Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette (P.S.) (46 page)

“And so the worst is over?” I inquire. I feel both resigned and hopeful.

“I could not go so far as to assure Your Majesties of that idea,” he replies.

Then the King asks, “You would not go so far, if you were I, to advise our friends or the Comte d’Artois to return?”

“No, Your Majesty, I would not,” he replies, taking a pinch of snuff.

“The palace seems haunted now,” I remark. “Haunted with quietness. I have always adored the company of my friends, but now their faces and presence seem more to be valued than words can express.”

The King regards me very sympathetically. “It is necessary to appoint a new governess for the children, since our dear Duchesse de Polignac has arrived in Switzerland.”

I delight in thinking of my dear friend’s safety.

“Yes. The new governess shall be the Marquise de Tourzel. I have already given the matter much thought. She is the mother of five and a paragon of virtue. She will bring her daughter Pauline, who is eighteen, with her.”

T
HE LAST MONTH
of the summer of 1789 continues to pass in a very quiet fashion. Since I no longer have my adult friends, I give myself more fully than ever to the Dauphin and Madame Royale, and to their education. I shall not neglect my daughter’s education the way my own education was neglected, nor do I want the Dauphin to receive more than his share of Madame Tourzel’s instructional attention at the expense of Marie Thérèse. Already my daughter likes to read better than I do. Sometimes she reads aloud to me as I do my needlework.

The Dauphin adores his sister, and he is full of mischief. He has a lively imagination and makes up his own stories—even about us!—while his older sister must be transported by the words of others to any world that is not directly before her eyes.

There are aspects about the characters of both my children that trouble me. Like her father, Marie Thérèse is not so warm or winning as I could wish for her. Certainly, at age nine, she has become less selfish as she has grown older, but she still has a haughtiness about her at times. But I know she would not be indifferent to my death. She loves her family; I am one of her possessions, and she would not want to lose me.

The Dauphin’s sensibility is entirely suitable for his age, but he needs to learn to distinguish between fact and fiction. He lacks tact and discretion, though that too is partly a matter of being still less than five years old. Indeed, the world I knew at his age has almost evaporated from my memory, it was so insubstantial. His nerves are not so steady as I would like. He prefers cats to dogs, especially if they are sizable or if they bark loudly. The dogs themselves seem somewhat nervous these days, however.

Ah, I remember my mother saying how she preferred calm, wise dogs to nervous, yippy ones, no matter how cute. I remember using some of the big dogs of Schönbrunn almost like cushions.

Summer has yielded to fall, but it is still warm enough to enjoy being outdoors in the gardens of my Petit Trianon. Count von Fersen writes me that he will return just as September turns into October.

5 October

Ah, he comes to me in the château and he comes to me here at the Petit Trianon, he the most innately noble, the most handsome, the most kind and good and loving—ah, yes, above all, loving—man in the world.

He has made this most terrible year into one of bliss. I call those moments “islands of timelessness,” for when he is with me, we are out of time and space and into a realm that surely partakes of eternity. In his company, there is no world but the loving nonmaterial tissue of love itself; perhaps it is like being unborn when the world is perfect and all needs are satisfied, yet I feel no sense of enclosure or confinement.

Today I return to the very best of nests: to the moss-lined grotto. I can see my Petit Trianon from here and imagine the simple elegance of its interior. Perhaps my own house is inside me as much as I dwell in it. But here within the rocks, where a waterfall falls more naturally than any fountain, where the moss is the best of mattresses, where the space defined is so perfectly artificial that it is the very essence of nature—here, today, I will dream of the bliss of the days that have come before.

It is almost the noon hour, and even the time of day pleases me: the morning is swooping toward its apex, when it kisses the sun both hello and farewell, and begins its descent. It is the crest of the wave, the peak of time, and for me the time to daydream, to remember and savor. To be so loved—surely nothing in the material world can compare to the idea of knowing the beloved and being just as fully understood by the beloved. Who can want more?

Not I, not I, not I. I am so content, my being dissolves into a boundarylessness. I am nothing and everything, I am every place and no place. What other word than
bliss
can describe the conjunction of like minds?

Égalité
is one of their words, but
they
know only its bitter meaning, only the
lack
of it, and never its perfect realization, which is only to be experienced privately away from the appraising world.
Liberté?
The heart is always at liberty—the sudden spark of feeling, the quick jet of passion, the mellow glow of satiated love. In all these states, the heart has its independence and will not be governed. The great secret is that all the conventions of society can be satisfied, and
still
the heart is at liberty. The heart knows what it knows, and it knows when it is
met
in a rapture of recognition.

And what else do they demand?
Fraternité.
No.
Amour
. Surely everyone knows that. I sink my fingernails into the cool moss and feel silly. Never mind
fraternité
—it is so ignorant of
sororité
! Sisterhood is all-helping, all-vanquishing of domination. Fraternity? They might as well go hunting. As they do go.

Only this I do not understand of Fersen—why he wishes to be a soldier. Why he has been willing to risk his life and our happiness in order to impose the masculine will on whatever it sees. But he does not impose his will on me, any more than I on him. We come and go as we please. And when he is absent, the moment of my awareness of him is just the same as when he is present. We are the perfect friends.

This transcendence of separation is what I learned from our letters to each other. The marks on the page that bring his
mind
into the habitat of my mind represent his mood and his being in a truthful way, one that is always affirmed when he himself appears. Is there anything so luxurious as long conversations? They are the true hallmark of friendship. Almost, through the words of my own thoughts, I can imagine him into being now—just as he recently was. I can envision him standing in a shaft of light that enters this grotto through a crevice in the rocks.

Now I look out—for this slit was made exactly for this purpose—to see while not being seen.

And I see someone approaching. A messenger from the outside world.

W
HEN
I
ARRIVE
at the château, I learn a messenger has been sent on a fast horse to find the King, who is hunting. Here are the Comte and Comtesse de Provence, and Madame Elisabeth, and the emissary of the minister of the household, all speaking at once: the people of Paris are marching on Versailles.

Why?

They fear a bread famine now, because the old harvest is used up and the new one not yet ready. They fear a counterrevolution led by the King, using the new troops that have come to Versailles, and they wish to put us in Paris where they can supervise us.

Who leads the people?

It is the market women.

I recall their leather skins, how they pumped their arms obscenely, how they tried to shame me for not producing an heir.

“But now there is yet a Dauphin,” I exclaim.

Elisabeth says, “They protest the high cost of bread.”

The Comte de Provence says, “They wish the King to remedy the condition of lack of work.”

I learn that these women are armed with sickles, pikes, and guns and that it is
myself
whom they blame for the financial crises, for the famine last winter, for the fact that the weather was colder than in any year of the last seventy-five. It is I, and not the American War, who have emptied the treasury, and I who have enacted the thousands of pornographic deeds depicted in the pamphlets, and I, most heinously of all, who have seduced the King into activities that have left the people destitute. Not even I hold myself blameless, but I am not a harpy and I have lived the life dealt to me with as much kindness as I could.

Their appellation for me is
L’Austrichienne
, and they clamor for my head as they march, but really what they want is a “scapegoat”—someone upon whom to heap all their suffering and misfortune and disappointment and anger. Yes, if I alone am responsible and they dispatch me, they tell themselves, all will be well. They are to be pitied.

They have no more reason than a troupe of insane children burning with rage.

Some of the ministers say we should flee to Rambouillet, some all the way to Normandie. I will go nowhere till the King returns.

A
T THREE IN THE AFTERNOON,
the King and his hunting party ride up to the château. They come like a whirlwind, like knights of old, their horses and themselves covered with sweat and dust. But once they have arrived, I know well what will follow.

Talk.

The indecision of the King reigns supreme. The time passes while more and more people arrive from Paris.

But they have stopped in the courtyards. They do not enter the château—yet.

At eight o’clock at night people still arrive and begin to camp in the vast Place d’Armes. Torrents of rain descend on the crowd; still they keep little fires burning. We hear that they are butchering and roasting horses, and I can smell the meat of the animals, bloody raw, cooking, and burnt.

In a flurry of confusion, first I tell the ladies to prepare the children to leave. Then I tell the ladies that the King and I and the children will not be going after all. Next, I tell them the carriages are now prepared. “Pack what you can! Hurry.”

We hear that when our horses and carriages emerge from the royal stables, they are surrounded by the mob. The harnesses are cut to bits, and the horses are stolen. They disappear into the sea of people on foot. Perhaps the horses are slaughtered and eaten.

Yes, we could yet go to other carriages—they have been offered by Saint-Priest and by La Tour du Pin, their very own carriages waiting beyond the Orangerie. The King and I look at each other. We have lost heart for flight, if we cannot go in our own carriages—I do not understand my own sense of identity. Besides, it is raining so steadily, surely the rain will drive them away, will drench their spirits.

I see our inability to impose our wills on this situation. We must wait and see what will happen.

S
OMETHING DOES HAPPEN.
At midnight arrives the Marquis de Lafayette, commander of the new National Guard, which marches with the populace. Because Lafayette reassures the King, and the King trusts him, my husband agrees: it is time to go to bed. Here before me stands his valet, repeating with his young and trembling lips the words of the King: “Your Majesty may set her mind at ease concerning the events that have just transpired. The King requests that Her Majesty retire to bed, as His Majesty himself is doing at this moment.”

I
S IT TWO IN THE MORNING?
I hear unnatural sounds, struggle, fighting.

“Save the Queen!”

It is the voice of a bodyguard stationed in the guardroom. From the sounds of desperate fighting, I learn my guards are being slaughtered, their heads severed from their bodies. I leap from the bed, pull on a skirt, something falls softly around my shoulders, and run for the secret door cut in the wall beside my bed. My two ladies are behind me, and I run through the inner rooms toward the inner entrance of the Oeil-de-Boeuf.

The door is locked! I hear my own voice shrieking that the door be opened, that my friends come to my aid, and suddenly! the door opens. A bailiff stands before me. Running past him, I enter the King’s bedchamber and find his bed is vacant, but now there are people to help, kind people who speak of safety in the King’s dining room.

And just in a moment, here is the King with our son in his arms. And Madame Royale?

There is an interior stair leading to her room. I descend it with wings, then pause, and say with utmost calm that we must quickly leave. I take my daughter’s hand—how slender and helpless it is—and guide her back to the others. Here with their coiffures askew are Mesdames Tantes, and I am very glad to see them and embrace them warmly.

I hear desperate fighting in the Oeil-de-Boeuf. But the Dauphin has fetched a chair, and he stands on it, so he can better reach the top of his sister’s head. He twines his baby fingers into her hair. He is in a rapture of touching, gently touching, her hair, sliding the strands through his fingers, curling them around a stubby pointing finger. He has no idea that men are fighting and dying outside the door.

Suddenly the Dauphin says, and repeats, “Maman, I’m so hungry.”

Outside, in the courtyard, the people are congregating and shouting.

“You must appear on the balcony over the Marble Courtyard,” Lafayette says to my husband, who merely nods in agreement.

First Lafayette steps out to face the crowd. They fall silent, as though before a god. “You have sworn loyalty to the King,” he yells in a terrible voice. “Swear again!”