Naturally, until science sheds rather more light than at present on the secrets of heredity, this is all just a game. The King was unquestionably French, made so by the whole atmosphere and tradition, by upbringing and destiny, and no one in their wildest dreams would have called his Frenchness into question. But what is also beyond question is that there is every good reason why, in his external appearance, his physical movements, his gestures and temperament, he might have resembled one of his German or Polish ancestors.
Joseph II said of his brother-in-law that he was like primal matter before the proclamation Fiat lux. He classified him with those people whose minds are ruled by their bodies. This was shown by his favourite diversions: spending his free time in wood and metal workshops, or playing billiards. Had he not been born to be King, he would have been a conscientious, respectable, and no doubt perfectly contented craftsman.
But his real passion was for hunting — the sport of kings — which he pursued with even greater dedication than his forebears, clearly because only through frenzied activity and vigorous movement of the body could he work off his excess physical energy. It was the only time, it could be said, when he lost his timidity and clumsiness, found himself in his element, and emerged as a man. “His gentleness and altruism notwithstanding,” says Boiteaux, “he hardened, and would deal ruthlessly with people if anything got in the way of his freedom to exercise his royal prerogative of hunting, like some old Germanic tribal chief. If a peasant strayed into the royal forest he would be in a rage for the rest of the day. The roads would be closed and all work would stop in the fields for miles around.”
On these occasions he would even dispute the prize with his brother the Duc de Provence, and often did. The numbers were huge: in the fourteen years of his reign he took part in thirty-five fox, a hundred and four boar, one thousand two hundred and seven stag and two hundred and sixty six deer hunts.
As is well known, almost the only thing he ever noted in his diary, apart from where he attended mass, was the outcome of these expeditions. Even in the stormiest days of the Revolution, if he had done neither he would simply enter ‘rien’ (nothing). One cannot be sure whether this should be taken as yet another sign of his mental hebetude; the diary was his personal secret, in which he wrote only what touched on his most personal life. Hunting and religion — these were the two areas in which his soul felt truly at home. Alongside the painstaking craftsman, there was a medieval lord of the manor inside him.
But also a minor civil servant, and an accountant. He kept a meticulous accounts book. In it he wrote what he spent his pocket money on, carefully totting up the receipts, his gains and losses at cards, and even what he paid his ‘royal secretary’ (for duties he carried out himself). He notes that he gave twelve thousand livres to the Queen, a figure that recurs frequently. But he also records that he spent three livres on bathwater; thirty-six on shoes; one livre, eighteen sols on a leg of mutton; twelve sols on a bottle of red wine; three livres on a dozen fresh herrings … What is really mystifying about these notes is that there were eight cobblers in the royal household who submitted large bills every year, while the bouche du roi, the ‘King’s mouth’, as the royal kitchen was known, spent several thousand livres on his victuals every day. But then nothing is more impenetrable than the finances of the Ancien Régime. Apparently even Louis occasionally found them confusing. In 1782 he writes in his accounts book that some sort of error must have crept in, since he finds an item in the same notebook which he had completely overlooked, and he has to start the whole reckoning again from the beginning. The sum he had failed to notice was 42,377 livres …
This is the outer aspect of the man who is ruled by his body. However active he is, he remains fat. This is true even in his youth, and thereafter he puts weight on ‘in the twinkling of an eye’. His gaucheness is clearly a version of the fat little boy’s withdrawn and embarrassed shyness. Otherwise his obesity is not a pathological symptom; there is no need to think about mysterious glandular problems. In one respect he had a great deal in common with his ancestor Louis XIV: he too ate a huge amount.
The public dinners at which he sat with the Queen (though Marie-Antoinette absolutely refused to touch food in front of an audience) consisted of fifty courses: four soups, two large entrées—beef and cabbage, tenderloin veal spit-roasted; sixteen entrées—giblets of turkey au consommé, sweetbreads en papillotte, suckling pig, roast mutton chop, calf’s head, and so forth; four hors d’œuvres—forequarters of veal, fillet of rabbit, cold young turkey cock, leg of veal. Then six baked dishes, two intermediary entremets and sixteen small entremets—vegetables, eggs, milk dishes; next, the dessert — grapes, pomegranates, pears, bitter oranges and so forth; and last of all, four hundred chestnuts and forty-eight slices of bread and butter. It seems unlikely that he ate all of these, but it is said that he set about doing so with a will.
He was not just fat: he was slovenly. While he was still the Dauphin, the Neapolitan ambassador described him to Queen Maria Carolina as “selvaggio e rozzo, a segno che sembra nato ed educato in un bosco”—like a wild man of the woods. Mme Campan, who was truly well-disposed towards him, later wrote: “His features were noble enough, and expressive of a certain melancholy; his deportment was clumsy and lacked distinction; his person was worse than neglected; his hair, though tended by a skilled barber, was always unkempt, because he took no care of it. His voice was not particularly harsh, but nor was it pleasant: when he became excited in conversation, it became sharp and high-pitched.”
Along with this physical makeup went a certain boorishness. Louis had a tendency to brawling. Even after he was married he came to blows with his brother the Comte de Provence over some trifle, in the presence of their two wives. He loved crude jokes, if only to make a stand against the over-refinement of the Court. When Benjamin Franklin visited Paris it became the fashionable thing to sing the praises of the hero of American freedom and inventor of the lightning conductor, and women wore medallions bearing the inscription:
Eripuit caelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis
Lightning burst from the sky and dashed the sceptre from the tyrant’s grasp.
So the King had a chamber pot made in Sèvres carrying the same quotation, and sent it to the Duchesse Diane de Polignac, one of Franklin’s enthusiastic admirers.
Otherwise, his mental and moral attitudes were inherited from his father (the Dauphin, the son of Louis XV, who died young). The Dauphin had lived his exemplary married life, with the ‘gloomy Pepa’, as Louis XV called his daughter-in-law, in scorned and scornful isolation in his father’s frivolous and sinful Court, and, like so many sons, had made it his business to oppose everything his father did, to expiate his sins. He was deeply religious, immersed himself in serious studies, and gave much thought to how he might make the French people happy.