The Exchange of Princesses (24 page)

Cardinal Dubois is not a lovely sight. One can’t accuse him of wearing the cardinal’s purple unctuously. For unctuousness, it’s best to turn to Cardinal Fleury. He’s the incarnation of courtesy and mildness of manner. A constant affability suffuses his regular features, and age has not tarnished their beauty. He belongs to the race of the ambitious who dissimulate their passion. Instead of furiously hurling himself into the melee, which is Dubois’s style, he contents himself with waiting — and with making himself loved. Like everyone else, Fleury observes that Dubois is visibly wasting away. Fleury’s smooth face displays the appropriate level of compassion.

That Dubois continues to play his part in working sessions is already no small feat. But he rises to heroic levels when he decides to accompany the king as he passes his troops in review. The crowd witnesses the bizarre way the cardinal
bumps and jerks while on horseback. Laughter breaks out. The cardinal, will he fall, won’t he fall, the cardinal? He doesn’t fall. But his riding ordeal pierces the anal abscess he suffers from. Once the review is over, he’s put on a stretcher, mad with pain. In keeping with the chasm separating the vision of persons in good health from the vision of those who are ill, the days are long, long gone when Dubois, at the height of his political intelligence, legislated without the slightest concern for the physical consequences of his decrees.

Using the work of cleaning the Grand Canal either as a pretext or as a genuine reason, the court leaves Versailles and moves to Meudon, where Cardinal Dubois is already installed. Meudon is halfway between Paris and Versailles and therefore much more convenient for Dubois. The cardinal looks like a dying man. He suffers atrociously. He’s finished. He will go no farther, he will never be pope. Bursting with fury, vilely abusing each and every one, Cardinal Dubois goes to his death ranting and raging, flailing about him in a battle long since lost. His conduct is devoid of all panache. “It’s the urchin coming out in him,” some people snigger. Traveling by carriage causes him to cry out, and even from his bedroom cries can be heard, the echoes of his rage at having to suffer and die. Philip d’Orléans and the king take up positions at his bedside so that work can go forward. The cardinal approaches death not as a Christian, but as a worker. Philip d’Orléans and Cardinal Dubois discuss financial affairs, alliances, ministers, and the future. The king, maintaining his habitual silence, peers into his chief minister’s emaciated face and sees there the glistening perspiration, the dark greenish circles under the eyes, the
deep wrinkles, the spasms that shake him and send the ink spattering from his pen. The youth is captivated. If every working session were to coincide with the progress of death, politics would begin to excite him.

At the other end of the palace, at the farthest remove from the cardinal and his final turmoil, Mariana Victoria sits in a rosewood carriage drawn by a single pony and rides up and down the paths in the park. She sings the refrains of the Protestant hymns she learned from Madame.

She writes — under dictation — to her brother Don Luis:

Like Madame, she has enough imagination to travel just by moving her finger over a map.

Dubois has reached the end. Another stretcher will bear him from Meudon to Versailles. He’s placed in one of those
enormous black coaches called
corbillards
(the name would later come to mean “hearse”) that are normally used to transport a high-ranking nobleman’s servants. Dubois’s
corbillard
is followed by three vehicles: the first filled with chaplains, the second with physicians, and the third with surgeons. The cardinal is going to die in a few hours, not without first being subjected to a real butchery of an operation, against which he will struggle in vain, reduced to beastly behavior by beastly suffering. Cardinal and chief minister, man of pleasure and subtle politician though he is, he bellows in despair, calling out for some relief or only for a little air, because the August night is stiflingly hot. A storm is prowling around; white lightning streaks the sky. The baleful flashes light up the exposed, muddy bottom of the Grand Canal, where dying fish are wriggling. Philip d’Orléans, who has joined Dubois at Versailles just before his death, returns to Meudon to inform the king. That same morning, the regent appears in the king’s chamber and announces the passing of his chief minister. He then proposes to replace Dubois himself, despite his rank.

The king says yes.

Philip d’Orléans kneels at his nephew’s feet and swears the oath.

Wedding Night

On August 25, a date that has long been set, Louise Élisabeth and Don Luis at last have permission to become man and wife, completely. The princess is thirteen years old, the prince sixteen. Exactly sixteen, because the king his father has thought about such things; he has authorized his son to consummate his marriage on the feast day of Saint Louis, which is also the prince’s birthday:

For the feast of your patron St. Louis, my well beloved son, here is a gift: your wife in the same bed as you. You have experienced that already, I know, but today you may enjoy the additional right of sleeping with her. The right, or rather the duty. Do not forget, either of you: we await an heir. Spain awaits an heir
.

That day — so long desired, fantasized, feared — is incredibly hot. Fortunately, there’s a Mass; churches are cool places. Upon leaving the service, Don Luis feels dizzy. Louise Élisabeth fails to notice. Afterward, they have the day to kill. Don Luis goes hunting. He trips over a root, suffers the
beginnings of a sunstroke, and spends the rest of the afternoon playing solitaire. His frustrated desires and the bullying he’s undergone have made him lose his confidence —
all
his confidence. The intellectual incapacity he’s always felt and to which he’s grown accustomed is complicated by sexual anxiety. Louise Élisabeth, for her part, gorges herself on tomatoes while someone reads stories to her. She bursts out laughing at the cruelest passages, always from tales of kings and queens victimized by curses, of little princesses abducted from their palaces, of princes paralyzed by the spells their wicked stepmothers have cast. “What could be truer?” she asks. “These tales show the world as it is!” Around ten o’clock in the evening, the king and queen arrive at the royal palace of Madrid. Philip V is suffering from an attack of gout. He limps heavily on the parquetry, and he’s in a gloomy frame of mind. The queen, a veteran at dissembling, has no trouble hiding the contempt and hostility she feels toward the young couple — this pair of losers — and silently offers up her most heartfelt prayers for their sterility.

The Prince of Asturias is undressed at the door of the bedchamber, where the princess has been undressed in the presence of the queen. When the princess is in bed, the queen escorts the prince to the bed in his turn. The bed curtains are closed. Don Luis feels ill. He can’t get hard. Louise Élisabeth, feeling not the slightest twinge of desire, mutely observes him. They have the sheet pulled up to their chins. Don Luis moves his hand over his spouse at random. He grips a shoulder, grazes her navel. She doesn’t move. He attempts some fondling but doesn’t dare touch
her sex. They embrace, and an onlooker might think they like it. It has all the features of a sin. The prince makes the sign of the cross. The princess moves away. He lights a candle. He reflects. They
must
copulate,
must
produce an heir. Right, but how? Neither of the two gets a wink of sleep. Toward dawn, the princess, with her back to her husband, begins to hum; it’s a malicious sound, the low buzz of a bee thoroughly resolved to produce no more honey. She bites her nails without interrupting the buzzing in the back of her throat.

The following day, the princess hastens to return to her quarters. The symptoms of erysipelas are coming back. The headaches, the swelling, the red, deformed face, one enormously swollen cheek. The prince comes to inquire about her health. For a sufficient answer, she shows herself.

The prince writes to his father:

A few days later, he writes again to his father; his note ends with these words:

In any case, he’s chained and bound: in Spain, any spouse who doesn’t share his or her conjugal bed is excommunicated. From now on and until one of the two of them dies, they’re condemned to sleep, or to prevent each other from sleeping, together.

A Successful Day

It’s also Louis XV’s saint’s day, but without any conjugal urgency on the horizon. The Feast of Saint Louis goes forward with the usual ceremonies. Masses, congratulations, the king’s music. After having a strawberry sorbet in the Bosquet de la Salle de Balle, the infanta is blowing soap bubbles. The king allows himself to be acclaimed by the Versaillais, the people of Versailles. A gondola ride on the Grand Canal concludes a successful day, successful because the official schedule has been strictly adhered to.

Opera Interlude

The princess rarely smiles, except for bad reasons. Nothing besides the facetious nonsense that occupies her days makes her laugh. A rumor about her face, too serious for a girl so young, is spreading. In the hope that such apparent seriousness may be a good sign, odes to the virtues of the Princess of Asturias circulate among the people. Like them, the prince would prefer to delude himself; night after night, however, the fiasco is repeated. Not without variations, of course. Once they even reach climax, not together, not in one another’s arms, but in the same bed. He strokes her hand. Her eyes are closed, as if she’s sleeping. He keeps her hand tight in his until morning. He tells her he loves her. She doesn’t withdraw her hand. He takes this as a confession. Louise Élisabeth finds the whole thing funny, and like a child who becomes infatuated with a new toy, she takes pride in responding to him and seeks to outdo him in the demonstration of feelings. In the austere setting of El Escorial, scenes
take place that leave the courtiers wondering. Louise Élisabeth accompanies her husband everywhere — almost everywhere, because she draws the line at hunting — kisses him, lets herself be embraced, spends days thinking about what gifts to give him. If he has to absent himself from the palace for two days, at his parting they act out a great scene of despair. They clasp each other, weep, move apart, rush back together with cries of “
¡Mi marido!
” and “
¡Mi mujer!
” The princess has to be supported. During this same period of time, she declares to her confessor that she wishes to reform her life and learn Latin.

The first noun declensions bore her as rigid as her role of loving wife does. She demands that those of her women who have remained in Madrid be brought to El Escorial. They’re hardly in El Escorial before they all, including the princess, proclaim their desire to go back to Madrid.

“There is nothing new here,” writes the prince to his father, “and the women have already asked me when we will return to Madrid.”

Among the things that aren’t new is the meticulous exchange on the subject of hunts good and bad, marked by such confessions of discouragement as “my hunting goes from bad to worse” (November 6). In this period of disastrous weather, the sources of the prince’s disappointment even include a sermon he’s heard: “the best thing about it was that it lasted only twenty minutes” (November 28).

“I hope for a crisis that will carry me off by surprise” (Philip d’Orléans)

Death has his eye on Philip d’Orléans. He feels it, knows it. It excites him and terrifies him. He has apprehended the demise of his daughter and his mother and Dubois as so many premonitory signs. Death appreciates that sort of consent, preferring as he does to work in collaboration. Perhaps that’s why, after the regent declares, “I would not want a slow death; I have no wish to undergo the torments of a fatal illness. I hope for a sudden death, a crisis that will carry me off by surprise,” his wish is granted. The evening of December 2, when a large part of the palace is plunged in darkness and things outside are much worse, Philip d’Orléans, on the point of going to finish some work with the king, decides to grant himself a respite. He sends for Mme de Falari. He’s sitting in an armchair beside a fire, and he wants her to amuse him with a little story, one of the thousand bits of gossip that make up the daily life of Versailles. She begins cheerfully, leaning toward His Lordship. And then stops in horror.
Philip d’Orléans has fallen forward, his chin on his chest. Mme de Falari rushes out of the apartment and calls for help. She finds the corridors empty, doors closed, no servants, certainly no doctors. She hurries up and down stairs, passes through deserted antechambers. After running around and crying out for more than half an hour, she finally manages to unearth someone. Philip d’Orléans is laid on the floor. In accordance with contemporary medicine’s first reflex and key remedy, the physician bleeds the patient. If the effects of this procedure upon the living are dubious, there’s no chance it will resuscitate a dead man. M. le Duc hastens to the scene and receives a double satisfaction: he sees the lifeless corpse of the man he detests and almost immediately obtains the post of chief minister. For he quickly betakes himself to the king, informs him of his uncle’s passing, and in the same sentence petitions to take the deceased’s place. After Cardinal Fleury gives his approval, the king, his eyes wet with tears, nods his head in affirmation.