark on the great cumulative
monument of Versailles. A woman of energy and taste, she set to work creating gardens with artificial ruins, grottoes,
cascades, pavilions-the newly fashionable "delight in disorder" of the English garden. She built an imitation peasant
village, the Hameau, where she could while away the hours in rustic simplicity playing milkmaid.
But the garden party she gave to inaugurate the Trianon gardens cost 200,000 livres. She had dressed the band of her
Guards regiment in Chinese costumes for the occasion; a thousand Chinese lanterns provided the illumination, and a
troupe of actors from the Comedie Francaise played charades for her guests on an open-air stage. All this, unfortunately,
cost more and more money at a time when the French government's finances were in perpetual disarray. On the eve of
the Revolution, the royal family's household staff of 15,000 people, both military and civilian, accounted for about
13 percent of the total national budget - and interest payments on the national debt had risen to 300 million
livres per year: a sum so great as to be meaningless, and the deficit rose annually.
Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette eventually had children, and the future of the dynasty seemed assured.
Part 1
Extract from “Treasures of The World The French Kings”, Written by Frederic V. Grunfeld.
Select Books, A Division of Time-Life Books, B.V. Amsterdam. Great Britain: 1983.
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