The Sisters of Versailles (45 page)

Touffe, my woman from Madame Lesdig’s, shows me to a bath. Down below I overhear my new husband screaming at his mother: “I won’t touch her until she bathes! You promised!”

The bath is unlike anything I have ever had, lakes of steaming hot water in a large marble tub. I luxuriate and think: I could get used to this. They do not have such baths at Versailles, and certainly not at Madame Lesdig’s. I decide I will come here once a month—no, once a week—and have a bath that lasts at least three hours. But even with the stoves ringed around the tub the water finally starts to cool and I must get out, for my husband is waiting. Below I can hear the sounds of the wedding party continuing in a great carouse of song and music. Somewhere a glass shatters and a woman laughs. I climb out reluctantly, sleepy from the hot water and the champagne and too much sugar pie. But it is time to go: the life of a duchess must be paid for.

As I enter the bedchamber Lauraguais quickly releases a chambermaid. She grows as red as the walls and runs from the room without looking at me. I am relieved she does not scamper into a wall niche, for I do not want eyes on me at this time. Though I have to laugh at the thought.

“You shut up. Always laughing.” Lauraguais pushes me down on the bed. It is unpleasant, very unpleasant even, but soon he snores from his drunkenness and I am alone, thinking: Now I am a duchess and soon I will live at Court. I am the last to marry and so the last of my sisters to know the reality of the marriage bed. I wonder what Marie-Anne and the king do together in their private apartments, and I wonder where Pauline is now. Is she watching me, perhaps laughing and raising one of her bushy eyebrows over her little green eye? She would be happy for me, I decide.

I fall sleep and dream of a pigeon pie, an enormous one, larger
even than the table. Around it folk discuss and poke it and some attempt to eat it, but then the crust breaks and out of the middle flies a blackbird. It disappears into the black-painted walls and everyone claps.

So now I am a duchess; therefore I am the envy of everyone who is not a duke or a duchess, which even at Versailles is still a great many people.

After the wedding I spend a few weeks with Lauraguais in his family’s apartment at Versailles. He is not always drunk and I discover he is even rather funny, and quite nice. We compare eyebrows: they are of exactly the same size and that makes us laugh. I am a woman and could replace mine with elegant ones of gray mouse hair, but he is stuck with his.

We are lying on the bed drinking cinnamon-flavored coffee, the latest breakfast drink.

“God, but I love your breasts,” he says, smothering himself in them then coming to rest against one. “A woman’s breasts—two, or one if big enough—are simply the best pillows. Far superior to anything those Turks can make, finer even than goose down. I must see about having a serving girl just for that purpose. One with large breasts, purely for my relaxation. I will call it”—he takes a puff on his pipe for inspiration—“a chest coddle.”

“Your family has strange ideas about servants,” I say, watching the smoke from his pipe curl up under the canopy of the bed. The smell is strange, an animal roasted too long on the fire. “The priests say we must remember their humanity.”

Lauraguais puffs languidly. “And this, from the woman whose grandfather knocked out the teeth of all his maids, to render them unattractive and remove his temptation.”

“But those were different times!”

He takes another deep puff. “Ah . . . I wonder what that would be like?”

“Oh, very painful, I’m sure! Once I had a tooth that ached so I—”

“No,” he interrupts me, “not the tooth removal, but a toothless
suck. Now, that is something I wish to experience. What would that be like?”

“You only ever think of one thing, you’re like a squirrel constantly searching for nuts.”

“It’s true, it’s true.” He doesn’t deny and returns to his favorite subject. “So come on, DouDou,” he wheedles.

“DouDou? Who is DouDou? Is that what you call your red-haired slut?”

“Which one?” He grins and shakes his head. “I cannot abide the name Diane. Never could. Had a nurse when I was younger called Diane. Such a stupid name. She was quite the witch.”

“Then call me Adelaide. Not
DouDou
.”

He pulls himself up on one side, balancing the pipe: “So tell me, DouDou. Is it true what they say, that the king can make love twice, with no rest?”

I laugh. “Who is ‘they’?”

“You know, the people that know. I’ve heard it said that he can do it twice in a row, and even twice in a row with the same woman?” He looks at me expectantly.

“I wouldn’t know. I have never slept with him. I have only ever slept with you.”

He lies back down on the bed and drops his pipe on the floor. “Is it true?” he asks again, and now there is a strange look in his eyes, glazed as though he has been hit on the head. “That you and your sister have slept with him, together? At the same time?”

I shudder. I could not, would not. “No, no! I told you I have never slept with the king, with or without Marie-Anne.”

“And Hortense? They say she is there too, but she does not participate, she just supervises. She’s too much of a prude to join in, but she is naked. She puts her hair down and—”

I smother his mouth with my breasts. “Oh, shut up, shut up!”

Lauraguais wriggles free. “But you’d tell me if you did? You’d tell me everything? The details?”

“If I did what?”

“Slept with the king. With your sisters. Especially if it’s with
Hortense. They say she lets her hair down and she licks—”

“Oh, please, Lauraguais! Stop it! That will never happen.”

After the rather pleasant interlude with my husband, I return to Paris to visit Madame Lesdig. She tells me I am a married woman now and must conduct myself like one, and not like the feckless, giggling girl I still appear to be. I know beneath her disapproval she adores me, so to make her happy I promise her I will no longer be like a chattering squirrel, but instead will be as proud and as stately as a lioness.

I then visit Louise. She is now in her own house, a small one the king provided for her on a funny, narrow street near the Louvre; Madame Lesdig’s predecessor—another Dowager Duchesse de Lesdiguières—used to live here. The rooms are unfurnished and so bare she could be in a convent. She doesn’t even have a carpet on the flagstoned floor, just little cut-up squares in front of the chairs to rest her feet on. One says
Welcome
, stitched in pink and blue, but there is nothing welcoming about this room.

“You look well,” says Louise, but she does not look well at all. Her skin is more gray than white and she is already like an old woman, though she is only four years older than I. She always used to take such care of her appearance but now she is dressed entirely in black with no rouge, nor even a beauty patch.

I laugh nervously: “You look like a nun, Louise.”

“That is a compliment,” she says softly, picking at a simple wood rosary in her lap. “I am thinking of taking orders.”

“Oh, don’t do that!”

She raises her eyes to the ceilings. “Whether I do, or don’t, is immaterial—I have devoted the rest of my life to God. To expiate my sins.”

For once, I don’t know what to say. There is a deep dark hurt oozing off her, filling up the room. “Would you like news of Court?” I ask brightly before I realize that any news of Court
must include news of Marie-Anne. And the king. “Of the queen, then?”

“How is Her Majesty?”

“Oh, very well, Marie-Anne tells me . . . I mean, Marie-Anne is now in her service, well, of course you knew that, you gave her your place, well, not to her but to Hortense . . . Marie-Anne says she is well . . . and . . .”

I trail off helplessly. All roads lead to Marie-Anne. Actually, Marie-Anne has no good words to say of the queen. She is a very good mimic and does a very funny impression of the queen’s Polish accent:
Goot, goot, goot.
Marie-Anne says the queen deserves to be mocked for not losing her terrible accent after almost twenty years in France.

Louise’s eyes flicker with pain when I say Marie-Anne’s name. There is silence and I struggle to think of something else to say.

“Do you like it here? These rooms are very . . . very . . . white. White! White is good, it’s so calm and serene. My apartment at Versailles is so cluttered, my husband’s family has more money than dukedoms and all they do buy is furniture and I keep knocking things over just like I did when I lived with Madame Lesdig, so I . . . this is nice. Your room. Calm.”

Finally she says: “It doesn’t matter to me. This, that, all of it.”

She makes another noncommittal gesture and looks up at the ceiling. It’s as if she’s not alive anymore, like her soul has gone from her body and left a shell where before she once lived. It’s very painful. When I leave I promise to write to her often but I know I won’t. What can I say to her? I have no comfort to offer.

Poor Louise. I don’t understand why Marie-Anne had to banish her—why could Louise not have stayed with us? Wouldn’t that have been kinder?

“Habits are a hard thing to break,” hisses Marie-Anne when I broach the subject. “And Louise was a habit.”

“But was she not a harmless habit?” Louise never hurt anyone.

“Nobody ever won by being kind,” says Marie-Anne, and I
know by the way she says it that I should not ask anymore. But what is she trying to win? She has already won the king’s heart, and I am sure he will make her a duchess very soon, and then she will have all she desires.

I am not happy about what Marie-Anne did to Louise, but I cannot say it out loud. There is something about Marie-Anne. Something . . . cruel. I remember when she was young, how she used to gather mice in a little box then starve them, to see how long they would take to die. I think I am a little afraid of Marie-Anne. Just a little.

Despite my fears, Marie-Anne and I are becoming closer and we spend much time together. I do have an awful lot of fun in her company. She is Marie-Anne—she can do anything. With her, I feel I am at the center of Versailles, which means I am at the center of the world, which is a very satisfying feeling. I like the king too; he has a good sense of humor and likes my jokes. I know Marie-Anne doesn’t really like them as much, but she tolerates me; she says I should go and live on the rue des Mauvaises-Paroles in Paris—the Street of the Bad Words. I don’t think I should like that; it’s rather too near a fish market.

The Marquis de Thibouville, an aspiring playwright and a confirmed dandy, has adapted
Cupid and Psyche
into a short pastoral play, and we are all to star in it. Well, Marie-Anne and the king are to star in it, but there are several other parts for the rest of us. Marie-Anne originally wanted to do something by Molière or Racine, but decided amateurs, even royal amateurs, might lessen the majesty of those fine works. I have been given the role of Marie, a young maid.

“Marie—that doesn’t sound very Roman? Are you sure that’s a Roman name?”

“We’ll rename you Claudia, then,” says Marie-Anne in irritation. I throw myself into the role: this is better than our games in the nursery! I leap around and offer my services to anyone that asks, or doesn’t. I swat away a mosquito from the Duc d’Ayen’s wig; take drinks from the footmen and serve them myself; hold Meuse’s snuffbox; fix Madame de Chevreuse’s hair ribbons, and
all in all enjoy service immensely. I can’t wait for my costume to be ready—I shall have an apron!

It is a Saturday and we are just eight, practicing; we hope to present the play next week, to a small audience of our friends. Outside the doors of the private apartments the grumblings and whining multiply, for eight is a small number and the king has been more absent than usual these last few weeks, locked away with the rehearsals.

The king seems to enjoy being a Roman god and forbids any of the players to address him as king, and no one is to wear powder or swords. It is all very informal and jolly.

I curtsy to the king. “Sire, Maid Diane at your service. May I straighten your cravat?”

“I’m a god now, Diane, not a king. And I’m not even sure the Romans wore neckpieces. But thank you for your offer.”