Versailles (10 page)

I thought the opera would never end, likewise the supper after it. Endless supper! Two hundred mouths, all of them endlessly opening, closing, chewing, chattering; two hundred bodies digesting, sweating, expelling gas. From time to time I'd catch sight of Axel, but since we hadn't been seated in the same pavilion it was always at a distance, my view partly blocked by some count's fat flushed face, some marchioness's towering hairdo. Pure and remote, Axel, like the north itself; he looked thinner than when I'd last seen him, darker, more melancholic—but that had been three years ago before he left to fight in America. Of course I had no appetite, not for food.

At last the musicians assembled on the terrace and began playing dances, their gigantic shadows sawing away madly on the wall behind them. Demented black shadows, smooth golden stone. Lilies and jasmine, boxwood and candle wax. When released into the sweet night air, the pent-up stink of two hundred bodies added its own crucial note, one that was welcome, seductive, even. Gustavus took off in hot pursuit of a coquettish little equerry; I could hear the sound of oars dipping in and out of the water, an oddly dry sound, like silk stirred by wind.

Antoinette! Antoinette! There was a game of hide-and-seek in progress somewhere near the Temple of Love, Artois hoodwinked and spinning, arms outstretched. Antoinette, come play with us! The grass was sopping, moondrops adrift on the water. No sign of Count Fersen anywhere.

The first time I saw him he was only eighteen, exactly the same age as I. At one of my Monday-evening masked balls, back in the days when Beloved was still alive, Louis impotent, and I was still a foreigner, my true identity pitifully obvious to everyone in the French court, despite the mask. A foreign body, Antoinette, like a piece of shot in a wound, something that has to be removed before it kills you.

We danced, we talked. Axel told me he'd been to visit Voltaire—all the young men did when they made their tour, as if the philosopher were a monument similar to Chartres or Notre-Dame. Voltaire's dressing gown was faded and his wig shabby, but he had beautiful soulful eyes. Axel said, almost as beautiful and soulful as my own. Of course they were all he could see of me-, he had no idea who I really was until I lifted the mask. Just for a second and then I was gone, leaving nothing behind except, I guess, an impression. Gold hair, white skin. "The prettiest and most amiable princess I know," as he told his sister.

Nor did
I
forget
him,
oh no, oh no. And sometimes found myself daydreaming about him, recalling his brooding look and agile body, his fine dark eyebrows and air of underlying sadness, as meanwhile I sat glued to that gold brocade loveseat in Adélaïde's apartments, embroidering my lumpish husband one pathetic vest after another and thinking,
This is where I'll be stuck all my life without company or friends.
Sifting through the ashes, weeping floods of tears.

Sorrow kills men, they say, gives life to women. A woman's heart is more alive than a man's, if less bold, and so with that heart of hers a woman can endure whatever comes her way.

But, for now, he had come back. Axel had come back and the night was sweet, the grass wet. Everything was joy, dancing and feasting. Hide-and-seek near the Temple of Love, blindman's buff on the terrace. Little roast pigs roamed crispy through the park, an orange in each mouth, a sprig of parsley in each ear, a knife and fork stuck upright in each back—my husband lay on the Temple steps, insensate from overeating. Antoinette! Antoinette! A chorus of voices, every one of them begging me to come play, every one of them not Axel's.

I couldn't rest until I found him. Or, better yet, till he found me, a white moth adrift on the night breezes.

I was headed more or less in the direction of the chateau, though why, I can't say, except possibly to trick fate into giving me what I wanted by appearing not to want it very much after all. I passed couples in rapt embrace, both vertical and horizontal. I passed men and women relieving themselves, some behind trees, others in the middle of the path. It was well after midnight, Cassiopeia descending, Antoinette ascending. The night was dazzlingly bright, the canal clear as air, weeds and stones gleaming at the bottom, a clump of waving cress, a sparkling pebble.

Drifting moth, drifting, drifting, almost as if my feet never touched the ground. Almost as if I had no feet, only wings, a quickly beating heart.

Who knows where I'd have come to light if it weren't for the lash in my eye? It was driving me mad; I thought I'd die if I couldn't get it out. I turned my back on Apollo's snorting golden horses, the moon casting my shadow before me on the Tapis Vert. I blinked. I pulled down my eyelid the way Papa had taught me. To either side, dense plantings of trees, their heads not yet thick with foliage, and up ahead the lit windows of the chateau, out of which everyone who wasn't at the Trianon, chiefly old people and sick people and servants, grudgingly monitored the night's festivities. Of course I was too far away for them to see me.

Too far away for them to see me blinking, tugging at my eyelid. Too far away to see the man dressed in white detach himself from the trees and approach, a finger to his lips.

I felt very alive. My eye was watering.

"Your Royal Highness," he said. His French was perfect, without a trace of a Swedish accent.

I asked him why he'd been avoiding me all evening, and he put on an expression of amazement. "
I
avoiding
you?
" he asked, then took me by the hand and led me into the trees to the left. His skin was smooth and dry and warm enough to suggest great stores of banked fire deep inside.

"Joséphine," he said, and I heard a catch in his voice, almost as if he were a young man again and his voice just starting to change. "I've said something to upset you."

"But I'm not crying," I told him, laughing. "There's something in my eye."

He drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket, licked one corner into a tip, cupped my head in his hand, and leaned in close. "Shhh. Don't move," he ordered. His breath always—always!—sweet like a child's, since he drank very little and never smoked a pipe and had adamantine teeth. My husband's opposite in every way but one, assuming, that is, I wasn't blind to the signs of true love.

"Better?" he asked.

"Now I get to make a wish," I said.

First the trees clustered thick around us, their trunks still giving off the day's heat, while the air that stirred between them grew cooler, darker. There was no pattern to their arrangement, and wildflowers clustered between their roots, anemone and violets. Little wild animals as well, rabbits, squirrels.

Axel guided our way through the trees, moving lightly but purposefully, his arm around my waist. I had no idea where he was taking me, and it was such a relief for once not to know—not to anticipate, you might say, the wheeling in of the toilet table after the wheeling off of the bathtub—that I didn't ask.

"I've told my sister about you," he said, looking down at me, his eyes black and avid. World of wild things, foxes, human glances. "She says she hopes the two of you will be good friends, and bade me warn you not to take my moods too seriously."

"You must give her two kisses—here and here—sister to sister, and reassure her that aside from matters of state, I take nothing seriously."

"Antoinette—"

"Shhh!" I admonished. "I refuse to listen. It's Midsummer's Eve. If you so much as
think
a serious thought, I will vanish into thin air. I promise. "

"But it's only because I care about you, you must believe me. Antoinette, dearest. The world is changing. Hear me out. The people of France hate you."

"Thank you very much."

"No, look at me! Joséphine! They want a Queen without flaw, but they also want no Queen at all. When you sit among them in a Paris theater, dressed as they are, they call you common, and when you leave them for Versailles, and put on your diamonds, they call you traitor."

Of course these may not have been our exact words, though they're close enough, at least in spirit.

Just as the planting of trees which Axel guided us through may not have been to the left of the Tapis Vert, but to the right, meaning that when I finally turned to him and said that all I really wanted was for him to help me find a way out, it may not have been in the North Quincunx, but the South, where we suddenly found ourselves.

Of course I'd been there many times before, only never from that direction, through the thick, patternless woods. Never on Midsummer's Eve, never with Count Axel Fersen.

It was as if, in the midst of life's bountiful yet confusing array of details—bark and leaves and rabbits and eyes; moon and stars, even, warnings, kisses—we had suddenly been vouchsafed a view of death.

I say death, though I ought not.

Ought instead to explain that where once there had been no plan or pattern, where once the space around us had been filled with trees like the Bull's Eye Chamber with aimlessly swarming courtiers, with trunks and limbs and twigs and leaves and
nature,
we now found ourselves in a place where the trees had arranged themselves according to the principle of the five-spot in a deck of cards, with a tree occupying each of the four corners of a square, a fifth the center, and the whole motif extending indefinitely outward.

The same earth beneath our feet, the same sky overhead, and yet we might have been in another world entirely.

Not one tree too many, not one out of place.

What is more beautiful than the well-known Quincunx, which, in whatever direction you view it, presents straight lines?

So said Quintilian, who also said that the perfection of art is to conceal art.

Nor does it matter, really, if Axel was my lover, in the physical sense at least. That isn't what matters, I know that now. It matters to historians, most of them men. It matters to gossips, most of them women. The pleasure is in the speculation.

My sister Carlotta made me eat sweet woodruff; it was early summer. My mother rode past us on her horse and for the first time I noticed they both had the same enormous buttocks. The air was fresh and blue, the grass new and green. Hope means if there once was a lash in your eye it will never be anything but that, no matter how old you live to be. Carlotta and I pricked our thumbs on a pricker bush; we mixed our blood and swore our undying love. You can always come back to a place, even if it isn't there anymore. The Labyrinth became the Quincunx, the Quincunx became nothing. It's always just
you,
even when your lover calls you Joséphine.

Inside the Quincunx, Axel and I were more alone than two stones at the bottom of a pool. It was the summer solstice; the nights were getting shorter, the dreadful winter of 1784 fast approaching.

There were thirty-nine fountains tucked away within the Labyrinth, and the Labyrinth itself tucked into a shady corner of the palace grounds, west of the Orangerie, south of the Latona Gardens, and north of the aqueduct carrying water to the town of Versailles.

Each fountain was based on one of Aesop's fables, though interestingly never on those about lions. The Monkey King, the Parliament of Rats, the Rooster and the Diamond, the Hare and the Tortoise—there were almost two hundred animals in all, all of them exquisitely cast in lead and gilt-painted, their gold mouths wide open, spewing forth bright jets of water.

The Sun King had the Labyrinth built for his heir, the so-called Grand Dauphin, alone among his six legitimate children to survive the court doctor's passion for bloodletting. A sweet-natured person, and also quite handsome until he grew fat, the Grand Dauphin. In the end the court doctors got him as well, leaving him empty as a glove, after which the Grey Sisters prepared him for burial. Or maybe it was the chateau floor polishers, or the workmen who made the coffin. Accounts vary.

Though when you think about it, isn't this the lesson of a labyrinth? You walk in filled with eager anticipation of the marvels that await you, racing along the boxwoodlined paths as if actually guided by some intrinsic sense of destination, only to find yourself in a dark little cul-de-sac, face to face with a gilt-painted lead rat on the back of a gilt-painted lead frog.

Of course the Sun King's intentions for the Labyrinth seem to have been somewhat less metaphysical. Aesop's pragmatic, you might even say
cold,
view of human relations deeply appealed to him, and he hoped to impress them by whatever means possible on the Grand Dauphin's dreamy sensibility.

The Labyrinth could be entered by means of a special key, in the keeping of Bishop Bossuet, the sadistic tutor.
Come, come,
Bossuet would implore in a fed-up tone.
For the love of God, lift your feet.
As often happens, the boy's gentle spirit stimulated the tutor's desire to inflict pain; soon enough Bossuet had beaten any love of learning out of his charge, who grew into what we'd call a nonentity if it weren't for the fact that he was heir apparent to the French throne. The Grand Dauphin loved playing card games, hunting for wolves, ugly women, and collecting art, though not necessarily in that order. Frequently he could be seen drumming his fingers on the lid of his snuffbox. "Like a ball to be rolled hither and thither at the will of others," according to Saint-Simon, "drowning in fat and gloom."

Bossuet would unlock the gate at the main entrance, flanked on the left by a statue of the fabulist himself, on the right by a statue of Love. Bowing, ironic
—After you, Monseigneur.
The Labyrinth astir with bees, the almost ducklike voices of the actual (as opposed to lead) frogs living in the thirty-nine fountains, the shifting shadows of millions upon millions of leaves.

Straight ahead, then right, then right again, then left. The Duke and the Birds. The Eagle and the Fox. The Dragon, the Anvil, and the File.

A Dragon wanted to eat an anvil,
wrote Aesop. And there the Dragon was, disgruntled and golden, coiled in his shadowy lair with water shooting from his mouth and nostrils.
A File said to him. "You'll break off your teeth before you even begin to bite into that, whereas I can chew my way through anything.
"