Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette (P.S.) (32 page)

It does seem
to me that Bavaria, left with no heir, due to the untimely death of the elector of Bavaria, should more naturally become part of Austria than an appendage of Prussia and Frederick II. If only my husband shared my brother’s suspicion of the bellicose King of Prussia, but Louis and Joseph are truly at odds on this matter. I could both please and impress the Empress if I could persuade my husband to consider as an aspect of the Bavarian question the importance of the Alliance between Austria and France, of which our marriage is the sacred seal. In the past my heart has always been in Austria, but perhaps the interests of France are growing now within my body.

As often happens in moments of confusion, Count Mercy appears and is admitted at the door of my apartment just as I am about to open a letter from my mother. His attendants must have seen her courier descending the stairs.

He bows to me, and again I admire his bearing, as I always do. Though I practice the feminine version of the bow, it is from him and not my dancing master that I have learned to convey so much in a gesture. His bow tells me that he is my friend, that he is wise, and that he will help me to understand the tangled skeins of loyalties.

“The Queen’s brow is clouded,” he remarks, with kindness in every syllable.

“I have a letter from Vienna—”

“I saw the courier in the courtyard.”

“Will you read it to me?”

I hand the letter to my trusted friend to interpret for me.

He reads, “‘Mercy’s illness comes at a very bad time when I need him to be active’” (he does not glance up but keeps his eyes steadfastly on my mother’s handwriting), “‘just as I need your own feelings of loyalty to me, to the House of Hapsburg, and to your native country of Austria. You must take to heart and you must tell the King that the King of Prussia is unscrupulous, and if an alliance with France should be formed with Prussia, we will be in great danger. Prussia fears only you—’”

“Let me read for myself,” I interject. My heart swells with pride that my mother acknowledges our importance. I read on to myself, silently:
The alliance between France and Austria is the only natural one, and though I cannot here go into all the details, you must turn to Count Mercy as soon as he is able to see you. He will make clear to you not only the usefulness of the alliance to both our countries but also its goodness. I oppose any change in our Alliance,
which would kill me
—

On apprehending those words, I exclaim aloud, and I can feel all the blood draining from my face.

“The Queen has turned very pale,” Mercy says.

“Read what she has written.” I give the page to my counselor.

“…‘Any change in our Alliance,
which would kill me
.’” His elegant fingers tremble as he holds the page. The Count hesitates and looks directly at me, his face full of concern. Thoughtfully, he says, “The Empress has underlined those last words.”

Because I feel dizzy, as though I might slide off my chair, I grasp the edge of the little table in front of me. Though my vision seems to spin the elegant chairs around the walls of the room, I see my choice. Very deliberately I address the count. “At your approach, I anticipated consultation with you to aid me in my confusion. After this moment, I myself
know
what path to pursue with the King. From you, I will need only the particulars for a reasoned argument. The spirit and direction that my remarks must take is abundantly clear to me. I will use all my power and influence with the King to assure the Alliance with Austria.”

“Even in her obvious distress, no one speaks more clearly from the heart than does my Queen,” the count replies. His own clear eyes flash their approval of my words. He looks down at my mother’s page again and summarizes her words in a quiet tone. His hand and voice are steady. “She says that many of her people are sick and that she kisses ‘my dear daughter.’ She says that soon she hopes she will be able to add the phrase ‘my dear little mama’ to the phrase when she sends her love to you, her most dear daughter. In closing, she says that everyone she knows is praying for you and that you may be pregnant. ‘I am always all yours.’”

My heart brims with love of my mother, and with guilt that I have not yet told her of my hopes. Even while she worries about the politics of Europe, nothing causes her to forget my situation. She says nothing of my sisters and brothers:
I am always all yours.
Those are her final words.

Now I will focus all my attention on Count Mercy as he explains to me what will be the best arguments to protect the King from the seductions of Prussia. I invite my friend to sit down. With a simple gesture, he parts the skirts of his coat, seats himself, rests his tapered hands on his thighs, and begins my instruction.

“My Queen’s eyes are beautiful, even when they are clouded,” he says gallantly. “Soon the skies of Her Majesty’s eyes will be their usual clear and charming blue again.”

Never have I listened so carefully.
Not only…but also,
he explains, and
moreover
and
however. Perfidy, insinuation, calamity.

 

Count Mercy can tell you that I grew pale at your words and that I am resolved that no concern in areas where I myself have influence will in any way weaken the health and heart of my beloved mother. It is painful to recall your suffering over the partition of Poland, and now this Bavarian business! I am well aware in this delicate situation that your worst nightmare is that the kingdoms of your children should war with one another, and I will use my own preeminence to assure that none of our countries become combatants.

Frederick II has created clouds of confusion for the King, but I have spoken with Mercy so that I can learn enough to dispel any such obscuring clouds created for the King. The King of Prussia is full of perfidious and persistent insinuations; he has already sent five couriers to our court in less than half a month. Count Mercy has explained the politics so well that I can see for myself what has confused the King, and those little clouds that others have created will soon vanish so that no change is made in our Alliance, which is based not only on the closeness of our affection but also on its usefulness to the general good of Europe. Moreover, I believe that no one can be more dedicated to our purpose than I am.

Talk has begun here that when the current Grand Almoner dies the young Cardinal de Rohan will inherit his position. Nothing could be more abhorrent to me, but he has powerful relatives among both the Noailles and Guéméné families. I am urging the King to resist their pressures. That brother Ferdinand’s health is improving is news of great importance to my own happiness.

 

When the King
dutifully approaches my bed to perform his conjugal duties, I surprise him—it has all been orchestrated—by holding out a warm cup of chocolate to him, over the bedcovers.

“Let us sit propped up together,” I say and smile at him. I am wearing a blue ribbon in my hair, and I have combed the soft blond curls over my shoulders in the natural manner as the painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun wears her hair. I feel like a shepherdess looking at her swain. “Let’s exchange gossip and news for a few minutes.” Then I add quite honestly, “I wish to share a confidence.”

“The Queen looks exceedingly pretty, and more important, very happy,” he says.

He himself is relaxed, for now he knows that he can perform the deed, and his self-confidence is much increased. Unfortunately, he has also become more firm and active in his political decisions, but tonight I will say nothing of Prussia and Austria.

Tonight I speak to him as a member of his family and as one who will, in the dead of winter, bring new life to the family bosom. In my imagination, the little being within—for I feel sure of his nascent existence—will become a valentine for all the world to see, held up lovingly, between us, in the arms of both his parents.

The King sits beside me in the bed, and once he is propped up and comfortably rests his back into the plump pillows, I hand him his cup, a beautiful green one of Sèvres porcelain decorated with a wide golden rim and lozenge portraits of deep pink roses. Then I reach for my own cup, as deep and satisfying a green as the forest itself.

“To Compiègne,” I say, lifting my cup in a toast.

“To Compiègne, always rich with game,” he says and tactfully waits to hear my explanation. I can see the questions rising in his expression, and also his love for me as a friend and not just as she who must produce an heir.

“For I am quite certain,” I say, “that the lateness of that monthly visitor whom my mother calls the Générale is a signal of our success.”

“You are often early—” he begins.

“But never late,” I finish.

Suddenly, with a blur of liquid chocolate, he tosses his cup and saucer into the air—they do not break, for I listen to their muffled thud on the carpet—and he embraces me with both arms. He has spilled the hot liquid all down the front of my white nightgown in a long brown stain. I lay the cup and saucer aside, on each side of me, and pull the King closer to my bosom.

A
S THE SUMMER
progresses, I often entreat the King to oppose Prussia—I even speak in very strong terms to his ministers Maurepas and Vergennes—but the King listens to them and not to me. To his credit, he never says a harsh word to me, and in fact he is quite sympathetic when I tell him of my fears for my mother’s heart. Nonetheless, he will not budge on the issue. I know now that the invasion was something my brother did, behind our mother’s back, and she considers it to have been most unwise. I hate it that it is another woman, the Russian Empress Catherine, who has humbled Austria by threatening to take the side of Prussia. But my mother is more wise than proud—she will not sacrifice her people to vanity—and she has agreed to give up some portions of Bavaria, keeping only Silesia.

Somehow the people know that I have advocated the cause of Austria, and I am unpleasantly referred to as
l’Austrichienne
, the Austrian, though I know that as my pregnancy progresses, I become more and more French. The appellation darkens my joy, for it hints of treason.

Lewd pamphleteers have the audacity to suggest that it is not the King who fathered the child I carry; they propose a ridiculous list of others. The King and I only laugh at them: we know the truth. What hurts me most is that the King’s younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, is named first on the lists of putative fathers, and Yolande has whispered to me that my husband’s other brother, the Comte de Provence, may well have paid the pamphleteers to do so. With a successful delivery, the Comte de Provence will no longer be next in line for the throne.

But I am introducing a wonderful new style of dresses—I and Rose Bertin.

Sometimes down on her knees, sometimes up high on a little stepladder, she drapes me in light silk fabrics in the colors I love most: pastel blue, a pale yellow soft as sunshine, turquoise that teases the eye between blue and green.

When she measures me around the hips, Rose pretends she cannot reach around me. Instead she marches around me with the tape, remarking like a character in a comic play, “What a distance, what a journey, I now must make!” Behind me, she begins to pant and puff theatrically. Seeing I am amused and pleased, she stamps her feet in place to prolong the charade. At last she comes wheezing around in front, closes the tape, and exclaims, “Four inches, you are already four inches
fatter.
”

I burst into laughter, for never in my life has anyone ever applied even the shadow of the word
fat
to my person.

“I am remembering Racine’s play,” I say, “and how the Jewish priestess wore flowing garments of surprising attractiveness. I have no intention of lacing myself and this child into any sort of corset.”

“As I recall, you have never had any love of corsets.” Rose’s good round face is wreathed by her smile and twinkling eyes. I love her because she is as jolly and frank as a peasant with me.

“My mother used to scold me about corsets,” I say. Soberly, I recall how my mother’s recent correspondence has been full of much more serious matters, and that for all of my efforts I really was not effective in helping her. A cloud of anxiety about her health passes through my mind.

“These gauzy garments,” Rose says, “might be named for one of the tribes of Israel and called Levites.”

By the end of summer, I know that I will be grateful to have clothing loose enough to allow the breezes to enter and fan my body.

O
NCE
I
AM ASLEEP,
I sleep and sleep and drink in yet more sleep, as though it were a flagon of nectar, but sometimes I have difficulty falling asleep. My appetite is excellent, and I have never felt happier. I was happy when my marriage was fully consummated, but that was only act one of this masque: I think that only maternity itself can eclipse the joy of pregnancy.

Just once have I felt the slightest discomfort. When I wrote my mother that I vomited a little, she replied she was glad even to hear of my nausea, for it is a common feature of a normal pregnancy. I confessed to my mother that because I had longed and hoped and waited so long, praying that I might have a child, sometimes I feared my present condition, here in the height of summer, might only be a dream. “Yet,” I wrote, “the dream does continue….”

N
EVER HAVE
I
FELT
more alive or more satisfied with the life I live. The King and I speak together most congenially of our plans for the care and education of our child. Having strolled all the way down the Grand Avenue from the château, we sit on a bench outdoors—the fresh air being so good for my health, despite its summer warmth—and admire the basin of Apollo. As Apollo’s horses pull the chariot bearing the sun out of the water, their powerful shoulders and forelegs rise above the surface of the basin. The breeze brings drifts of spray to cool our faces with the fine mist.

“Perhaps I shall nurse the child myself, at least some,” I say. I long to feel the little babe’s mouth at my breast.

The King is not aghast. He treats all my ideas about our coming child with utmost tenderness.

“Nor shall he be tightly swaddled,” I say. “He shall have the freedom to toddle about, and his nursery shall be on the ground floor, for greater ease of access to the outside world.”

The King agrees by taking my hand in his and very gently squeezing my fingers. Rapt with happiness, he now looks the very figure of both King and husband.

An imp makes me say, “I believe you too are putting on weight as the weeks pass.”

The King blushes, and he has no rejoinder. I regret having given him discomfort.

“It is but natural,” I add hastily, “as we grow older.”

The image of his grandfather, Louis XV, comes to mind, conjured up by yet another imp, and I recall how even when he was old, that king was called the most handsome man in Europe—a title my Louis will never possess. For a moment I feel ashamed of my own superficiality.

“You are such a good king,” I say. “All the people say so.”

Again the King blushes, but this time with pleasure. Again he finds no words with which to reply.

Finally he says, “Rousseau,” quite enigmatically.

I smile at him encouragingly.

“You have caught the ideas of Rousseau—from the very air, it would seem. I do not think any of the queens of France, for two hundred years, have considered sparing their children the oppression of protocol and custom. The royal children of France have simply been turned over to others. I was.”

“I see virtue in motherhood,” I reply. I feel proud that the inclinations of my heart are congruent with the thinking of the revered philosopher Rousseau. “Even when our children are babes, I myself will inhabit the role of mother.”

I tell him that I want my darling Yolande at some point in the future to become the governess to the children of France, that I have seen her with her own adorable children, and there is no one whom I can trust so fully with the welfare of my son or daughter. The King agrees so readily that his very acquiescence makes me remember for a moment, in contrast, the grave face of my brother Joseph, when he criticized my Yolande as superficial and manipulative, but we do not always agree with Joseph. It was Joseph’s decision to annex Bavaria that cost many common soldiers their lives and weakened the heart of our mother.

“Perhaps we should return to the château,” I remark, “and prepare to receive guests.”

I am only a little bored. During the good humor of my pregnancy, I have found court more entertaining than usual. As we slowly ascend the slope toward the château, I hear the waters of the fountain of Apollo grow more and more dim, like distant rain.

“The populace of Paris was overjoyed,” the King says enthusiastically, “when they heard of your pregnancy.”

The slope is steep, it is very hot, and contrariness causes me to picture not joy but the hard fierceness of the faces of the women who taunted me after the birth of Artois’s first child. They seemed almost dangerous—but that was years ago.

My mother used to remind me that contrariness showed a failure in obedience, the cardinal virtue in a princess. Suddenly I feel tired, and I stop in our progress up the slope and look back at the figure of Apollo. Heavily gilded, he gleams golden in the August sun.

Though I am tempted to exclaim
What a magnificent figure of a man!
I restrain myself. Perhaps the King would feel that he was being adversely compared with the god. Sweat trickles down his brow from under the edge of his wig.

“My mother wrote that she is sure the happiness expressed by the citizens of Paris could not equal the ecstasy throughout Vienna when the news arrived of my pregnancy.” My tone is petulant.

A
T COURT, THE
A
UGUST
heat is oppressive to many. The women fan rapidly, with the serious intent of stirring up a breeze. The men shift their position from foot to foot; sometimes they hold open their heavily embroidered waistcoats to admit air. But I breathe deeply the perfume of my handkerchief—lavender refreshed with mint—and feel quite comfortable and happy. The lemonade in my goblet refreshes me even more. Heat is like cold: one must give her body to it and then one is relaxed and comfortable.

I know the courtiers would love to toss their powdered wigs, en masse, into the air to cool their pates. I smile at the comic image and feel even more delighted with the world.

For all their discomfort, their elegant rainbow clothing makes them beautiful to behold, and besides, I stand close to an open window where puffs of cooling air enter from time to time.

Yolande de Polignac stands on one side of me, and the Princesse de Lamballe on the other. Today I have no trouble speaking to them both in tones that are smooth as pearls. Though her dark ringlets are damp against her neck, Yolande accepts the summer heat as a natural state and makes no complaint. The Princesse de Lamballe has a heart (and mind), I think, that moves more slowly than most and never overheats her; the skin on her neck and chest is like porcelain and would feel cool, if touched. They are both as gay as I am, and like the three Graces, we are gradually making all hearts glad.

No, it is the mere fact of my pregnancy that pleases them all. I glance down at my belly with enormous satisfaction, for it is more beautiful than a large bouquet of the most pleasing flowers.

The crowd before us moves this way and that like a giant organism, like a flight of bright birds, or like daisies bent together by a unifying breeze. At the corner of my eye, I note a posture and movement that is so elegant that I think for a moment it must be Count Mercy, but the figure is too tall.

And too young.

And even too handsome.

The man is hauntingly but not immediately familiar, like a figure from the past or from a foreign land, a memory or a traveler too good to be true.

“Ah, it’s an old acquaintance!” I exclaim, catching his pale blue Swedish eye.

I nod, and the crowd parts to allow his approach.

He bows, yes, with all the elegance in the world, plus the grace of youth, and begins to speak, but I speak with him, so we say his name in duet. “Count Axel von Fersen.”

We laugh, and I say simply, “It has been too long a time since I saw you,” but I know my eyes are dancing. He is the lad, grown into a man, that I saw in the dead of winter when I was eighteen at the Opera Ball in Paris. We are exactly the same age, I recall.