universally believed—and here we have little-tattlers who are past-masters of the art.
The Cardinal has made we of my name like a vile and clumsy forger. It is probable that he did so under pressure and an urgent need for money and believed he would be able to pay the jeweller without anything being discovered.
In May of the year 1785 a great joy came to me when I gave birth to my second son. My confinement was attended with the same ceremony as that which there had been at the birth of my little Dauphin. My husband declared that never again should I be submitted to the danger I had faced at the time of my daughter’s birth.
Louis himself came to my bedside and emotionally declared: We have another little boy! ” And there was my dear Gabrielle holding the child in her arms coming to my bed.
I insisted on holding him. A little boy . a perfect little boy! I wept; the King wept; in fact everyone was weeping, with joy.
My husband commanded that messages be sent to Paris with the news. My little son was baptised in Notre Dame by Cardinal de Rohan, as his brother had been, and he was christened Louis-Charles. Te Deums were sung; the tocsins were sounding; the salute of guns was fired. There was rejoicing in Versailles for four days and nights. I was so happy.
My dreams were coming true. I had two sons and a daughter. I would often bend over the little newcomer as he lay in his beautiful cradle.
You will be happy, my darling,” I told him. Oh, if I could have foreseen the misery into which I had brought this unfortunate child I How much better if he had never been born I
There was one man whose name was on every lip. It was the author Beaumarchais, who had written a play called Le Manage de Figaro in which there was tremendous interest throughout the Court and I believe the country. The author had had difficulty in getting the play performed because the Lieutenant of the Police, the magistrates, the Keeper of the Seals and strangely enough the King did not think it would be good for the country to see it.
I had thought what fun it would be to put it on at my Trianon theatre and Artois agreed with me, seeing himself in the part of the Barber.
He flitted about my apartments, doing the rogue of a Barber to the life. It was small wonder that people had suggested that Artois and I were closer friends than propriety permitted. We were completely in tune on matters such as this. He could not see why we should not do the play any more than I could.
I see it now, of course; I see how that dialogue is full of innuendo, I can see that Figaro is meant to represent the People; and that the Comte Ahnaviva is the old regime, the tottering structure of aristocracy. Almost every line of the dialogue is charged with meaning. This was not a play about a Comte who commits adultery as naturally as eating and breathing; it was not an account of the shrewdness of a wily barber.
It was a picture of France—the uselessness of the aristocracy and the growing awareness of the shrewd people of the state of their country;
it was meant to set them wondering as to how it could be remedied. I think of little snatches of dialogue.
I was born to be a courtier. “
“Receive, take, ask. There’s the secret of it in three words.”
With character and intelligence you may one day rise in your office.
”Intelligence to help advancement? Your lordship is laughing at mine. Be commonplace and cringing and one can get anywhere. “
“Are you a prince to be flattered? Hear die truth, you wretch, since you have not the money to recompense a liar.”
Nobility, wealth, rank, office—that makes you very proud! What have you done for these blessings? You have taken the trouble to be born, and nothing else. “
I was too immersed in my own affairs to be fully aware of the crumbling society in which I was living. I saw nothing explosive in these remarks. To me they were merely excessively amusing. But my husband saw the dangers immediately.
“This man turns everything to ridicule—everything which should be respected in a government.”
“Then won’t it be played?” I asked, showing my disappointment.
“No, it will not,” replied my husband, quite sharply for him.
“You may be sure of that.”
I often think of him now, poor Louis. He saw so much that I could not understand. He was clever; he could have been a good king. He had the best will in the world; he was the kindest, the most amiable of men;
he sought nothing for himself. He had his ministers—Maurepas, Turgot who was replaced by Necker in his turn replaced by Calonne-but none of these ministers was great enough to carry us safely over the yawning abyss which was widening rapidly beneath our very feet. Dear Louis, who wanted to please.
But it was so difficult to please everyone. And what did I do? I was the tool of ambitious factions and did nothing to help my husband, who wanted to please me and wanted to please his ministers, and vacillated between the two. That was his crime: not cruelty, not indifference to the suffering of others, not lechery—not all those crimes which had undermined the Monarchy and set the pillars on which it was erected mouldering to dust: it was vacillation, in which he was helped by a giddy thoughtless wife.
This affair of the play was characteristic of Louis’s weakess and my frivolity.
When Figaro was banned everyone became greatly interested in it. When Beaumarchais declared that only little men were afraid of little writings, how clever that was! And how well he understood human nature I There was no one who wished to be thought a ‘little man,” and his supporters were springing up everywhere. Gabrielle told me that her family believed the play should be performed. What sort of society was this where artists were not allowed to speak their minds I The play could not be performed, but what was to prevent people’s reading it?
“Have you read Figaro’?” It was the constant question asked everywhere. If you had not, if you did not burst into immediate praise, you were a ‘little man or woman. ” Clever Beaumarchais had said so.
There was one section of society which placed itself firmly behind Beaumarchais. Catherine the Great and her son the Grand Duke Paul expressed their approval of the play and declared they would introduce it into Russia. But the most important supporter was Artois. I think he longed for us to play it and therefore he was determined to see it performed. He was as lighthearted as I, and even went so far as to order a rehearsal in the King’s own theatre —Menus Plaisirs. Here my husband showed himself firm for once. As die audience was beginning to arrive he sent the Due de Villequier to forbid the performance.
Shortly afterwards the Comte de Vaudreuil, that most forceful lover of Gabrielle’s, declared that he could see no reason why the play should not be performed privately, and gathered together actors and actresses from the Comedie Francaise, and the play was put on in his chateau at Gennevilliers. Artois was there to see it performed. Everyone present declared it a masterpiece and demanded to know what was going to happen to French literature if its most important artists were muzzled.
Beaumarchais made fun of the censorship in the play itself:
“Provided I don’t speak in my writings of authority, of religion, of politics, of morality, of the officials of influential bodies, of other spectacles, of anyone who has any claim to anything, I can print anything freely, under the inspection of two or three censors.”
This was, many people were declaring, not to be tolerated. France was the centre of culture. Any country which failed to appreciate its artists was committing cultural suicide.
Louis was beginning to waver, and I repeated all the arguments I had heard. If certain offensive passages were removed . “Perhaps,” said the King. They would see.
It was a half-victory. I knew that he could soon be persuaded.
I was right. In April 1784 in the theatre of the Comedie Francaise, Le Manage de Figaro was performed and there was a stampede to get tickets. Members of the nobility stayed all day in the theatre to make sure of their places, and all through the day the crowd collected and when the doors were open they rushed in; they were
