Costly
Christopher Hibbert
Marie Antoinette Desmond Seward (Constable pp. 297, £8.95).
While the formidable personalities of Danton and Mirabeau and the feline brilliance of Robespierre have received such scant attention from English writers of popular biography, it seems perverse of Desmond Seward to devote his talents to yet another book about that pathetic victim of the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette. Yet there are good reasons for his choice of subject. As Professor Hampson pointed out RI his illuminating short study of Danton three years ago, it is difficult to write a conventional biography of any of the leaders of the Revolution, since the private Papers, diaries and letters to friends that help the historian to penetrate beyond the Public façade are nearly always lacking. Also, the tragedy of Marie Antoinette has, in Mr Seward's words, 'a perennial fascination. Each time the story is retold it sheds a little more light on this unfortunate woman' Who was, he maintains, far from being the selfish, scatter-brained figure who frequently appears in accounts of the period, idly frittering away her life and her husband's money amidst the endless frivolities of Versailles. Certainly, it is now generally agreed that this familiar picture of Marie Antoinette is a caricature, but there is still no agreement as to whether it is outrageously exaggerated in the manner of Gillray at his most malignant or a mere heightening of undoubted failings as in a Rowlandson. When Marie Antoinette first apppeared at Versailles as the intended bride of the future Louis XVI the worst expectations seemed justified. The fifteenth child of Maria-Theresa of Austria, she was only 14 Years old and looked at least two years Younger. Her mother had always neglected her; her father had died when she was nine; her governesses had allowed her to do as She liked, even tracing out her lessons for her so that all she had to do was to ink in the answers. She was, accordingly, so illeducated as to be barely literate. She was also wholly uninstructed in the ways of the World and in the mysteries of sex and Procreation; and as her slovenly and lethargic 15-year-old husband had neither the capacity nor the will to teach her, and may at first have been physically incapable of making love to her, she found marriage to him profoundly unsatisfying. Frustrated and insecure, she went out of h. er way to shock and surprise and became increasingly pert and saucy. Often bored and even more frightened of being bored, she was constantly looking for new ways of relieving boredom; and in her obsessional pursuit of variety her extravagance became legendary. This, however, was not the main cause of her alienation from so many of her husband's courtiers. They were not so much inclined to complain of the huge sums she spent on clothes, jewellery and gambling, on the cottages and barns of her hameau and on the embellishment of the Petit Trianon, but of her refusal to be gracious to those whose company she found tedious; of her obvious impatience with the stultifying etiquette of the court and its drearily correct denizens; of her passionately romantic attachments to those of her favoured ladies upon whom and upon whose families were heaped gift upon gift, honour upon honour; and of her gay and intimate parties from which all buther favoured friends were excluded. To many of the old aristocracy, indeed, she was soon known as `la petite moqueuse' and then as that meddlesome foreigner, Autrichienne', with the accent on the last syllable: 'the bitch'. The people at large, at first sympathetic, began to form the same opinion of her as malicious libels spread from mouth to mouth. By the time the Revolution broke out she was, perhaps, the most widely disliked woman in France. In the hatred which she had aroused her good qualities were obscured. She was undoubtedly wilful, sharp-tongued, tactless and flamboyant, as well as wildly extravagant; but she was also loyal to her friends, devoted to her children and deeply affectionate. Her husband, of whom she grew fond, adored her; and, hesitant and selfdoubting as he always remained, looked to her continually for advice and guidance. 'It is all very well to blame her for meddling, Mr Seward contends, 'but with such a weak and indecisive husband there was little else she could do.' Yet, for all his gallant and often convincing defence it is impossible to deny that Marie Antoinette's advice was usually misguided, that she mishandled nearly all those who might have saved the monarchy, and that, by ignoring Mirabeau's warnings and urging the King to make his ill-fated flight to the frontier, she helped to bring about the downfall of the regime she had been intent upon saving.
Mr Seward's partisanship is not, however, taken to extremes. He retells lucidly and sensibly the sad, dramatic story of this woman whose dignified and courageous behaviour towards the end of her life did so much to mitigate the follies of her earlier years. He has a troubling propensity for introducing characters whose provenance and personalities are not described until their later appearances; there are occasional lapses into that kind of writing which pushes conjecture to the verge of bathos — 'every girl dreams about her future husband and Marie Antoinette can surely have been no exception'. But his is a well written, understanding and sympathetic study and if one may doubt that the last words on his wayward heroine have been spoken, the case for her defence has rarely been presented with such skill and conviction.
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