Louis XVI also enjoyed serious study. He read English readily and well (he was especially fond of Milton) and concerned himself above all with history and geography, the true subject matter of kings. But literature held little interest for him, and this was a great pity. It was a major deficiency in a French king at a time when his people read feverishly and unceasingly, and acquired their ideas about the world through the medium of the printed word.
He was deeply religious. That was how he had been raised, first by his father and then by the man entrusted with his upbringing, the Duc de Vauguyon — about whose own piety there is little to be said. But his own nature inclined him that way too, and his religion gave a deeper colouring to his innate good-heartedness and the love he felt for his people. His faith was the secret, immeasurable source of inner strength that enabled him — a man who in life was so shy and self-effacing — in his hours of trial and affliction to face death like a hero and a martyr: a death that retrospectively ennobled the memory of all he had done before.
He lived in Puritan simplicity. He loathed the pomp of the Court, and his first act after mounting the throne was to incur the bitterness of the aristocracy by trimming the royal household. Amongst its members was a class of persons known as the menus plaisirs, the ‘little diversions’, whose honour and duty it was to attend to the monarch’s pleasure. No sooner had he been crowned than their intendant La Ferté presented himself to the King, who asked him:
“Who on earth are you?”
“I am the person in charge of the ‘little diversions’, sire.”
“Well, my little diversion is to take a stroll in the park,” the King replied.
But the greatest of his virtues, and what might indeed be considered his dominant characteristic, was his goodness of heart. This was a king who spontaneously and sincerely loved his people. This sincerity shines through his remark: “Il n’y a que Monsieur Turgot et moi qui aimons le peuple.”—It is only Monsieur Turgot and I who love the people.
Gentle and humane, he had a horror of cruelty and bloodshed. He was prone to tears and full of sensibility, as was the entire age, but in his case it came from the heart. When Chamfort’s neoclassic drama Mustafa and Zéangir was staged in the royal theatre — a play that celebrates sibling love — he shed a fountain of tears. He actually loved his own brothers and sisters, which, in the circumstances, and considering their own cooler feelings for him, was rather remarkable.
I could continue to enumerate his virtues, and that might seem well worth doing in view of all that has been said about his weaknesses. But there really is no need. In recent decades royalist historians have reiterated to the point of tedium what a kind and noble soul he was.
We must also consider how very different a king was from an ordinary mortal. From the moment of his birth, he was raised in so rarified and sheltered a world that it must necessarily have weakened his grasp of reality. He could never become familiar with the common people and the difficult raw material of their daily lives. For this reason — because they were an unknown quantity — he was every bit as uncomfortable meeting commoners as his grandfather, Louis XV, had been. The reason why he failed to recognise the danger hanging over his throne, and made no effort to counter it, is, quite clearly, that he was a king. In the clear sunny sky depicted on the ceiling of his throne room he never noticed the gathering storm clouds …
However, contrary to what I have just argued, we have also to recognise that the rulers of old lived in much greater proximity to life and to their people than those of today. Or more precisely, the people of those days lived in greater proximity to their rulers. They could enter their great halls, stroll in their parks and shout abuse at them with impunity. Louis XVI probably knew much more about his people and their moods than the leaders of society today. Somehow, both monarch and people were cut from the same cloth. The social gulf between them was confined to the external world, not the inner one. The King was more akin in spirit to his serf than the director of a modern business is to his office-boy; and more able to strike the right note when they spoke to one another.
The sad thing is that it should be necessary at all to draw attention to Louis’ virtues, as opposed to his shortcomings. Those virtues did almost as much to pave the way for the Revolution as did the sins of his predecessors. As Sainte-Beuve expressed it, rather more elegantly: “Louis XVI’s spiritual virtues ran far beyond what was required for the role of king. It was his very kindness and humanity that drove him unremittingly towards the role of sacrificial victim, and, as he stumbled from one act of weakness to another, the only way in which he would ever attain greatness was through martyrdom.” And so this kind-hearted, saintly king proved to have been of the least possible use to the institution he represented at that precise moment in history. Had he possessed the easy-going, sanguine, rococo spirit of Gustav III of Sweden, he might have come up with some stratagem to protect, or at least prolong, its existence. But at that precise moment only a king with the mind of a Machiavelli could have measured up to the situation. Instead, they had Louis XVI, the humane, indulgent soul who loved his people and shed bitter tears over their fate.
“On that final day,” Sainte-Beuve continues, “Marie-Antoinette poured out her heart, urging him to die like a king, like a true descendant of Louis XIV. But he had resolved rather to die like a Christian, as his forebear St Louis had done.” It was the fate of the French monarchy that this Louis had more in him of his sainted ancestor than of Louis XIV.
The Verdict
THE HEARING LASTED FOR MONTHS. The arrests of d’Oliva and Réteaux changed everything. Once d’Oliva had confessed to her appearance in the Venus Bower, and Réteaux that he had written the letters from ‘the Queen’, Jeanne’s lies collapsed one after another. On 12th April she was brought face to face with Réteaux and d’Oliva and finally compelled to admit to the Venus Bower charade. The confession was torn from her between a thousand screams and convulsions; her superior manner vanished, and she fainted. A warder took her in his arms and carried her back to her cell. But the moment she recovered herself she bit him in the neck, whereupon he simply let her fall.
With the collapse of her scheme to blame everything on Cagliostro, she concocted a fresh one intended to make Rohan the sole villain and herself merely the blind instrument who had had no idea what she was involved in. When that became untenable, she tried another experiment: taking refuge in secrecy—“the sort of secret,” she claimed, that “she could reveal to no one, not even to the head of the royal household in strictest confidence.” And finally, when that too proved ineffectual, she began to feign madness. She smashed everything in her room, and refused to eat or to go down to the hearing. When the warders entered her cell, she would be found lying on the bed stark naked.
Cagliostro however found himself in top form on several occasions during the trial. He castigated Jeanne roundly, making her so angry that she grabbed a candle-holder, pulled it towards her and inflicted a burn on herself. When Réteaux was brought before him, he unleashed a powerful moral lecture — if we can believe him, he “talked until his lungs could no longer bear it”. Réteaux broke down completely, and the judges thanked Cagliostro warmly.
But by the time he had recovered his normal self the strength had gone out of him, and so it seems had the Ram Apis, and even Zobiachel, and, like all the other accused, he suffered something of a collapse. His Italian temperament made him far less able than his French counterparts to withstand the loneliness, and stress, of imprisonment. It seems that he, the great mystic, commanded the fewest sources of inner strength, which rather confirms the bogus nature of his grand spiritual claims. He needed constant supervision, as it was feared that he might kill himself.