Marie Antoinette and her son;

Introduction

THE marriage of Maria Theresa's fourth daughter, Josephe Jeanne Marie Antoinette, to the Crown Prince of France, on May 16, 1770, was the work of Prince Kaunitz, and, in his own opinion, one of the triumphs of his diplomatic career. The Austrian ruler and her minister regarded the alliance only as a brilliant move on the chess board of international politics, and the young princess (she was only fifteen years old at the time of her marriage) was specially instructed to keep her mother informed regarding the policies of the French king and his ministers. Unhappily, the part she thus played could not be kept secret ; she became unpopular with the people, notwithstanding her graciousness, and received the opprobrious epithet of " the Austrian," or even " the Austrian Spy." Her disregard for the strict etiquette of the French court, moreover, made enemies for her among the nobility, and the members of the royal house regarded her with disfavor. She succeeded in making her influence felt especially in the War of the Bavarian Succession, but generally used it only in obtaining great gifts for her favorites, whom she believed to be her devoted friends, though in reality they only served their own interests with shameless rapacity.

Frivolous, extravagant, fond of pleasure, and regardless of appearances, she became the victim of many vile slanders, which culminated in the famous necklace episode. It is beyond doubt, however, that she was a virtuous woman, whose only sin was boundless imprudence. No historical basis exists for the many scandals that were told of her in all the capitals of Europe, but their effect at the time was disastrous.

2038920 iv MARIE ANTOINETTE AND HER SON.

Louis XVL, who succeeded his grandfather in 1774, owed his fall to her as well as to his profligate predecessor, and to the disastrous reign of the Sun King, whose funeral procession was pelted with mud by the Paris mob. A true daughter of the house of Hapsburg, Marie Antoinette had inherited her mother's autocratic tendencies, but not her talents. She opposed and defeated her plodding, wellmeaning husband's attempts at reform (whence her later nickname of " Madame Veto "), was directly responsible for the taking of the Bastille, and mistrusted the few friends who still remained loyal to the house of Bourbon. Mirabeau's plans for a strong constitutional monarchy she frustrated, and on the latter's death, April 2, 1791, persuaded the king to take the very step against which the count had warned her. The unsuccessful flight to the frontier was stopped at Varennes on June 20, 1791, and after that the inexorable course of events could no longer be changed. The armed intervention of Austria and Prussia, on which she built all her hopes, only made their case worse, and Louis XVI. was executed on January 21, 1793. Marie Antoinette followed him to the scaffold on October 16, and her son, the unhappy dauphin, was handed over to the care of the cobbler Simon.

Notwithstanding her many faults, Marie Antoinette well deserves the tender regard in which her memory is held. The policy of her house imposed upon her a task that was beyond her strength ; a mere child when she came to France, she lacked judicious training of mind and character, and these circumstances combined to speed her to her ruin. But her noble devotion to her husband and children in the days of adversity, and her undoubted conviction that the course she counselled was the right one, have expiated her sins, which were really only fatal mistakes, and softened the judgment of history. The blackest feature of the persecutions to which she was exposed is the prominent part taken therein by the delectable Duke of Orleans and the contemptible Count of Provence, who in 1814 became Louis XVIII.

The dauphin, to whom history has assigned the title of Louis XVII., was born at Versailles on March 27, 1785, and was the third child and second son of the royal couple. His ultimate fate was long one of the puzzles of modern his-

INTRODUCTION. v

tory, but the theory that he really died in the Temple on June 6, 1795, is now accepted as the correct one. The author's assumption, however, that the so-called Duke of Normandy was in reality Louis XVII. , was for a long time held by many to be true.

Many impostors arose, of course, to claim the dauphin's name and dignities, the best known of them all being, besides the so-called Duke of Normandy, a German, Charles William Naundorff, whose descendants, now living in the Netherlands, still cling to his pretensions. Jean Marie Hervagault, the son of a tailor at Saint- L6, was the first to make the claim ; he died in 1812 in prison, to which he had been condemned for vagrancy. Another impostor of this kind was Mathurin Bruneau, who disappeared utterly after the revolution of 1848.

The author has told us in this volume, not the story of the French Revolution and its leaders, but the martyrdom of Marie Antoinette, from the happy, thoughtless days of Trianon to the sublime close of the life of the daughter of the Hapsburgs who scorned to be afraid of death. She has interwoven therewith the chronicle of Louis XVI. 's life, and of her friends — Madame de Lamballe, Madame Elisabeth, Toulan, and a few others ; and, finally, of the child upon whom fell all the unspeakable cruelty of the infuriated mob, incarnated in one of its most despicable members, the cobbler Simon. Then, following the history of the pretended Duke of Normandy, she sketches the period of reaction, of reconstruction, and of final repression by the hand of Napoleon. In this way she introduces the murder of the Duke of Enghien — an echo of the days of the guillotine, wherein the First Consul took the place of the mob, not blinded by passion, but from cool and heartless calculation ; and finally she shows us Josephine, to whom her next volume is devoted.

After Long Wanderings, .

MARIE ANTOINETTE AND HER SON.