The Exchange of Princesses (21 page)

On the day of the king’s return to Versailles, the infanta receives a gift from him, a pretty basket lined with white silk and containing three oranges, two limes, and a lemon. Her complaints, already weakening, dissipate altogether. She’s all his, she can’t stand to wait for him any longer. With her basket on her arm, she strolls between her apartment and Mme de Ventadour’s. The next day, having observed the good effects of this gift, Mme de Ventadour has the same basket filled with flowers and presents it as a little thought from the king.

A contemporary, a lawyer named Mathieu Marais, notes in his diary:

And above all, practically since infancy she has heard her father, whenever he feels called upon to perform, exhibit consummate rhetorical artistry, an eloquence that surprises
Saint-Simon and elicits comparisons to Philip’s grandfather Louis XIV.

At last the king comes to pay her a visit. He is the anointed of the Lord, and adorably so. He’s miraculous. In Reims, at the Abbey of Saint-Remi, His Majesty touched more than two thousand people suffering from scrofula, Mme de Ventadour proudly announces, her hands crossed over her chest. “The king touches you, God heals you,” the king confirms. “I touched each sick person’s face with my right hand and repeated those words. Two thousand times.” The infanta swoons with admiration for a being capable of such things. A being with supernatural powers. Her husband. She repeats the number and starts to count: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 25, 43, 200, 2,000.

“Did all two thousand crofulous people get well right away?”

“Scrofulous,” Maman Ventadour corrects her. “Of course they got well right away; after all, His Majesty had touched them.”

The king bows and goes out.

“The king doesn’t speak to me. Why doesn’t he ever say anything to me?”

“Because he loves you. That’s a real sign of love.”

Madame’s Fir Tree

Madame has returned exhausted from her journey to Reims. She takes to her bed, perfectly aware that her “little hour” is
approaching and resolved to be well prepared to die. In the period of time that elapses between her still bearable weariness and the first symptoms of angina pectoris, she receives, at Saint-Cloud, a visit from her “dear little queen.” The ceremony is reversed. Madame, lying on her bed, is lower than the infanta, who’s perched on an armchair. Therefore the child’s the one who has to lean down to kiss the damp forehead, the wrinkled cheeks. The parrot cries, “Put out your paw!” The infanta and Madame burst into laughter, which for the old lady ends in a choking fit.

She catches her breath and in a voice made low and gravelly by illness says to the little girl, “You have always thought me worthy of hearing your secrets, so today it’s my turn to tell you one. But remember, don’t be sad. In a few days, a few weeks at the most, Almighty God is going to call me back to his kingdom. I shall never again have the happiness of coming to pay you court, but I wish you to know that I have never loved any of my granddaughters as much as I love you. And not because I am old and weak and my faculties are declining, but because you are exceptional, Madame. Without allowing the consciousness of your merit to render you arrogant, do not let mediocrities humiliate you and make you doubt yourself. The court is an appalling mechanism. Like all the foreign princesses who come here, I was celebrated and then mistreated, slandered, wounded. In the beginning we are young and amusing, some of us are pretty, the court caresses us and seems to fawn upon us. But in fact it’s a devious vampire, and it sucks our blood. Pregnancies do the rest. The young bride quickly dwindles into nothing more than a poor thing, dragging herself along and soon forgotten.”

Mariana Victoria can make out only that she won’t see Madame anymore, and that’s awful. The Princess Palatine comes back to herself and adds, “God be thanked, your destiny will be nothing like that. You will be happy, because the king your husband …” Madame turns her face aside. She interrupts herself. She hates falseness too much to echo the official lies, but she’s not cruel enough to disclose what she ascertained very early on. It doesn’t surprise her, given her opinion of the boy’s personality and character, which she has always considered diametrically opposed to any form of candor.

At the end of her strength, Madame still has enough to write a letter to her half-sister, the Raugravine Louise:

Between consciousness and unconsciousness, in the acute suffering caused by a cough that shreds her lungs, she keeps on gloomily rehashing all the things she hasn’t had the time to pass on to the little infanta. She has told her — and it’s important advice — not to yield to mediocrity, to the petty atmosphere of a society totally dependent on the king, of a court that destroys all spiritual aspiration and drags you ever downward, but she hasn’t been able to reveal to the child the essential thing, her recipe for survival, for escaping the general dissolution of character and the leveling of personalities: to make writing her true life, to transmute ordinary, trivial events into words all her own, to know, my dear, my darling little girl, the music of your being, your own true tastes …

It’s frigid and rainy. At Versailles, Mariana Victoria has a cold. Like everyone else. The subject of taking her to visit Madame is avoided. The infanta has the same impression she had before the coronation: something’s going on without her. If her exclusion from the trip to Reims caused her profound chagrin, being kept away from Saint-Cloud and Madame’s chamber fills her with anxiety, makes her suddenly stop playing, makes her call Maman Ventadour and cling to her skirts so persistently that the governess complains in a letter to the child’s parents about how difficult it is to find time to write so much as a word. She adds a hasty note: “We are expecting Madame to die at any moment.”

In the afternoon of December 5, Louis XV goes to see Madame. He excels in all ceremonies, especially those that have to do with death.

On December 8, Madame dies.

Saint-Simon describes the grandiose and mute scene of the ceremony known as the visit of condolence. The courtiers, more than five hundred strong, “each dressed in a coat with mourning bands on the sleeve, a hat adorned with crape, a pleated rabat, worn-out shoes, and a cloak with a train four or five feet long,” come and bow to Louis XV, wearing a purple mourning suit, to the queen-infanta, to the regent, his eyes red with tears, to the Duchess d’Orléans, lying on a sofa, and to the Duke de Chartres.

The moments when the infanta finds herself at the king’s side for a ceremony are joyful moments, no matter what that ceremony may be. They’re the king and queen, united and together, as the medals, engravings, paintings, and prints celebrating the royal couple show them to be. She stands very straight and with a furtive caress grazes her prince’s cuff. He’s there, he’s hers, everyone can see it. Condemned to play the role of the neglected wife despite her tender age, the infanta is at the height of her powers of presence and charm in every official situation. Even today? Even for Madame’s burial? Yes, for she doesn’t truly comprehend the nature of the event.

She sees only that she’s occupying the central place with the king, that it’s
the two of them
before whom the immense procession of courtiers, the 534 long cloaks with long trains, file past and bow. Yes, she loves this moment, and may it last. The ceremony goes on for hours. The infanta is thrilled.
At least this time, she’s sure the king isn’t going to slip away as soon as the greetings are over. And therefore she stands firm, dressed like him all in purple, though her fur collar tickles her chin and her nose runs; at regular intervals, Marie Neige discreetly applies a handkerchief. That makes her feel like laughing, and there are some funny things she’d like to whisper to her Neige, but Marie moves away too quickly. So the infanta remains alone with her joy, alone but within reach of the beloved who is its source. In writing about Madame’s funeral to the infanta’s parents, Mme de Ventadour doesn’t hide the joyful excitement exhibited by their daughter. She describes it as a sort of worldly fever, a frenzy of clothes and movement, carriages and corteges, music and singing — unseemly, but excusable in so young a child as Mariana Victoria. The implication of that excitement — the brief happiness of a woman revered as the official wife of the marvelous young man on display in her company — remains veiled to Mme de Ventadour. On this occasion, she also writes, “[Madame] loved our little queen more than her children, and as Madame was truthful, she found her prettier and said so truthfully.”

In spite of the disparity in their years and the differences in language, experience, reasoning ability, and maturity of judgment, the old lady and the little girl had recognized and mutually reinforced each other; they were true, they were lively, they were incapable of inhabiting the same asphyxiating spheres as people devoid of feeling. The old lady and the little girl: an encounter absolutely poetic and profoundly right. Madame had paid tribute to Mariana Victoria’s genius for being both child and adult at once, but she was the same,
provided we reverse the terms: at once adult and child. It was enough to observe her face, to read her smile, when, bedridden by age and disease, she traveled by finger across the map of the Palatinate and pointed unhesitatingly at the magical cherry tree of her youthful summer dawns.

After the old lady’s death, the little girl is the only truthful person left. The manufacturers of lies redouble their zeal, trumpet to the world outside the fable of the dream nuptials, the myth of the children born to love each other, while inside the stern law of survival rules. Madame used to say about herself that she withstood the courtiers’ malice because she was a hard nut to crack. How can the infanta, so little, so tiny a nut, succeed in doing the same? On the other hand, some little nuts don’t crack so easily. And innocence, without being a weapon, possesses a strange power to disarm — at least for a while.

Madame’s death creates a void, even for those who weren’t especially attached to her. The young king, however, is not particularly bereft. Madame made no mistake when she suspected that he was hostile to her, that he felt aversion to her outspokenness, her impetuosity — her “big mouth,” as Louis XIV would say, referring to the people of the Palatinate but putting her in the same category. Louis XV doesn’t pretend to weep for Madame or to be affected by her absence. Once the ceremonies are over, he keeps the color purple but abandons his funereal demeanor. The scandal of the “fence-wreckers” has taken some of his friends away from him; enough are left to make up opposing teams for snowball fights in the foggy park, enough to have a target installed at
the northern end of the Hall of Mirrors for the young people to shoot arrows at. At such times the infanta prefers to remain invisible at the other end of the gallery; she occasionally has the door of the Salon de la Paix set ajar so that she can assess the situation. The boys are gathered in the Hall of Mirrors, their backs turned to her. They draw their bows, their entire attention concentrated in the direction of the orange-gold target. What if the group should break ranks with their leader, what if they should all turn against him as one man? Frightened, wedged between the two leaves of the half-open door, she sees the arrow penetrate cloth, pierce flesh, and strike not the little golden sun but the king’s heart.

The infanta still has a bad cold. She’s not allowed to go out. She watches the snow fall from inside the palace. Sometimes she stations herself at a window in her chamber, facing Satory Hill, sometimes in the Hall of Mirrors, and sometimes, but more rarely, in one of the smaller rooms in the back that overlook an obscure courtyard, because from there she has no chance of seeing the boys engage in their brutish games. But one bright sunny morning, the kind of morning when Versailles sparkles, a dogsled is made ready for her. The sled takes off — it seems to her it takes flight — and in a breath she passes up the king and his friends, who are departing for a hunt. She’s so completely wrapped up that she doesn’t have time to free one of her hands and wave, but he salutes her as she goes by.

In an all-out crusade against the truth, Mme de Ventadour writes, “It appears to me that his penchant for our little mistress is steadily increasing, he would be in the wrong were that not so, for she is prodigiously lovable.”

During all those hours, and during many others, the infanta doesn’t miss Madame. Besides, the little girl is used to going for weeks without seeing the old princess. Except that eventually she would always reappear … Madame loved to tell stories of her childhood Christmases and promised the child a decorated fir tree, something completely unknown at the time. Mariana Victoria makes a deal with herself: if she gets that tree, it will mean that Madame’s alive and that she has managed to send her the promised gift, which will further signify that Madame, wherever she might be — swollen feet, loud voice, kind eyes, and all — is going to come back and take her in her arms.