The Exchange of Princesses (6 page)

Philip V’s calculations are correct. His lust hasn’t clouded his judgment. The ambassador extraordinary has fallen well behind schedule. To begin with, the diabolical Cardinal Dubois, by assiduously multiplying the obstacles that Saint-Simon had to overcome before his departure, caused the duke to make his travel arrangements on short notice, which obviously cost a great deal more. The same Dubois imposed on him a ruinously expensive retinue and military accompaniment. Then, during the French portion of his journey, a combination of bad weather and an abundance of receptions considerably slows Saint-Simon’s progress. And after that, when they finally reach the border, the French company is most thoroughly searched. Since the plague is still raging in Marseille, they have to open each parcel. Every person coming into Spain from France represents a risk of contagion. The Duke de Saint-Simon, suspected of bringing the plague in his baggage! It’s too much! He gets indignant, he rants and raves, but he’s forced to comply. And to round out the sum of his cares, in Burgos the elder of his two sons falls ill, a victim of smallpox, the scourge that kills people by the thousands, especially children. Saint-Simon has to leave the young man behind. He also leaves his other traveling companions: his younger son; his brother the Abbé de Saint-Simon; various friends, including the Count de Lorges and
the Count de Céreste; and several servants, who are going to follow in coaches while he, Saint-Simon, aware of the royal couple’s impatience, continues on horseback. Worried about his sick son, stressed by the great number of messages with which the king and queen of Spain steadily bombard him, he urges on his horse.

At the end of the month of November, in the middle of the night, Saint-Simon enters Madrid. He’s gone practically without sleep since leaving Burgos. His Excellency the ambassador’s body is in bad shape, and likewise his morale.

He has but a poor understanding of Spanish. It’s a tongue he dislikes, a brutal, loud tongue whose sounds remind him of sneezes. A language that suits the lice-infested people who speak it. And as if their spoken language weren’t enough, the Spaniards sing, too, and their bizarre, indefinable songs get directly on his nerves. Wherever he stopped, in the most remote hamlet, out in the countryside — and the windswept expanses of Castille have nothing in common with the pleasant copses of
la douce France
— in places one would believe uninhabited, a song, often accompanied by a guitar, would arise, a piercing, maddening song. Most of the time, he couldn’t see the singer, but at some point the awful lament would always start up, usually out of nowhere. It sounded like something halfway between the mewing of a cat and the cries of a hysteric. And to top everything, the singers would express their torments amid exhalations of olive oil! It was enough to make you puke! Were Saint-Simon to classify, in ascending order of repulsiveness, all the annoying things he’s encountered on this trip, he would have to put
olive oil at the top: an emetic that makes an already crude cuisine impossible to swallow. On the night when he first sets foot in the capital of Spain, which is even more dimly lit than Paris, the Duke de Saint-Simon is feeling queasy. And as he follows his guides, who are happy to have arrived and therefore cry out more vociferously than usual in their ignoble lingo, his morale bottoms out.

Above everything else, the Duke de Saint-Simon believes in hierarchy, in the sacred rituals of etiquette. He’s fastidious about questions of honor and courtesy. His journey to Spain, with its dirt roads, its arid plains swept by icy winds, its sporadic groups of dirty, sunburned peasants and ragged beggars, seems to him like a trip to another planet. The discrepant combination of poverty, superstition, and the desire to sing is beyond his understanding. He’d certainly like the title of grandee of Spain for himself and his sons, but if the older one has to die of smallpox in Burgos and the younger one, like himself, is afflicted with a liver disease brought on by too much rancid olive oil and nervous disorders caused by musical intolerance, then wouldn’t that title — so sweet to murmur to himself, so awesome to imagine amplified into echoes from hall to hall and palace to palace — wouldn’t that title be too dearly bought?

Nay, says Saint-Simon when he’s finally in the apartment prepared for him, sitting before a blazing fire at a table on which he spreads out the precious documents entrusted to his charge: a portrait of King Louis XV and a copy of the marriage contract, written in Spanish. The French version, which he has incessantly requested from the infernal Dubois, has yet to come into his hands. He tenses up at the thought
of it. To relax, he steps over to the window and verifies the presence of the royal coach that has been placed at his disposition at any hour of the day or night. There at least is something that corresponds to his idea of respectability, and it leads him, now that he’s starting to feel better, to ponder a thorny question: At what time will he be able to present himself to the king and queen?
As soon as possible
, they’ve stressed in their innumerable messages. But what does “as soon as possible” mean to a king and queen of Spain? If he were in Versailles, he’d present himself without hesitation at the
petit lever
, but what to do here, where Their Majesties shut themselves up in private, where they sometimes, according to rumor, even go back to bed in the course of the day?

What Saint-Simon has learned about the way Philip V and his wife lead their lives alarms him. Their schedule, he’s been told, is as follows. They are awakened at eight; they remain in bed together, say their prayers together, get up, get dressed, and go to Mass together. After the Mass, they play billiards for a while and then read some devotional work together. Then they dine, and after dinner they play piquet or some other card game or chess, take a walk, or go hunting (an only moderately risky activity, given that the sovereigns sit in a coppice shaped like a theater box and from there, without budging an inch, fire on the animals peasant beaters drive in their direction). They return to the palace to read together, deal with political matters together, do good works together. Then they have supper together, pray together, and return to their bed. When they walk, they walk exactly side by side. If by chance they are disunited, because there are
other people present and the queen, caught up in a conversation, drops off the pace, the king stops and waits for her. Only at the moment when she gets out of bed and puts on her shoes — and when she goes to confession — is the queen separated from the king; but in the latter case, if she stays too long whispering with her confessor, the king comes looking for her. It goes without saying that their
chaises percées
, their commodes, touch each other, and that in no case, not even when one of them is ill or during the queen’s lyings-in, does the king sleep in a separate bed. Saint-Simon finds all this disquieting. The only reassuring element, the fact that the royal couple, a sort of two-headed monster, both speak French, doesn’t suffice to dispel his apprehension.

Saint-Simon picks up his wig. In his ignorance of the proper etiquette, how can he know the right time for him to make his appearance before the sovereigns? Why not hasten to wait upon them right away? But then, should he appear in full court costume, with all his decorations, or in simple court costume? And here, with this last question, His Excellency the ambassador extraordinary condemns himself to a night of insomnia. By the dirty light of dawn, filled with incertitude, he decides on eight-thirty in the morning and full court costume.

And suppose it’s a terrible blunder, suppose an untimely arrival discredits him forever? Saint-Simon has to admit that the full court costume, with its stiffness, its heavy fabric and brocade and embroidery, doesn’t make his move any easier. He has trouble making himself understood and gets dropped off at a secondary entrance. A side entrance for suppliers, thinks the horrified French envoy. Down ugly brown
corridors, marred with scratches and here and there showing the stains of water damage, the ambassador extraordinary advances. Sick corridors, he’s thinking, just at the moment when nausea overcomes him, seizing him before he can even name its origin, as intense as in the worst of all the inns that punctuated his journey. As incredible as it may seem, the royal palace, the Alcázar, stinks of olive oil. Behind the doors of rooms where vile fried foods are sizzling, he can hear voices jabbering away in Spanish. “Good God, where am I?” groans Saint-Simon. He turns back, takes other corridors, encounters servants who, as soon as he addresses them in French, spit on the floor and run away; he passes through antechambers as attractive as storage rooms. All the same, they offer him the opportunity to sit down and recover himself a little. The odor has almost disappeared. He’s breathing better and would be ready to press on again — ready to be the man for whom his splendid ceremonial outfit was made — if he didn’t have the feeling of eyes on him. Saint-Simon peers in their direction and discovers a group of dwarfs, richly arrayed, their hair down to their feet. Creatures who have no sort of consideration for a duke and peer of France. They shake their big faces at him and make gestures whose mocking intent pierces him through and through. A little more and he’ll collapse!

But suddenly, in one of those reversals of fortune in which a desperate man can no longer believe, the introducer of ambassadors stands before him. He speaks to Saint-Simon in French, exudes a fragrance of mimosa, and explains to him, with many apologies for having missed him when he left his coach, that he wandered by mistake into
the
Casa española
, the Spanish House, but that his lucky star eventually led him into the French House, the
Casa francesa
. These are two enemy worlds, locked in a war that has lasted since Philip V’s reign began and is not confined to a virulent culinary struggle between proponents of a cuisine based on olive oil and those of a cuisine based on butter. The introducer could go on, but they’ve arrived. As if by magic, Saint-Simon’s in the royal chamber. Their Majesties, still abed but in a decent posture, give him a warm welcome. The king’s wearing a nightcap and a white satin jacket; the queen’s lace nightdress has a very low neckline. They both receive him joyously.

A little later on this same day, in their official capacity — that is, out of bed and seated before a larger audience — the king and queen treat Saint-Simon with the same goodwill. And as for him, luck’s on his side: he performs his three bows impeccably. Before the sovereigns depart, he has time to return to the threshold of the Hall of Mirrors, a sumptuous but long and narrow room (the king and queen enter and exit at the opposite end), to greet one by one the ladies lined up with their backs to the wall — and to do so without undue haste. Before he goes, he has a private conversation with Philip V. And finally the queen, as a sign of special favor, shows Saint-Simon the infante Don Carlos. The child is made to walk and turn around for the duke. Don Carlos does very well. He’s neither crooked nor lame — no more than is his half-brother, Don Fernando. And the infanta, the future queen of France? Her Serene Highness Mariana Victoria is sound asleep.

Her slumber is all smile and contentment, the sleep of perfect trust, of complete innocence; she sleeps the sleep of an angel, her bed rests on a cloud.

Doña Maria Nieves, the infanta’s beloved “cradle-rocker” since her earliest infancy, imparts a gentle swing to that bed as she sways the child to the rhythm of Paradise.

The Palace Ladies’ Perfume

On the following day, the day the marriage contracts are to be signed, Saint-Simon, still radiant from his success, readies himself with extreme care; as he cannot fall short of yesterday, he once again dons his full court costume.

Mariana Victoria is awakened and awakened well. Perched on a little platform encrusted with precious stones, she holds herself very straight in her crinoline dress. She is, in fact, a beautiful child, though really small, pale, fragile-looking. But she has lively blue eyes, an inclination to imperiousness, and a way of handling her fan to which there is no reply. The private music that sings her victory song hasn’t left her. She receives His Excellency the ambassador extraordinary with the natural hauteur that will soon enchant the French. Saint-Simon bows. He deems the infanta “charming, with a little air of reasonableness and not at all embarrassed.” As for her, her eyes do not light on the ambassador.

Saint-Simon also sees Don Luis, Prince of Asturias, a thin but good-looking and elegant young man. He can barely stand to wait any longer for his fiancée. But Mariana Victoria
is calm. She has grasped that she’s going to become the queen of France — and besides, her brothers have started giving her precedence at every opportunity — but she doesn’t exactly understand when that condition is to come about, or how.

That same evening, or perhaps another, and perhaps to help the infanta get a clearer idea of her destiny, she’s shown a portrait of the infanta Maria Theresa of Spain, painted by Velázquez. “She was the daughter of Philip IV of Spain and Elisabeth of France,” the child is told. “She married her first cousin Louis XIV, your great-grandfather. She became queen of France, just as you will become queen of France by your marriage to your first cousin, King Louis XV.”

Mariana Victoria considers Maria Theresa. She examines the red cheeks, the potato nose, the swollen lower lip, the thick wire wig stuck with silver butterflies. “
Muy fea!
” (Very ugly!) the infanta proclaims, and covers her eyes. She’s reprimanded. She must offer her apologies to her great-grandmother, the queen of France. She does as she’s told, all the while ogling the painting next to the portrait of Maria Theresa. At first, she wants only to avoid looking at the ugly infanta any longer, but then she’s captivated by what she discovers: a pretty blond infanta in a white moiré crinoline, posing beside her dwarf and observing her with a proud look. “The infanta Margarita,” someone tells Mariana Victoria, making a slight bow toward the picture. “That’s not true,” the child proclaims. “That one there, that’s me.”