But the letters from Maria Theresa were coming less frequently.
In the last few years she had grown very fat. She had suffered badly from the smallpox, and Antoinette would not have recognised her if she had seen her at that time. The Empress knew that she had not long to live; and one day, soon after Antoinette’s miscarriage, when driving, she had caught a chill. A few days later she was dead.
When the news was brought to Antoinette she was prostrate with grief.
The King had sent the Abbé de Vermond to break it to her gently; he himself, guessing how broken-hearted she would be, declared he could not bear to do so. But as she lay on her bed, too dazed for speech, Louis came to her and took her into his arms.
‘I cannot believe it, Louis,’ she said. ‘Mother … dead. But she was so vital. I think she believed she would be immortal.’
‘We are none of us that,’ said Louis.
‘Yet she seemed so. And to think I have sometimes put her letters aside because I knew they would contain scoldings. As if she ever scolded when I did not merit a scolding. Louis, who will look after me now?’
‘I will,’ said Louis.
She smiled at him tenderly. Dear Louis. But Poor Louis. How different he seemed to her from that strong woman to whom she had felt she could always turn.
‘I cannot believe,’ she went on, ‘that she is not there. You see, Louis, she was always there … from the moment I first became aware of anything she was there …’
He soothed her. She felt closer to Louis than ever before; and in those days of mourning she wished to be shut away from everyone but her husband and her dear friends, Madame de Polignac and the Princesse de Lamballe.
The finances of France were tottering.
Necker had overlooked the fact that when he had made his drastic plans for reducing expenditure, the result would produce unemployment and the dissatisfaction of a great number of people; and that hundreds who had looked upon the service of the nobility as their livelihood would be without means of earning a living.
Necker was idealistic. The state of the hospitals appalled him, so he prevailed on the King to pay secret visits to those of Paris; and Louis, whose great desire was to serve his country, was willing to do so. What Louis saw in places such as the Hôtel-Dieu filled him with horror. Disguised he had wandered through the wards and seen the dying lying in heaps in corners, had seen as many as four people crowded into one narrow bed, all in various stages of misery.
He had come back to the Palace and told the Queen what he had seen; and he and Antoinette had wept together. Something must be done for the hospitals. In the provincial cities they were moderately satisfactory; it was in Paris that they provoked such horror and shame.
The Queen founded a maternity hospital at Versailles; the King bought new beds to be installed in the Hôtel-Dieu. This was admirable; but it cost money. Turgot, Malesherbes and Necker were all reformers, all idealists, but all lacked the means to bring their reforms into being.
Necker was now at the height of his popularity. Only Maurepas, now in his eighties, wise and shrewd, doubted the banker. Maurepas could not believe that the country’s financial state was as good as Necker had made it out to be; to Maurepas’ practical mind it was an impossibility. Trouble started between Necker and Maurepas when the banker rejected a proposal to strengthen the Navy, which had been put forward by de Sartines, who was then Minister for Naval Affairs and whom Maurepas was supporting.
There was an open rupture in high places. Necker, who was cheered every time he went into the streets, thought to score off the old statesman by demanding the post of Minister of State.
Maurepas then threatened to resign and take the Administration with him, pointing out that Necker was a Protestant and no Protestant had ever held the post of Minister of State since the days of Henri Quatre; but Necker imagined that, since the people believed in him, new rules should be made on his account.
The King and the Queen were reluctant to accept Necker’s resignation, but this was forced on them. Necker fell from power; and the men and women in the streets murmured because of it.
There was another disturbing factor. Many French had returned from America, now that war was being brought to a satisfactory conclusion. This sent the citizens of Paris wild with joy. From the beginning they had been on the side of those who called for liberty. They had cheered Benjamin Franklin, Arthur Lee and Silas Deane when they had appeared in Paris some years before to enlist French support. Many had sailed to America under the Marquis de la Fayette.
The King had wanted to remain aloof. It was because he was distrustful of war. He had an uneasy feeling too that, as a royalist, he would be fighting on the wrong side. All Europe was declaring against England in the struggle, not on principle but because they feared that mighty rising Power.
And now the war was over and the Declaration of Independence had been signed. This was success for the settlers, success too for France. The stigma of the Seven Years’ War which had so humiliated the French was wiped away. Now they were victorious over their old enemies, the English.
It had been an easy war, as wars which were not fought in the homeland should be. France had recovered her colonies in the West Indies, in Senegal and India. She had hoped to regain Canada, but that country had refused to rise against the English.
It seemed that France was set for glory again as it had been in the days of Louis Quatorze. Here was the beginning of richness, the people told each other.
There were certain things they had forgotten.
The Déficit was greater than ever, for the war had cost forty-three million livres. Those reforms, which Louis had so dearly wished to put into being and in which he had ministers to support him, had had to be put off for the sake of the war.
This was bad; but there was one thing which, for the monarchy, was more dangerous still.
Soldiers sat in the taverns and cafés and talked of the new country. In the new land there were no Kings. There was more freedom in the New World.
A new cry had replaced ‘Long live the King’. It was ‘Long live Liberty!’
The Queen was oblivious of the change which was coming over the country. Her mind was occupied with one thing. She was again pregnant, and this time she was determined not to lose the child.
She shut herself away from the Court, took the utmost care of her health and saw few people apart from Louis and her dearest friends.
In the streets the people had ceased to talk of the new world and were discussing the coming of the child, for a royal birth was an event to eclipse all others.
The King was firm in declaring that he would not have the Queen submitted to the danger and indignity which she had suffered during the birth of Madame Royale. He proclaimed that only those close members of the family, doctors, ladies-in-waiting and those necessary to the occasion should forgather in the lying-in chamber. He did not forget how the Queen had come near to death by suffocation at her last confinement.
The King called the Queen’s ladies to him a few days before the child was expected.
‘I am anxious on the Queen’s behalf,’ he said. ‘I remember last time. If the child should be a girl she will be distressed, I know. This fact must be kept from her until she is well enough to learn the truth.’
The Princesse de Lamballe said: ‘Sire, if the child should be a boy, shall we not tell Her Majesty?’
‘No,’ said the King firmly. ‘For joy can be as big a shock as grief.’