Versailles (8 page)

"You'll want to establish a room for the baby here on the ground floor, adjacent to the terrace," announced the Princesse, speaking from her position as Governess to the Children of France. "That way, as soon as he is able, he'll take his first steps outdoors in the fresh air." She was a tall, rather badly made woman who, though pretty, maintained an unwavering look of deep concern, chiefly for the stupidity of others, and who claimed to communicate with the spirit world through her dogs.

"You seem so sure it will be a boy," said Madame Dillon. "I would predict a girl."

"Oh?" said the Princesse. "Why is that?"

"The way she carries."

"Antoinette is wide and flat through the hips. She has no alternative. Besides"—and here the Princesse indicated her dogs with a sweeping gesture—"I have it on the best authority. By next Christmas France will have the heir we've all been waiting for. A strong healthy baby boy, the reincarnation of Louis Quatorze himself."

We had come to a halt by one of the tall windows lining the Gallery; the light was no longer red-gold but red, and thin, almost watery, the way it gets when it prepares to fill with darkness. Lanterns hanging from the prows of the gondolas on the Grand Canal, lanterns circling Latona and her frogs, moving back and forth across the terraces, ferried by dark figures, men and women dressed for dancing and intrigue, mounting the steps between the Vases of the Sun.

Meanwhile the Princesse de Guéménée continued droning on and on. Clio, yap yap yap, animal magnetism, blah blah blah..."I still say it will be a girl," chimed in Madame Dillon. "You will be a girl, won't you?" she said, sweetly addressing my stomach, at which moment I felt the baby swim toward the surface like a fish about to leap from the water into the thin red air, as simultaneously a group of masked men and women burst through the doors from the Southern Terrace, bringing with them the combined smells of attar of roses, brandy, and perspiration. Racing together, laughing and chattering, their voices echoing off the smooth stone walls and the vaulted ceiling.

Pleasure-seekers, all of them.

The City of Sows, who can't be satisfied with noble loaves of barley and wheat but must have relishes and desserts. That's what Plato said.

Painting, embroidery, gold, ivory. Perfume, jew-elry, courtesans, wine. Poets, rhapsodes, actors, choral dancers, beauticians, barbers, relish-makers, cooks.

Swineherds, too, to fatten the pigs so they'd be good to eat.

The City of Sows, the Feverish City. See them turning and turning on their golden spits, their fine skin cracking, releasing fat.

Whereas I was content. I was content for that one little moment as I stood by the tall window in the Low Gallery in the growing darkness, feeling my baby move inside me.

Speeches have a double form, the one true, the other false.

Plato also said that.

M
ERCY
(entering the Bull's Eye Chamber through a door, stage right)

All is not lost yet;
We can still hope.

 

(Antoinette enters stage left, humming to herself, the red velvet bag containing her missal over one arm.)

 

But here is the Queen; a golden opportunity.
I'll pretend not to see her.

 

(Aside, loudly)

 

If only she would come, that pearl of virtue,
Whose charms the King cannot resist.

 

A
NTOINETTE
(aside, holding back)

He's talking about me.

M
ERCY
(aside, to himself)

After all, in this strange land
She's the best one can hope for.
Style means everything.

A
NTOINETTE
(aside)

A spiteful tongue! Lucky for him
He has my mother's blessing.

M
ERCY

Bravo! Such discretion!
And those modest eyes,
That demure expression,
Those...

A
NTOINETTE
(aside)

Enough is enough.

 

(Both spring into motion, meeting at the door to the King's Bedchamber)

 

M
ERCY
(executing a deep, satiric bow)

After you,
Your Royal Highness.

A
NTOINETTE
(executing a low, satiric curtsy)

No, I insist,
Most worthy sir.

M
ERCY

No, you go first, pray.

ANTOINETTE

No, no, after you.

M
ERCY AND ANTOINETTE
(together)

Your words can sway the King;
Mine are like millet seed.

M
ERCY

Expectant mother, first.

A
NTOINETTE

First, brilliant statesman.

M
ERCY

Austria's pride and joy.

A
NTOINETTE

The toast of France.

M
ERCY

Your comeliness.

A
NTOINETTE

Your wine cellars.

M
ERCY

Your dramatic gifts.

A
NTOINETTE

Your lies.

M
ERCY
(aside)

I'll die of apoplexy
If I stay here one minute longer.

A
NTOINETTE

Duplicitous old sodomite.
If only my mother knew...

 

(Exit Mercy in a fury.)

Almost a perfect cube, four
toises
wide, four long, four and a fraction high. A jewel box, the ideal receptacle in which to put a Queen, beginning with stumpy little Marie-Thérèse of Spain, the Sun King's long-suffering bride, who enjoyed the company of puppies and dwarfs, and whose teeth were black from eating chocolate. Queen-in-a-box. Open the lid and out she pops!

The Queen's apartments are to the left of the Marble Court, the King's to the right, both occupying more or less the same amount of floor space. A novel arrangement, at least as far as seventeenth-century royal dwellings were concerned, and one designed to suggest the equal political—if not marital—status of husband and wife. Both apartments contained an unprecedented number of bedrooms and a confusing array of beds, making it difficult to know who was sleeping where, and with whom, until after the construction of the Porcelain Trianon, the Sun King's glittering blue and white tile pleasure palace.

The Queen's Bedchamber was completed during Louis XIV's second building campaign, a so-called "peacetime effort." The mood of the day was brightly nationalistic, favoring the use of indigenous materials—marble from Languedoc and the Pyrenees, tapestries from the Gobelins workshops—despite the fact that the interiors themselves were Italianate in design. The Bedchamber ceiling, for example, was divided into multiple compartments, and everything in the room was banded in marble, contributing to an oppressive and oddly trussed feeling in all the Queens who slept there. So what if two immense pairs of floor-to-ceiling glass doors provided a fine view of the Orangerie, where, in clement weather, the potted palm trees stood row upon row like feather dusters, and, just beyond them, one could see the glittering rectangle of the Pool of the Swiss Guards, and Satory's wooded hills? Hadn't the Pool of the Swiss Guards originally been called Stinking Lake?

Marie-Thérèse died in the Bedchamber, as did Marie Leczinska, Beloved's equally long suffering wife. He replaced some of the marble with wood, most notably on the floor, added bronze doors, and hired Boucher to paint the ceiling compartments with
grisaille
celebrations of the Queen's virtues, all of which—lucky for him—had their roots in a dull and basically tractable nature.

Marie Antoinette hated the Bedchamber. She did what she could to make it a more congenial place, putting up giant mirrors festooned with gilded bronze lilies, getting rid of all the tapestries commemorating the Sun King's military victories, and covering the walls instead in a lustrous white
gros de Tours
embroidered with bouquets of flowers and ribbons and peacock feathers. Wherever possible she added fringes, tassels, plumes, and braids, as well as cramming in chiming clocks and footstools, wing chairs and dainty cabinets, which were in turn filled with lacquerware, crystals, jasper, sard, and petrified wood.

But nothing helped. A box is a box, after all, no matter how many pretty things you put inside it.

Meanwhile, in her thing-filled Bedchamber, Antoinette dreamed.

She dreamed that while she slept her keys were taken from her pockets, permitting anyone to unlock her desk and read her letters, while at the same time making it impossible for her to lock them back up.

She dreamed that while she slept she was being watched.

Sometimes it was her mother's face bending over her, scowling, checking for signs of disobedience. Sometimes it was Mercy's face, masking disgust. Sometimes a complete stranger's.

The dirt-smeared face of a Savoyard, for instance, who seemed to have climbed onto the chimneypiece. Grinning and shouting words of encouragement as, meanwhile, a very hot fire burned near at hand, nearer than it should be unless it had somehow escaped the fireplace. Go away! Go away! The glass doors were caulked shut and pasted over with paper, and on all sides thick tapestry screens were held in place with rope, just barely protecting her from a great press of people, watching and whispering on the other side. The smell of vinegar, lavender, hyssop. A hand inside her, a hand on her stomach, and, shamefully, her naked body exposed from the waist down.

Such pain. Open the doors! Please!

But this was no dream, and the next thing she knew there was the Princesse de Lamballe's hand right in front of her face, her awkward overlarge fingers with their embarrassingly chewed nails making the private signal they'd settled on for
girl.

All those chairs and clocks and mirrors and crystals and chimes and hands and mouths and noses sucking up what little air there was—first came a muffled thump as the Princesse fainted, followed by a low moan as the Queen followed suit.

"Warm water!" shouted the terrified accoucheur, who thought she was dying. "She must be bled in the foot!" But the room was so packed with princes and counts and countesses and foreign dignitaries as well as everyone who'd wandered in from the courtyard, not to mention all the furniture and knickknacks, that there was no way to get a basin of water through to him, and so he was forced to lance her foot without it. One quick jab and a jet of blood came spurting forth; naturally this cured her at once.

It was December 20, eleven o'clock in the morning; Antoinette had been in labor for eight hours. Louis smashed through the caulk and paper and glass, letting in gusts of cold winter air and a few flakes of snow. "Poor little thing," Antoinette is reported to have said to her daughter, "though you were not wanted, you will be my very own the more for that. A son would have belonged to the state, but you will be my happiness, and soothe my sorrows." Meanwhile the accoucheur, who would have received a pension of forty thousand
livres
for delivering a boy, did his best to hide his disappointment, wrapping the infant in blankets and handing her over to the Princesse de Guéménée. Through the broken panes the Orangerie terrace was barely visible, empty of palms, its two little reflecting pools glazed over with ice, staring blindly up at the lightless gray sky. A salute of one and twenty guns was fired, the meager number echoing the accoucheur's disappointment.

Two years later it would be a salute of one and a hundred guns, and the festivities celebrating the long-awaited birth of an actual heir to the throne would go on for weeks. In Paris the tocsin would ring without cease for three days. Fireworks would explode over the Seine, the fountains pump wine, and enormous heaps of meat and mountains of bread appear for the taking. Little Louis Joseph, decked out in gold raiment, would prepare to receive adoration as if he were the Baby Jesus.

Two years later delegations of tradespeople would come, bearing gifts: the chimney sweeps a miniature chimney with a regally clad boy crawling out the top, the locksmiths an elaborate and mysterious lock designed to release, when the King finally figured out how to spring it, a tiny Dauphin of steel. The whole world would come to pay its respects, and the whole world would be welcome, with the possible exception of the gravediggers, who'd be sent packing after showing up with a Dauphin-sized coffin.

Granted, it wasn't as though the birth of Marie-Thérèse Charlotte went completely unmarked. Prayers of thanks were offered for the opening of the Queen's womb, and it seemed possible, if only for a moment, that the French people might be willing to let bygones be bygones.

But only for a moment. Once it sunk in that Antoinette wasn't going to die, once word got out that her belly had been restored to its former supple state and that she was eating cream of rice with biscuit and a little poached chicken, everybody suddenly remembered how much they didn't like her. The Austrian Bitch—a big dis - appointment. Couldn't even be counted on to get the baby's sex right...