Watched from the shadows and by mama
Peter Quennell
MEMOIRS OF MADAME DE LA TOUR DU PIN edited and translated by Felice Harcourt
Century Publishing, f6.95
IMPERIAL MOTHER, ROYAL DAUGHTER: THE CORRESPONDENCE OF • MARIE ANTOINETTE AND MARIA THERESA by Olivier Bernier
Sidgwick & Jackson, £12.95
IDuring the autumn of 1794, a fugitive from the French Revolution, Madame de la Tour du Pin, who had not yet heard of Robespierre's death, was busily at work in the kitchen of the American farmhouse that she and her husband now occupied, when she heard behind her a deep French voice, which exclaimed 'Never was a leg of lamb spitted with greater majesty!' Her uninvited visitor was Talleyrand, a person- age she did not trust or respect but could not help admiring; for no one else had so Much 'grace and ease' and 'memories of his wrong-doing were always dispelled by an hour of his conversation'. He had perfect manners and an 'exquisite sense of proprie- ty that prevented him making any remarks !he might perhaps have found offensive; and if, as sometimes happened, they did escape him, he would recollect himself immediately and say "Ah yes, but you don't like that" '. Both Talleyrand and his fellow exile were characteristic products of the Old Regime, but afterwards quickly came to terms with the Napoleonic Empire. In their youth they had enjoyed the patrician douceur de vivre'. Yet they survived the destruction of the carefree society they had known and continued their successful prog- ress some way into the 19th century. Between 1820 and 1853 Madame de la Tour du Pin, like Talleyrand, decided she would write her own memoirs, which portray a difficult childhood, a harmonious married life, her apprenticeship at the court of Louis XVI, the outbreak of the Revolution, Napoleon's rise and fall, and the restoration of the Bourbon line.
Although she was not a brilliantly im- aginative writer, worthy to stand beside Chateaubriand (whose Memoires d'Outre- tombe, she thought was 'full of ideas that, were at once revolutionary and irreligious), she became an excellent reporter; and some of her most interesting passages concern her service with Marie Antoinette as a junior Lady of the Household. Young and newly married, she had joined a strange, alarming world; and her present- ation at Versailles proved a particularly formidable experience. It would have been hard to conceive, she wrote, anything more ridiculous than the elaborate rehearsal of the ceremony that her family arranged.
Her dancing-master, M. Huart, had been appointed to put her through her paces. A stout, well-dressed and well- powdered man, he himself adopted the Queen's role and, below his masculine coat, wore a billowing underskirt: He told me what I had to do, sometimes taking the part of the lady who was to present me and sometimes that of the Queen. Standing at the end of the room, he showed me just when to remove my glove and bow to kiss the hem of the Queen's gown. He showed me the gesture she would make to prevent me. Nothing was forgotten or over- looked in these rehearsals, which went on for three or four hours.
Later, once she had grown accustomed to her duties, she was granted an unusual privilege. Hearing that she was again preg- nant, the Queen excused her from accom- panying the morning procession to Mass, lest 'I might walk too fast and slip on the parquet', and allowed her to sit quietly in an armchair near the bedroom window. Thus she was able to observe the daily making of the royal bed. First, waiting- women opened its immense double cur- tains. Next, they removed the bedlinen and pillows, tossing them into huge baskets `lined with green taffetas'; and a quartet of footmen turned the matresses, 'which were too heavy for women to lift', and the maids put on white sheets and carefully arranged the coverlets. This whole operation took only five minutes, and had to be completed before the Queen returned from chapel. Marie Antoinette was 'always thought- ful' says the authoress, at least on domestic occasions such as these. But she had an obvious streak of vanity, which it was essential not to rouse; and, since the new Lady of the Household was still young and blooming, her friends warned her that, if their mistress passed, she must stand with her back towards the light, so that the beauty of Marie Antoinette's skin should not suffer by comparison.
Madame de la Tour du Pin's portrait of the Queen grows more and more critical as her narrative proceeds. Marie Antoinette never acquired the gift of doing the right thing at exactly the right moment; and, during an early stage of the Revolution, when the staff-officers of the Garde Nationale, whose loyalty to the throne was, at the time, especially valuable, were introduced by their commander La Fayet- te, the memoirist noted that the Queen's emotions appeared to be beyond control:
She stammered a few words . . . and nodded her head in dismissal . . . That unfortunate Princess was incapable of gauging the im- portance of an occasion; she allowed her feelings to be seen without reflecting what the consequences might be. These officers, who could have been won by a gracious word, went off instead in a very had humour and spread their discontent throughout Paris.
It was not that Marie Antoinette had failed to receive a proper royal education; and until her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, died in 1780 she was always under a vigorous epistolary bombardment. From Vienna the Empress endlessly advised, encouraged, but, more frequently, repri- manded her errant child; and her efforts were regularly supplemented by the offi- cious Austrian ambassador, who despatch- ed secret reports on her conduct and the character of the 'ill-chosen' companions the Polignacs and others — she had selected for her personal amusement. Be- sides being much too fond of gambling and riding, she displayed a foolish interest in fashion. Drawings had reached her mother that illustrated the kind of dresses she now wore: We are being shown outfits so exaggerated that I cannot believe the Queen, my daugh- ter, should wear the like. . . It is not that I want to be critical, but I cannot believe that reasonable people dress as we are told over here, and I want to defend the French nation and only attribute these foolish displays to the young with whom one must be indulgent.
Worse still, as the sovereign of the 'most puritanical court in Europe', the Empress was horrified to learn that her awkward and weak-minded son-in-law hesitated to perform his matrimonial functions — a state of affairs that only reached an altogether satisfactory close just over seven years after his marriage, once in August 1777 he had submitted to a simple piece of surgery. Of the immense correspondence between 'Madame my dear Daughter' and `Madame my very dear Mother', no more than a minute fraction has hitherto been published; and Olivier Bemier's far more generous choice of material runs to 315 pages. Though neither of the correspon- dents was an accomplished letter-writer, and the subjects they discuss are necessari- ly somewhat repetitious, it makes an illu- minating and often tragic and horrific book. Behind the story it tells we cannot help foreseeing the dreadful events of 1793 and remembering one of the grimmest pictures ever drawn from life — David's sketch of Marie Antoinette, then renamed `la louve autrichienne', her face haggard, her hair dishevelled, her hands bound, being carted to the scaffold.
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