MARIE ANTOINETTE.*
TEE last Queen of France will not hold a place in the romance of history so large and lasting as that which Mary Stuart has occupied, nor can controversy concerning her have so wide a range and so acrimonious a spirit. And yet the nearer figure in the distances of the past is a more tragic one than the farther, by many degrees of grief and suffering, and especially in the sense of the utter cruelty of contrast. Mary Stuart has been made supremely interesting by every pen which has attempted to tell her story, whether guided by admiration and pity, or by dishie. The romance of the time and the facts is irresistible, whether they be dealt with in the one spirit or in the other, and the Queen of Scots is the typical image of the irony of fate. Marie Antoinette is a truer and completer typical image of that irony, when one follows the outlines of her life's story, from its purple- born dawn to the coffin which cost seven francs, and the quicklime-lined pit in the common graveyard. But the frightful convulsion in which she perished upheaved so many striking individuals, and involved so many awful catastrophes, that she loses the reality and extent of her dreadful pre-eminence in most of the memoirs and histories which depict her ; and also, her personal qualities were not of the romantic, nor—except the grand and simple courage which she displayed in the evil days— of the heroic order. The Austrian princess might have been a common-place person enough, if her surroundings had not been so exceptional and unnatural, even for a royal lady under the old regime; but Mary Stuart would have made her mark in any age, in any position ; the individuality of her would no more have been repressible than that of her "good cousin" who killed her, if they had both been born to the lowly lot for which the Poet-Laureate makes the Princess Elizabeth sigh. Perhaps it is because we always see Marie Antoinette in somebody's hands, an object of or an agent in some scheme, that she is never so distinct as to gain our warm sympathies until she commands them by her un- surpassed suffering. Managed by her mother, managed by her husband's aunts and sisters-in-law, and by Mercy d'Argenteau, her mother's confidential friend (whose functions came unpleasantly near those of a spy), in her Dauphiness-days, Marie Antoinette— the poetic description of Edmund Burke notwithstanding—is not a very interesting personage to contemplate, except in the light of compassion for a mere girl, parted from all the wholesome and pious happiness of girlhood and of home, and thrust into an atmosphere of low, selfish, scheming, habitual falsehood, mere cold lip-service, in which no girlish graces of mind and soul could thrive, and where she found the only relief from the con- straint and pretence of her scrutinised and calumniated life in the indulgence of a capricious vanity.
"L'Autrichienne," who never saw her own country after she was fifteen, and adopted France only too thoroughly, was, it seems to us, judging from her correspondence with her mother, intelligent and affectionate, simple, and endowed with a sense of humour which she would have been better without. It was dangerous,—it got in her way, it tripped her up. The story of her first years in France is very sad, under all its brilliance, when one remembers that she was so young, that she had come from so homely a home, and that she had not a true friend in the world, not even in the dull and indifferent husband, who learned, indeed, to love her afterwards, but never learned that, though she made some blunders, she was far more intelligent than he, • The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France. By Charles Duke Tonga. London: Burst and Blacken.
and especially never learned that a division of their interests was an absurd impossibility, a chimera with which his advisers either wickedly or ignorantly frightened him. The Dauphiness is never distinct to one's fancy, except in the perfect womanliness of the picture one forms- of her ; there is not a masculine trait in her character or conduct, not even after she had begun to medcllo in affairs of State ; her insight, her instincts, her pre- judices, and her errors were all womanly. The flight from Lochleven and the famous ride to Carbery would have been as impossible to Marie Antoinette as the endurance of Louis's stolid obstinacy, and the observance of perfect respect at the momenta when her intellect, her heart, and her good-taste must all have been in revolt against him, would have been to Mary Stuart. Motherhood formed the character and filled the heart of the one woman, it seems to have made no impression at all upon the other.
Every writer upon the Revolution presents the Queen of France in colours to suit the general tone of his picture, whether he be a historian or a romance-writer ; from M. Louis Blanc, who affects to believe her guilty in the matter of the Diamond Necklace, while he affects to believe Robespierre innocent in the Sainte- Amaranthe affair, and praiseworthy as regards the execution of Denton and Desmoulins ; to Alexandre Dumas, who dances her like a puppet through a series of intrigues ; and Erckmann- Chatrian, who ignore her importance and action in the Revolu- tion, and dismiss her " supplice " in two lines ; not to men- tion the other numerous writers belonging to both categories. On the other hand, the writers of memoirs of the Queen have generally selected, among the incidents and features of the Re- volution, those which serve to illustrate their respective views of her, and thdugh to a certain extent that is right, and the only method possible where the solitary figure en evidence must have so lurid a background, the selection has rarely been made with impartiality, and the reader who does not share the idie fire of the writer, but wishes to be guided to the formation of a true ideal, finds himself confused, either by unbounded panegyric, or by a common-sense conviction that no single individual, even though she was a queen, could possibly have done the amount of evil attributed to Marie Antoinette, unless every man in power and place had been either a villain or a fool, or both.
Mr. Yonge's " Life of Marie Antoinette," with all its merits, has not that of repairing the general indistinctness of the Queen's image as presented to us in her youth ; all the people who schemed and intrigued about and around her are plainer, to our fancy, than she is, in the days when she drew eulogiums from such widely different sources as Edmund Burke and Horace Walpole. The flowery flatteries of that joyous time are but vague, and in the letters of the Dauphiness to her mother, and the stern rebukes and astute counsels of perhaps the most passionately-political woman that ever lived — for Maria Theresa loved politics better than she loved her children, though her maternal love was very strong and constant—we come upon the anguis in herbs.
Mr. Yonge has shown great judgment and discretion in selecting from the mass of correspondence at his disposal, and he meets the objection which might be taken to his reliance on M. Feuillet de Conches, by pointing out that the letters from his collection which are incorporated in this narrative are taken from the unimpugned portion of the "Recueil." He has consulted a great number of authorities, and he has gleaned from them all the salient Incidents of the life of the Queen, for whom he has an ardent admiration. He has produced the most interesting history of Marie Antoinette which has yet been written in English, and nothing can be more ardent than his panegyric on the woman whose fate was terrible enough to have blinded the world to worse faults than those which the least partial scrutiny can impute to Marie Antoinette. His style is, however, so devoid of picturesqueness, that he fails to stir the feelings of his readers as such a subject should stir them ; the inner meaning, the frightful interior struggle and anguish of those concluding years are not reproduced ; it is with the external aspect of them, horrible, indeed, but not the worst, that the writer deals. Thus, while his work is valuable, it is not entirely satisfactory ; a certain flatness comes sometimes to dis- appoint the reader, and make him long for a life of this wretahedest of women written outwards from the inner view of her, less a defence than an analysis. Such a life would be a feat of extra-
ordinary difficulty ; the knowledge of the end in the writer's mind, the shadow of the guillotine, the prolonged agony of the death-
ride, which resumed in itself all that the moat powerful and the gloomiest imagination could conceive of the anguish
of contrast, is always thrown over the preceding years, insensibly influencing their significance, and especially exaggerating one's impatience with the frivolity and love of pleasure which were Marie Antoinette's chief faults. Her constant dread of ennui Provokes the reader, who knows what she did not know, and who is also apt to forget that she had no resource but to believe in and cling to the mere veneer of friendship and good-feeling, which is her daily life represented all that her warm heart and quick in- tellect longed for of love and companionship. The cowardly selfishness of the friends to whom she attached herself so fondly is too often charged upon the Queen, by a kind of reflection which is not fair to her who suffered so much from them. To our mind, Marie Antoinette's love for her friends, which, if not always, or even often, wise, was both eager and constant, is one of the great charms of her image, amid the selfish cynicism of that cold-hearted and shallow society. This, however, does not blind us to the errors into which her friendships led her. We suppose nobody believes, not even the apologists of the worst excesses and the vilest men of the Revolution, that Marie Antoinette was an un- faithful wife ; and we admire the good-taste with which Mr. Yonge passes almost scornfully over the scurrilous and disgusting imputations upon the Queen on which the rascally pamphleteers of the Revolution lived, and to which men like Desmoulins and Herault, who, even in their excesses, ought not to have fallen so low, lent themselves. Mr. Yonge comments with reason upon the incredulity of loose livers and free-thinkers when the virtue of Marie Antoinette was impugned. It is strong presumptive evidence indeed for the Queen's innocence that Horace Walpole believed in it, and that Madame Du Deffand did not call it in question.
Mr. Yonge's work does not add to the general knowledge of the facts of Marie Antoinette's life, nor does it place her in any novel light. He is a panegyrist, though not extravagant ; but he would be more effective and would more readily touch the sympathies of his readers, if his judgment upon the enemies of the Monarchy and the fauteurs of the Revolution were less pro- miscuous and more discriminating. He has read and gleaned from an immense number of works on this seemingly inexhaustible subject, and he has condensed the facts with skill, so that his work will no doubt be the chosen reference for students of the time who prefer having their information boiled down. We regret that Mr. Yonge has not given the benefit of doubt to some of the disputed incidents of a history which, however carefully it be filtered through impartial historical scrutiny, must retain enough of the horrible and the disgraceful to make it an indelible stain on a phase in the life of the once chivalrous French nation. For instance, he relates the incident of the worst outrage of the return of the Royal Family from Versailles to Paris—the hoisting of the beads of the two soldiers of the Queen's guard on pikes, and the dressing their hair at Sevres—asif there had never been a question of its authenticity. Yet be cannot have read some of the writings on his own list, or M. Louis Blanc's history (he does not, how- over, allude to the latter work), without being aware that repeated and emphatic denial is given to this story by several creditable writers. It does not matter very much, after all, except asa proof of the authenticity of the other horrors which they do not attempt to deny, that this accusation is refuted by the partisans of the Re- volution, and that they make so strong a point of its not being true. An occasional foot-note, admitting the dissentients in cer- tain matters, would have improved Mr. Yonge's book, and not weakened his claim to having been guided in his judgment by the preponderance and credit of the evidence. This omission is but a small fault in a work of remarkable merit and interest, which will, we do not doubt, become the popular English history of Marie Antoinette.
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