Louis XIV. had taught his nobles the pernicious notion that an order to withdraw from the court was a penal banishment, and his successor now banished Madame de Grammont fourteen leagues from Versailles, and for some time refused to recall his sentence, though Marie Antoinette herself wrote to him to complain of one of her servants being so treated for such a cause. She had not, as she reported to her mother, been very willing to write, knowing that Madame du Barri read all the king's letters; but Mercy had urged her to take the step, thinking it very important that she should establish the practice of communicating directly with Louis on all matters relating to her own household, and that she should avoid the blunder of his daughters, her aunts, whose conduct toward their father had, in his opinion, been mischievously timid, and to follow whose example would be prejudicial both to her dignity and to her comfort.
The aunts too, and especially the eldest, Madame Adelaide, had schemes of their own, which, they also sought to carry out by underhand methods. The more conscious they were that they themselves had no influence over their father, the less could they endure the chance of their niece acquiring any, though it could not have been said to have been established at their expense. On the other hand, they had before his marriage had considerable power with the dauphin, which they had now but little hope of retaining. They saw also that Marie Antoinette had in a few weeks gained a general popularity such as they had never won in their whole lives, and on all these accounts they were painfully jealous of her. They put ideas and plans into her head which they expected to grate upon their father's taste or indolence, and then contrived to have them represented or misrepresented to him, though he disappointed their malice by regarding such things as childish ebullitions natural to a girl of her age, and was far more inclined to humor than to reprove her. With the same object, they tried to induce her to interfere in appointments in which she had no concern; but she remembered her mother's advice, and on this point kept steadily in the path which that affectionate adviser had marked out for her. They even ventured to make disparaging observations on her manners, as inexperienced and unformed, to the dauphin himself, till he silenced them by the warmth of his praises alike of her beauty and of her disposition; and they were so afraid of any addition to her popularity with the nation at large, that, when the city of Paris and the states of Languedoc presented her with an address, they recommended her to make no reply, assuring her that on similar occasions they themselves had never given any answers. Luckily, she had a better adviser, who on this occasion was the Abbe de Vermond. He told her truly that in this matter the conduct which the older princesses had pursued was a warning, not a pattern: that they had made all France discontented; and at his suggestion Marie Antoinette gave to each address "an answer full of graciousness, with which the public was enchanted."
Thus in the first year of her marriage, by her kindness of heart, guided by the advice of Mercy and the abbe, to which she listened with the greatest docility, she had won general affection, and had made no enemies but those whose enmity was an honor. She was, as she wrote to her mother, perfectly happy, though, had she not wished to make the best of matters, she was not, in fact, wholly free from disappointments and vexations, some of which continued for years to cause her uneasiness and anxiety, though others were comparatively trivial or temporary, while one was of an almost comical nature.
She had conceived a great desire to learn to ride. Her mother had been a great horsewoman; and, as the dauphin, like the king, was passionately addicted to hunting, which hitherto she had only witnessed from a carriage, Marie Antoinette not unnaturally desired to be mistress of an accomplishment which would enable her to give him more of her companionship. Unluckily Mercy disapproved of the idea. It is impossible to read his correspondence with the empress, and in subsequent years with Marie Antoinette herself, without being forcibly impressed with respect for his consummate prudence, his sound judgment in matters of public policy, and his unswerving fidelity to the interests of both mother and daughter. But at the same time it is difficult to avoid seeing that he was too little inclined to make allowance for the youthful eagerness for amusements which was natural to her age, and that at times he carried his supervision into matters on which his statesman-like experience and sagacity had hardly qualified him to form an opinion. He was proud of his princess's beauty; and, considering himself in charge of her figure as well as of her conduct, he had made himself very uneasy by the fancied discovery that she was becoming crooked. He was sure that one shoulder was growing higher than the other; he earnestly recommended stays, and was very much displeased with her aunts for setting her against them, because they were not fashionable in Paris. And when the horse exercise was proposed, he set his face against it; he wrote to Maria Teresa, who agreed with him in thinking it ruinous to the complexion, injurious to the shape, and not to be safely indulged in under thirty years of age[8]; and, lest distance should weaken the authority of the empress, he enlisted Madame de Noailles and Choiseul on his side, and Choiseul persuaded the king that it was a very objectionable pastime for a young bride.
There was not as yet the slightest prospect of the dauphiness becoming a mother (a circumstance which was, in fact, the most serious of her vexations, and that which lasted longest): but the king on this point agreed with his minister, and after some discussion a compromise was hit upon, and it was decided that she might ride a donkey. The whole country was immediately ransacked for a stud of quiet donkeys.[9] In September the court moved to Compiegne, and day after day, while the king and the dauphin were shooting in one part of the woods, on the other side a cavalcade of donkey-riders, the aunts and the king's brothers all swelling Marie Antoinette's train, trotted up and down the glades, and sought out shady spots for rural luncheons out-of-doors; and, though even this pastime was occasionally found liable to as much danger as an expedition on nobler steeds, the merry dauphiness contrived to extract amusement for herself and her followers from her very disasters. It was long a standing joke that on one occasion, when her donkey and herself came down in a soft place, her royal highness, before she would allow her attendants to extricate her from the mud, bid them go to Madame de Noailles, and ask her what the rules of etiquette prescribed when a dauphiness of France failed to keep her seat upon a donkey.
She had also another annoyance which was even of a less royal character than being doomed to ride on a donkey. She had absolutely no pocket-money. For many generations the princes of the country had been accustomed to dip their hands so unrestrainedly into the national treasury, that their legitimate appointments had been fixed on a very moderate, if not scanty, scale; so that any one who, like the dauphin and dauphiness, might be scrupulous not to exceed their income (though that scruple had probably affected no one before) could not fail to be greatly straitened. The allowance of Marie Antoinette was fixed at no higher amount than six thousand francs a month; and of this small sum, according to a report which, in the course of the autumn, Mercy made to the empress, not a single crown really reached the princess for her private use.[10] Nearly half of the money was stopped to pay some pensions granted Marie Leczinska, with which the dauphiness could by no possibility have the slightest concern. Almost as much more was intrusted to the gentlemen of her chamber for the expenses of the play table, at which she was expected to preside, since there was no queen to discharge that duty; and whether her royal highness's cards won or lost, the money equally disappeared,[11] and the remainder was distributed in presents to her ladies, at the discretion of Madame de Noailles. Had not Maria Teresa, when she first quit Vienna, intrusted Mercy with a thousand pounds for her use, and had she not herself been singularly economical in her ideas, she would have been in the humiliating position of being unable to provide for her own most ordinary wants, and, a matter about which she was even more anxious, for her constant charities. Yet so inveterate was the mismanagement in both the court and the government, that it was some time before Mercy could succeed, by the strongest remonstrances supported by clear proofs of the real situation of her royal highness, in getting her affairs and her resources placed upon a proper footing.