Versailles (12 page)

Jeanne de La Motte, who was a very shrewd woman, managed to convince Cardinal Rohan, who was a very silly man, that the Queen secretly loved him, even though everyone knew she'd despised him for years. La Motte conjured a heady mix of romance and the occult, of love letters and a starlit assignation—finally tricking the Cardinal into authorizing the purchase of the necklace on behalf of his Queen.

Once the jewelers had handed the necklace over to La Motte's lover, disguised as the Queen's private courier, he immediately broke it into pieces and began to fence it around Paris and London. "I love imagining the most beautiful diamonds in the world on the world's most beautiful neck," Böhmer said in a note to Antoinette, which she burned to bits, going on the not unreasonable assumption that the man was mad.

That neck! Rohan was baffled. That perfect white neck, but why was it not wearing the necklace? Candlemas had come and gone, and still no sign of it. The skin so smooth, so white, so creamy and delicious! That perfect white column where he longed to press his lips.

He couldn't believe it when the King had him arrested on the Feast of Corpus Christi, and sent him to the Bastille. His lawyer spread the news that he was languishing there in irons, but in fact he was lounging in a very comfortable apartment, dining on oysters and drinking the finest wine.

Popular sentiment held that Rohan exhibited an "excess of candor," meaning everyone knew that he was stupid. Meaning everyone knew he was somehow worthy of their forgiveness, of their love. He was tried before the Parliament of Paris and acquitted on May 31, 1786.

The necklace ceased to exist except as a diamond here, a diamond there. A pair of pendant earrings. A brooch. A single stone hidden in a black velvet bag in a mahogany box, traded for a snuffbox and a pair of silver asparagus tongs.

R
OHAN
(
singing
)

Slander's like a gentle wind,
a gentle zephyr pitched so low
you hardly feel it, till it lightly,
oh so sweetly starts to grow.
Piano, piano, slowly seeping,
sotto voce, softly creeping,
slyly sneaking, deftly slipping,
faintly humming, lightly tripping,
as the storm begins to blow.
First a mere insinuation,
then a hinted accusation,
what began as innuendo
all at once starts to crescendo,
louder, bolder, brazen-sounding,
stomping, beating, thumping, pounding,
screaming, banging, booming, clanging,
spreading horror through the air...

 

November. My thirty-third birthday. Day of the Dead, 1788. Beasts howling in the forests. Ice like diamonds. Every night at dinner the water froze in the jugs. Every night at dinner the King gorged himself on roast meat and wine. His eyes got smaller and yellower, he quoted Milton. The Dauphin was getting weaker; the Dauphin was dying. He didn't want to eat. The idea of eating three meals a day bored into his brain like a worm into an apple.

 

Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race.
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours...

 

Was ever a woman so sad, ever a woman so hopeless?

Yes, Antoinette. Probably all of them, if truth be told. Brave women, stuffing rags in their shoes, foraging for bread in the streets of Paris. Brave murderous women, if truth be told, since what woman would hesitate for a second if she thought that by murdering someone she could save her own precious child's life? People in Paris were black with hunger, Axel said. Each night forty newborns were left on the doorstep of the Foundling Hospital. People were making straw effigies, Louis the Crack-Brained, Madame Deficit, and setting them on fire to warm their hands and feet. The Seine was frozen solid as a rock. Frozen water everywhere like a message from the future.

 

Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss
With an individual kiss;
And Joy shall overtake us as a flood.

 

He had quite a memory, my Louis.

The Diamond Necklace Affair was finally over, Rohan back in his palace, writing his memoir; Cagliostro duly idolized, writing a memoir. The little streetwalker Oliva's memoir had already been published and branded a great popular success. The only one of the key players left in prison was La Motte, and when she escaped everyone said it was through my influence. We'd been lovers, it was said; she was my cat's-paw. The whole thing had been her idea, so you'd expect her to have had a good imagination (or at least as good as every other French citizen busy picturing his Queen lavishing attention on one cock after another; so many cocks, said the author of "The Patriotic Bordello," that if they were laid end to end they'd stretch from Versailles to Paris), but she didn't. La Motte ended up all by herself in a filthy room in London, writing memoir after memoir. Eventually she threw herself from a window.

Maybe it's that whatever passes for imagination in a conniving mind has very little to do with hope. Hope is the ability to imagine other ways out, at least when you're young. Later it changes into something else.

The passageway from the South Quincunx, for instance, via the vanished Labyrinth. Imagine that passageway, like something a small animal might tunnel, twisting and turning around tree roots and past glittering fountains, through the Land of Dancing Water, the Land of the Singing Apple, the Land of the Little Bird Who Knows All, and to Eternity. The long Eternity that would greet our bliss.

Back then I was thirty-three going on a hundred. My hair was turning white.

Nor was I thinking of anything so fanciful as Eternity. No, what I was really thinking of were Axel's apartments, that labyrinth of rooms I'd had built for him just above my own, tucked into long forgotten hallways and within walls, between second-story ceilings and third-story floors, folded in so perfectly you needed to count footsteps or use a tape measure to know they were there, a maze of secret corridors and cubbyholes accessible through doors you could only barely make out, the faintest seam in a panel of silk wallpaper, in a gilt molding, the whole thing a little on the dark side but giving onto a small courtyard and with enough mirrors so that you could count on the occasional ray of morning sun to kiss your skin.

From the South Quincunx, through the Labyrinth, and into Axel's arms.

"Close your eyes," I told him. I led him into the room where the new Swedish stove stood ticking in the corner as its dark blue tiles heated up. Tall, from floor to ceiling—it had been next to impossible to sneak it in without anyone noticing, but I'd managed. Maybe the more obsessed the people around you are with rumors, the less observant they are of what's actually going on. Maybe the busier they are reading "A List of All the Persons with Whom the Queen Has Had Debauched Relations," or discussing how the Queen paved the floor of the Trianon with jewels, or pondering how the Queen got the King drunk on purpose in order to have sex with—of all people!—Cardinal Rohan, the less they see.

Axel said it was a beautiful stove, he couldn't have been happier with it, and I started to cry.

The logs were green and wet, the chateau reeking of smoke. All the windows were thick with frost; you couldn't see through them, let alone open them, even a crack.

He was so kind. It was more than I could bear. Not just the pamphlets, though they were bad enough. Not just my sweet sickly boy. My baby girl, born in July, dead the following June, her lungs the size of teaspoons. The Serious One, my own dear daughter. She heard I'd fallen from my horse and said she wished I'd died.

"Dear heart," Axel said. "Joséphine." He'd chosen that name because he said it made him think not only of the softness and paleness of my skin and hair, but also the firmness of my chin, which he loved. I couldn't stand having anyone around when I was miserable; he took my chin in his hand, he looked me in the eye. "She didn't mean it," he said. "She's very harsh; that's her way. It's how she protects herself. She'll live to be a hundred."

From the north, Axel—the frozen north. If you were to split the frozen surface of the Grand Canal with an axe, out would flow blood, warm red blood. He didn't mind if you saw that about him.

Wicked men, monsters! What had I done that they should hate me so?

A proper Queen would stay in her apartment doing needlework, everyone said. A proper Queen would never have gotten mixed up in the Diamond Necklace Affair in the first place.

No smoke without fire, everyone said, except Goethe, who said the affair filled him with as much terror as the head of Medusa; or Napoleon, who referred to it years later as the gateway to my tomb.

Generally speaking, men are more melodramatic than women.

Meanwhile the Dauphin was dying. He was getting thinner by the day, his poor little spine more and more twisted and his poor little face pinched with pain, every single breath costing him the greatest effort. Lying flat on his stomach on the green felt billiard table in the Chamber of the Pendulum Clock, reading history, philosophy. Reading Hume's
History of England,
like his father. Our expectation that the sun will rise tomorrow has no basis in reason, but is a matter of belief, which is why it should have come as no surprise to Charles I to wake up one fine day to find his head chopped off.

The two beautiful clocks tick tick ticking away.

Even the surviving Mesdames, Adélaïde and Victoire (Sophie died in 1782) couldn't remember a worse winter. Paris was in chaos; things weren't much better at Versailles. We handed out food to the poor; we built bonfires at the crossroads near the Grand Canal. Food and bonfires, just as Louis's cousin Philippe, the Due d'Orléans, was doing in Paris, though unlike him we didn't try suggesting that no one else was doing anything to help.

But Philippe was busy becoming ringleader of the opposition, turning the Palais Royal, his Paris residence, into its headquarters. The Due d'Orléans—a true Prince of the Blood but otherwise Colonel in Chief of the Emptyheads, a man best known for enjoying rabbit hunting in the nude. "I'm stunned by the pleasure of doing good!" he exclaimed, though that was merely that devil Laclos, who also happened to be his private secretary, speaking through him.

Did I say frozen solid? Did I say reeking of smoke? Did I say four walls do not a prison make?

With a polite nod of the head this footman or that would indicate that hidden door or this; we still thought things weren't so bad. We still thought we had choices. I'll tell you a secret. We ran out of wax candles and had to use tallow; the whole palace smelled like sheep.

You can either refuse to give up hope or you can sink into the deepest of depressions. Eventually the horrible winter will turn to spring, no matter what. Your beautiful clocks will keep marking the hours, days, weeks, months, movements of the stars. Also, your bosom will get bigger, forty-four inches. Your husband will develop eczema. He will become increasingly despondent, unable to decide anything.

"It is the doom of our great ruling line to rest inert at some poor halfway house," said the Austrian playwright Grillparzer, "deaf to the call for strenuous endeavor." Which is why even though I knew that Charles I's fatal mistake was to listen to his wife, I also knew it was time to interfere.

Eventually the horrible winter was over. Everyone was in a better mood because Louis had taken my advice and brought Necker back as Minister of Finance. Liverish, self-satisfied Jacques Necker, with his prissy pursed lips and his understated cravats and his sanctimonious wife, Suzanne. "Savior of France he shall be," everyone was singing, "
Alléluia!
" As if he could actually turn back the clock. Late spring, the days mild and sweet. White asparagus, red
fraises des bois.
Lent had come and gone, making "
alléluia
" once again permissible.

The dying Dauphin sat propped on cushions by his window, eating the jujube lozenges I'd sneak to him against the doctors' orders and watching the twelve hundred deputies to the Estates-General march in procession across the three toes of the goosefoot, from one side of town to the other. Blue sky and white clouds, a fresh spring breeze. The parish priests wore black wool robes, the noblemen black silk outer coats, the Third Estate plain black suits and black tricorn hats. I had a circlet of diamonds around my head, a little heron feather in my hair.

Twelve hundred deputies. Twelve hundred and one, if you counted both faces of the Due d'Orléans. Robes pierre, Mirabeau, Talleyrand. Of course you had no way of knowing who would emerge as a hero or a villain before it was over.

Of course, then, you had no way of knowing there was going to be an "it."

After the sun had gone down the air grew chill; the Swedish stove kept burning all night long. Through the open windows came the sound of inflamed oratory, songs, cheering. Kill the rich! Liberty! Democracy! Axel described the swamps of the New World to me, tree trunks like elephant legs caparisoned in lacy green moss. In America they were wearing steel buttons and steel shoe buckles, a Republican fad that was just beginning to catch on here at Versailles, along with no wigs, no panniers, no jewels, and clothes the color of goose droppings. In Paris you could see me and Louis and the Dauphin sitting under a baldaquin at the Wax Museum, dining with Voltaire, Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin.

Axel, my knight-errant from the north. Axel, with his brown eyes and heart of fire. He wasn't especially witty, unlike everyone else at Versailles; it was a great relief, really. When urged to plight his troth with Necker's ugly daughter Germaine (the future Madame de Stael), he said it was impossible. He'd never marry, he said, since the one he loved was already taken. I always wore dark colors in his rooms, deep red, deep green.

Were we sexually intimate? What difference could it possibly make to you?

I wrote a song for him: He is my friend, give him back to me. I have his love, he has my trust; I have his love, he has my trust.

The Estates-General continued to meet. The Third Estate convinced most of the clergy and noblemen to put aside their separate identities and join in a National Assembly that would draft a Constitution and keep meeting even if the King ordered it not to, which, as it turned out, he didn't, but instead issued a proclamation ordering all the deputies to join the National Assembly.