Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette (P.S.) (27 page)

Perhaps late summer
is simply the time to be bored. Everything stays the same, even though we travel to Fontainebleau, and the draperies and colors are different. The days are endless. And now it is time for another ball. Another endless night.

The Princesse de Lamballe does not know how to dwell in the realms of fun; she is too serene. She offers no challenges but quietly fits in as well with the worldly circle of Madame de Guéméné as with the loyal servitude of Madame Campan. She has no variety of affect: she is the same whether she is riding at breakneck speed or sitting with a fire screen between her and the hearth fire as she embroiders. I love to ride, I love my needlework—but I am not the same person when I perform one or the other. We Hapsburgs have something of the chameleon in us. I am tired of her steadfast angelic sensitivity, her blond innocence. She
wants
nothing.

And with a wish—there! In the midst of the ball—I see someone new. Her face is as perfect in its beauty as that of the Princesse de Lamballe, but this unknown lady is dark brunette. She is not buxom but possessed of a delicate figure. There is a modesty and grace in the way she stands. Quickly, I approach her, smile so as not to frighten her, and ask why I have not already made her acquaintance.

“I lack the means,” she replied in a simple sincere but musical voice, “to appear often on grand occasions.”

Oh, I need not have feared intimidating this frank soul!

“Let us promenade together,” I reply and slip my arm around her narrow waist. As we walk, I ignore all others to whisper to her. “Never has anyone answered any question of mine with such unpretentious honesty.” And then I giggle, a cascade as tinkling as any uninhibited falling of water.

She laughs in reply. “I could think of nothing else to say, once having said the truth.”

She has entered my mood exactly. Strolling beside her as I am, I cannot see her face, but I can feel the smile in her body, the release of tension till her emotion matches mine. She is the Comtesse de Polignac.

“It is my immediate and spontaneous wish,” I tell her, “that you attend court regularly, and you must come and stay in an apartment I shall appoint at Versailles.”

Then I guide her through doors till we step outside the crowded ballroom into the summer heat. Immediately my mood shifts to languid. The very air is sensual. Our bodies wilt and relax, as I still hold her about the waist. I kiss her cheek in friendship, and she takes this kiss as the frank offering that it is.

My own frankness causes her to speak of her situation. She wishes me to call her by her given name, Yolande; and I reciprocate immediately: Toinette. Without apology or embarrassment, she acknowledges that her husband, the Comte de Polignac, is the most obliging of husbands in allowing her to have her own amusements, and that she enjoys a liaison with the Comte de Vaudreuil, known for the amusing circle of artists and musicians he often entertains. “One is never bored with that graceful man,” she says.

Ah, like the du Barry, my new friend lacks the virtue of…the virtue of what?

The virtue of virtue.

I laugh out loud, having amused myself.

I have changed: I have no impulse to chastise her, let alone send her into exile. Instead, I ask about the artists they befriend, and I confide that I am never content with my portraits, not since the one made when I was still a little girl, just arrived at Versailles, and wore the costume of an equestrienne. “My mother, the Empress, still treasures that portrait,” I add, “but of course now, I am much changed.”

Arm in arm with this slender creature, I suddenly swell with pride in my own voluptuous figure.

Suddenly I say exactly what has come into my head. “I am chaste and ever will be—for that is the only wise and politic course for me—”

“At least till you have produced an heir,” Yolande de Polignac interjects mildly.

“But I wish to be filled with evanescence, with
fizz
.”

We both cover our mouths with our hands and giggle. She looks almost as though she is merrily vomiting.

“Flirtation,” she says, supplying the very word that could certainly enliven my dreary existence.

“I can easily draw the line of propriety between myself and any
gallant
, for I am the Queen, the power is all mine.”

T
ONIGHT
I
GO
to sleep quite happy, after talking with my new friend till well after midnight. I go to sleep thinking of her and picturing her as though I were a painter. Her nose is particularly charming, small and shapely, but her eyes are large, and her dark hair softly frames her face. Her chin is particularly beautiful, just the right length and shape, softly rounded. I would paint her with parted lips so that her perfect pearly teeth would show. Above all, her expression is one of relaxed sweetness; her mien is calm, utterly natural, and lacking in egotism—Yolande de Polignac.

His amusements
are not mine. He has the smithy; he has his hunting. No, I will not play the role of Vulcan. Were I to play the role of Venus and stand beside him in diaphanous gowns, he would be displeased.

So I amuse myself. What else can I do? It suits me to clothe myself in fun, even if at its edges there is nothing but the black lace of desperation.

I have the theater, I have my balls, I can gamble and dance the night away.

An Englishwoman, Georgina, the Duchess of Devonshire, joins us in gambling. Though not a queen, she is the English version of myself. Married to a cold husband, she delights in fashion. But it is her charm and grace that make her shine. Like myself, she loves Yolande de Polignac, whom she calls “Little Po.” Like myself, she loses large sums of money and covers her wild distress with hysterical gaiety.

We three adore each other.

Sometimes we gamble all night. There’s no need to lie alone in bed, waiting. What is the fruit of rejection, of loneliness? Only slow tears seeping from the corners of my eyes. How utterly silent they are. I only notice them when they draw across my temples into my hair.

But the King has given me my Trianon! My own little house, a key with my name on it. He flouts the convention that women can have nothing significant, no property, of their own. For that I am grateful to my impotent husband. And I remind myself that I must be of good cheer.

Sometimes now he grows hard. He makes a halfhearted attempt to enter. I have hope. The endless parties are nothing more than a visible enactment of my gaiety. He needs—the world needs—to know that I am happy, that no foot is more light or definite than mine, that no smile is more ready or dazzling.

Now there is Trianon to decorate, and around my little pleasure house all the gardens to rebuild in the new Chinese-English style, which replaces regimented greenery with the riotous abundance of blossoms. He has been good to me. With good humor, endlessly, he opens his purse to me.

O
CCASIONALLY
, I still hunt with my husband. This bright day, as I sit in the moving coach, I look at the houses of the peasants, and I wonder what it is in their lives that most brings them joy. Perhaps it is the sunshine, which also brings me joy. Glancing out the window, I see a blond boy—four or five years old—standing in the doorway. His face is dirty. We’ll hunt nearby. His cottage is thatched, and a clump of violets blooms on his roof. Suddenly the coach swerves. The boy no longer stands in the doorway.

Under the hoofs!
I hear someone cry, and I scream for the coach to stop.

Bursting through the coach door, I fly from the vehicle to run back to him, crumpled in the sandy road, and I lift him in my arms, shaking him gently to revive him. Suddenly his eyelids raise, and I look into the bluest eyes I have ever seen.

“He is mine! I will have him!”

I am amazed to hear myself shrieking. The child clings to me as much in fear as in desire. Naturally, he is crying. But he is unhurt. Not a single hoofprint has nicked or bruised his arms or legs or his broad fair forehead, not in the least. I know that he has run into the road because he heard my heart calling for him.

A woman emerges from the roadside cottage. She says she is his grandmother, and his mother is dead. Yes, now he will be mine. The grandmother says five others are inside, like him.

She is told I am the Queen and that I would like to take him. Yes, that was my urgent whisper—
make it happen: he will be mine.

In dulcet tones, as though I were calm, I promise that she and all the others will be cared for, forever, if she will give him to me. (My need for him is desperate. I have no child of my own. Why else was he sent under the hooves and wheels and then sheltered by the invisible hand of God?) Yes, I am hysterical. My hands are shaking as they do when I shake the dice, for high stakes. Here, indeed, are high stakes. A child. A boy.

She has no objection if I take Jacques with me to Versailles. Now. Forever.

The horses’ heads turn back for Versailles. I send a messenger to the King. All the way back, I hold Jacques in my lap. Passive with wonder, he merely clings to me.

O
NCE HOME
, he is washed and dressed in white, the color of innocence. I tell him that the Dauphin and I wore all white when first we went to Paris. Jacques is to share the food from my plate. Now. Just as Mops used to do, when I was a girl in Vienna, and no one was looking.

Let the market women see what I have now! Jacques! There is no more beautiful child, dressed in white, of fair skin, hair like ripe hay, eyes as blue as the cornflowers growing out of the dust.

Yes, I will see to his education. Yes, he is to be brought to me as often as is possible.

But one day I do not see Jacques at the table, and I do not send for him. They bring him less often. Jacques will always be a part of our household. I will always speak to him with kindness.

But Jacques has not redeemed my life.

Jacques is not really mine.

At first the dream
is pleasant: I am young, only four or five, and I am visiting the cottage of my wet nurse and her son, Joseph Weber, who is just my age, and who suckled, as I did, at the bountiful breast of his mother. The Empress has made sure that I know something of the peasant life, that I be a part of their joys and sorrows, that I know the furniture and the food and the fabrics that contain their lives.

In the dream, I am made welcome as I step inside the cottage of my dear nurse, but no great fuss is made of my presence. I often come here to play with Joseph Weber.

Then I remember how he cried a few days before I left Vienna to come to France to be married. But in the dream, his face, red with grief, becomes flushed with anger.

Then he holds out his hand to me, and for a moment he is Artois, my brother, whose newborn child is third in line for the throne. Artois, the young father, is asking me to dance, but no—I am a child who has come to play in a humble Austrian home, and all the adults with their watchful, critical eyes have gone. Little Joseph Weber holds out his hand to assist me. I step up easily, light as an airborne milkweed seed, onto his parents’ feather bed. Our bare feet sink up to the ankles in the soft down, and then we hold hands and begin to jump in unison.

Higher and higher we jump, breathless and panting, our heads so close to the low ceiling I begin to fear injury. Our jumping then becomes ragged in its rhythm, and when my face is low, his is high, just under the square beams of the ceiling, and his face has been transformed into that of an angry peasant woman. Not his mother’s face with the smooth round cheeks, but a French face, the face of hardship and of the scheming marketplace.

Now the figure above me becomes one of a bat or harpy, and she cocks her muscular arm to knock me flat on my back. Her beak and talons tear at my body. She massages my bare breasts—
oh yes, they are large and attractive,
she says,
and what man who is a man would not want the abundance of your body?
—her fingertips hard as horn explore my secret places, and I awake with a little yelp, such as a puppy might make when her toe is accidentally trod upon.

It is my own hand and my own fingers on my breast and in my body. Slowly I withdraw them from these forbidden places. Lying curled on my side in my own ornate bed, I place the palms of my hands together, press my cheek into the pillow, and pray.

While I am walking
in the lower garden, not too far from Trianon, where work is progressing on the new garden and on the grotto of the Belvedere, I decide to walk into the Bosquet of Enceladus, which depicts a man in agony.

Today I visit agony, for my amusement.

Enceladus has tried to scale Olympus, and he has been cast down. He lies, all smooth and golden on an island, and he is half-buried in rocks, the textures of which are as rough as art can make. The fountain is a study in contrasts—the smooth, gleaming metal of his body and the rough rocks that represent the wrath of nature.

The King is with me, and at my elbow, he says, “It is a lesson in the vice of pride. We must control our ambition, and that of others.”

“You mean the nobles, who feel entitled to receive every privilege and obliged to return nothing.”

“Yes. We must not be greedy.”

Does the King mean to criticize me? Does he suggest my expenditures seem unbounded?

“I need pretty things,” I reply, “as you can imagine.”

“But your wardrobe allowance is a hundred and fifty thousand livres.”

“And my debt with Rose Bertin is five hundred thousand livres.”

At this moment, I am tempted to say that in the old days the du Barry ran up a bill with Rose Bertin of 100,000 livres a year
just
for ribbons and lace, when suddenly we both see a pamphlet that has been stuck among the green leaves of a topiary trimmed to resemble a large green vase. The King plucks the pamphlet—a poem—from the bush.

Its title is “Les Nouvelles de la Cour.” The drawing depicts a sad Queen. Between every stanza, the words repeat the question “Can the King do it? Can’t the King do it?”

His face is scarlet with shame. My eyes fill with tears and mirror his shame, but we continue to read what has been written about the novelties of the court. The most pure and innocent Princesse de Lamballe is maligned: the verses suggest that with her little fingers she has done the work of the King. My mother, the Empress of Austria, is blasphemed as one who does not care who fathers the successor to the throne, as long as the deed of impregnation is finally done. I cannot look at my husband.

The King rips the pamphlet to shreds and throws the pieces into the basin of water that surrounds Enceladus. In his gleaming misery, we both see the mirror of our own. Who dares to throw us down and trample on our dignity?

Suddenly the King says, “I will pay your debts for you, Toinette. You and your Rose will construe whatever fashion pleases your fancy.”

“My mother hopes my brother, the Emperor, will travel here. She thinks he has advice for us, that he will help us.”

“Yes, of course he must come.” The King smiles at me. He is glad to think of something other than obscene
libelles.
There is a graciousness in my husband’s forehead when he releases tensions. Smiling, he tries to make my moment a happy one.

“When Joseph comes, I want the entertainments to be lavish beyond anything he has ever had mounted in Austria.” My gaze roams over the clenched body of the statue, follows the spout of water rising into the air from the Titan’s tortured mouth into the beautiful blue of the sky. “During his visit, my brother must never be bored.”