L’Autrichienne

Marie Antoinette: “a frightening destiny, sown throughout with intersignes.”¹⁵³ She approached the point where the meanings were too many (and would later overwhelm her) when, as a fourteen-year-old betrothed in marriage, she arrived at Strasbourg in a glass carriage. The crippled, the elderly, and the diseased were kept hidden, as they had been for the young Buddha. An island in the middle of the Rhine was where the masters of ceremony had arranged for the archduchess to be handed over, naked, into the hands of her husband’s envoys. A building had been specially erected to receive her and its rooms decorated with tributes to the future queen. The magnificent large tapestries in the main hall were France’s inaugural gift to her.

Goethe, a young law student, stopped there several times before Marie Antoinette’s procession reached the city. Setting foot in the great hall, he was appalled. “It was hung with many splendid, sumptuous tapestries, surrounded by heavy ornaments and modeled on pictures by French painters of the moment.¹⁵⁴ Now, I would no doubt have found a way of appreciating even this fashion, since it was most rare for my sensibility and my judgment to reject something altogether; but here the subject filled me with unspeakable horror. These tapestries contained the story of Jason, Medea, and Creusa, and were therefore an example of the most disastrous of marriages. To the left of the throne the bride was seen struggling against the most atrocious death, surrounded by the grief of those present; to the right the father, horror-struck at the sight of the murdered children at his feet; meanwhile the Fury rose up into the sky on her chariot drawn by dragons. And to ensure that such atrocity and repugnance lacked no touch of absurdity, seen to the right, behind the red velvet backrest of the throne, was the white, coiled tail of that legendary bull, while the fire-breathing monster and Jason in combat were entirely covered by rich drapery … ‘What!’ I exclaimed, regardless of those present. ‘Can anyone so thoughtlessly place before the eyes of a queen, and on her first setting foot in her new land, the example of the most horrible marriage that there has perhaps ever been! Does no one among the architects, the decorators, the upholsterers of France understand that pictures operate on minds and feelings, that they leave impressions, that they stir forebodings! It all seems as if they had wished to send the most ghastly specter to the frontier to welcome this lovely and, as we hear, most joyous lady.’ ” But Goethe’s young friends sought to calm him, to reassure him that nowadays “no one was concerned about searching for meanings in pictures; for them, at least, it would never have entered their minds, and the whole population of the city and region of Strasbourg who would be passing before those tapestries would certainly have no such notions, nor either would the queen herself, or her retinue.”¹⁵⁵