The Queen's Necklace by Antal Szerb Read Free Book Online Page A

things, understand how deeply his manner of life—so often unworthy of his position—might offend her religious sensibilities? No doubt the Empress saw him as the embodiment of the French frivolity and immorality that so alienated her. But perhaps, in the end, it wasn’t Rohan himself that she loathed so much as the people behind him, the vast entourage from whom she wished to protect her people.
    She did all she could to have him recalled. She saw him as the ambassador to her Court not only of France but of the Powers of Darkness. She mobilised her envoy to Versailles, Mercy-Argenteau, and she mobilised her daughter, the Dauphine.
    This constant call to action from her mother was one of the causes of Marie-Antoinette’s tragedy. The Empress regarded her daughter as a diplomatic instrument comparable to d’Argenteau, an attitude inherited by her son, Joseph II. But as far as Marie-Antoinette was concerned, her mother was the closest to her of all living creatures, and she sought to obey her in every way possible. For all her sagacity, the Empress did not know, or did not want to see, that despite the present alliance betweenher country and France the ancient enmity between the French and Germans was a far more deeply rooted affair; nor could she imagine that the same person could be at the same time a good Frenchwoman and a good German. As she wrote to her daughter: “Be a good German—it’s the best way of being a good Frenchwoman.” In short, she sacrificed her daughter to her political ambitions.
    Not every child smothered with love by a mother who makes herself indispensable continues to feel strongly bound by that love. But we do sometimes see examples of the reverse—children who remain permanently tied to mothers who want to dominate them for ever. Maria Theresa did not exactly swamp her children with maternal affection—she would not have known how to. Like all Habsburg rulers, she sacrificed every moment to her implacable sense of duty. The Habsburgs ruled the way a born writer writes, and a born painter paints—in the middle of the night, waking between two dreams. For centuries they had had little time for tenderness. Their style was the direct opposite of the idle and voluptuous Bourbons’, with whom Marie-Antoinette, the most delicate flower of the Habsburg forest, was now entangled.
    Of course we might think otherwise when we gaze on Maria Theresa’s imposing baroque tomb in the Capuchin cemetery in Vienna. The Empress sits enthroned amidst her offspring, the multitudinous little princes, like some ancient fertility goddess, a Magna Mater, the very symbol of motherhood. But her actual practice is revealed in the words of Marie-Antoinette, as recorded by that gifted writer, her
Première Femme de Chambre
(not, we repeat, ‘chambermaid’!), Mme Campan: “Whenever she heard that some foreigner of note (
un étranger de marque
) had arrived, the Empress would surround herself with her family, sit the little ones at table and create a tableau to suggest that she was bringing them up herself.” It was certainly not the case.
    So it might well have been from a sense of duty that Marie-Antoinette adopted her mother’s stance of intense hostilitytowards Rohan. She had met him only once, in Strasbourg. It is possible she took a dislike to the rising young churchman even then. Carlyle may well be right: “Perhaps even then, her fair young soul read, all unconsciously, an incoherent
Roué
-ism, bottomless mud-volcano-ism, from which she by instinct rather recoiled.”
    Carlyle was the second person, after Goethe, to give literary expression to the necklace trial, in his famous essay
The Age of Romance
, written from the necessary historical distance at the beginning of the last century. In what follows we shall be frequently quoting his highly compressed, savagely ironic and eloquent phrases. In the lines transcribed above he employs the term ‘
roué
’. The word is still in use today, but it first