Marie Antoinette by Fraser Antonia

Author:Fraser, Antonia [Fraser, Antonia]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780297857945
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2010-06-23T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Hated, Humbled, Mortified

‘The Queen [is] hated, humbled, mortified … to know that she favours a Measure is the certain Means to frustrate its Success.’

Gouverneur Morris, 1 July 1789

Crucial decisions of the Third Estate were taken during the week beginning 14 June 1789 when the King and Queen were at Marly, mourning the ‘first Dauphin’ (as Louis Joseph became known with time, the little ghost who had to be distinguished from Louis Charles). Louis XVI’s geographical separation from Versailles, where the political action was taking place, had the effect of subjecting him further to the conservative pressures of his brothers, especially Artois. On this occasion, Marie Antoinette did not mount an independent initiative. The King continued to vacillate, something that for the last few years had given her the opportunity to display contrasting firmness. Recent events had, however, sapped her strength. Whether it was due to the private grief she felt or the public odium she had to endure, the Queen’s confidence had waned. That feeling of being ill-fated, one whose destiny was to bring misfortune, haunted her anew.

This was the woman about whom it was earnestly believed in certain quarters that she intended to poison the King and install Artois – on the grounds that he was her long-term lover – as ruler of France. This was the woman who, according to a play of 1789 called La Destruction de l’Aristocratisme, loathed the French people with such intensity that ‘with what delight I would bathe in their blood’. She was also the woman of whom it was believed that she had secretly spirited away millions to her brother Joseph.1

And always the pamphlets poured forth their lubricious slime. Artois in L’Autrichienne en Goguette took the Queen from behind in public with obscene exclamations about her ‘firm and elastic’ body. If not an ardent lover of men, Marie Antoinette was an ardent lover of women; the message was always hammered home that the Queen was insatiable – even when alone. In Le Godmiche [Dildo] Royal of 1789 the Queen was satirized as the goddess Juno, in a text which began with Juno sitting alone ‘with her skirts hitched up …’ and went on from there.2 Perhaps it was her ‘Germanic vigour’ that was responsible, which had led to her deflowering even before she left Austria. Now it led her to indulge in orgies with bodyguards where drink featured as well as constant sex, although Marie Antoinette was in fact, as has been noted, a teetotaller.

Who could respect such a creature as a woman, let alone a queen? A woman who, quite apart from her sexual appetites, was a dangerous agent of a foreign power. It all had to be true. The stories had, after all, been printed over and over again, repetition being a cynical substitute for veracity. In the words of the radical ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf about this time, Louis XVI was a donkey, weak and obstinate but not cruel, who should have been mated to a young and gentle she-donkey; instead he had been given a tigress.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.