Antoinette’s brother, Emperor Joseph, watched with horror. In 1787, Joseph had joined Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin on a dazzling, festive tour of New Russia and Crimea, the Tatar khanate just annexed by the Romanovs, but its showmanship provoked the Ottomans to counter-attack: the resulting war was a triumph for the Romanovs, who gained south Ukraine and the Black Sea coast, but not for the Habsburgs. Joseph, at the Ottoman front in Wallachia (Romania) and Moldavia, faced defeats and epidemics, consoling himself by singing the score of Mozart’s new opera.
Mozart was flourishing in fun-loving Vienna, but he overspent on clothes and luxuries, conducting rehearsals wearing a crimson cloak and a cocked gold-laced hat. In 1785, still only twenty-nine, he brought Beaumarchais’s play Marriage of Figaro to Joseph’s favourite librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, a Jew born in the Venetian ghetto who became a dissolute priest and brothel-keeper. Figaro the opera delighted Joseph. Next, Mozart and da Ponte started to work on Don Giovanni, joined by da Ponte’s friend Casanova, who helped with the libretto. ‘My opera Don Giovanni was performed,’ wrote Mozart from Prague where it was premiered, ‘with the greatest of applause.’
Mozart was in a frenzy of creativity – in 1788, he wrote three symphonies in six weeks. Although the war was destroying Joseph, he loved Don Giovanni: ‘The opera is divine, possibly just possibly even more beautiful than Figaro.’ Mozart borrowed too much and went on tour to raise money, writing to Constanze, ‘Dearest little wife of my heart. Are you thinking of me as often as I’m thinking of you? I look at your portrait every few minutes, and cry half out of joy, half out of sorrow … I’m writing this with tears in my eyes.’ But his debts were out of control; he was tormented both by Constanze’s flirtations and by her illnesses. And his patron Joseph was suffering TB, malaria and a revolt in Flanders – just as his sister Antoinette faced destruction in Paris.
Lafayette consulted his friend Jefferson on a French Déclaration des droits de l’homme. Like all the revolutionaries, they were influenced by Rousseau, whose Du contrat social argued that the people expressed themselves through ‘la volonté générale’ – the general will. ‘The law,’ Lafayette wrote, ‘is the expression of the general will.’ The Assembly passed the Déclaration along with a draft constitution. In Paris, royal authority had almost vanished.
‘Is it a revolt?’ asked Louis.
‘No, sire,’ replied a courtier. ‘It’s a revolution.’ The king was appalled when Lafayette was elected commander of the militia, renamed the Garde National, but he was now too paralysed to take advantage of a stalemate between moderates and hardliners. The latter broke the impasse by dispatching a Parisian mob to Versailles, which stabbed two bodyguards and burst into the palace crying, ‘Cut off her head and fry her heart and liver!’ Antoinette hid in a secret passageway: her hair turned grey that day. She and her husband nonetheless appeared on the balcony with Lafayette to face the people, before Louis and Antoinette were dragooned to the Tuileries Palace in Paris by a mob bearing the piked heads of their bodyguards. ‘I was witness of it all and I returned to Paris in one of the carriages of the king’s suite,’ wrote Fersen. ‘God keep me from ever again seeing so afflicting a sight.’ The terrorized king tearfully approved the abolition of old feudal taxes and rules and the Déclaration des droits, drafted by Jefferson.
As Jefferson was enthusiastically watching the revolution, he learned that Sally was now pregnant. Her view of Jefferson is mysterious. ‘Oppressed people … often develop their own internal narratives … contemptuous of their overlords,’ writes Annette Gordon-Reed, but ‘the way Jefferson treated Hemings and her family probably made her more favorably disposed toward him than hostile.’* Sally knew enough about French slavery laws to understand that she had a choice: she could stay and claim freedom via the Admiralty court, or she could return with Jefferson to slavery at Monticello. So, her son Madison recalled, she did a bold thing: ‘She refused to return with him,’ demanding concessions for their children. Jefferson ‘promised her extraordinary privileges … a solemn pledge’.
