... "I was a wife and you killed my husband, I was a mother and you deprived me of my children"...
With these words, pronounced by the Queen Marie Antoinette, echoing in my mind,
it was with intense emotion that I acquired and held in my hands this letter case that bears her monogram and the crown of France.
Therefore, I decided to keep and display it beside the pouch that belonged to her husband, King Louis XVI, and the working bag embroidered by her daughter, Marie-Therese, whose desire to be buried next to her parents was rejected by the French government.
The letter case is sable beaded and has, on the front side, the words “Here's my secret" with a crown and the letters A and M intertwined whereas on the back there are two amorini that bear the crown of France among flowered trees; underneath there's a flaming heart with the words “I love my slavery."
The crown of France beaded here, as well as on the other two purses, has a particular story. It was created for King Louis XV in 1722, and it's the only crown that survived the incredible theft of all the Crown jewels that happened in 1792. It is kept in the Louvre, but not in its integrity. This crown contains three of the largest diamonds in the world in addition to 230 pearls and one hundred precious stones. The rarest of the three diamonds, the Bleu de France, disappeared and was found twenty years later in London, in the hands of the banker, Henry Hope, and, as the “Hope Diamond," is kept in Washington, in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
The lining of the purse is in light blue silk, and it is not sewn along its sides.
But more important than that, is the fact that it evokes images of the life of a woman who was born to live a happy life but instead was the most miserable and unfortunate Queen.
Maria Antonia Josepha Joanna was born in the Hofburg Palace on November 2,
1755, (a day that, for the Catholics, is devoted to the Dead), last daughter and fifteenth of the sixteen children of the Empress Maria-Theresia and Emperor Franz I. She was a lovely child and when the child prodigy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, at the age of six, gave a concert in the Salon des Glaces in the Schoenbrunn Castle, on October 13, 1762, he was attracted by her beauty and asked her to marry him!
But her destiny had been very differently planned. Maria Antonia’s destiny was determined by her marriage to the heir apparent to the French throne, LouisAuguste, who became King Louis XVI.
Her mother, Empress Maria Theresia, has been a great historical figure, but I personally think that this marriage arranged for her youngest daughter is not to be considered among her best decisions. She acted as an Empress and not a mother. Ageing and longing to make an agreement with France, the Empress was indifferent to the voices that said that Louis XVI had a problematic character and that Voltaire's revolutionary ideas (She considered him an Antichrist.) were spreading all over France. Moreover, she undervalued, the strong nationalism of the French people and their hatred of Austria, their eternal enemy for centuries, above all after the recent terrible Seven Years War. Finally, the Empress’s wish to turn French politics in favor of Austria through her daughter was a sort of delusion that became a catastrophe for her daughter. Maria Antonia, known as Marie Antoinette in France, married as a teenager with little education that had been mainly lessons of music and dance. She knew nothing of politics and diplomacy, neither by education nor inclination.
On April 2, 1770, at the age of fourteen, that girl leaves her family and her country to marry the future King. The emotion and commotion that her leaving evoked among the citizens of Vienna who had gone to say goodbye to her was so great that even the Empress was impressed by it, as it seemed a sad omen.
Arriving at the French border, she had to leave all her Austrian clothes and objects, to undress under the eyes of the French representatives and wear from that moment on, French clothes and jewels only.
One can't be surprised if the poor child burst into tears.
On May 16, at Versailles, she married the fifteen-year-old Louis-Auguste, a tall, stout boy, clumsy and shy. Just to have an idea of what kind of marriage that was to be, it's interesting to recount the following episode. During the banquet given after the marriage in honor of the couple, the King Louis XV noticed that his grandson was stuffing himself, so he advised him to ease up on food since that could impair his performance that night. The groom's reply was that the more he ate, the better he slept!!!
You can easily imagine what kind of life the poor girl had to put up with, living with a husband who was not a husband and who had not even tried to speak to her.
Moreover, she had lived in a court and a palace that were simple and austere.
Therefore, she found the etiquette and customs at Versailles unbearable and the immense crowd of nobles living there, corrupt and scheming, made her feel trapped.
We have seen so many examples of princesses that have not been able to endure Court etiquette, but at that time such an attitude had the only effect of making enemies for herself.
It's difficult to find in history a Queen more hated, insulted, and denounced by her own subjects. They attributed to her sentences never pronounced, scandals of which she was totally innocent, printed her in poses that Playboy would have found chaste, accused her of sexual perversions to the point that the charge against her, at the one-day trial before being guillotined, was to have had incestuous relations with her son of eight years.
One can't but quote Shakespeare "O judgement, thou art fled to brutish beasts and men have lost their reason.”
But what kind of person was the real Marie-Antoinette? If we consider her physical aspect and her contemporaries' witnesses, we find a lovely girl with a beautiful figure and elegant carriage, a natural charm, a porcelain skin and a sweet smile that attracted most people. She was surely the most beautiful Queen France ever had. She loved simplicity and when her husband presented her the petit Trianon in 1774, she found there her solace, alone with her few friends, with simple light clothes, in the open pure air, far from a Court she couldn't bear.
As Stefan Zweig so rightly says, she was simply a woman, like you and me, like millions in the world, not particularly interested in matters like politics and economy, who had to face a drama she had never imagined she would live, but just then finding inside all the strength, courage and nobility of her ancestors.
To have a right idea of her character it's useful to read her correspondence with her mother, preserved in the National Archives in Vienna. Even if she may have written for duty and not for pleasure, since her mother did nothing but reproach her, we can note that, a girl as she was, she was able to behave with firmness of character, refusing to speak to Madame du Barry, the young mistress of the ancient King, or keeping her brother-in-law, the Count d ‘Artois, in his place. Honest she surely was.
But Marie-Antoinette did not yet know that her monotonous, empty life was going to change forever.
A young man, born only two months earlier than she was, the Count Hans Axel de Fersen, a Swedish aristocrat, has undertaken the classical Grand Tour voyage and is going to arrive at Versailles. The 19th of November 1773 is a day Marie Antoinette will never forget. It's the day when she first meets him, when she first meets love.
They meet at balls more than often, but as soon as she becomes Queen in May 1774, he leaves France where he will return only four years later. From that moment on they will never cease to meet and write and the first witness of his feelings is in a letter to his sister Sophie where he declares that he'll never marry, because he can't be with the only woman he loves. So much has been written on that subject, but once again their correspondence is the only way to throw the right light on their love story. .
Their letters were all sealed with their motto, in Italian, “Tutto a te mi guida” that can be translated “Everything leads me towards you." They were written by Marie Antoinette with lemon juice or sympathetic ink, in code, with her nickname “Josephine." Even if most of them were destroyed during the Revolution, and others dispersed by Fersen' s heirs, a group of fifteen survived and were acquired by the French National Archives. Since they had been heavily marked with ink by Fersen himself to prevent them from being read, they remained unread until last year, when using fluorescence spectroscopy, the researchers succeeded in decoding them.
As the Head of the Archives says, those letters not only show new aspects of Marie Antoinette's character, a maturity, a sense of responsibility, an attachment to her children, a soul disposed to pardon and not revenge, that are so far away from the frivolity she has always been accused of, but much more than that they show that the enchantment of their love is still there, they speak as they were in their first moments of love, even if nearly twenty years have passed.
“Je vais finire, non pas sans vous dire, mon bien cher et tendre ami, que je vous aime a' Ia folie et que jamais, jamais je ne peut etre un moment sans vous adorer' (Marie Antoinette –January, 4,1792. N440AP/1)
And he answers : “le ne vis et n'existe que pour vous aimer- vous adorer est ma seule consolation" .
I am going to end, not without telling you, my very dear and tender friend, that I love you madly and that never, never can I be for a moment without adoring you '(Marie Antoinette -January, 4,1792. N440AP / 1) And he answers: “I only live and exist to love you – to worship you is my only consolation "
He organized their unlucky effort to escape, he toured all the courts to ask for help and save her, he hoped till last and when he knew of her death he gave orders to acquire whatever objects could be found that belonged to her in order to keep them as a sacred relic. He didn't know then that he, too, would face an atrocious death in Stockholm, on June 21,1810, just like his beloved Queen, and like her, owing to false charges. In such a tragic way ends a sweet and tender love story, born in a Court that didn't even know what sweetness and tenderness were, accustomed only to libertinism and opportunism.
Living in such a court, oppressed by a mother obsessively asking to direct French politics in favor of Austria, with courtesans that mocked and despised her, with a husband that didn't even touch her, she turned to balls and fashion, creating from nothing the beginning of the French "Haute Couture" with the stylist Rose Bertin whom she discovered and encouraged. Together with her she launched different styles of clothes, called "a' Ia Reine" or "a' Ia Polonnaise", that had, among other things the characteristic to be a little shorter, arriving at the ankles only, therefore making walking much easier. What was perhaps her most famous attire, the so called" chemise a' Ia Reine", is the white dress in a very light fabric from the West Indies, worn in the famous painting by her favorite painter, Elizabeth Vige'e LeBrun.
Not only that, she was the first to establish a sequence in the wardrobe, according to the season, something that was totally unknown before, she gave impulse to the theatre and painting, transforming the French court into the most glamorous in Europe.
The most important moments in her life as a woman are two: the first is when she meets the Comte de Fersen and the second when finally, her husband, seven years after their marriage, succeeded in fulfilling his conjugal duties and she got pregnant, giving birth to Marie-Therese on December 17, 1778. Compelled to do so in front of the Court, when she knew it was a female, she rejoiced saying that she could have the baby all for herself and as a mother nobody could ever say anything. She deeply mourned her two babies that died early, one just a few days before the dramatic 14 July 1789 that found her in a terrible distress and sorrow.
That she was loved by her children, we have, among other witnesses, the moving graffiti scratched on the wall of her prison in the Temple by Marie-Therese herself: "Marie-Therese Charlotte is the most unhappy person in the world. She can obtain no news of her mother/ nor be reunited to her/ though she has asked it a thousand times. Live/ my good mother/ whom I love well/ but of whom I can hear no tidings......O my God/ forgive those who have made my parents suffer."
Her marriage to Louis XVI was a quiet one, she didn’t love her husband, that for sure, but whereas at the beginning they lived on their own, with time and the birth of their children, they started a life together and nobody has ever reported any kind of unpleasantness between them.
Even when, on July 15 1789, she perfectly realized the gravity of the situation and
tried to convince the King to fly to the fortress in Metz (which would have probably saved their lives), with the baggage already made, she accepted the will of her husband not to leave· Versailles and from that moment on she always stood by him, refusing to divorce as somebody had advised her to do. And there's nothing more moving than her caraco' de deuil, worn after Louis XVI's death on the scaffold, when separated from her children, alone with her guards, she asked to have a mourning jacket. It's in a worn, shabby fabric, showing darns made by the Queen herself. What was inflicted to her in the last year of her life is something I prefer not to tell, since it shows how beastly cruel men can be, even if she was spared to know the atrocious tortures perpetrated on the eight years old Louis-Charles, her favorite child, that she called "chou de coeur”. She, that lived her life with lightness, died with courage and dignity, a courage and dignity that Robespierre and his bloodthirsty companions were unable to show when it was their turn to ascend the scaffold.
Bibliography :
Archives Nationales Françaises. Lettres entre Marie Antoinette et Fersen.
Francoise Ravelle. Marie-Antoinette: Reine de la Mode et du Bon Gout, Paris, 2017.
Mathieu Da Vinha. Dans le garde-robe de Marie Antoinette. Paris, 2018.
Stefan Zweig. Marie Antoinette. Wien,1932
Austrian National Archives. Letters between Marie Antoinette and her mother.
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See other articles written by Barbara:
The Perfume Of History: Sweet Bags
Royal Purses