The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, Charles Duke Yonge [e book reader android txt] 📗

for rehearsals, when a royal warrant[1] peremptorily forbidding such a proceeding was sent down from the palace. A clamor was at once raised by the friends of Beaumarchais, as if "sealed letters" had never been issued before. They talked in a loud voice of "oppression" and "tyranny;" and any one who knew the king's disposition might have divined that such an act of vigor was sure to be followed by one of weakness. Presently Beaumarchais changed his tone. He gave out that he had retrenched the passages which had excited the royal disapproval, and requested that the play might be re-examined. A new censor of high literary reputation reported to the head of the police[2] that if one or two passages were corrected, and one or two expressions, which were liable to be misinterpreted, were suppressed, he foresaw no danger in allowing the representation. Beaumarchais at once promised to make the required corrections, and one of Madame de Polignac's friends, the Count de Vaudreuil, the very nobleman with whom that lady's name was by many discreditably connected, obtained the king's leave to perform it at his country house, that thus an opportunity might be afforded for judging whether or not the alterations which had been made were sufficient to render its performance innocent.

The king was assured that the passages which he had regarded as mischievous were suppressed or divested of their sting. Marie Antoinette apparently had her suspicions; but Louis could never long withstand repeated solicitations, and, as he had not, when Madame de Campan read it, formed any very high opinion of its literary merits, he thought that, now that it was deprived of its venom, it would be looked upon as heavy, and would fail accordingly. Some good judges, such as the Marquis de Montesquieu, were of the same opinion. The actors thought differently. "It is my belief," said a man of fashion to the witty Mademoiselle Arnould, using the technical language of the theatre, "that your play will be 'damned.'" "Yes," she replied, "it will, fifty nights running." But, even if Louis had heard of her prophecy, he would have disregarded it. He gave his permission for the performance to take place, and on the 27th April, 1784, "The Marriage of Figaro" was accordingly acted to an audience which filled the house to the very ceiling; and which the long uncertainty as to whether it would ever be seen or not had disposed to applaud every scene and every repartee, and even to see wit where none existed. To an impartial critic, removed both by time and country from the agitation which had taken place, it will probably seem that the play thus obtained a reception far beyond its merits. It was undoubtedly what managers would call a good acting play. Its plot was complicated without being confused. It contained many striking situations; the dialogue was lively, but there was more humor in the surprises and discoveries than verbal wit in the repartees. Some strokes of satire were leveled at the grasping disposition of the existing race of courtiers, whose whole trade was represented as consisting of getting all they could, and asking for more; and others at the tricks of modern politicians, feigning to be ignorant of what they knew; to know what they were ignorant of; to keep secrets which had no existence; to lock the door to mend a pen; to appear deep when they were shallow; to set spies in motion, and to intercept letters; to try to ennoble the poverty of their means by the grandeur of their objects. The censorship, of course, did not escape. The scene being laid in Spain, Figaro affirmed that at Madrid the liberty of the press meant that, so long as an author spoke neither of authority, nor of public worship, nor of politics, nor of morality, nor of men in power, nor of the opera, nor of any other exhibition, nor of any one who was concerned in any thing, he might print what be pleased. The lawyers were reproached with a scrupulous adherence to forms, and a connivance at needless delays, which put money into their pockets; and the nobles, with thinking that, as long as they gave themselves the trouble to be born, society had no right to expect from them any further useful action. But such satire was too general, it might have been thought, to cause uneasiness, much more to do specific injury to any particular individual, or to any company or profession. Figaro himself is represented as saying that none but little men feared little writings.[3] And one of the advisers whom King Louis consulted as to the possibility of any mischief arising from the performance of the play, is said to have expressed his opinion in the form of an apothegm, that "none but dead men were killed by jests." The author might even have argued that his keenest satire had been poured upon those national enemies, the English, when he declared what has been sometimes regarded as the national oath to be the pith and marrow of the English language, the open sesame to English society, the key to unlock the English heart, and to obtain the judicious swearer all that he could desire.[4]

And an English writer, with English notions of the liberty of the press, would hardly have thought it worth while to notice such an affair at all, did he not feel bound to submit his judgment to that of the French themselves. And if their view be correct, almost every institution in France must have been a dead man past all hopes of recovery, since the French historical writers, to whatever party they belong, are unanimous in declaring that it was from this play that many of the oldest institutions in the country received their death-blow, and that Beaumarchais was at once the herald and the pioneer of the approaching Revolution.

Paris had scarcely cooled down after this excitement, when its attention was more agreeably attracted by the arrival of a king, Gustavus III. of Sweden. He had paid a visit to France in 1771, which had been cut short by the sudden death of his father, necessitating his immediate return to his own country to take possession of his throne; but the brief acquaintance which Marie Antoinette had then made with him had inspired her with a great admiration of his chivalrous character; and in the preceding year, hearing that he was contemplating a tour in Southern Europe, she had written to him to express a hope that he would repeat his visit to Versailles, promising him "such a reception as was due to an ancient ally of France;[5]" and adding that "she should personally have great pleasure in testifying to him how greatly she valued his friendship."

Her mention of the ancient alliance between the two countries, which, indeed, had subsisted ever since the days of Francis I., was very welcome to Gustavus, since the object of his journey was purely political, and he desired to negotiate a fresh treaty. But those matters he, of course, arranged with the ministers. The queen was only concerned in the entertainments due from royal hosts to so distinguished a guest. Most of them were of the ordinary character, there being a sort of established routine of festivity for such occasions. And it may be taken as a proof that the court had abated somewhat of its alarm at Beaumarchais's play that "The Marriage of Figaro" was allowed to be acted on one of the king's visits to the theatre. She also gave him an entertainment of more than usual splendor at the Trianon, at which all the ladies present, and the invitations were very numerous, were required to be dressed in white, while all the walks and shrubberies of the garden were illuminated, so that the whole scene presented a spectacle which he described in one of his letters as "a complete fairy-land; a sight worthy of the Elysian Fields themselves.[6]" But, as usual, the queen herself was the chief ornament of the whole, as she moved graciously among her guests, laying aside the character of queen to assume that of the cordial hostess; and not even taking her place at the banquet, but devoting herself wholly to the pleasurable duty of doing honor to her guests.

One of the displays was of a novel character, from which its inventors and patrons expected scientific results of importance, which, though nearly a century has since elapsed, have not yet been realized. In the preceding year, Montgolfier had for the first time sent up a balloon, and the new invention was now exhibited in the Court of Versailles: the queen allowed the balloon to be called by her name; and, to the great admiration of Gustavus, who had a decided taste for matters which were in any way connected with practical science, the "Marie Antoinette" made a successful voyage to Chantilly. The date of another invention, if, indeed, it deserves so respectable a title, is also fixed by this royal visit. Mesmer had recently begun to astonish or bewilder the Parisians with his theory of animal magnetism; and Gustavus spent some time in discussing the question with him, and seems for a moment to have flattered himself that he comprehended his principles. But the only durable result which arose from his stay in France was the sincere regard and esteem which he and the queen mutually conceived for each other. They established a correspondence, in which Marie Antoinette repeatedly showed her eagerness to gratify his wishes and to attend to his recommendations; and when, at a later period, unexpected troubles fell on her and her husband, there was no one whom their troubles inspired with greater eagerness to serve them than Gustavus, whose last projects, before he fell by the hand of an assassin, were directed to their deliverance from the dangers which, though neither he nor they were as yet fully alive to their magnitude, were on the point of overwhelming them.


CHAPTER XX.

St. Cloud is purchased for the Queen.--Libelous Attacks on her.--Birth of the Duc de Normandie.--Joseph presses her to support his Views in the Low Countries.---The Affair of the Necklace.--Share which the Cardinal de Rohan had in it.--The Queen's Indignation at his Acquittal.--Subsequent Career of the Cardinal.

Marie Antoinette had long since completed her gardens at the Trianon, but the gradual change in the arrangements of the court had made a number of alterations requisite at Versailles, with which the difficulty of finding money rendered it desirable to proceed slowly. It was reckoned that it would be necessary to give up the greater part of the palace to workmen for ten years; and as the other palaces which the king possessed in the neighborhood of Paris were hardly suited for the permanent residence of the court, the queen proposed to her husband to obtain St. Cloud from the Duc d'Orleans, giving him in exchange La Muette, the Castle of Choisy, and a small adjacent forest. Such an arrangement would have produced a considerable saving by the reduction of the establishments kept up at those places, at which the court only spent a few days in each year. And as the duke was disposed to think that he should be a gainer by the exchange, it is not very easy to explain how it was that the original project was given up, and that St. Cloud was eventually sold to the crown for a sum of money, Choisy and La Muette being also retained.

St. Cloud was bought; and Marie Antoinette, still eager to prevent her own acquisition from being too costly, proposed to the king that it should he bought in her name, and called her property; since an establishment for her would naturally lie framed on a more moderate scale than that of any palace belonging to the king, which was