Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette (P.S.) (2 page)

History, like fiction, is in many cases a matter of interpretation, especially when one tries to understand motivations or to link causes and effects. My readers may well wonder how accurate a historical portrait is presented in these fictive pages. Relying primarily on contemporary scholarship, I have tried to imagine the Marie Antoinette story accurately and to achieve a degree of understanding of this traditionally misunderstood and often maligned queen. Often, I have tried to employ phrases, translated into English, available in the historical record—initially recorded in memoirs by those who heard her remarks or surviving in real letters exchanged between Marie Antoinette and her mother, the Empress of Austria.

Within this novel the reader will hear Marie Antoinette, when she first sets foot in France, spontaneously ask her hosts in Strasbourg, France, to speak to her only in French, not in German, implying how fully she wished to embrace her new identity as French; she actually did say the words given her in this novelistic rendering of the occasion. Likewise, at the end of this novel, when Marie Antoinette mounts the scaffold to the guillotine, the words she speaks were her actual words. Many readers will expect to meet in these pages the Marie Antoinette of tradition, a woman reputed to have said, when informed that the people of eighteenth-century France were starving, “If they have no bread, then let them eat cake.” But that notorious retort will not be found here. Why? She never said it, and contemporary biographers, such as Antonia Fraser, have taken care to vindicate Marie Antoinette in this matter. That heartless sentence was the speech of another queen, the wife of Louis XIV, not Louis XVI, a hundred years before a very young and innocent Marie Antoinette traveled by horse-drawn coaches from Austria to France to marry the Dauphin destined to inherit the throne of France.

The fate of this charming, beautiful, extravagant princess is well known, but through imagination, based on research, the reader will experience her life as she lived it moment to moment. Full of human needs, fears, and talents, Marie Antoinette engaged life with an abundance of feeling and met death with heroic courage, during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. I have written this novel believing that her life, one often marked by compassion and gaiety, like all our lives, is a valuable one.

Like everyone, I am born naked.

I do not refer to my actual birth, mercifully hidden in the silk folds of memory, but to my birth as a citizen of France—
citoyenne,
they would say. Having shed all my clothing, I stand in a room on an island in the middle of the Rhine River—naked. My bare feet occupy for this moment a spot considered to be neutral between beloved Austria and France. The sky blue silk of my discarded skirt wreathes my ankles, and I fancy I am standing barefooted in a puddle of pretty water.

My chest is as flat as a shield, marked only by two pink rosebuds of nipples. I refuse to be afraid. In the months since I became fourteen, I’ve watched these pleasant rosebuds becoming a bit plump and pinker. Now the fingers and hands of my attendants are stretching toward my neck to remove a smooth circlet of Austrian pearls.

I try to picture the French boy, whom I have never seen, extending large hands toward me, beckoning. What is he doing this very moment, deep in the heart of France? At fifteen, a year older than myself, he must be tall and strong. There must be other words than
tall
and
strong
to think of—to describe him, to help me imagine and embody his reality.

My mother, Empress of Austria, has told me how to anticipate the meeting of our bodies and all the events of my life to come; I am always in her prayers. Every month I will write to her and she to me, and our private letters will travel by our own couriers between France and Austria. When I try to picture my future husband, Louis Auguste, standing in the forests of France with hands and arms outstretched to me, I can only envision my most dear mother, dressed in black, sitting behind me like a dark wedge at her desk; she awaits the courier bearing a white rectangular packet, the envelope that represents me.

After I am married at Versailles, when Louis Auguste and I are alone in bed, certain events will follow. We will copulate through the door at the bottom of my body; next, I become pregnant. Nine months after my marriage I give birth to a baby. There will be many witnesses when my body, then age fifteen, opens to produce a future king. Years from then, after my husband has died, this baby will be the seventeenth Louis, King of France. This is what I know.

While my ladies flutter like bright butterflies around me, I glance at my naked body, a slender worm. Louis Auguste and I must be much the same, as all humans are really much the same, except for the difference of sex. We all have two legs—mine are slender—supporting a torso; two arms sprout on either side of a bodily cabinet, which contains the guts and bladder in the lower compartment and the heaving lungs and heart in the upper section. In between, for women, is the chamber called the womb. From the trunk, a neck rises up like a small lookout tower whose finial is the head.

Mine is a graceful body—made strong by dancing and riding—and of a milky porcelain color. Recently a few curly threads emerged from the triangle between my legs. Squeezing my thighs together, I try to shelter this delicate garden because my new hair seems frail and flimsy.

The French word for him, the prince who will become my husband and king, is
Dauphin,
and the French word for me, who will be his bride, is the same, but with a small letter
e
, curled like a snail in its flinty house, at the end of the word:
Dauphine.
I have many French words to learn.

My darling Austrian ladies sail around me in their bright silk dresses—cerise, and emerald, deep blue-with-yellow-stripes; their throats and sleeves bedecked with frothy, drooping lace. Like dancers, they bend and swoop to gather the garments I’ve shed; other ladies, standing patiently, hold my new French clothing folded across their forearms, cloth of gold and filmy lavender.

A flock of goose bumps sweeps over my bare flesh.

Antonia,
the pretty mouths of my ladies breathe,
Antonia.
Their eyes glisten with unshed tears, for I am about to abandon my old name.

The stern French require that I step forward, naked, with no ribbon, memento, ruby, or brooch of Austrian design. To my ladies, I display my open palms so they may witness and affirm that I leave empty-handed and am beholden in no way to my native Austria. Resplendent in rich colors, they draw near, in a solemn circle, to regard my vacant hands.

My nakedness complete, now I die as
Maria Antonia,
Archduchess of Austria, daughter of Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria.

To be her worthy daughter, I will that my chilled flesh unpucker itself and become all smooth and lovely. Clothed nobly in nothing but my own skin, described as
pearly
by some in its translucent sheen, I begin the donning of French clothes, no longer
Maria Antonia
but my French self, now named:
Marie Antoinette.

I
GASP
—my first damp breath of French air on this small island embraced by the arms of the rushing Rhine—and remember the admonition of my mother:
Do so much good to the French people that they can say that I have sent them an angel.

So said my mother, Empress of Austria, and I
will
love them, and they will love me, and I will love my husband, who is shy, they say, and the old King, Louis XV, who is not my future husband’s father (that Dauphin having died without his ever having become king) but his grandfather; and I will love the maiden aunts of my future husband, Louis Auguste, who will become Louis XVI, God willing (but not soon, not soon I hope and pray, for in fact I know that not only my unformed body but also my spirit is still that of a child), and I will love the Duc de Choiseul, the great foreign minister of France, who has made my happiness come about by mating me with Louis Auguste, whom I have never seen yet—and I will love the Count Mercy d’Argenteau, for he is Austrian—
Austrian!
—and my mother’s friend and our—no, not “our” but “the”—Austrian ambassador to France. I will love them all, especially Choiseul the foreign minister and Mercy the Austrian ambassador, even as I have been instructed always to love those who further our cause—the peace of Europe. And I will find new friends, my very own friends, to love as though they were sisters.

But now they say Mops is not to accompany me. Mops! More precious than any ornament of silver or gold because Mops is a living being who scampers across my heart with all four of his fast little feet! My loyal companion, Mops is not a
thing
to be abandoned! Mops has tender feelings. But it is this very loyalty, and mine to him, that disqualifies him for passage.

I place the heels of my hands, like broad stoppers, against my closed eyelids, behind which hot tears are collecting. Unfortunately, when I press inward, tears gush out and track my cheeks. Someone is pulling my hands away from my face. I must present a cheerful countenance to the French—no one needs to remind me. Making myself cheerful is my own chore, a task I must spare these kind souls around me. Because I hold no handkerchief or possess not so much as a sleeve with which to dry my tears, I hunch up the round of my bare shoulders, on each side, to wipe my eyes and cheeks.

Then
Mops, Mops!
I cry again, while my imploring hands beseech the empty air. He lifts his darling black-button pug nose and howls and yaps. Tossing his forelock from his brown eyes, he struggles to leap from the vise-grip of strong female hands. He cannot prevail, so he wags his tail like a little plumy flag, the best flag, the flag of my own heart to try to cheer me.
Au revoir
, Mops.

The bare ends of my toes yet touch the blue silk of Austria, puddled on the floor around my feet. Blue, blue as the Danube swirling through Vienna on a bright blue day. I believe silk and water
do
have something of the same fluid slipperiness.

My ladies would have me to step forth. It is the littlest toenail of the most little toe on the left foot that lastly brushes the fabric of the House of Hapsburg. All my being rushes into this insignificant toenail, not so big as a shiny sequin or a flake of trout skin. My toenail is like the loop on the letter
e
at the end of a word:
Dauphine.

Auf Wiedersehen
—my little toenail whispers to the silk. To think, that it is the tiniest toenail so honored, the last part of me tangent to home!

“She’s like Venus rising from the sea,” my Austrian attendant exclaims, to make me feel clothed in beauty. But I am rising from the Rhine and am the Daughter of the Danube.

“Like Flora, goddess of flowers, and a goddess herself,” another murmurs, so that I lift my chin, to be worthy, and I suck the air through my nostrils as though, indeed, I were smelling flowers, as though I were among lilacs in some enchanted garden—yes, a theatrical garden, on a floral stage. Trained by the best dramatic coaches of Europe, I raise my eyes and inhabit my role.

“You make too much of me,” I say gently and smile.

“How prettily she speaks.”

“They will adore her,” they say.

Emotion plays within their words as fragrance lives in flowers; their sympathy for me is fringed with fear.

Suppose the French do not adore me, neither the King, the Dauphin, nor the people?

“My sorrow is to leave you behind,” I say, performing serenity, but, lo, now I myself experience that feeling I have invented for their dear sakes.

Turning to embrace them once more—how strange to embrace someone who wears clothes, when you yourself wear none! Their skirts rustle and creep against my bare thighs, while their own firm legs are veiled in layers of fabric. My skin brushes against their silk ribbons, a stripe of velvet, hard jewels sewn against the colors of their skirts.

Unclothed, I feel less human than they, in their finery.

From outside this chamber, Mops barks once, distantly, in his high, sharp voice.
Punctuation!
my mother, the Empress, humorously used to say of such unexpected assaults on the ear.

Quickly, quickly, my darling Austrian attendants dress me in a chemise of creamy French silk, then come the sterner, scratchier petticoats from Paris. The soft stockings, they say, were knit in Lyons (but where is that?), and tapered-toe shoes made at their court—Versailles, and next the lilac skirt and bodice of gold, laced tight, and oh, snowy lace, half made of airy nothing, settles around my throat. Tenderly, I touch my neck and feel my skin, more delicate than swan’s down.

Does Mops still wear his blue silk collar, the silver buckle that I fastened this morning with my own fingers? They’ve carried him away.

In the place of furry Mops comes the stately Prince Starhemberg. Perhaps he is really Mops in disguise, transformed by fairies! If my sister, my best and dearest sister and also dearest friend, if my Charlotte were with me, she would smile at my fancy. Her sensibility is with me: they can never pry it from my soul! The Empress has selected Prince Starhemberg—short, sturdy, wrinkled of face—to be my trusted escort all the way to the depth of France, but I feel alone.

Clenching my fingernails into the heels of my hands, I wish again for my sister Maria Carolina, whom I call affectionately Charlotte, who loved just my own favorite card games and music and theatricals and sleighing and fun. I miss my Charlotte, already married and become the Queen of Naples, but I carry her in my heart.
Have your fun, daughters
, the Empress used to say,
before there are marriages and deaths, and alliances to be made.
She spoke to all of us, not necessarily to me, mostly forgotten, being the daughter in tenth place in the chain of diplomatic marriages, hence, tenth in my mother’s hopes—and love.
Have your fun
, she would say, exhaling a long slow breath that reminded me of the north wind,
for life is not all play
.

I look at the prince whose eyes are like my mother’s—direct, knowing, discreet. Then, can I trust him? I must, for I am clothed and named now in the French manner, and it is time to cross over, my hand in the crook of his arm.

When I hear the waters of the Rhine swirling around this island, I hear the sound of panic, even through the walls. Or is it the rushing of my blood through the vessels of my heart? Here the walls are smothered in tapestries; I gaze at myths of ancient, woven worlds, crowded spectacles that Prince Starhemberg and I must walk past. I see a feast table surrounded by flowers, lilies and roses. In a wedding scene, the banquet table is heavily laden; there, in a blue bowl, threaded apples sit beautifully round and red.

Dressed in the lavender loveliness of France, laced up with golden cord, I progress in my new silk shoes, which fit strangely and tip my body at an unfamiliar angle. I must move forward. The angle itself propels me. Does Louis Auguste try to visualize me? By chance, is he walking toward me at this moment? Does he reach out his hand—but pause, instead, to pick up a book bound in red leather and stamped with gold? I fear he may prefer reading to conversation, no matter how polished the phrases or how musical the tone of voice. I do not like to read. I prefer the garden—
mille fleurs—
to the library and its myriad, unfathomable books.

At home, my mother must be conferring with her ministers. In Vienna, brilliant men lend the suppleness of their minds to that of majesty, but I fear both women and men who are too bright and knowing. My older sister Marie Christine was very clever—and cruel—to us little ones, but she is the daughter most loved by our mother. Marie Christine wanted us to feel that we didn’t count. Perhaps my mother regrets that she could not make Marie Christine the Dauphine. Yet Fate, as well as my mother, has dealt me a card of Importance that far outweighs what marriage brought Christine. My hand on Prince Starhemberg’s velvet arm, I will myself not to tremble as we walk forward, my curved French heels sinking into the deep rug.