For a long time after their first uneventful night together, the Dauphin did not venture again into his wife’s bedroom; and when, eventually, he did so, having overcome his early suspicions and fallen in love with her, it seems from Marie Antoinette’s letters to her mother that he derived as little pleasure from these visits as he was able to give her. It was the stated opinion of the Austrian Ambassador, Comte Florimond Claude de Mercy, who was naturally anxious to blame Louis rather than Marie Antoinette for their failure to have children, that the Dauphin was hampered by a physical deformity. Marie Antoinette’s brother, who became Emperor Joseph II on their mother’s death, believed, on the contrary, that Louis’s ‘laziness, clumsiness and apathy were the only obstacles’. ‘As for my sister,’ he added, ‘she is not amorously inclined and when they are together they are a couple of awkward nincompoops.’ Certainly Marie Antoinette appears to have been extremely modest: in her bath she wore a flannel shift, buttoned from neck to ankle, and when she emerged she required her maids to hold up a sheet as a screen between her body and her ladies. But there were those who hinted that this modesty was merely the affectation of a fundamentally libidinous nature. It was rumoured not only that the King was impotent but also that the Queen sought her pleasures elsewhere, both with men and with women.
Neither the King nor the Queen was an unpopular figure with the people as a whole in the early years of their marriage; on their first visit to Paris they were warmly welcomed by cheering crowds in streets decorated with flowers and triumphal arches. But pamphlets, at first attacking Marie Antoinette as a meddlesome, troublesome foreigner, then accusing her of adultery and lesbianism, had already begun to appear and were soon in wide circulation. Her passionate friendships with the excessively sensitive widow, the Princesse de Lamballe, the Superintendent of her Household – who lost consciousness so readily that she once swooned away at the sight of a lobster in a painting – and with the pretty, high-spirited Duchesse de Polignac, were described in these pamphlets in obscene terms that gave much satisfaction to her enemies. It was said that these two ladies, on whom she lavished money, offices, apartments and gifts, helped her widen ‘la porte de Cythère’ so that her husband’s ‘jeanchouart’, ‘toujours molle et toujours croche’, could more easily enter it.
Whatever the difficulties of the young couple may have been, it was not until August 1773, over three years after the marriage and thanks, so some reports had it, to an operation performed on the Dauphin’s foreskin, that Marie Antoinette was able to report to her mother, and then rather doubtfully, ‘I think our marriage has been consummated.’ And a further four years were to pass before she could write more confidently that the marriage had at last been ‘parfaitement consommé’, that she was ‘dans le bonheur le plus essentiel pour toute ma vie’. In the spring of 1778 she discovered herself to be pregnant, and just before Christmas that year, following the accoucheur’s announcement, ‘The Queen is entering labour’, a crowd of Ministers, Court dignitaries and others rushed into her bedroom to witness the delivery, two men clambering on to a sofa to obtain an unobstructed view of the bed, which had been placed near the fire, behind a low screen. So intense was the crush, so hot the room that the Princesse de Lamballe lost consciousness for several hours. For fear lest his wife might suffocate, the King with unaccustomed decision tore off the tapes which hermetically sealed the windows to let in some air. A few moments later, the child, a daughter, was born.
Three other children followed her, a brother in 1781, another brother, the future Louis XVII, in 1785 and a sister in 1786. But, while his family grew, the King’s self-assurance did not. He continued hesitant, undignified, clumsy, reticent and self-doubting. He appeared to have no will of his own, to act only under pressure. ‘Imagine,’ said one of his brothers, ‘a handful of oiled ivory balls that you are trying to keep together!’ Had he had any choice in the matter he would certainly not have been a king: he once remarked to one of his Ministers who relinquished office, ‘How lucky you are! Why can’t I resign, too?’ Still impressionable and sensitive, his true feelings remained concealed behind a façade at once blunt and severe. As kind-hearted as ever, he could not bring himself to be gracious to his courtiers, to offer them sympathy in grief or illness, to speak to them other than off-handedly or with harsh and tactless banter. He still indulged in horseplay and tiresome practical jokes, trying to trip his pages up with his cordon bleu, making a face and childishly running away when his nightgown was handed to him, walking with his breeches hanging around his ankles. Laboriously painstaking, he occupied himself for hours with petty details, minor cash accounts and lists of game killed in the forests, as though to avoid consideration of the wider, complicated problems of the state. He preferred to work with his hands, beating out bronze and copper, carving wood, constructing locks, building stone walls – all of which tasks he performed with competence – rather than to discuss with his Ministers their departmental affairs. He gave the impression of studiousness: he built a fine white and gold library at Versailles, he purchased a second-hand set of the Encyclopédie, he read a great deal – both newspapers and books, he taught himself to read English and, after a fashion, Italian and Spanish. But he rarely seemed to profit from his study or to show that he remembered what he had read.
His day began at six o’clock when one of his four valets de chambre, who had passed the night on a truckle bed, threw back the curtains of the four-poster to awaken him. He rose immediately, put on his dressing-gown, shaved, dressed in the clothes that the valets ceremonially presented to him, had the Star of the Holy Spirit – France’s highest order – fixed to his left breast. When his hair had been satisfactorily curled, powdered and decorated with a silk ribbon round the queue, he went for a walk, returning precisely at eight o’clock for the petit lever during which Ministers and officials of the Household were admitted to discuss business with him. He then went up to his private apartments to read or tinker in his workshop. Mass was said at noon.
Dinner, which was usually over at half-past one, was eaten in public. The King and Queen sat next to each other in armchairs, their backs to the fireplace, a row of stools arranged in a semi-circle in front of their small table. On these stools sat various female members of the royal family and the senior ladies of the enormous Household, and behind them stood other ladies of the Household and as many spectators as could be admitted into the room. One day in November 1775 these spectators included Samuel Johnson and his friend, Hester Thrale. ‘They had a damask tablecloth neither coarse nor fine,’ Mrs Thrale noticed. ‘Their dishes were silver…and their dinner consisted of five dishes at a course. The Queen ate heartily of a pye which the King helped her to. They did not speak at all to each other, as I remember, but sometimes talked to the Lord-in-Waiting.’
In the afternoon the King and Queen sometimes went to a play performed for their benefit in the Salle de Spectacle; and in the evening the Court settled down to play card games, billiards, backgammon or cavagnole, the King disapproving of – but refraining from objecting to – the high stakes gambled by his wife and his two brothers.