Ah Maria, a Match Made in Heaven… or Not.

We now veer sharply into titillating details of Marie Antoinette’s marriage.

A proxy marriage ceremony was carried out in Vienna and a game of one-upmanship between Austria and France shifted into high gear. Receptions of the utmost splendor were held at the Belvedere and Liechtenstein Palaces. Full-dress military reviews, theater galas and much more filled the itinerary. And while all this was taking place in Vienna, frantic preparations were under way at Versailles, including the construction of a new opera house.

The duc de Dufort arrived in April 1770 to attend the wedding and to escort the blushing bride to France. This was not going to be a quick road trip. The train of wagons and coaches required 340 horses, plus two traveling coaches of “fabulous splendor, especially designed and constructed for the occasion by order of the French King.”

This was the public face of the wedding. Behind the scenes, things were even more complicated. And not at all amendable to being fixed by a command from a king or queen. This was a binding of the two most powerful dynasties of Europe. The Hapsburg and Bourbon families were ancient. They bowed to no one. Including each other. Which presented a unique problem.

Marie Antoinette would become, upon marriage, The Dauphine of France. How nice. Except she was already an Archduchess of Austria. Marie would have to surrender, literally, her identity upon marriage . That’s the way those things worked in France. But how to do so without loss of face or Royal Dignity. A very thorny problem. Vienna and Versailles argued about it endlessly in the months leading up to the wedding.

They finally came up with a solution. To modern eyes, it looks completely absurd. But it was deadly serious to the parties involved at the time. In the Rhine River, opposite Strasburg, was an island. More of a sandbar, really. On this island, a very elaborate pavilion was constructed. This scrap of land became, officially, nowhere. Neither Austrian, nor French, nor anything else. No Man’s Land.

Two rooms in this pavilion faced east, two others faced west. Between the sets of rooms was a central hall hung with expensive tapestries. In this hall was a single throne. The eastward facing rooms were for the Austrians. The westward, the French. Marie entered the Austrian rooms with her ladies. There she had to strip. Completely. Buck neekid.

All Austrian clothing and jewelry, hair ornaments, everything, was taken away. Then she was dressed from the ground up in French clothing, French jewelry, her hair was done in the French court style with French hair ornaments. She was not allowed to keep anything. Not even a hankie, as a memento. But worse, by far, was the dismissal of her Austrian servants. All of them. The Dauphine of France didn’t need Austrian servants. Their places were taken by French servants. Too bad Marie spoke such god awful French.

When she was ready she was taken into the central hall and introduced to the Comtesse de Noailles, her new First Lady-in-waiting. Marie burst into tears and threw herself into the Comtesses arms. With this, she was officially handed over to the French. The Archduchess of Austria was dead. Long live the Dauphine of France.

Say what you will about European royalty, they certainly didn’t lack drama. And then there was her arrival at Versailles to meet for the first time the boy she had married.

The Dauphin, the future King Louis XVI, was an unfortunate person. An unprepossessing, ungainly and, by many accounts, unpleasant looking youth, he grew up to retain all of these features as an adult. At which point his notorious indecisiveness would be added to the mix. He wasn’t a bad fellow. He was smart, he was nice, he didn’t run with scissors and played well with others. But he never should have been King of France. It would be going too far to blame the French Revolution on him. The seeds of that were planted long before he was born, but he sure as hell didn’t make things better when it was within the King’s power to do so. And, had he been a commoner, I don’t doubt that he would have remained unmarried. Yes, he was that unfortunate.

More unfortunate was young Marie Antoinette. She wasn’t born into this, she didn’t ask for any of it. It was moms idea. She was still, basically, a kid. As I mentioned earlier, both of these kids were still kids when they were married. They both had a lot to learn about life, and, apparently, procreation.

Mom was concerned that the Dauphin’s physical appearance might cause her daughter to shy away from her duties as a wife. And not just any wife! No indeed! The wife who was going to produce Future Kings of France. This point was driven home with particular vehemence in letters to young Marie.

Alas for Marie, in order to produce future kings of France, it was necessary for the guy who would be King of France after dad died to produce the necessary..um..materials. This the Dauphin was either unable or unwilling to do. Or perhaps a bit of both. What the boys problem was has been debated endlessly by historians. Some say the problem was Marie’s. I consider this most unlikely since she eventually produced four children. I say eventually because…well… I’ll get to that.

The problem lay with the Dauphin. Whether physical or psychological, again, much debate. One thing is certain. At least with Marie, the boy was impotent. Doctors reported he was fully capable of rising to the occasion, but not with Marie. What would render a sixteen year old boy impotent while in the presence of an attractive fifteen year old girl was a subject of lively debate at the time. Much of it extremely ribald and much of it reflecting badly on the boy’s manhood. Or lack thereof.

Of this we are certain. Married at Versailles, May 16, 1770. Marriage consummated, August, 1777. I believe the phrase is; “You do the math.”

— Mr. Al