Queen Maria « Alice Audrey

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Ah, Maria, the End is Near

If Maria Theresa, Queen of Austria, was feeling her age by 1780, it isn’t hard to understand why. If she’d had only two children instead of sixteen, and those two were Marie Antoinette and Joseph, that would have been enough to age Mother Theresa prematurely.

Toss in fourteen more, the rigors of not just running, but re-building the Austrian Empire from practically the ground up, starting this at age twenty-three, with no formal training, in what was very much a man’s world, and the fact that by 1780 she had long ago given up a physically active life; she was feeling every minute of it.

In the first years on the throne she could ride at a gallop for hours, she could and did literally dance all night, night after night. Meals were spare and taken on the run. She must have cut quite a figure. Indeed, many visitors, mainly male, wrote about her striking physical appearance. Some of these fellows quite fell in love with her at first sight.

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Ah Maria, A Long Distance Scolding

Watching Marie Antoinette take her place in the history books was not easy for her mother. Snubbing the king’s mistress would prove the least of Marie’s mistakes.

In 1774, King Louis XV died. The Dauphin became King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette became Queen of France and life did not improve. For Maria Theresa things became, if such were possible, even worse. France was still vital to Austria’s long term strategy of containing Prussia. Maria still had a very full plate, but her daughter becoming a French Queen did not make them easier.

In fact, Marie Antoinette as Queen was in a position to do incalculable damage. Of this possibility, she was oblivious. With her father-in-law dead and her husband on the throne, Madame Dubarry was no longer an issue. But Marie had returned to the unfortunate habit of intriguing with court favorites against politicians and others with whom she had a bone to pick.

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Ah Maria, What Does it Mean to Be Untouchable

As my readers may recall, Marie Antoinette’s finally speaking to Madame Dubarry was hardly the end of her troubles. A baby was still years away and Marie had begun to acquire the very unfortunate habit of publicly displaying contempt for her husband. The girl never learned. Said Joseph after the 1777 visit to Paris, “She does not love him in the least.”

I say “The 1777 visit” because it was the big one that finally put some, ahem, firmness, into Marie’s husband’s resolve to father a child on the woman who, at this point, probably actively hated him. No one knows what Joseph said to these young persons, it was a very private conversation. Afterward in letters and in conversation, Joseph alluded to the subject of his little speech.

Joseph being Joseph, he was no doubt blunt to the point of being mean. Perhaps that’s what the boy needed, because the deed was done not long after and Marie Antoinette found herself pregnant.
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Ah Maria, It’s a Royal Dressing Down

So many people became embroyled in the stalemate between Marie Antoinette and the King’s mistress, Madame Dubarry – starting with the king’s daughters and ending with, of course, Mom; Maria Theressa of Austria.

Marie Antoinette’s continued slighting of Madame Dubarry had finally been pushed to it’s logical, or perhaps I should say illogical conclusion. France and Austria were facing the possibility of war. This was not Marie’s fault alone. Brother Joseph’s connivance in the partition of Poland was the event that was causing the most strain between the two countries., but his little sister’s unbelievably gauche behavior was not putting King Louis in a good mood. Add to this the undeniable strain between Marie and her husband, the fact that not only were there no babies forthcoming but the young couple didn’t even seem to be trying to make them, what was up with that?

The only person in all of Europe who really could speak to Marie, to tell her what she needed to to be told, was mom. Mom didn’t like this because she was more than aware that she was going to order her daughter to be nice to a whore, but, that’s life. Sometimes you have to find a way to get your gay husband to impregnate you, sometimes you have to kiss and make up to your father-in-laws favorite A-number one “girlfriend.”
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Ah Maria, How to Tell Who Reigns

Queen Maria accidentally gave Marie Antoinette a puritanical upbringing by example. But she knew when to draw the line. How to teach as much to Marie?

“The Court of Versailles was beside itself with delight at the spectacle of this child setting herself up against the King’s mistress, therefore, against Louis himself.” And this was what Marie Antoinette could not grasp. She was too young and too un-worldly to understand what Madame Dubarry meant to King Louis. As a result, she continued to diss Dubarry at every opportunity.

Needless to say, King Louis got an earful from his girlfriend. No doubt Madame Dubarry knew full well that the King’s daughters were real source of the trouble, but they were untouchable. And she could not ignore the fact that Marie was an enthusiastic participant even if she didn’t fully understand what she was doing. Bookmakers were doing a land-office business taking wagers on what would happen next.

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Ah Maria, She’s the Most Powerful Woman in France

Maria Theressa of Austria sent her daughter, Marie Antoinette, off to France with little preparation and many fears. Prince Louis didn’t help matters when he put off the consummation for years.

Wrote Maria to Marie on the subject of getting her husband to…cooperate…so to speak.

“On no account any peevishness, but only tenderness and caresses; for too much eagerness could ruin everything. Gentleness and patience are the only things that can help. Nothing so far is lost. You are both so young. On the contrary, it is better this way for the health of both of you. You will both grow stronger. All the same, it is only natural that we old parents long for the consummation.”

According to one historian; “As time went by she forgot about patience.”

Once a month Marie sent mom a letter telling her how things were going. Mom would respond to these letters. Indeed, mom was sending out detailed letters every two weeks. It seems never to have occurred to Marie to ask her mother how she came to possess such detailed information about stuff she had never even written home about.

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Ah Maria, It Was Merely a Tiff

Having inadvertently raisied Marie Antoinette to have strong, puritanical notions, there was little her mother could do to make her understand the special place of a king’s mistress.

King Louis put a flea in the ear of Madame de Noailles. “Tell your mistress to stick to her knitting. She may one day be Queen of France, but I am the King of France NOW. My girlfriend is furious and that makes things bad for me. Make sure she understands that.” Madame de Noailles passed this on to Marie with some words of her own. Marie understood. Unnerved, she told the Royal Sisters-in-law and Abbe Vermond, who went to Count Mercy with some advice. “Do something about that girl.”

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Ah Maria, a Match Made in Heaven… or Not.

We now veer sharply into titillating details of Marie Antoinette’s marriage.

A proxy marriage ceremony was carried out in Vienna and a game of one-upmanship between Austria and France shifted into high gear. Receptions of the utmost splendor were held at the Belvedere and Liechtenstein Palaces. Full-dress military reviews, theater galas and much more filled the itinerary. And while all this was taking place in Vienna, frantic preparations were under way at Versailles, including the construction of a new opera house.

The duc de Dufort arrived in April 1770 to attend the wedding and to escort the blushing bride to France. This was not going to be a quick road trip. The train of wagons and coaches required 340 horses, plus two traveling coaches of “fabulous splendor, especially designed and constructed for the occasion by order of the French King.”

This was the public face of the wedding. Behind the scenes, things were even more complicated. And not at all amendable to being fixed by a command from a king or queen. This was a binding of the two most powerful dynasties of Europe. The Hapsburg and Bourbon families were ancient. They bowed to no one. Including each other. Which presented a unique problem.

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Ah Maria, How to Educate a Heedless Lady

Mr. Al’s take on Marie Antoinette, as seen by her mother, continues.

I must beg forgiveness of all my readers for a mistake that I made last week. I said that Marie Antoinette was not born to be Queen of France. This was quite true. However, she had been pledged to to wed the Dauphin at age eleven. This should have given mom plenty of time to prepare her except for the fact that she actually got married when she was barely fifteen.

Those few years might have been enough for most girls to acquire at least enough knowledge to wing it until they got their “sea legs,” so to speak. But, alas, Marie Antoinette was a Hapsburg. And, as many historians have noted, Hapsburgs were not, as a group, the sharpest pins in the cushion. Marie Antoinette was not dumb, but she had much to learn, not much time to learn it, and a personality that disinclined her to learn anything.

Maria Theresa was an anomaly, although no one would have ever mistaken her for a genius in the conventional sense. It was probably one of Maria’s bigger mistakes to believe her children could rise to the occasion as the situation demanded because, well, that’s what she did. She should have known better.

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Ah Maria, What of Marie Antoinette?

Emperor Joseph wasn’t Queen Maria Theressa of Austria’s only wayward child. In fact, he wasn’t even the best known of the lot.

In the great mass of official business that Maria had to attend to, she still found time to correspond with family and friends. After the death of Francis, Maria took, not surprisingly, a great interest in the family affairs of her married children. There were a lot of them. By 1774, only two children remained at home; daughters Marianne, who’s health was poor, and Elizabeth, who was so disfigured by smallpox that she was apparently considered un-marriageable.

Joseph, of course, was the main recipient of the bulk of the writing Maria sent to her kids. Considering her propensity to go on,page after page, with advice to her head-strong co-regent, it is highly probable that he read very little of his mom’s correspondence. The fact that mom ordered him to attend an audience, solely for the purpose of reading to him a letter she considered very important, says much about how he treated the usual letter from her.

Her letters to her children must have numbered in the thousands. Most of these, but not all, were burned, as Maria had requested, by the recipients. Maria destroyed all the letters she received from her children, except for those from Joseph and Marie Antoinette, which were considered by her to be state documents.

While the letters to Joseph and Marie Antoinette were filled with advice neither would take seriously, her letters to her other children were more relaxed and informal. Much was made of grandchildren. Inquires after their health as well as urgent requests for the latest portraits produced mixed results. This excerpt is from a letter to Marie Beatrix;
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