Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette (P.S.) (23 page)

While going on a hunting expedition,
the King has been taken ill. Because he felt uncharacteristically weak, he actually rode to the hunt in his carriage. Though he is now in his sixty-fourth year, he is of an unusually sturdy constitution. Perhaps in a perverse way, Louis XV’s life of debauchery has contributed to his physical vigor. This illness comes as a surprise. Of course everyone takes any illness of the King seriously, and the frivolous entertainments have been suspended in Paris.

Because of the King’s illness, it is imperative that Gluck’s production be terminated now after only a few days. Quite naturally, he is in despair, but I cannot intervene in any way.

A
FTER THE
K
ING
has been taken back in his carriage to the Grand Trianon, his private palace beyond the fountain of Apollo at the foot of the garden, he has continued to feel nauseated. While his ailment might have been caused by unfortunate eating—though the King has mostly retained his figure by
not
overeating—he also has a high fever. In the night at Trianon, Madame du Barry is summoned to ply cold cloths to his forehead, for he suffers from a terrific headache. Now he is no better, but I have not been informed if she is still in attendance.

Declaring “Versailles is the place to be sick,” his doctor has mandated his removal from the Grand Trianon to the château, a careful trip of only ten minutes. When I enter the sick chamber, crowded with doctors, I kneel by his bed and say, “Papa-Roi, all my prayers are for your recovery.”

Ever gallant, he replies, with closed eyes, “The mere sight of you gives me strength and a reason to live. I thank you for your sweet prayers.” To keep the light dim and comfortable, very few candles burn. Like a clock set to chime mechanically, his words to me are automatic. Though he enunciates from rote, his compliment has its usual charm of sincerity offered with affection, even though he is very weak. The dark blood under his skin makes me wonder if he shall not soon be bled.

Behind me, I hear someone murmur that the du Barry has been invited to care for him by night, though she is not among the present assemblage. Quickly I must give my place to one of the doctors, who wishes once again to take the King’s pulse.

Surrounding the bed are six physicians, five surgeons, three apothecaries. They are accompanied by sixteen attendants skilled in the art of nursing. Opinions are whispered back and forth as to the diagnosis, but no idea wins consensus.

The King himself appears helpless and bewildered. He knows that he who has ruled over the whole of France is now at the mercy of the expertise of these medical people. When he asks for water in a begging tone, I am the first to understand what he wishes, and I am honored to take the cup to his parched lips. He does not know who has helped him. I would attend him longer, in these simple ways, if it were allowed, but my aunts, his three daughters, have arrived, and I know that their claim is greater than mine.

I look from their grim faces to the window curtains, where a narrow slit tells me it is yet bright daylight outside. Feeling that the crack of light may hurt the King, I myself back up to it and quietly struggle to close the gap. A servant sees that the drapery is too heavy for me to move and comes with a long brass extender to push the rings along the high rod.

The King groans a long and piteous moan, and his daughters, in spite of themselves, echo his suffering. The chorus of woe is extremely unsettling. Is this what it comes to? I ask. Life? When he moans a second time, they have mastered their voices and make no sound except the kind of cluckings that mothers make to soothe sick children.

I
N THE EVENING
, the Dauphin and I sit waiting for news in the hall outside the large anteroom. Over and over the beads of the rosary slip through my fingers. The Dauphin’s face is set in a kind of anxious seriousness that lends a certain nobility to his features. We watch the Comtesse de Noailles quickly cross that great anteroom, packed with courtiers, which separates the King’s bedroom from the Dauphin and myself. The black space of night is visible through the oval-shaped window, the Oeil-de-Boeuf, and it seems as though a dark eye is looking down on the assembled mortals. Now Madame de Noailles slowly comes to speak to us. Even
her
sternly controlled face bespeaks sorrow instead of protocol. The closer she approaches, the more small, frightened, and childlike I seem to become.

“They have bled His Majesty twice,” she says, “but still no one knows the nature of the illness. I am commissioned to bring you to him to say good night.”

As we walk near the King’s bedroom, a terrible stench greets us.
He is rotting
, I think, and a wave of nausea, followed by a measure of panic, sweeps through me. What can be done? I remember my mother, and her great calm when faced with difficult or distressing scenes. Though I am walking through foul air, I lift my head and do not forget that I can yet move with grace.

Entering the room, I see that they have prepared a comfortable camp bed at the foot of the royal bed, and the King lies there, resting in the smaller but more accessible bed, his eyes closed. My shoes crunch spices that have been scattered on the floor to mask the horrible odor. The room has a degree of darkness I had not anticipated, and it is difficult to tell how many people are standing in the shadows.

I do not try to approach too closely but say in a clear voice, “May you sleep well this night, Papa-Roi, and awake restored.”

“Amen,” the Dauphin adds, and I hear his voice soaked with grief, not hope.

Suddenly someone ignites a torch and brings its blaze close to the King’s face. There we all see the red spots and pustules that speak smallpox. The King is asleep. As the room gasps, he makes no movement of recognition.

“We will stay to nurse him,” the voice of Madame Adelaide sounds in determined tones, full of pity for her father.

“I have been inoculated,” I say, “when I was a child. Let me stay with him, Mesdames, for you run a great risk.”

“I will be here always.” It is the voice of Madame du Barry, in the dark. Even now there is something languid in her voice, something too layered with honey.

Someone says to the Dauphin that he and his brothers must leave the sickroom and not return.

“But the King has always said that he had smallpox as a youth,” the Dauphin remarks.

“He was mistaken,” a physician says. “You must leave at once.”

It takes little courage for me to say again that I will gladly stay.

After the smallpox took so many of the family, the Empress bravely and wisely insisted that I and the others be inoculated. We could have died of the inoculation, but she weighed the advantages and the risks and bravely made the correct decision. Again I say, “I can nurse the King, whom I love so dearly, more safely than you, my aunts.”

At my elbow, I feel a hand—one determined to guide—the hand of Count Mercy, who tells me I must be a companion for my husband at this time. Remembering how many times the Empress has written me that she now speaks to me through Mercy, I acquiesce.

I
N THE
D
AUPHIN’S
apartment, we are quickly joined by the brothers of Louis Auguste and their wives. We six young people sit in silence. I am glad we are all together. We depart to our own chambers only to sleep.

N
O ONE TELLS
the King of the diagnosis. Day by day he grows steadily more ill. At some point, they
must
tell him, for he must make confession. When we are visited in our quarantine, I make the argument, on behalf of the King’s soul, for telling him of the gravity of his illness. Again and again I am told that there is yet time.

T
HIS IS THE NIGHT
of 3 May, and the King has been ill since 27 April. The Parisians were right to close the amusements. Still, my mind cannot embrace the fact that with the King’s departure from this life (sure to occur, if not with this illness, then in the future), the role of the Dauphin (and of myself) will change forever. No, I cannot imagine us without Papa-Roi present to make all the decisions while we play. Our ignorance is immense.

I walk to the window and look across the small interior courtyard to another window where a candle burns. Beautiful light, full of hope! As long as it burns, I know the King lives. The signal is prearranged: should he die, someone will snuff out the candle.

My soul feels bleak.

These interior courtyards are barren places where nothing green or pretty is visible. These open squares let in only air, light, odors, temperature; they are forgotten spaces, though apparently necessary. Nothing elevates them in the slightest above mere functionality. I find myself irritated with the minds of the architects responsible for this neglect. Hovering above the shaft, a snatch of night sky is visible. The night I learned the pleasures of gambling—now a favorite pastime—I entered a little apartment in the interior and coveted it.

Across the way, a single star burns steadily—perhaps the candle, like the star, will continue to glow and never be snuffed out.

F
ONDLY
, I
RECALL
how my mother called in new tutors for me, corrected my teeth, improved my French, discussed the role of religion in her life, talked to me of the needs and urges of the male body, and in a hundred other ways tried to prepare me for marriage and life at the court of Versailles. Now who will prepare me? Us? In whom can we have confidence, and why have they let us live as though our roles would never change?

For a moment, someone stands beside me. An emissary from the sickroom, because her clothes emanate the terrible decay of that room.

“The King knows,” Madame Campan, whose duty it is to read aloud to me at my request, murmurs. “He knows he is dying.”

“How does he know?” I ask in the same quiet tone, but everything inside me quakes with fear. Then must I too know the truth?

“He has looked at the flesh of his own hand and arm, brought it close to his eyes, and said without hesitation, ‘It is smallpox.’”

I hear the Dauphin burst into tears. He has feared his grandfather, but his sympathy for any human who must face his or her mortality is boundless.

Looking across the way at the lighted candle, I can only say, “The candle still burns.”

I think of the very long road that runs from Versailles to Vienna. Probably the Empress has moved to Schönbrunn now because spring is well on its way. As always, of course, I can rely on my mother. But she loves Austria more than she loves France—or me.

Not her love, but the gift of love by the people of France has come to me without stint. It is they who make me secure in my sense of worth. Through Count Mercy I will learn what is best for France and for the Alliance, and Louis Auguste, when he becomes King, will listen to me.

“Now my grandfather must be led to repent,” my husband says to someone. “For the du Barry, for all of them.”

Will we become King and Queen before we are truly husband and wife? The fact that I cannot assert my will over even that small rectangle of the marriage bed fills me with a frantic sadness. I have failed, but it is
not
my failure. My mother criticizes me for my frivolity, but so long as this…reticence…of my husband continues…I have a right to divert myself in whatever ways I can, so long as my virtue is never compromised. The bedside readings by gentle Madame Campan have not sufficed for a long time in soothing my restlessness.

4 M
AY
, deep night again. In these long days, we play no cards; we make no music. Sometimes the six of us speak of other deaths, in other lands. I do not tell them about the death of my father, how, as though he had had a premonition, he stopped the coach, descended, hugged my little body one last time. Here, they are not my true family, and my love for my father is too precious to show them.

I have sent for little Elisabeth and Clothilde to stay with us. They are both afraid, and Elisabeth leans close against my body, as close as the wide panniers of my skirt allow. She has a need for my bodily warmth to reassure her. I have asked that their favorite dogs and cats come with them, and their small hands seem to draw comfort in the act of stroking fur or watching the dogs and cats go about their oblivious play.

Here is an account of the King: he has told the du Barry that she must allow the Duc d’Aiguillon to take her to the château at Ruel. I wonder if hope has been with her till this moment. Now, even if he should survive this devastation, if he sends her away and repents, he will not recall her. No doubt she knows the story of the Duchesse de Châteauroux, who, thirty years ago, was sent away during an illness from which no one expected Louis XV to recover. When he did recover, he could not have her back, for fear of offending God.

They say he spoke to the du Barry with dignity, telling her that he must send her away, that he would not have kept her beside him in the sickroom had he known the nature of his illness, that he would always have “tender feelings of friendship” for her.

But she is finished.

I am too sad for the King—his waste of life, his enslavement to passion—to feel much triumph over this wanton woman. How I admired her golden beauty and voluptuous figure when I first came here with my little flat chest and naive ways. She is still beautiful. I cannot deny I am glad that her carriage is now departing—I can hear the rattle—from these gates for the last time. I am relieved of an irritation, of a burden. Involuntarily, I breathe more deeply and lift my head.

The days of the du Barry, here, have come to an end.