The Queen's Lover Read Online Free PDF Page A

ladies, who along with the Comte d’Artois enjoyed sitting up at their whist and backgammon games until the predawn hours, often played a prank tomake sure that the king went to bed even earlier: one of them would sneak up to the clock in the queen’s drawing room just before the family gathered there after supper, and move the clock an hour forward. After amiably playing a few games of cards, the king unfailingly said good night at what he thought was 11 p.m. to retreat into his evening prayers and his deep, contented sleep, leaving the queen and d’Artois to gamble until long past midnight and make sly comments about the monarch’s virtuous, drowsy nature. There was an edge of disdain about Toinette’s attitude toward her husband, in fact, that I thought inappropriate and for which I’d have sternly reprimanded her had I been in the position to do so. (“Toinette”: so I’d refer to her in my enamored musings long before I dared to thus address her.)
    Before ending this brief portrait of the couple who would soon become central to my life, I should clarify the gossip about the royal couple’s initial marital problems, which concerned the fact that they did not consummate their marriage for an entire SEVEN years. It was simply a case of juvenile ignorance. Imagine the fourteen-year-old girl and sixteen-year-old boy forced into bed without any marital instructions whatever beyond the minimal information that big sow of an empress, Maria Theresa, had offered her daughter. Having given birth to a whopping fifteen children, Maria Theresa was the kind of royal mother who trotted out her offspring two or three times a month, whenever truly important guests came to dine, leading them to believe that she was as accomplished and devoted a mother as she was a ruler. But this appearance of “loving attention” was another instance of her talent for public relations—in reality she totally abandoned her progeny to the whims of their numerous tutors and governesses. She was far too busy attempting to carve up Poland, or stopping Russia from invading Finland, to instruct even her favorite daughter on the techniques of bedding. She had been vigilant about only one aspect of her daughter’s life—her marriageability, thus recording for posterity theprecise moment of Toinette’s first period—5:15 p.m. of Thursday, February 14th, 1770, two months before she was shipped off to France. Otherwise, “Be lavish with your affections!” is all she would intone as she wrote the dauphine throughout the terrible years during which the young couple could not consummate their marriage.
    Let’s be blunt about their problems: the dauphin had no trouble getting an erection, but experienced terrible pain as soon as he’d begun the coital act. After a few minutes he apologized, kissed his bride’s cheek as he bade her good night, and retired to his own bedroom. This went on for seven dreadful years! The lack of significant stains on the princely sheets was a matter of public knowledge throughout Europe. In France anti-Austrian feelings already ran high, and courtiers enjoyed making lewd jokes about Viennese wenches having a saltpeter effect, giggle giggle, who could get it up properly with an Austrian? Within two years of the dauphine’s marriage, fishwives started shouting at the poor girl as her carriage passed through the streets, “Are you a woman or not? Give us an heir!” This private debacle and public opprobrium did much to deepen Marie Antoinette’s depressions. The d’Artois, who already had children, and the Provences, who had trouble conceiving, took equal delight in snickering behind the young royals’ backs. “Be prodigal with your caresses, etc.,” Maria Theresa continued to intone.
    After seven years of this nonsense—by this time Louis XV had died and Marie Antoinette was queen—her oldest brother, Emperor Joseph II of Austria, who ruled in consort with his mother, decided to investigate a nuptial predicament