To the scaffold by Carolly Erickson Read Free Book Online Page B

encumbered by her increasing girth, her breathing evidently labored. An attack of smallpox two years earlier had left her with a weakened heart and unsteady nerves, and she looked aged and tired as she passed by.
    "The day of her beauty and brilliancy was past," an eyewitness noted. "Her countenance, marked by smallpox, had lost its former charm and showed traces of the emotions produced by an illustrious but laborious reign, joined to an expression of weariness and lassitude."^ She was tired, but triumphant. By arranging her daughter's marriage, she had saved Austria, for as long as Bourbon and Hapsburg were allied by marriage, the Monster Frederick of Prussia would remain at bay. But few in the crowd took notice of the Empress, except to remark on her evident ill health. Her day was past, while her daughter's was just dawning. It was the fresh-faced, lovely child with the striking coloring, the Archduchess Antoinette, who drew the attention of all eyes.

    >^4^si^

    T Versailles, the dauphin Louis Auguste was far from enthusiastic when he learned that he was to marry the Austrian Archduchess. He had no desire to be married, in fact he had no interest whatsoever in women and the subject of sex filled him with dread. At fifteen, he was a clumsy, loutish youth, pudgy and dirty, with appalling manners and a terror of public ftinctions. His grandfather's mistress, Madame Du Barry, who was none too well-bred herself, called him a "fat, ill-bred boy" and the Neapolitan ambassador remarked wryly that he seemed to have been "bom and raised in a forest." That this enfant sauvage should be the heir to the throne of his grandfather Louis XV was a disaster the King and his ministers would gladly have averted. The Due de Choiseul, chief promoter of the Austrian marriage and a man of blunt pronouncements, prophesied glumly that if the dauphin grew into as embarrassing a man as he was a boy, he would one day be "the horror of the nation."
    An unkind fate had thrust Louis into his role. The most unpromising of his father's four sons, bullied by his siblings, a piteously shy and sickly child, he had suddenly become dauphin at the age oif eleven, when his father and older brother died. He wept from terror, and took reftige in his favorite haunt, the forest of Compi^gne. There he could hunt, and bury himself in the forest depths far from the disapproving eyes of his grandfather's ministers. Louis was an eccentric child, poor at his lessons yet bookish and pedantic (he compiled a detailed, prosaic Description of the

    Forest of Compi^gne before he was twelve), ill at ease with other children and with the courtiers of Versailles, happiest in the company of ordinary laborers and servants. Maps were his passion, though in his early teens he developed an interest in history as well, particularly in the English Civil War with its sensational regicide. He also kept a diary, primarily to record his hunts and to keep a record of expenditures.
    Overweight, uncouth, badly dressed and painfully self-conscious, the dauphin was not unaware of his shortcomings, yet he seemed incapable of rising above them, and still more incapable of coming to grips with the challenges of rule. "My greatest fault," he wrote candidly, "is a sluggishness of mind." Others were prepared to enlarge on this assessment. "This prince, by his face and his talk, shows only an extremely limited intelligence, much clumsiness," was the judgment of the Austrian envoy to Versailles, Count Mercy. "Nature seems to have refused everything to the dauphin."^
    Nature had refused him everything—except a charming and pretty wife. In the summer of 1769, the French and Austrian diplomats began negotiating the betrothal contract, with an understanding that the wedding would take place in the following April. Antoinette's dowry was fixed at two hundred thousand silver florins in cash, with an equal amount in jewelry. With the pride of two great powers at stake, ceremonial details took on heightened