Before Versailles (9 page)

Louise de la Baume le Blanc, maid of honor to the court’s new goddess, counted under her breath to twenty, then pulled a curling iron from the hair of that goddess, the new Madame. The burnished red curl hung in a satisfactory spiral, and choosing hairpins set with pearls, Louise gathered other carefully crafted tresses to pin over the princess’s ears, so that a set of four or five long ringlets hung to each side of Madame’s face. Among them, on one side only, was a longer curl, which lay against the angle of Madame’s collarbone. The longer curl was Louise’s idea, and she wasn’t certain how it would be received. This was a court where fashion and appearance were paramount. With a tortoise comb, Louise quickly loosened tendrils around the princess’s face, and it became framed by tiny, mismatched curling wisps.

“I love it,” cried the young woman who was the object of all admiration these days, described by her admirers as a creature of moonbeams and fairy dust. She was that startling white redheads display, as if all color were saved for the tints in their hair and the blue of their eyes. Impulsively, she selected a ring from the litter of ribbons, combs, feathers, and small gold and silver boxes spilling across her dressing table. “For you.”

“No, Madame,” said Louise, “there’s no need—”

“Take it. I command it.”

Finished with Louise, the princess stood, and serving women moved forward to help her with the selection of a gown. They were to assemble shortly in the king’s ballroom. They’d dance and flirt, dine and flirt, talk and flirt, and agreeably while the night away until the wee hours. Princess Henriette did not like to go to bed early, and what she didn’t like wasn’t done these days.

Leaving the princess standing indecisively before two gowns, Louise ran upstairs to the attic chambers in which she and the other maids of honor lived. Unlike the opulent surroundings in Madame’s rooms—not a ceiling or wall without its moldings, its tapestries, its gilt ovals holding portraits—these chambers were much plainer, little but beds and trunks and charming, big windows out of which to look or call down to friends walking in the courtyard. Shocked, two of the maids of honor had sent home for thick rugs and handsome chairs, and so now their chambers looked quite respectable.

The others were already gowned for evening and were arranging their curls to copy Madame’s. Louise had warned them she was going to create the longer curl, and, after much discussion, the three others had told her they thought it was brilliant. A long curl set against a bare shoulder will take the female portion of the court by storm, Louise’s best friend, Fanny, predicted.

Fanny, dressed and ready, paused in her task of arranging hair. “Curl no or yes?”

Three sets of eyes regarded Louise with some anxiety.

“Yes,” said Louise.

“I knew it,” Fanny said to the two others.

Louise looked down at the ring in her hand, gold with an emerald set in it. She’d have Choisy sell it for her; he was always going back and forth to Paris. She opened the trunk in which her gowns lay carefully folded. All she possessed was here, though Fanny was generous in lending small fripperies that made a difference. The choice this evening, any evening, wasn’t difficult; she had only a few gowns. Unlike Princess Henriette—Madame as she must now be called—no overwhelming largess had showered down on Louise when she joined this new household. Her mother hadn’t a coin she would spare, and Madame de Choisy had helped Louise arrange to borrow money to purchase another gown or two and frivolous items such as shoes and gloves so that she might not be the plainest flower in Madame’s new bower.

Putting the ring down a shoe, Louise selected the gown she’d wear, laid it across the bed, then pulled a wicker box from beneath. Inside were odds and ends, castoffs from the Orléans princesses. There were ribbons and shoe buckles, cloth flowers and scarves, shawls and lace collars, a fan or two, some gloves. Louise was deft with a needle and would snip something, a bunch of ribbons or a cloth flower and baste such to her gown, so that at least a gown worn over and over again might have different trimmings once in a while. It was the fashion here at court to buy what one wished and never mind the payment to a merchant or seamstress. Keep them on a string, Fanny counseled, but Louise hadn’t been brought up to regard debt lightly. You really do need to move past that, Fanny advised.

“What’s Madame wearing this evening?”

Fanny spoke around the hairpin she had in her mouth as she bunched and pinned curls for the girl sitting in front of her. Louise and Fanny felt like they’d known each other forever because both their families held positions in the Orléans royal household, and they’d become friends as young girls. Louise thought Fanny the cleverest person in the world, other than Choisy, and Fanny thought Louise the dearest, and they considered it a bolt of lightning luck that they’d both been chosen to be Madame’s maids of honor.

“Silver or lilac,” Louise answered.

“It’s a pity we didn’t know sooner. We could have matched our gowns,” said Claude, whose hair Fanny was arranging. Louise could not have done so, but she didn’t say the words. She’d learned long ago that those who were given much in life seldom realized or truly wished to know the travails of those who had to struggle. The next thing she knew, Fanny dashed out the door.

“My hair isn’t done!” wailed Claude.

“Let me dress, and I’ll finish your hair,” Louise soothed, already the peacemaker among them.

Quickly, she stitched a big cloth-of-silver and gauze flower to a gown she’d worn more than once. The stitching done, she stepped out of one gown and into this one, her maid there to tie up the back. The style this decade was for a very tight waist that V’d deep into the skirt, for all of a woman’s neck and shoulders and some of her bosom to show, and for sleeves to fall in a voluptuous swell to the elbow from those bared shoulders.

Excited that evening was here, excited because they were part of one of the most splendid courts in the world, excited because they were fifteen and sixteen and seventeen, and there’s little that isn’t exciting at that age, they took turns helping each other, Louise finishing Claude’s hair and Claude, in turn, lending Louise a pretty shawl. The fourth of their quartet paid no attention, simply continued to concentrate on herself, on which pair of her numerous earrings she would wear.

Louise and Fanny weren’t certain what they thought of this one, this fourth of their four, this Madeleine. Louise was ready to keep her mind open; the priests said there was good in everyone, but after the first week of living together Fanny had announced in no uncertain terms that Madeleine was selfish and stupid as well, and that’s just all there was to it.

Louise pulled on white stockings, each kept up with a garter, and was stepping into high-heeled shoes her maid held for her—shoes of soft leather dyed sky blue; too expensive, they’d put a big dent into her little borrowed bag of coins, but she hadn’t been able to resist purchasing them—when Fanny breezed back into the chamber.

“Look what I have.”

As proud as if she brought them gold coins or marriage contracts, Fanny held out wads of silver gauze ribbons. “Let’s sit down and make shoulder knots. These match the gown Madame has chosen. We’ll be like the musketeers, marked by what we wear as hers. Madame loved the idea.”

Fanny is so clever, thought Louise, as she began to cut and knot the ends of ribbons. One had only to look at her to see it. One could literally see thoughts passing through her head, or at least Louise could. She depended on her friend’s cleverness. It had gotten them out of more than one scrape in the Orléans household.

Part of the largesse of a maid of honor’s position was a small stipend, but more than that, the opportunity to meet all the eligible men of the kingdom, not just the ones parents might deem suitable. To be selected a maid of honor was no small thing. It gave a well-born girl extra cachet, made her interesting even when her dowry for marriage wasn’t. Of course, Cousin Choisy had been so helpful, teaching her a more graceful curtsy, he and his mother explaining the intricacies of who at court deserved a deep curtsy and who did not. Now you be on your mettle, he warned, shaking a finger at her, because the men will attempt to seduce you. He’d tried to kiss her when he said this but he’d been dressed in a woman’s gown, so it was hard to take him very seriously. It really was a lot of fun to know that men thought you were pretty and said so. It was delicious, actually. Louise could see why the priests and nuns warned against pleasures of this world. They were—well—pleasant.

She thought about that as they—Madeleine the snob among them ordering her maid to do the task—clustered ribbons into small masses in order to sew them to one shoulder of their gowns, their gowns just cupping the lovely rounds of their shoulders. Of course, there was a long discussion as to which shoulder, and somehow it was settled: the left, that being the one closest to the heart. Romantic.

Ribbons in place, the four of them surveyed one another critically to see that each looked her best. The admiration for Madame, heady and delicious, unexpected and fantastic, had spilled over onto them—more good fortune for us, declared Fanny—and they wanted to make certain they kept it. From the moment of their arriving to serve the newly married Madame at Monsieur’s palace in Paris, there had been nothing but play. Monsieur loved festivity, and the princess he’d married had adapted at once as if she’d known it all her life.

That sense of gaiety had traveled with them here to this palace with its grand gardens and nearby forest. There was something in the air at this place, along with the scent of summer’s opening roses and jasmine, something giddy and high-spirited, flirtatious and daring. There were balls or fêtes every evening as the May moon sometimes seemed close enough to touch in the night sky. During the day there were hunting and riding, and they went with Madame swimming in the river every day the sun shone. Afterward, there were promenades near the beautiful carp pond at the edge of one of the courtyards, as they waited for the queen to return from a visit to a nunnery or to wake from her nap.

Afternoons were leisurely affairs. Talk was idle. They listened to one or another of the men play guitar. Sometimes the king played. He played wonderfully—wildly—Louise thought. He was beautiful in every way that Louise could see, but all the maids of honor thought that. Madame would sit in the shade on a rug under a tree, chattering to one and all, as courtier after courtier came to call on her. Her popularity was immense; it had swept through court like a storm. Madame was presenting a court ballet in July, and her maids of honor all had parts, and rehearsals were beginning. The head of an acting troupe of which Monsieur was patron was working with them so that they would perform better than anyone else. It was all too exciting. Louise felt as if she’d stepped out of a cramped box into an enchanted, open-ended fairy tale, like the ones an admirer of Madame’s told them, about sleeping beauties and maidens sitting in cinders before they wore glass slippers or kissed frogs who became princes.

And so, to honor the enchantment of the moment and how beautiful all the compliments and attention made them feel, as well as to make certain such admiration didn’t disappear, Louise redid certain key curls for Fanny, and Claude lent small pearl earrings that heightened the beauty of Louise’s lithe, incandescent fairness, and even self-absorbed Madeleine offered to share from among her many bracelets.

Bracelet on an arm, long curl on a shoulder, Fanny opened the chamber door, unfurled a fan, stamped a foot encased in smooth, colored leather and announced, “Hearts will be broken tonight.”

“Ours,” Claude said with a laugh.

“Only if we’re stupid,” answered Fanny.

A girl must keep her wits about her. Choisy had been right about that. Many of the gallants who courted and flirted and plied them with admiration were married. This was where the fairy tale showed its dark side. Louise and Fanny discussed it endlessly. What if one of them should fall in love with a married man in spite of herself? It happened. And while this court seemed to regard fidelity casually, Louise had taken in the priests’ strictures with her wet nurse’s milk: to stay pure, to save herself for marriage. But already, she could see how easily a girl could slip and fall before the ardent persuasion of a man who said he loved her. She thought of true love as something unalloyed and grand, something larger than the two people it bound. Absolute idiocy, was Fanny’s opinion. Look around you, for heaven’s sake. Is that what you see? We’ll marry whoever our families approve, and we’ll be lucky if he has a kind word for us, and I, for one, intend to take my fun where I can find it.

Giggling over nothing, the way women will when they’re young and lively and in a cluster together and life is alluring in all its unspoken promise, they hurried downstairs to Madame’s apartments and sailed through the door, giggles preceding them, and an arrogant princess, who served as Madame’s lady-in-waiting and who they secretly had named the gargoyle, looked down her nose at them.

“Late,” she said.

She was in her early twenties, the daughter of a duke and a marshall of France, as well as the wife of the crown prince of the small nearby kingdom of Monaco. She was only four years or so older than they were, but in sophistication and certainty, the span might have been a hundred.

It’s clever of Madame to have taken her on, Fanny had announced, because the princess was one of the leaders at court. And of course there did need to be an older woman among them as a kind of duenna or superintendent. Madame was no older than they were. But this princess didn’t care to supervise. She only cared about how quickly one or another of them could leap up to perform some small task, and it was never quickly enough.

Beautiful and proud, the gargoyle rose from her chair to touch the knot of ribbons at Louise’s shoulder. “And what’s this?” she asked, scorn clear in her tone.

Looking like an angel in her gown of silver, the red in her hair made even more pronounced by the shade of her dress, their bright-faced new Madame, the Princess Henriette, answered. “A whim of mine. Does it please you?”