Versailles (18 page)

Who are you?

I was called Maria Antonia Josephina Johanna.

Do you want counsel?

I want my family.

My eyes failing but my ears still perfect—I could hear every whisper.
Oho, look at her now, the bitch. That'll teach her to steal our food. But why is she drumming like that on the arm of the chair?

My mother stifling a yawn as my fingers flew across the keys of the clavichord.
Les Barricades Mystérieuses.
François Couperin. Sit straighter, Antonia. Do you want to end up with a hump?

To which the answer of course is no no no no no, unless to avoid it you have to die before the age of forty.

"Do you believe Kings are necessary for a people's happiness?"

"An individual cannot make such a decision."

The trial lasted two days. Among other things, I was accused of conspiring with my brother against France, of forcing my husband out the door and into a carriage bound for Varennes, of appointing perverse ministers, of engineering famine, of keeping the Swiss Guard in a state of perpetual drunkenness, of printing slanderous pamphlets about myself to arouse sympathy abroad, of having sex with my own son.

"Human nature cannot answer such a charge against a mother," I said. "I appeal to all the mothers in the room"—at which even the most crazed of the
tricoteuses
stood up in their red bonnets and cheered.

Naturally it didn't matter what I said.

Naturally I was found guilty.

Then it was Vendémiaire, the Feast Day of Saint Theresa, sacred to my mother, my daughter. Then it was Amaryllis, in the new calendar. A fine fresh day, a little mist, the sun trying to shine, and all the birds singing.
Two hundred thousand people have fallen in love with you,
said the Maréchal de Brissac twenty years earlier, when I made my triumphal entry into this same Parisian square. On that day, as now, people were selling cakes and lemonade. On that day, as now, everyone was in a state of high excitement.

October 16. Theresa, Amaryllis. I combed and powdered my hair. So thin, so white but with hints of fire, of who I used to be. My hair used to be beautiful. Also my eyes, also my mouth. I removed the bloody rag from be tween my legs, rolled it up and stuffed it in a chink in the wall. For posterity, I told myself, but I admit I was angry. Let posterity make what it would of menstrual blood. Rosalie was sobbing and to please her I ate a little bouillon. I dressed myself for the last time, in a gown of white piqué, a black slip, a muslin shawl, and my plum-colored high-heeled shoes.

When they went to bind my wrists, I put up a fight. You didn't bind my husband's wrists, I said. But when I saw the tumbril, I fell apart. My husband rode in a carriage, I told them. I squatted in the Mouse's Corner and relieved myself.

I was going. I was going.

Antonia, SIT UP STRAIGHT!

In the tumbril, riding backward, leaves and nuts raining from the trees. The sky blue now, dotted with clouds. Blue. Blue and white.

Though the soul has no spine. THE SOUL NO SPINE.

Antoinette. Antoinette.

He cut my hair, I stepped on his foot.

When you look up, clouds; when you look down, the same. Blue sky and clouds and, suddenly, water. Suddenly against the blue sky a spray of jewels.

Pardon, monsieur, I said. I did not mean to do it.

It cuts through.

Once upon a time, that's how it was. The chandelier's facets were unpolished stone. The fountain's water was sludge in a swamp.

From the ceiling, against the sky. The shining thing cuts through. A light blooms, a current tugs, the human body works to escape its tether.

You can feel it tugging. Not love, not hope. The opposite of hope, really. There's no future in Eros, only
this.
Behind pleasure, the body moves backward.

On the palace floor a pattern of light and shadow. On the water in the basin a flicker of sun and shade.

Backward, the body says. You feel it pulling.

Through the door and up the Queen's Staircase, tap tap tap up forty-two steps. TAP TAP TAP the echo comes back, in golden rings, in rings of gold. A thin layer of dust lies everywhere. Also cobwebs, though spiders have trouble making their thread stick to marble. They have to be patient.

Patient as a spider in a mausoleum. Patient as a cat whose paws are being grilled. Over hill and dale, over moor and meadow, a million miles and a million to go. Late autumn light spills from the second-floor loggia, the smell of burning leaves, of burning houses. The planet tilts, plane trees drop their leaves; earth and clouds stream by.

It's Allhallows, it's All Souls', it's the Day Between the Years. Brumaire. BRRRRRR. It's time to fatten the pigs with acorns. It's the end of the world, where the world stops in a point like a tail.

The Room of the Queen's Guard, the Queen's Antechamber, the Salon of the Nobles, the Apartments of the Queen. Over river and stream, over valley and mountain, a million miles to the end of the world.

Meanwhile in Paris they're making things pure. Meanwhile in Paris the cats are eating the cats. Sssssss-boom. Sssssss-boom. Saint Guillotine. The Black Widow. Wasn't it Mirabeau who said that liberty is a bitch who likes to be bedded on a mattress of cadavers?

Try to be nice, though, try to be nice. It's the Reign of Purity, after all, also known as the Reign of Terror. Most people look better painted on walls. The Sun King, risen like a god to the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors, surrounded by blue sky, clouds, the sun breaking through.

From the Salon of Peace to the Hall of Mirrors, in its seventeen windows the sun breaking through.

Seventeen windows, forty-four panes of glass each. Seven hundred forty-eight panes of glass and through them all the November sun shines on poor lonely Latona and her frog companions, the fountain dry as a bone, the basin full of leaves and in the distance the Grand Canal like a long gray finger pointing at a pair of nondescript poplars.

Tap tap tap on the parquet floor. TAP TAP TAP the echo comes back. Gold November sun, thick with dust and the illusion of heat, dripping off the crystal pendants of the chandeliers. Raindrops, teardrops. Twenty-two chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, twenty-four on pedestals along the walls. Forty-six chandeliers in all.

Spades and hearts, power and courage; clubs and diamonds, money and pleasure. Bacchus and Venus and Hermes and Modesty. If only we knew how to see green things, see them as though in bloom, in their wonder! A cord from the center of the heart, a cloud of birds from the corners of the sky.

Over earth and sea, over moon and sun. Two poplars, a million birds.

Two hundred twenty steps, a million miles. From the Salon of Peace to the Salon of War, from the root to the crown, from the rock to the spring. From Versailles to Paris, from heaven to earth.

Seventeen arcades, each with eighteen mirrors. Three hundred six mirrors and in every one of them no Antoinette.

Kathryn Davis is also the author of the novels
Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell,
and
The Walking Tour.
She has received a Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and lives in Vermont and New York with her husband and their daughter.

Versailles

 

A NOVEL BY

K
ATHRYN
D
AVIS

What could be less hospitable to the writer of fiction than the prospect of telling a story whose ending everyone already knows? And really, if there's one thing
everyone
knows about Marie Antoinette—aside from the "let them eat cake line," which is, by the way, apocryphal—it's what finally became of that famous neck of hers. If you already know the ending of a story, what is going to keep you reading the book? What becomes of suspense, that mysterious element that makes you itch to turn the page, that keeps you up until all hours of the night, the birds beginning to chirp and the first light of dawn beginning to leak through your blinds and there you still are, wide awake, dying to find out what is at last going to become of poor pockmarked Esther Summerson or poor blind Mr. Rochester?

Of course, this doesn't account for the fact that when you reread a beloved book you already know that Esther will end up married to her darling Mr. Jarndyce and that Mr. Rochester will end up married to his darling Jane Eyre. You know what's going to happen, and yet it seems to me you still experience a version of suspense—a different kind of suspense, generated, I think, by the way you willingly abandon yourself into the hands of the writer, almost as if you've chosen to no longer remember the outcome or, remembering it, to let yourself be resistlessly ferried toward it. A different kind of suspense, but suspense nonetheless. Why else do you find yourself wishing, every time you read
Romeo and Juliet,
that the outcome will be different?

In any case, I knew that if I wanted to tell the story of Marie Antoinette I had to find a way of getting around the suspense problem.

But why, you might ask, would I even want to tell the story of Marie Antoinette?

Let me begin by explaining how the idea came to me. It was 1998, my daughter Daphne's junior year in high school, and we were headed to Paris for her spring vacation. This was where my daughter and husband thought we should go; I preferred Italy but had been outvoted. Daphne had gotten permission to take an extra week off if she wrote a paper on a relevant topic, and she'd chosen Robespierre.

So there we were—April in Paris. I immediately realized I'd been crazy to oppose this plan; I immediately fell deeply in love with the city. What had possessed me to think I didn't like Paris? The fact that I was charged an exorbitant amount of money for a slice of melon I ate in a Right Bank restaurant one August almost thirty-five years earlier? Now the trees were just coming into leaf, the bulbs coming up. In the morning all the gutters in my neighborhood ran clean with water; tiny dogs peeked out from the unbuttoned tops of people's spring coats; and in the market I could watch a man eviscerate bright yellow chickens, the justly famous Poulets de Bresse, pulling their innards out on a single glistening string like a magician pulling scarves from thin air. I adored Paris.

Adored it so much that when my daughter suggested a trip to Versailles I once again dragged my heels. I know this doesn't make me look good. I'd been to Versailles—that same August of the overpriced melon—and I'd hated it. I'd been, at the time, a sort of fledgling beatnik, digesting my first taste of existentialist philosophy—no wonder I found it oppressively ornate, overwhelmingly claustrophobic. "Let's go shopping," I suggested to my fashion-loving daughter, but she dug in her heels.

And so I found myself at Versailles. I found myself in the gardens of Versailles, and I was transported.

Walking down the sun-dappled allées, past the Grand Canal, the momentarily dormant fountains (about which more later)—I had that feeling I always have when I know I want to write about something. It's like when you fall in love. You sink so deeply into your dream of the love object that at least for a spell you don't know where the loved one ends and you begin.

I knew I wanted to dwell in Versailles the way you get to dwell in whatever landscape becomes the subject of your fiction—the way you get to dwell in your beloved's heart. I knew I wanted to wake up at my farmhouse in Vermont, and then sit at my desk and be once again walking down those allées, along the Tapis Vert, watching the sun glint off the little frogs in the basin of the Latona fountain. Of course, at the time I didn't know any of those names. I hadn't even gone inside the chateau yet—I hadn't even bought a guidebook.

We returned to Paris; I was already sunk in a dream of Versailles but without a clue about what I wanted to do with the place. And then, once again, my daughter intervened. (There's a good reason this book is dedicated to her.... ) Daphne wanted to visit the Conciergerie, where Marie Antoinette, as well as many other doomed members of the nobility, awaited their trip to the guillotine. Once again, I dragged my heels. I hate visiting historic sites. "Let's go shopping," I said. (I did.) Daphne reminded me of her school project. And so we went.

And it was there in the Conciergerie, looking at the teeny tiny squalid room where Marie Antoinette—the same Marie Antoinette who had lived in the glorious immensity of the Palace of Versailles—had spent her last days on earth, that I knew what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about Marie Antoinette. But I wanted, equally, to write about Versailles.

I didn't want to write a historical novel, no. I wanted to write a book about
that life, that place—
and I wanted to write about them in such a way that the reader would end up thinking about the animating spirit, about whatever it is that animates any container, whether a body or a building, that makes it so absolutely what it is and nothing else. In that way, though this book is very different from any of my other books, it is also the same. It's the same because, like most writers, I have one particular thing I can't stop thinking about, wondering about, and in my case it's the animating spirit of a thing, what we also call the soul.

So, to get back to my very first question—"What could be less hospitable to the writer of fiction than to tell a story whose ending everyone already knows?"—I soon realized, once I knew I wanted to write about Marie Antoinette and Versailles, that the best way around the problem was to focus not on the mystery of her actual ending, but on the mystery of what it actually means to
live a life.
I remembered a TV show I'd seen when I was very young. It was a dramatic presentation, maybe
Playhouse 90
or something similar. Sort of
Twilight Zone-ish,
but before
The Twilight Zone
existed. Two little children were in a very big house, and as they moved from room to room, they got older and older, until finally they opened one last door, and ... but the TV producers dared go no further. And I thought I'd like my book to be like that TV show, only more daring: that I'd like to tell Antoinette's story by moving her from room to room of Versailles, time passing with each move, so that the whole book would be infused with a sense of impending mortality.