Versailles (4 page)

 

She exits stage rear, ostensibly to chase the offending party a way, and returns with a discarded leek from the refuse pile.
I will give you one last chance.
She stares intently at Jean-Claude, positioning the drooping vegetable at her crotch and deepening her voice.
Try as I might, my insatiable sweetheart, I cannot manage to hit love's bull's-eye.

 

J
EAN-CLAUDE,
shocked, as light finally dawns:
Oh. But that is blasphemy. They are our King and Queen. The King and Queen of France.

B
READ,
singing:

The King is a lout and
The Queen is a whore
Make them ride in the carriage
With thirty-six doors.

Françoise ornaments her hair with the leek, as if it were a feather.

FRANÇOISE
: Kiss me! Fill me with your royal broth! But wait.
I
forget myself. You'd rather be pounding the royal forge.

JEAN-CLAUDE:
As a woman, you should be sad for her, rather than making fun.

FRANÇOISE,
pulling a solemn face:
I
am
sad for her. She is so beautiful and clever, and he is a gluttonous dullard.

B
RIGITTE
: Allow me to remind you that, clever or dull, they'll both have our hides if we don't get these cherries pitted. Not to mention that what they do behind the doors of the royal apartments is none of our business.

JEAN-CLAUDE
: Besides, she should be glad not to be saddled like my poor little mother with as many brats as there are holes in a sieve.

BREAD,
singing:

Poor little mother
Poor little brats
Poor little Queen
With her million hats.

 

But oh! how exciting it was. You will have to take my word for it, really and truly exciting, the way even the smallest event of a life—like having your hair dressed, let alone being crowned Queen of France—can seem when you're young, before you've gotten a glimpse of the final shape of a thing, or even realized that final shapes exist.

When I first arrived at Versailles, everything was new to me. I would be out walking and I'd smell a flower of such astonishing sweetness it would take my breath away, and I would think, WHAT IS THAT? Or a little round object would suddenly fall on my head, and I would think, WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?

Later I'd discover that the one was jasmine from Spain, the other a black walnut from America, and I was utterly excited, as if no one had ever seen such things before.

Imagine! Antoinette, not so very different from Jacques Carrier, first Frenchman to clap eyes on a polar bear. As if a huge white creature that could devour you in one bite were the same as a walnut.

Of course I mock myself, but everyone knows what I mean. The first time you look out your window and see that it started snowing during the night and is snowing still—and when you fly down a hill on your sleigh it feels as if stars are beating against your face. You want it to happen again and again and again.

Which is how it was in the first days of my queen-hood as I watched the wardrobe women arrive with their basketloads of underclothes, handkerchiefs, and towels, as well as armloads of dresses from which to choose the ones I'd wear that day. The black? Or the black? Possibly the black. We were in mourning, but all of the dresses, being Rose Bertin's handiwork, were of the most exquisite fabric and cut.

My windows slightly open and facing south—even the mildest breeze carried with it the smell of orange blossoms. Southern light, light from the Midi, turning the crystal facets of my chandeliers to honey. I was the Queen of France! The Queen of France, bathing her soft white body (chastely hidden under a flannel gown) in her swan-shaped tub on wheels. The Queen of France donning her taffeta wrapper and dimity slippers, before returning to bed for a breakfast cup of chocolate and a breakfast roll, Eggplant curled adoringly at her feet.

Then the door leading to the Salon of the Nobles would fly open (letting in a faint whiff of stink from those endless unlit hallways where the lowest of the low tunneled their invisible way throughout the chateau) and the parade would begin. Abbé Vermond with some tiresome piece of state business, or occasionally a letter from my mother. "Madame my dear daughter"—for so she addressed me—"They say one cannot tell the Queen from the Princes, that they are shockingly familiar with you..." And who might be this
they
who told her that? None other than Count Florimund Mercy d'Argentau, blabbermouth Austrian envoy to the court, planted there by Madame my dear mother, and otherwise known as Mercy.

Next my two brothers-in-law, the so-called familiar Princes of the Blood, fat pedantic Provence, and elegant witty Artois (whose observation that there was only one King of France, and that was the Queen, Mercy couldn't let slip to my mother fast enough), followed by the little Princesse de Lamballe, a pretty but not especially bright widow of two and twenty, who would wring her unnaturally gigantic hands and burst into tears at the least provocation, a trait I willfully mistook for warmheartedness, so eager was I to have a girlfriend more or less my own age. All of them sitting there watching me drink my chocolate and eat my roll, Vermond stiffly, Provence hungrily, Artois somewhat salaciously, as the Princesse de Lamballe discreetly blew her nose. A tableau I often found myself studying in the immense mirror on the opposingwall, where all of us appeared ludicrously small in comparison to the furniture, like dolls made to live in the wrong size dollhouse.

At some point the toilet table would be rolled in and the Grande Toilette would commence, during which Monsieur Léonard would do my hair while a crowd of high court officials, including those ill-dressed hags pushing forty I'd made the mistake of referring to as "bundles," looked on, their panniers mashed together. Initially they came to ooh and aah and garner fashion tips, but eventually, I'm sony to say, their chief objective was to compile evidence against me, and not just (as I thought) because I was so much better looking, even with my hair in curling papers, but also (as my mother had to keep on reminding me) because I was Austrian.

As if marrying Louis could undo centuries of enmity between our two countries. As if I had always been, was, and would always be Antonia, never Antoinette. As if on the stroke of twelve I could remove my face the way I'd remove my mask at a ball, revealing my true monstrous aspect.

Or, as the pamphleteers wrote:

 

Little Queen of twenty-one,
If you don't stop making fun,
We'll kick you straight back home.

 

After Léonard took off the curling papers, he frizzed my hair with a hot iron, combed it out with nettle juice, powdered it with bean flour, then mounted a ladder in order to affix the horsehair cushion that would form an armature for the final hairdo.

Cypresses and black marigolds and wheat sheaves and fruit -filled cornucopias—a hairdo reminding everyone that while they mourned the loss of one King, they also looked forward to the bounty the next would bring. Or how about the Inoculation Hairdo, commemorating the Princes' victory over smallpox? One day Léonard made me Minerva. One day he made me an English garden with lawns, hills, and streams. One day he made me the world.

Really, you could put anything on your head your head your head ... so long as it didn't (excuse me) snap your neck.

Léonard used long steel pins to hold the cushion in place and combed my own hair up over it. Then he matted everything down with pomade, creating a kind of moist hive under which fleas and lice bred, and soon enough there wasn't a fashionable lady alive who wasn't using a long thin stick identical to the one Léonard made for me, complete with a little ivory claw, to scratch away at her scalp like mad.

Whatever I did, everyone wanted to do; whatever I wore, everyone coveted. First they wanted to copy me, then they began to hate me.

But,
comme on dit,
one must suffer to be beautiful.

It took forever, the royal
lever.

By the time Louis got there he'd have been up for hours, hammering away on his forge, shooting at cats, or watching the arriving guests through his telescope. My poor dear Louis, squinting his pale blue nearsighted eyes in an effort to locate me within that thicket of courtiers and under that mountain of hair. Smiling with delight when he finally did, while attempting to appear cool and detached.

"Bonjour, la Reine," he would say. Never one for nicknames or wordplay of any sort, my Lou-Lou, drawing up his chair, companionable. After our initial awkwardness, once we got the fact out of the way that two people couldn't possibly have less in common than a reclusive locksmith and his impudent wife, we actually became quite close, more or less along the lines of Aphrodite and Hephaestus. Just as the pamphleteers would later suggest, aiming merely to hurt but none theless hitting the target, in that vexing way that cruelly can sometimes approximate truth.

So sweet, my Louis. What was he doing in that nest of vipers?

"I had a dream," I recall him once confiding. "It was in another century, but the doors opened and shut the same way."

There were more than two hundred ways to get in and out of Versailles, not counting windows. Of course the door you used depended on who you were: for instance, the kitchen gardener's third assistant's lackey, delivering cherries, would have entered through a so-called Dutch door located at the nethermost tip of the south wing; whereas the rakish Due de Lauzun liked to sneak in through a door of the type that would come to be known as French, off the Large Reception Room; and the Archduke Maximilian, arriving for a visit in February of 1775, waddled in through one of three imposing gilt-grilled doors on the south wall of the Marble Court. This was the Queen's brother—her dear little Maxie—who had, as a child of three, decked out in a blue velvet coat, white twill breeches, and white silk stockings, transported guests with his ability to recite Italian verse from memory, but who had become, at fifteen, no longer cute.

February. Low gray skies and a dusting of snow. Snow disturbed by the carriage wheels, like bean flour in a draft. The Archduke rides with his head hanging out the window and his mouth open, catching snowflakes on his tongue. Both he and his sister adore snow and always have. When Antoinette was a little girl she told him she was made of snow, and he couldn't sleep, terrified that he'd come into her room in the morning and find nothing but a puddle.

Definitely not cute, the Archduke Maximilian—slow, rather, and grossly fat, as well as harelipped and given to "smudging" his consonants—though that's hardly reason for the Princes of the Blood to cut him, as they do. No sooner has he huffed and puffed his way up among the noisy stinking throng of courtiers and servants and messengers and sedan chairs crowding the Queen's Staircase, barely escaped the humiliation of walking smack into a
trompe I'oeil
vista at the head of the stairs, negotiated the narrow corridor that gives through an arcaded opening onto the Room of the Queen's Guard, made his way past the series of ornate gilt-painted doors that lead from the Queen's Antechamber to the Salon of the Nobles and into the Queen's Bedchamber, than Provence and Artois have hightailed it out the door at the rear of the bedroom, into the Salon of Peace and thence through the Hall of Mirrors (a million ungainly Provences, a million handsome Artoises) to the King's Bedchamber, where they collapse on a sofa in its winter upholstery of thick red velvet embroidered with over a hundred and twenty pounds of gold thread and break out laughing.

According to protocol, the Princes of the Blood are supposed to call on the Archduke, not the other way around. Certainly they aren't supposed to lead the Archduke a merry chase.

But is it Antoinette's naivete that permits her to trivialize the incident? Or is it, rather, her disdain for whatever it is in the French character that finds such protocol of vital importance? In fact the Princes are engaging in a political act that is openly hostile, but Antoinette is more interested in the steady accumulation of the snow, the way it's making the conical topiary on the Southern Terrace look like the little wooden trees in the manger scene she used to be allowed to play with at Christmas, before she took the Baby Jesus off to her room and lost it. The snow is turning the parterre's dark green love knots white and piling up on the heads of the statues, making them look like bewigged courtiers rather than Greek gods and goddesses.

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. Antoinette's heart beats faster, though she has no one in mind, or maybe someone, but no one in particular. They'll ride out in a sledge, she and Maxie, just like when they were children. Later, boiled chicken, a potato. He isn't clever enough for cards, but maybe the Princesse de Guéménée can be persuaded to read his fortune. A little adventure, a little romance? A rendezvous at shepherd's hour with a mysterious dark-haired woman?

Not likely, given the harelip.

Snow falling softly, softly. Snow covering the 11,520 black and white paving stones of the Marble Court, where carriage traffic is strictly forbidden. Snow falling on the 250 carriages waiting in the Forward Court for their owners, and on the hatless head of the kitchen gardener's third assistant's lackey, waiting against an espaliered fruit tree for the arrival of Françoise, with whom he has been having a little dalliance, though tonight he will wait and wait, growing more and more furious to have been jilted on Valentine's Eve, without realizing that meanwhile Françoise is watching the first macule erupt on her pretty forehead and does not need her cards read to know she's doomed.

How late it is getting! The snow still falling though lighter now, little flakes through air made wet and fresh by the storm, an oddly pale lucent darkness. And footprints everywhere, up and down the Stairways of the Hundred Steps, along the Infants' Walk as far as the Neptune Fountain, in and out of the bosquet at the Baths of Apollo, and around and around Air, Water, Earth, and Fire; Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall. Footprints of messengers and courtiers, lovers and thieves. Rabbits and deer. Murderers. Foxes.