celebrated in the streets of Paris; and a delegation <>l market women actually came to congratulate the Queen. (They would return eighteen years later
in an unfriendlier mood.) The rejoicing was general just because the Queen's ability to bear children had been a topic of caustic popular comment for some years. The real problem, however, lay with her partner. For some years (it is uncertain exactly how many), sexual relations between Louis and Marie-Antoinette were complicated, if not actually precluded, by the King's phymosis. This is a condition in which the foreskin is deprived of its elasticity, making erections painful. Intercourse, from both the conjugal and dynastic view, was thus perfunctory and unsatisfactory. The Queen was bewildered and unhappy; the King pursued the boar and stag with all the ardor denied to him in bed. Both of the partners seem to have confided to Joseph II when he visited his sister in 1777, since he wrote a characteristically clinical report of the problem back to his brother Leopold.
[Louis] has strong, well-conditioned erections, introduces the member, stays there without moving for perhaps two minutes and withdraws without ejaculating but still erect and says goodnight; this is incomprehensible because he sometimes has nightly emissions but once in place and going at it, never—he says plainly he does it from a sense of duty.
Brotherly intervention in this delicate affair seems to have produced the minor surgery necessary to correct the abnormality. And in August— two months after Joseph's letter—Marie-Antoinette wrote rapturously to her mother, making it plain that their marriage was now "perfectly
consummated."
The failure of a royal pregnancy to materialize for the first seven years of the marriage was enough, however, to start tongues wagging and to end the grace period that Marie-Antoinette had enjoyed on coming to France. It was her own attitude to her position, though, that caused the most serious damage. She had grown up in a Habsburg court where the excesses of traditional ceremony and protocol were being discarded in favor of a simpler, more engaged style of government. Her mother had herself come to the throne as a young girl at a catastrophic moment in the history of the Empire—the loss of Silesia to Frederick the Great—and had learned enlightened absolutism the hard way. Her brother, Joseph, was a notorious iconoclast when it came to the polite rituals of court. Yet both understood that in an age when monarchs were supposed to be "servants of the state" it was especially important to present an image of devoted self-sacrifice to their subjects.
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But it was precisely this rather grave demeanor that Marie-Antoinette shrugged off when she arrived at Versailles. A bride at fifteen and a queen at nineteen, like all adolescent girls of her generation she drank deep at the well of sentimental literature. Her library was full of Richardson,
Rousseau, Mercier and even Restif de Bretonne. A passion for flowers, a rather merry candor and a dislike of stolid formality were, after all, the virtues in vogue. But they were supposed to be hidden behind the mask of royalty.
Almost from the outset, the Queen made no concessions to her public role. She giggled at the pecking wars of ladies-in-waiting, yawned or sighed ostentatiously at the admittedly interminable ceremonies that left her stark naked in the cold of her Versailles apartment while they went through the business of passing the royal shift or selecting the royal ribbons. Worst of all, she began to rebel against wearing stays and corsets at all. The King's sisters were tiresome, his brothers' wives aggressively unsympathetic and, even worse, they were pregnant. Gradually they came to understand that Marie-Antoinette was not prepared to resign herself to the customary role played by Bourbon queens and princesses: the production of heirs in meek invisibility, leaving the King to disport himself as he chose. If anything, the roles were reversed, Louis remaining awkward, secluded and retiring as his wife became more brazenly outgoing. Her brother was shocked by this impolitic defiance of convention. "She has no etiquette," he wrote to his brother Leopold, "goes out and runs around alone or with a few people without the outward signs of her
position. She looks a little improper and while this would be all right for a private person she is not doing her job. . . ."
Joseph saw clearly that his sister wanted the privileges and indulgences of monarchy while being free to pretend that she was really a private individual. This, he predicted, was to court unpopularity, even to undermine her legitimacy. But Marie-Antoinette remained determined to design her own identity. Repudiating her officially assigned councillor, the Prin-cesse de Noailles, she selected her own friends. The first in this galere was the Princesse de Lamballe, whose husband had died of syphilis, leaving her a widow at nineteen. She was supplemented by the Princesse de Guemenee and, finally and most disastrously, the indisputably ravishing but dim-witted Yolandc de Polignac. None of this would have mattered a great deal except for the fact that the Queen used her authority to shower gifts, offices and money on her chosen favorites. Much to the horror of the economizing Malesherbes the Queen revived the redundant office of Superintendent of the Queen's Household, carrying a stipend of 150,000 livres a year, specifi-cally for the Princesse de Lamballe. And along with each of the favorites came a large clan of relatives and cronies who clung to the sides of the royal
ship of state with the tenacity of barnacles. There were impecunious aunts, profligate brothers, scapegrace grandpas, broken-down baronies and mortgaged plantations in the Antilles, all to be satisfied and made good. So that what to the Queen seemed innocent enough—putting favors in the way ol her friends—to less partial judgment looked like a gigantic network of sinecure and graft; the empire of "Madame Deficit," as her brother- in-law Provence called her.
The more the Queen struck out for independence, the greater seemed the impropriety. Dismayed as she was by Louis' loutish humor and his brother Provence's total devotion to the joys of the table, the youngest brother, Artois, must have seemed a paragon of elegance, charm and conceivably even intelligence (though this is stretching credibility). But, undoubtedly, Artois did make her feel clever, graceful and—with her large-eyes, protruding lower lip and shade of the Habsburg chin—even beautiful. They spent a good deal of time together at the theater, the gaming table and the concerts spirituels that were Paris's nightly musical entertainments. They both were fanatical partisans of the composer Gluck against his foe Piccini; and both, mirabile dictu, were staunch champions of Beaumarchais. Together they created the amateur court theater at the Trianon, where they acted out Rousseau's The Village Soothsayer and The Barber of Seville.
There were other chevaliers servants on hand to keep the Queen flattered and amused: Arthur Dillon, the Due de Lauzun, Axel von Fersen, the Baron de Besenval, the Prince de Ligne and especially the Comte de Vau-dreuil. Other than Lauzun—who flirted so outrageously with the Queen at one outing to the racetrack at the Plaine des Sablons that he was banished—none of them were from conventional noble backgrounds. For uncharitable gossips they were all conspicuous by their foreign ancestry or affiliation: the Dillons were Irish-Jacobite, Fersen was a Swedish soldier-courtier, and the Prince de Ligne came from the Habsburg Netherlands. It seems obvious that the Queen felt more comfortable with these foreigners and parvenus than with the established court hierarchy, but her favoritism courted its alienation. The whispering campaigns that dogged her reign began in the palace itself. Vaudreuil was a particular target. He came from a West Indian planter family and had made a splash in Paris society by spending his sugar fortune as freely as he could. His mistress was the Queen's favorite, Yolande de Polignac, and that in turn opened for him not just the blessings of the Queen's presence but a cornucopia of offices—some very lucrative, all of them high-status. In 1780 alone he was made grand falconer of France, governor of Lille and marecbal de camp. In turn, Vau-dreuil looked alter his own. He saw to it that Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun,, who
57. Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Le Comte de Vaudreuil
in 1784 painted a portrait of the Comte weighed down with decorations, became the most important artist at court (no more than she deserved), that her brother joined the company of the secretaires du roi, thus ennobling him, and that her dealer-husband received a constant stream of high-born and well-heeled customers. He himself reveled in being the clotheshorse of the old regime, and its best amateur actor (by general consent an inspired Almaviva). Trailing enormous debts, scrabbling for offices to pay for them and never quite succeeding, Vaudreuil was everything the revolutionaries had in mind when they characterized the court as a playpen of spoiled and greedy children.
It seems improbable that any of these men (other, perhaps, than Fersen and that, much later) were anything more than companionable flatterers for the Queen. But the informal manner she promoted and the visibility she courted at all three of Paris's major theaters—the Comedie-Francaise, the Opera and the Comedie Italienne (against the express wishes of the King)— were bound to play into the hands of the scandal-mongers and pornogra-phers. Marie-Antoinette was hopelessly unprepared for the kind of criti-c
ism to which she opened herself by redesigning the
royal identity. Nature was the word in vogue bv the 1780s and she blithely assumed that by acting
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"naturally" she would be taken for the innocent she mostly was. But what seemed spontaneous to her appeared as shockingly licentious to many of her subjects. And there was, in their angry, visceral response, more titan an element of psychosexual anxiety. Marie-Antoinette—though she could hardly have dreamed of it—represented a threat to the settled system of gender relations. If the King was supposed to be the emblematic head of a patriarchal order, by the same token his wife was supposed to show a face of especial obedience, humility and submission. This had not always been the case in French history, of course, and it is not surprising to find a sudden crop of "histories" appearing in the 1780s of other wayward (that is, headstrong and independent) queens—especially Anne of Austria (the widow of Louis XIII) and even more infamously Catherine de Medici— each with thinly veiled analogies to the present incumbent.
Most important is the directness with which the Queen represented her own femininity. What had been permissible, even expected, in a mistress of the monarch was somehow intolerable in a queen. It made matters even worse that this femininity was candidly presented and designed, more or less exclusively, by other women. Rose Bertin, the Queen's dressmaker, became one of the most influential women in France, and it was she who encouraged Marie-Antoinette to abandon the stiffness (both material and figurative) of formal court dress for the loose, simple gowns of white lawn, cotton and muslin that she came to favor. Formal appearances, complete with hooped panier dresses and piled coiffeur, were restricted to "Sunday courts" and even then, as Mme de la Tour Du Pin recalled, it had become fashionable to complain of the dreariness of the routine. Certainly, it was the more unconventional face of the monarchy, displayed in the paintings of the Queen's other most important friend, Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, that provoked further comment.
Though much of her work is of manifestly spectacular quality, Vigee-Lebrun has, until quite recently, been written off as just another light entertainer of the ancien regime: a lady-in-waiting with brush and palette. And she has suffered as much from sentimental nostalgia for the old regime as from dismissive neoclassicism. But in her time she was correctly recognized as a phenomenon, exhibiting no less than forty paintings at the biennial Salons. In 3783, the year she became one of two women admitted to the Royal Academy (the other being her rival Adelaide Labille- Guiard), the Memoires Secrets testified to her influence and renown:
When someone announces that he has just come from the Salon, the first thing he is asked is: have you seen Mme Le Bmn?
What do you think of Mme Le Brun? And immediately the
answer suggested is: Mme Le Brun—is she not astonishing? . . . the works of the modern Minerva are the first to attract the eyes of the spectator, call him back repeatedly, take hold of him, possess him, elicit from him exclamations of pleasure and admiration . . . the paintings in question are also the most highly praised, talked about topics of conversation in Paris.
Part of Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun's appeal lay in the person as much as the art. The daughter of a minor portraitist and a hairdresser mother from peasant stock, she was largely self-trained following her father's death when she was twelve. Using models from her own family but presenting them in a bold, expressive manner in which the brilliance of her color matched the flamboyance of poses and composition, she made a reputation as a prodigy. At nineteen she was already enrolled in the painters' academy of Saint-Luc. Marrying her mother's landlord, the dealer Lebrun,
propelled her into Paris society and gave her a ready-made showcase for her talent in the galleries and soirees held at their town house. She was clever, articulate and strikingly beautiful: a winning combination in the Paris of the 1780s. And she succeeded in differentiating herself from the mass of dull academicians or pseudo-Bouchers by promoting, in her social life as well as her art, the cult of the unaffected. Her soirees served nothing other than fish, fowl and salad. At the famous souper au grec she stripped Lebrun of his pretensions by "wiping off his powder, undoing his side curls and putting a wreath of laurel about his head" as honey cake with Corinth raisins was served together with a Cypriot wine.
The painter carried these airs of ostentatious simplicity right into the court. In her (doubtless idealized) memoirs Elisabeth recalled improvised Gretry song duets with the Queen. On another occasion she looked on admiringly as Marie-Antoinette obliged her six-year-old princess to dine with (indeed to wait on) a peasant girl of her own age. Hair powder, elaborately structured coiffures, stays and hoop petticoats were all banished
except for formal ceremonies. Instead hair was encouraged to fall in natural curls over the shoulders; flowers and grasses were used for ornament on straw bonnets and wide-brimmed rustic hats. The natural line of the body was exposed beneath diaphanous, shiftlike dresses of white or ivory- colored cotton lawn gathered below the breast, and fastened loosely with a ribbon. The Duchesse de Polignac, who was, by any standard, strikingly comely, was painted in this new uniform looking like some freshly harvested and luscious fruit, Even when sitters were reluctant to go the whole way
towards informality, Vigee-Lebrun found ways of making their attitudes less monumental,
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58. Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, self-portrait 218
59. Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Duchesse de Polignac
60. Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Bacchante
As I despised the costume then worn by women I tried in every way to make it more picturesque and I was delighted when I obtained the confidence of my sitters, who allowed me to drape them as I pleased. Shawls were not yet the fashion but I made use of large scarves lightly woven about the body and over the arms with which I attempted to imitate the beautiful style of Raphael and Domenichino.
This was all presented as the costume of natural innocence, but like some of the poses of the Greuze girls, of whom it was reminiscent, it had unmistakable erotic power. In Vigee-Lebrun's Bacchante, painted in the year of the Diamond Necklace scandal, this was explicit, but some of the elements in this sexually charged design were transferred to portraiture: the highlighted teeth of an open-mouthed smile or the upward-rolled pupils in the painting of the "maintained" actress Catherine Grand, later Talleyrand's wife. The Grand painting, though, is an exception in presenting a woman is a kind of sexual property. For the most part the great series of female portraits done by Vigee-Lebrun in the 1780s are strikingly free from rococo voyeurism. Instead of having their heads turned from the beholder and bodies exposed, the women depicted here—not least the artist—stare directly back in expressions of challenging independence. They are often seen in groups of friends or with their children in uninhibited poses of affection and embrace. It was this refusal to ingratiate that contemporaries found simultaneously exciting and alarming.
When it came to representing the Queen, of course, some special con-cerns intervened between Vigee-Lebrun's "natural" manner and the commission. First summoned to court in 1778, when she was just twenty-three years old, she dutifully turned out a wholly traditional image, face seen in three-quarters profile, decorated with feathers and costumed in an enormous tanklike robe a panier. By 1783, a transformation had taken place and the portrait of the Queen that appeared in the Salon showed her in a simple muslin dress, holding a rose. Others in the same vein followed, many of them copied for French embassies abroad and for private clients.
None of this helped arrest the deterioration of the Queen's reputation. In fact it might have hastened it by appearing to confirm an image of casual disregard for propriety. At any rate, by the Salon of 1785 there was concern as to how Marie-Antoinette ought to be represented before the public. The painting displayed that year was by the Swedish court artist Wertmuller and showed her walking in the park at Versailles with her children. It was presumably expected to appeal to the vogue for sentimental family groups.