Versailles (9 page)

Marie-Thérèse Charlotte. Popularly known as Madame Royale, and nicknamed Mousseline la Sérieuse by her doting parents. A pretty child, with her mother's clear fair skin and large blue eyes, the older she grew and the more male siblings she acquired, the more her habitual gravity turned to sullenness, the sort of dusty limp look a sun-loving plant, a daisy for instance, develops when stuck in a shady part of the garden.

She would outlive them all, La Sérieuse, ending her days deep in the woods in a dark stone house, with only mice and squirrels and owls and the occasional fox for company. A persistent sighing of wind in the trees, a constant rain of leaves and acorns. A leaky roof, a smoking fireplace. Once upon a time she was a princess and she was crying because she was teething, and she was holding onto her father's finger as she sat on his lap in a wing chair covered in white
gros de Tours.
She loved to hold onto that finger, so long and plump and warm, with a consoling knob of knuckle in the middle and a smooth gold ring at the base. Big white clouds sailing past the window, and her father giving off his usual smell of sweat and horse manure and wine. Her mother playing the harp. Pling pling pling. I had a little nut tree and nothing would it bear.

La Sérieuse died in 1851 at the age of seventy-two, the same year Louis Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor. The house fell into ruins and was sold as scrap. Eventually the road to Quimper was built over the place where it had stood.

The English-style garden of Montreuil, the Prince and Princesse de Guéménéee's small yet graciously appointed chateau. It is a brilliant afternoon in early autumn, 1782; the Princesse is seated on a stone banquette, surrounded by her dogs. She is wearing a simple white lawn dress in the Creole style currently favored by the Queen, and a wide-brimmed straw hat, its blue ribbons loose and dancing in the breeze. Her eyes are closed.

 

P
RINCESSE: HOW
out of sorts
I
feel today, my darlings! Not unlike a soup tureen in the hands of a clumsy servant, if you know what I mean. Come closer. Speak to me. Set my mind at ease.

C
OOKIE
: Hark, hark, the dogs do bark...

P
OUNCE
: The beggars are coming to town...

P
RINCESSE
: Please. You're just making things worse.
She rubs her temples and sighs.
I want good news. Tell me some good news. The war in America? My dear friend Antoinette? Her adorable children?

W
INNIE
: Your dear friend Antoinette has an income of between three and four million
livres
a year.

P
EARL
: She also has one hundred seventy new dresses since January. White spots on a lavender ground. Gosling green with white spots. Mottled lilac.

L
ULU
: Spots are all the rage.

W
INNIE
: Not to mention she's more beautiful than ever. Everythingthat astonishes the soul leads to the sublime—Diderot said that.

P
EARL
: Infernal depths, darkened skies, deep seas, somber forests. The war in America is over, by the way.

P
RINCESSE
: Hush, hush. You've made your point.

P
OUNCE
: A clear idea is another name for a little idea.
He bares his teeth and, growls.

C
OOKIE
: Pounce is a very clever boy, but dangerous.

L
ULU
: He's a very bad boy.

 

A shower of yellow leaves blows in from stage left; Pearl paws at the Princesse's shoe, whining.

 

P
RINCESSE
: This wind! If it doesn't let up soon I'm going to have to go inside.

P
EARL
: But
I
thought you wanted to hear about the adorable children. Don't you want to hear about them?

P
RINCESSE
: Yes. That's right. I do.

C
OOKIE
: The little girl is solid as a rock, but the Dauphin's a mess. His vertebrae are put together wrong.

P
RINCESSE:
I'm their governess. All
I
have to do is look at them to know that.

C
LIO
,
angry:
Then what more do you expect? You of all people should know that the future is off-limits, even to the dead.

C
OOKIE
: You of all people.

 

More leaves blow in; the dogs become suddenly watchful, tense, their muzzles raised, their ears pricked. The wind lifts the Princesses hat from her head and carries it, ribbons atwirl, toward the chateau.

 

P
RINCESSE
: Stop please!

C
OOKIE
: But we can't. We can't.

F
LOSS:
You of all people should know that we can't stop anything.

P
EARL
: Where the sheep is tied, it must graze.

C
OOKIE
: Famine and pestilence.

W
INNIE
: Fire and flood.

 

Suddenly everything is in motion, the agitated dogs, the blowing leaves, the Princesses gauzy white skirts. A combined sound of barking and snarling and howling can be heard, as well as the leaves' dry rattle and the flapping of fab - ric. And then, just as suddenly, the wind dies down; everything becomes perfectly still. By the time the Prince enters, stage right, the Princesse is paging through her breviary, and the dogs are lying in various postures of repose throughout the leaf-strewn garden. The Prince de Guéménée is a heavyset middle-aged man with a wild look in his eye. He is wearing a dove gray frock coat and tan riding breeches; his thinning white hair is braided into a pigtail and tied with a black ribbon.

 

P
RINCE
: Where on earth have you been, my darling? I've been looking everywhere, calling and calling.

P
RINCESSE,
setting her breviary aside:
Nowhere but here, my darling.

P
OUNCE
: Nowhere but nowhere, don't you mean?

 

The Prince sinks heavily onto the banquette beside the Princesse and heaves a loud sigh.

 

P
RINCE
: Then you haven't heard.

P
RINCESSE
: Heard what?

P
RINCE
: That we are ruined.

P
RINCESSE
: Indeed.
She laughs nervously.
And shall we have nothing to eat but pig swill from now on?

P
RINCE
: Please, my darling. Try to be serious. Our debt is somewhere in excess of thirty-three million
livres.

P
RINCESSE
: Ours and everyone else's.

P
RINCE
: You don't understand. Debt is like building a castle in the air, stone by stone by nonexistent stone. To be free of a tangle you must borrow, to borrow you must be at ease, to be at ease you must spend. And then one day a real crack appears, and the whole thing falls in a heap at your feet.
He puts his head in his hands.

L
ULU
: Like faith.

O
PHELIA:
A castle built to the glory of God will never fall.

P
RINCESSE
: But you can't live in it, can you?
Can
you?

P
RINCE
: My darling, please try to concentrate.
I
've had to declare bankruptcy.

O
PHELIA
: With faith, two fish can feed thousands.

P
OUNCE
: Not if there's a cat around.

P
RINCESSE: YOU
aren't answering me.

L
ULU
: Death to the cats!

 

And if I had it to do over? Would I choose to live my life differently?

What a question!

Change even the smallest detail, the eyelash that got in your eye that summer night when Count Axel Fersen—beloved Axel!—spirited you off with him to the North Quincunx, and the next thing you know you're an old woman raising pigs in the Perigord. An ugly old woman with multiple chins and liver spots and a head where a head's supposed to be, attached to a neck, that is, which is in turn attached to a body.

Joséphine, he called me. A pet name, though of course I remained Antoinette, just as the Quincunx used to be called the Great Labyrinth.

They amount to the same thing, choice and fate. No one made me be Queen, and yet. "You took the trouble to be born, nothing more," wrote Beaumarchais.

Say goodbye to the eyelash in your eye and you say goodbye to your eye, as well. Eyebrow, eyelid. Antoinette, goodbye, you say.

Nor would you necessarily end up old and ugly and a woman. You could be King of Sweden, for instance, a handsome young count tucked firmly under your wing. You could be a butcher, a cow. Even the handsome young count himself, tucked there firmly yet, I have no doubt whatsoever, platonically, despite the King's famous appetite for handsome young men.

In the beginning the bodies stand empty, like milk pails waiting to be filled. Then the spirit is apportioned, completely at random, and once it's been poured in, that's that. There's no room for leaks or spillage. You can catch the measles from your brother-in-law. You can eat roast beef. You can take a lover, give birth. But no matter how close the proximity, it's only your flesh that's changed, only your flesh that sprouts a rash or puts on weight or bursts into sweat. No matter how close the proximity, you'll never end up with a trace of cow-spirit.

No matter how old you live to be, that is what you are, through and through. Like a tree, when it's sawed in half, or a body that's been torn to pieces by a mob.

It was the summer of 1784. Everyone said I was at my most radiant. I had my two dear children and was once again pregnant, in the early stage that leaves you flushed and bright-eyed and nauseated. My husband was busy making preparations for a French expedition to the Pacific. We'd won the war in America. My mother was dead.

I was in love.

The gardens around the Petit Trianon had been lit with log fires and fairy lights. Anyone who wanted could walk there after supper, provided they could still walk after dining on forty-eight entremets and sixteen roasts, and provided they were wearing white.

The white was my rule. I wanted everything to be perfect. Perfectly beautiful, the sky as dark and endlessly translucent as the Hall of Mirrors at midnight, the moon a dazzling milk white globe, and the courtiers drifting along the pathways in their white clothing like moths.

Everything perfect except, no surprise, my husband, who'd come out wearing shoes that didn't match.

I was in agony, I admit. As if the shoes were a moral failing.

Louis was keyed up, and not just because he'd spent the whole afternoon studying maps of the Sandwich Islands, but also because he wanted to make a good impression on the aforementioned Swedish King, who was considered at the time to be our best bulwark against Russia, as well as Europe's leading enlightened despot. A great theater lover, Gustavus enjoyed traveling incognito. Though unlike my brother he was quite the fashion plate, having made his entrance at Versailles disguised as Turkish royalty.

Louis said I was to spare no expense in planning a party. My favorite directive, even though I knew I'd come in for the same dreary criticism soon enough. Of course I had my own reasons for wanting the event to be a success, an occasion that would not only reflect the grandeur of the French court, but would also provide a brilliant setting for me, Antoinette, the brightest jewel of all.

Poor girl, so full of expectations! She had no idea, no idea at all...

We were to have a new opera, performed on the stage of the Trianon theater. Called
The Sleeper Awakened,
it was based on a story from th
e Arabian Nights
about an ordinary citizen named Hassan who becomes a caliph and then falls in love with a slave girl. I'd chosen it myself, as it required the endless costume changes Gustavus was said to adore.

Poor poor Antoinette, turning this way and that in her chair to survey the audience. Where
is
he? Poor sad Hassan, renouncing his throne for love.

You can generally count on a sodomite to appreciate the company of witty and fashionable women; Gustavus clearly found me irresistible, or at least until it was time for bed. "The Queen spoke to all the Swedish gentlemen and looked after them with the utmost attention," he later reported, though whether he was slyly hinting at my attention to one Swedish gentleman in particular, who's to say?

Gustavus was a tall man with an extremely high forehead and the stubbornly impassive look of a sheep, though whatever his face lacked in expression he made up for with his hands, which were, as he was well aware, his finest feature. He wrung them to indicate anguish, fluttered them to show amusement, waved them around in time to the music. When he clapped, he held his hands absolutely upright as if getting ready to pray, so you couldn't fail to notice how long and graceful his fingers were, how exquisitely manicured his nails.