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.
By 1780, all this was a dim memory. Maria had not been active for years. Her weight had ballooned so much that one of her daughters noted that whereas before she had had trouble walking up even a short flight of stairs, now she found it nearly impossible to walk anywhere. Part of this was rheumatism, of which she was severely afflicted.
Historians have ascribed this to her habit, even this late in her life, of sleeping with her windows wide open, even in the depths of winter. Whatever the cause, it hampered her considerably. Although the loss of mobility frustrated her, what gave her the greatest alarm was her waning ability to write. As long as she could write, she was in touch with the world.
Frivolous daughters, condescending sons, heads of state, her ministers, her church leaders, her generals, were all just a pen stroke away. Rheumatism was slowly robbing her of even this course of action. This seemed to happen to monarchs. Not the rheumatism, but the ballooning weight part.
Queen Victoria had put on so much weight by the time she neared the end that she needed strong assistance to get from Point A to Point B. Henry the VIII, even with his, ahem, extra-marital exercise regime, required a special chair that was part wheel chair, part fork lift, with a crane on the back to lift him into bed.
For Maria Theresa, loosing the ability to write was the worst. She knew she still had so much work to do. After Joseph had become Emperor, she had written to many people, saying that she looked forward to laying aside the responsibilities of state and focusing on the family. She may have actually meant it. Of course, she never did it. She just knew that there were too many things that required her personal attention.
Marie Antoinette needed to be chaperoned 24/7 and Maria had to do it by letter from Vienna. There was still Prussia to worry about, and there was that shocking hussy, Catherine, in Russia. Maria was very upset when Joseph paid a visit to the Tsaritsa and the two of them seemed to take a real shine to one another. To the point where Joseph spent a good part of the summer of 1780 with Catherine as she traveled south to the Crimean and back again to St Petersburg. Maria had to watch that boy like a hawk. Especially since he had the nasty habit of starting wars when her back was turned.
There were a thousand, no, a million details she had to attend to personally. Like, for instance, the information that reached her that Marie Antoinette and her locksmith hubby (It was his favorite hobby) were no longer sleeping together. Honestly, why this news would come as a surprise is a mystery, but it did. And Maria sent letter after letter to her daughter, urging her to fix whatever the hell was broken in that woebegone marriage and be a proper queen.
The Queen of France responded that it was in the French “style” to sleep apart. Preferably in separate buildings, if not separate geographical locations. Mom responded that snuggle-bunnies was the Austrian “style.” How did she think she ended up with so many siblings? Marie wrote back; “We have slept apart for a long time now. I thought my darling mother knew.(meow) It is the custom here, between man and wife, and I should not consider myself justified in pressing the King in a matter which goes very much against his way of life and….personal tastes.”
“Hint, hint, mom. My husband is one of THOSE fellows. Likes to do the midnight minuet with the footmen, if you know what I mean; nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Joseph told me to put a gun to his head to get him to impregnate me…” Okay, Marie Antoinette didn’t put it like that, but she was thinking that and I liked the way it sounded.
— Mr. Al
Next week there will be no Mr. Al post, due to the rules and requirements of Blogmania. The week after marks the end of the Ah Maria series. I have not yet gotten Mr. Al to agree to begin a new series, though I’ve been lobbying for something I think might be fun. In the interim I intend to share some of his photos on Wednesdays. Thank you, dear readers, and please stay with us for the final installment of Ah Maria, Mr. Al’s take on the life of Queen Maria Theresa of Austria, better known as Marie Antoinette’s mother.
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