England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [92]
After the constitution was passed, the city was thrilled. Elite Parisians planned to seize positions in the new republic, and everybody else hoped that the settlement would bring the bloodshed to an end. A large hot-air balloon was raised above the city center in celebration, buildings blazed with illumination, and relieved citizens flung themselves into music, feasting, dancing, and cooing at a grand display of fireworks. Palmerston, the Hamiltons, and the Marquis de Noailles, an ex-courtier, wandered around until ten o'clock, surprised by the widespread “Enthusiastical attachment to the new Constitution," as Sir William put it.1 Over the next few days, Emma visited the many English nobles in town and sang or performed her Attitudes. Palmerston was appreciative: "I have seen her perform the various characters and attitudes which she assumes in imitation of statues and pictures, and was pleased beyond my expectation, though I had heard so much. She really presents the very thing which the artists had aimed at representing." He commissioned Thomas Lawrence to alter a painting by Reynolds in order to put Emma in the center, and he kept the painting until he died. He decided Emma "very handsome," "very good humoured, very happy, and very attentive" to her new husband.2
All the while, Emma was pressing for an introduction to Marie-Antoinette. If Emma could meet the queen, she would score an amazing coup and increase her chances of being received at the Neapolitan court. Like every woman in Europe, she was fascinated by the glamorous French queen, who was doubly appealing now that she was imprisoned at the rambling palace of the Tuileries. Marie-Antoinette had once animated pampered Versailles with her gaiety, and her extravagant dresses and coiffures had led European fashion. The novelist and antiquarian Horace Wal-pole had described both Emma and Marie-Antoinette as statues of beauty, but Emma was very different from the queen: she knew how to satisfy her husband but had no idea how to please a court. Meeting Marie-Antoinette would prove a crucial stage in her training.
Under her mien of graceful resignation, the queen was begging her brother, Leopold, the Emperor of Austria, to threaten the French into reinstating Louis XVI as monarch. Throughout September, she wrote letters in code and sometimes in invisible ink to Leopold and various European royals, collaring passing aristocrats to pass them on. She was intent on winning the support of her favorite sister, Maria Carolina of Naples, only three years her junior. Emma's visit came at an opportune moment. Marie-Antoinette neither knew nor cared that Queen Charlotte had not received Emma: she wanted a favor from the woman she believed to be an ambassadress.
Few women (and no man other than her husband) could resist Marie-Antoinette. Trauma had wrecked her beauty: she had grown gaunt, and her luxuriant hair had thinned and turned white at only thirty-six. But her limpid blue-gray eyes were still enticing, her sweet, hesitant voice was still tempting, and her soft smile—once able to charm the most embittered courtier—had won the hearts of her guards. Deeply emotional, she kissed and embraced frequently. Ardent revolutionaries faltered when they thought of Marie-Antoinette, and Emma fell in love with her on sight. Ambitious to be at the center of politics, she dreamed of a queen restored to the throne, thanks partly to her efforts. Despite her impoverished childhood, Emma believed in opulent courts and thought, like many others, that the king was vital to maintain the correct order of society. She saw the French political conflict in personal terms as the bloodthirsty Jacobins against her beautiful, victimized new friend. When she heard that peasants had thrown stones at the royal family when they were caught trying to escape from Paris,