Versailles (19 page)

But since I'd also begun hearing Antoinette's voice—since her voice was coming to me very clearly, beginning with what would soon be the opening sentences of the book—I knew I wanted her to be the one telling her story, and since I knew I wanted to avoid having her speak in an annoyingly formally accurate eighteenth-century voice, and since I knew I wanted to include her death, I knew I was going to have to position her somewhere outside of herself in space and time. In other words, I knew she had to be speaking from a somewhat
disembodied
place. From the soul, I guess. Which was exactly where I wanted her to be.

But where did all of my actual information come from? The Valley of the Danube to the castle of Nymphenburg. 150 chickens, 270 pounds of beef. Pilchards and apricots and kugelhopf. The decayed molar, the coughing sister. Did I make it all up, fiction writer that I am? The truth is, I made none of it up. I am proud to say that every single fact in my book is a true fact, or as close to a true fact as a fact can be, given the vagaries of historic documentation.

Of course, the animating spirit of a thing is impossible to apprehend without first understanding the container.

When I set out to write
Versailles
, all I knew about Marie Antoinette was pretty much what everyone knows—probably less. I remembered descriptions of the
lever
from eleventh grade history, so horrified had I been by the idea of being watched by an audience upon awakening in the morning. The rolling in of the royal bathtub. Worse yet, the royal chamber pot. I remembered the insanely elaborate outfits. The Tennis Court Oath, though only the name of it, which I'd mixed up in my head with the Jeu de Peaumes museum. My sixth-grade teacher's name had been Robespierre Ichabod Fine, and he'd had pretty much nothing good to say about his namesake, whom he called a bloodthirsty tyrant, though I knew from my daughter that the story was more complex than that. I'd also read the Literary Heritage edition of
Dangerous Liaisons
when I was much too young to understand a single thing that was going on in it, but had been drawn to it (my parents had loads of these fancy-pants Literary Heritage books in their living room bookshelves) by the pictures and reread it many times as light progressively dawned. My same sixth-grade teacher—one of the best teachers I ever had in an academic career unusually blessed with good teachers—used to take three of us out for Cokes after school, and I remember one afternoon how he told each of us in turn which period in history he thought we belonged to. Wicki, twentieth-century America. Liz, Renaissance Italy. Me, eighteenth-century France. I remember I was insulted—eighteenth-century France! How stuffy and boring!

But Mr. Fine was right. I am an eighteenth-century girl, through and through. The secretly soft hopeful heart, the coolly ironic exterior. Lover of good food, lively conversation, romantic intrigue. Ruled by curiosity.

Still, I knew that before I could write my book there was a lot I had to learn about Marie Antoinette, about the period in which she'd lived, about the Palace of Versailles. I also knew I didn't want to write a book that sounded "research driven." I decided to read two biographies straight through, taking no notes:
To the Scaffold
and
Marie Antoinette, the Life of an Ordinary Woman.
Immediately I was struck by the fact that the story of Marie Antoinette's life was one of the most fascinating stories I'd ever read, and that every single detail in it was shimmering with narrative possibility. The way the names of the fashionable colors for ladies' gowns changed from season to season: baby flea to lover's guts. The way Mirabeau wore his unruly curls in a large velvet bag. The way tulips could or could not be planted depending upon whether or not France was at war with Holland. The way Louis XV walked around on the rooftop after dark, talking to his guests down the chimney flues. The way Antoinette unraveled a chemise and pried two nails from the wall so she could amuse herself by making lace while she was incarcerated in the Conciergerie.

Every single fact I encountered seemed seductive, though obviously I couldn't use them all.

And as I read my first two biographies, I began to surround myself with other books: more biographies, architectural treatises, history and philosophy books, prayer books, books of fairy tales, cookbooks. Piles and piles of books. You fall in love with your subject; you transfer your love to the books. It's almost as if they generate heat, standing there in their tall piles around your desk. I would write, and I would dip in and out of my books. I wasn't allowed to take notes. This was one of my most important rules, but also hardest to enforce. I was allowed to write smallish notes to myself on little scraps of paper and put them in a file box meant for index cards. I figured that way I'd only include information that had truly lodged itself in my imagination and would thus avoid the "overresearched" problem, though of course it would often happen that I'd be writing a chapter—about Louis's problems with his penis, for example—and I'd realize that I'd forgotten the name of Antoinette and Louis's doctor, and have to go rummaging through my books till I found it. A real historian, watching me at work would have gone out of his or her mind.

I also realized that I'd have to come to my own conclusions about some of the more "iffy" historic information, the king's penis being a case in point. Did Louis suffer from phimosis, a condition in which (forgive me) the foreskin gets stuck during ejaculation, thus making the act of intercourse so painful as to be avoided at all costs? Did he finally, seven years into his marriage to Antoinette, consent to the operation that at last made the production of an heir possible? Certainly it's true that during this seven-year period the French people tended increasingly to blame the absence of an heir on Antoinette, who turned in their affections from a blond, blue-eyed sweetheart to "the Austrian bitch."

The eighteenth century had a great fondness for all forms of drama; amateur theatrics were popular at Versailles, with the queen often taking a leading role. I decided to make use in my book from time to time of playlets, particularly when I was dealing with some of the more ambiguous historical situations.

Are the playlets true to fact? Yes, if you ignore the issue of what the people are actually saying to one another. But Antoinette
did
have a pug. She
did
tear around on horseback—rode astride, to be perfectly accurate, as she'd been instructed by her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, to the horror of the French court. Her eyes
were
trained on the flies of all the handsome young men, or at least according to the pamphleteers (Laclos, the dangerous author of
Dangerous Liaisons
being chief among them). Louis
did
make Antoinette a spinning wheel. He
did
on occasion eat entire roast piglets. And yes, Antoinette—that very same Marie Antoinette we've been encouraged to think of as devoted to a life of pleasure—never touched wine, or any alcoholic beverage for that matter.

Unfortunately, unless you want to litter your story with footnotes, it's impossible to reassure your reader about the historical accuracy of your material. That's one of the big drawbacks of historical fiction, I think. Once the reader begins to question the historical accuracy of a piece of information—whether Carlotta actually gave up liver pudding for Lent, for instance—the floodgates open. Everything gets thrown into doubt.

To get around this difficulty I chose to try to make the world of the book
feel
exceptionally real. The more I dwelt in it, the realer that world became for me, and I hoped this would rub off on the prose. I also wanted the movement of the book, the reader's sense of the passage of time, to be almost mimetic. I figured that in creating a real sense of time's passage, I could generate a kind of suspense, a version of the suspense otherwise denied me by my infamous subject matter.

Almost from the beginning I knew that I wanted the book to be full of numbers. An odd desire, given my own antipathy to mathematics, but utterly compelling. This was due, in part I think, to my wish to convey, simultaneously, a sense of almost unimaginable limitlessness and almost unendurable limit: to show how Versailles was a world with so many windows and doors you could barely keep count of them, and yet, ultimately, you
could
keep count. I wanted to make it clear that the container, no matter how huge, how apparently infinite, always has limits; that's what makes it a container.

And at the same time I wanted the numbers to contribute to that crucial sense of time passing, footsteps tapping along an endless marble hallway, a ticking clock.

Naturally in my research I unearthed lots of numbers. Chiefly dates, but also amounts of things, miles from here to there. Six doctors in attendance when Louis XV was dying, five surgeons, and three apothecaries, and six times an hour they took turns taking his pulse, studying his tongue, and poking his stomach. Eleven miles from Paris to Versailles, from the Chaillot tollgate to the Place d'Armes. Six hundred forty-seven diamonds the size of robins' eggs in the necklace that spawned the Diamond Necklace Affair. Prisoner Number 280: Marie Antoinette de Lorraine d'Autriche.

I found lots of numbers, but in the end, it turned out that the numbers I needed most were not to be found in any of my books.

I'd completely avoided the idea of going back to Versailles, following that initial visit, that moment of inspiration. I didn't want the place as I was imagining it—not the Versailles I'd actually seen, but the Versailles that was by now so vivid in my imagination—to be supplanted by the real thing. This is a genuine danger. (Why Vladimir Nabokov always said he never wanted to return to Russia, even after it was possible to do so: because that way the landscape of his childhood would remain intact, pristine in his memory.)

But the closer I came to the end of the book, the more I knew I had to go back to Versailles. I had to go back if only to find out, among other things, how many steps it would take to get from one end of the Hall of Mirrors to the other.

At the time when this conviction hit me, I was lucky enough to be staying in Bellagio, Italy, at the Villa Serbelloni. The Rockefeller Foundation had invited my husband to be a fellow there, and amazingly enough, spouses were not only tolerated but welcomed. In order to make my arrangements to get from Bellagio to Versailles—a truly complicated journey involving several ferryboats, several trains, and several buses—I consulted with Gianna Celli, the remarkable woman who pretty much single-handedly oversaw all of the Villa's operations, including the gardens. Though to say that Gianna "oversaw the gardens' operations" is misleading—more often she was down on her hands and knees uprooting peonies or up on a rickety stepladder ruthlessly pruning back the wisteria. After giving me detailed travel instructions, Gianna led me into the Bellagio gardens where she showed me a shrub not yet in flower, though if it had been, she told me, the flowers would have been a deep purple-blue. She explained that it was called La Gloire de Versailles (the Glory of Versailles), and asked me to find out whether it actually came from the palace gardens.

So armed with my tasks like a character in a fairy tale I made my way, once again, to Versailles.

It was late March; the weather was awful. The French museum workers had been on strike for over a month, and though the strike was supposed to have ended the day before I arrived in Versailles, I ended up standing in the pouring rain with an increasingly angry and slowly diminishing crowd for two and a half hours, watching the museum workers sitting behind their desks in the warm cozy entrance hall, drinking coffee, laughing, pointedly ignoring us all. End runs were attempted; rumors abounded. One particular British tour group leader routinely banged his fists on the windows, but to no avail. The strike wasn't over. The strike was over but the palace wouldn't open until the next day. The strike was never going to be over. The strike was over but the museum workers were punishing us by opening the palace three hours later than usual. (This proved to be the actual explanation.)

I was greatly relieved, having planned to stay in town for only three days.

Of course, it was a wondrous thing to be suddenly transported into the actual physical world I'd been living in in my imagination for over two years. 1 also felt weirdly proprietary, almost as if it were at my behest that all these strangers were being let loose in
my
house. First I took the regular tour, the one that permitted me access to the Hall of Mirrors. Notebook in hand, head down, counting under my breath, I made my way from one end of the hall to the other. I got some strange looks, stranger still when I started counting panes of glass, chandeliers, mirrors, but I was in ecstasy. I felt like I was doing something almost unheard-of: that I was actually in a position to be able to take the physical measurements of a place of my own invention.

Eventually the rain stopped and I went outside.

The sky was so dark blue it was almost black; the clouds were enormous and stormy, but everything was clear as crystal—a perfect French sky. The sun was shining. I went to work.

I counted how many steps it took to get from the palace to the far end of the Grand Canal and back.

I counted how many white squares and how many black squares made up the floor of the Marble Court.

I counted how many doors there were, how many windows.

How many fountains (all of them still dormant, the displays occurring only on Sundays, and for a hefty admission price, to boot).

How many steps from the Place d'Armes to the front door.

It was extremely difficult to keep count, especially since I was often interrupted. Sometimes by museum personnel wondering if they could help me. Sometimes by other tourists wondering if I knew how to find something or other. Sometimes (well, twice) by really weird men hitting on me. I think the nature of my activity was particularly attractive to the weird. From time to time I remembered Gianna's request and kept my eyes peeled for the Gloire de Versailles, but since nothing was in bloom there either, and since there were no labels on any of the plants, and since everyone I asked gave me a blank look, I finally gave up.