Versailles (16 page)

There is no such thing as a bad-tempered pear, said Jean de La Quintinie.

When he died in 1688 the Sun King was inconsolable. Eventually the pears made their way to America, where they were called Bartletts.

 

Spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall. Pentecost, haymaking, Saint John's Eve, Michaelmas, deer hunting, winemaking, Advent. You think it will go on that way forever; the days get long, the days get shorter. The pigs have babies, the pigs get slaughtered. Acorns. Willow wands. Lard.

At Versailles there were so many mirrors! I had most of them put there myself, and when I caught a glimpse of the Queen walking by in all her majesty it would please me, even surprise me a little, to see those blue eyes I'd been looking at my whole life still looking back at me, like a friend. Mama's silver hand mirror in Schönbrunn Palace, the reflecting pool beside her summer house. Your eyes will stick like that, Antonia, if you're not careful.

Not so many mirrors at the Tuileries, though—grâce
à Dieu, grâce à Dieu.

Not so many mirrors here and no one playing the harp in a far-off room, a long thread of music winding back through the hallways to tangle round your heart.
It's raining little shepherdess. Ach du lieber Augustin.
The music box Carlotta gave me when she was dying and Papa took away because he said it made me morbid.
Alles ist weg, weg, weg...

Princess Snowflake, Princess Bright-Eyes. What do you do, take them out at night and polish them?

"Our family life is a kind of hell," I wrote Axel. Everyone had taken to calling Louis "King Log," most notably Provence and Artois, as well as the rest of our fair-weather friends who'd eventually decamped for Koblenz, and as if to prove them right he'd stopped talking or doing much of anything except for playing backgammon with the Serious One, who was looking more like him with every passing day.

Though did it matter, really? At her age I was already married, a Dauphine. At her age I thought my whole life lay before me.

Sometimes we were allowed to go to the Princesse de Lamballe's salon, once to the theater to see
Psyche.
The Furies shook their torches as they danced, lighting our faces.

Sometimes I barely recognized myself and had to pause to realize that this person was really me.

"Tranquillity hangs by a thread," I wrote Axel, trying to get his attention. I sent him a gold ring inscribed
Lâche qui les abandonne,
after wearing it myself for two days to take the chill off. Coward, to abandon me!

Ach du lieber Augustin, all is lost, all is lost...

And then, one day I looked up. Late winter, lambs being born, also kids and fuzzy yellow ducklings, but it made no difference, I scarcely went anywhere.

I was looking up more those days, holding my head up high, as they say—it gave me a certain perspective, ceilings, birds, clouds, rooftops. Chandeliers. Hot-air balloons. The indifferent sun and indifferent moon as opposed to the expressions on the faces of the people around me, my dejected family, my pitying servants, the occasional furious Jacobin holding a calf s head aloft on a pike at the window, sticking out its tongue at me while its eye sockets buzzed with flies.

Holding my head up high and more than usually aware of my throat, where I used to paint a thin blue vein on top of the thick white makeup we all had to wear in the good old days at Versailles. Full of arsenic, that makeup—though when has it ever been safe to be beautiful? When has it ever been safe to be Queen?

The Blade of Eternity was busy flashing away out there in the weak Parisian sunshine. Monsieur Guillotin's brand-new idea, designed to sever the heads from the bodies of rich and poor alike in less time than it took to blink, or so Madame Campan informed me, having made a point of watching the trial demonstration on a petty criminal, a man convicted of forgery, in the Place de Grève, Nor did the forger's headless body commence to dance, as scientists predicted it might, nor did his bodiless head jabber in the basket.

Though who knows what ghostly thoughts kept flying through the hallways of the forger's brain?

A particularly challenging signature? The extreme forward slant of the capital
A
? The ornate flourish trailing from the final letter?

Or maybe his mistress's mouth preparing to smile, her upper lip lifting to reveal the white tips of her teeth and on her breath the smell of the season's first apricots?

Maybe
So this is what becomes of Eros.

Maybe OH NO OH NO OH NO OH NO.

One evening in February, I looked up and saw a tall man with a large dog walking into my room.

He was wearing a disguise but I recognized him immediately, just as he did me. Even without mirrors I knew I was no longer slim and pretty, or not so slim though still pretty and vivacious, or verging on fat though radiant; even without mirrors I knew I was pale and haggard and white-haired.

But you can't have let your defenses so thoroughly down with someone and not forever after know them, no matter if they're disguised as a common messenger, like Axel that February day, flying on his winged feet past twelve hundred murderous guardsmen. I saw the melting snowflakes in his black eyelashes. I saw the set of the mouth, a dimple to either side of the faintly trembling lips, the brow no longer smooth yet still wide and intelligent, the nostrils flaring a little with each breath.

The dog was as long-legged as its master, a snow-white creature with pricked ears and a beautiful plumed tail that made me think of the ostrich feathers on my bedposts at Versailles. As I stood there rigid with longing, it leapt up and licked my cheek.

"Odin," Axel said. "Mindyour manners."

And then he embraced me and, really, I thought a person could lose her head forever and what difference would it make.

Only later—much much later, the next day in fact—when Louis finally joined us, did the talk turn to politics. We were flirting with danger. Axel said. Flirting, he repeated and threw me a look; we were playing both ends against the middle, wooing every crowned head in Europe on the one hand, every bloodthirsty revolutionary on the other. It was too late, Axel said; our only hope was escape. Just because the last attempt had failed was no reason not to try again. "We could head northeast this time, concealed within the dark tunnel of forests that stretched from Paris to the marches of Flanders. Why not? he pleaded, but of course we all knew perfectly well that even if escape had once been possible it no longer was. Not only was every avenue fiercely watched, but Louis had pledged his word to the National Assembly that he would stay in Paris, and Louis was an honorable man.

"If you stay you will die," Axel said.

"When the counterrevolutionaries finally get here," Louis replied, "the revolutionaries will need to keep me alive as a hostage to save themselves."

The human heart is many-chambered; I loved them both. I loved the touch of both men, the one seeking to calm my blood, the other to heat it up. The one froglike in his unfashionable wig, the red sash of the Order of Saint-Louis straining across the immense hill of his belly. The other tall and thin. On edge, watchful. Like a racehorse. A beacon.

Resté là,
Axel would later write in his diary. This was his usual method for recording an amorous liaison, the equivalent of Louis's
got one,
but without the bloodshed.

Quick, quick, along the Avenue de Sceaux. Quickly. Quicker. Sky the palest blue, every trace of color wrung from it by the heat, and off to the left on the far side of the stables and the tennis court, the Sun King's Kitchen Garden, its trees still standing in orderly rows, their boughs heavy with fruit. Pears, apples, apricots, plums. A drift of leaves underfoot, though it's too early, really, the second week in August, the wind from the east and hot.

An unendurably hot wind, breath of the Devil, ovens of hell. Eleven miles to the east, Paris is on fire. The Tuileries have been set ablaze, the royal family herded off to be locked in a tiny cage behind the rostrum of the Legislative Assembly, where everyone can keep an eye on them. "What a lot of leaves!" the King was heard to observe as he and the Queen were making their way along the crowd-filled Terrace of the Feuillants, her face red and blotchy, her bodice stained with sweat.

The wind raises dust from the cobbles of the Parade Grounds, dust and heat phantoms, transparent carriages, shimmering men and women, laughing, rippling, breaking apart.

Let us go, children of France, our day of glory has arrived...

Glory, yes! Let us go!

Four hundred steps from the first of two ornate golden grilles to the second, their gates padlocked, their gilt paint chipping off. Sun directly overhead and out of the wind now. Trash and leaves, dust and grit. Seventy-six steps across the Royal Court and then
tap tap tap tap tap
up five long stairs and you're almost there.

Almost.

Sun beating down. Down the row of wheat I've run and now my story's almost done...

Eleven miles to the east, the young Napoleon Bonaparte watches the goings-on at the Tuileries from the second-story window of a nearby furniture shop. The Knights of the Dagger, all of them old and infirm, together with a mixed bag of cooks and grooms and laun-drywomen and spies and members of the Swiss Guard, are being thrown from the flame-filled palace windows, sometimes their entire bodies, sometimes just their heads.

Day of glory! Let us go!
Little children catch the heads and impale them on sticks. The greenery runs red with blood.

Even after Russia, Napoleon will say he never saw such carnage.

And what of the fat pig that has cost so much to fatten? Let him drink! Let him get drunk! Since Nature has given him a porker's character, let him live on as a porker!

And his tigress wife, meowing sweetly, biding her time till she can scratch again?

Lock them in the Temple, throw away the key!

Leaves and phantoms, Prudence and Mars.

Sun beating down and the way so long. Sun so hot and your heart so broken.

Fifty-seven steps to cross the Marble Court, from the top of the five stairs to the front entrance. All the doors and windows boarded up and the clock stopped at half past ten. Black paving stones, black ones and white ones, 11,520 marble paving stones in all.

Diligence and Peace, Wealth and Hercules.

Eleven miles to the east, the Tuileries turns to ash.

Eleven miles, no more, no less.

Let me in! Let me in! Let me in!

The Temple, an oppressive medieval fortress in the Marais. It is a rainy autumn night, the month of Brumaire, Year One of the new Republican calendar. As the curtain rises we see Louis Capet and his wife, formerly known as the King and Queen of France, seated with their two children at a candlelit wooden table, the Jacobins having papered the walls behind them to resemble the inside of a prison. Louis is in the process of making a puzzle map for his son, who is doing his best to stop coughing long enough to finish his bowl of soup. Antoinette is embroidering pink roses on a white seat cover; the Serious One is scowling into space.

 

L
OUIS
: Could you hand me the scissors, dearest?

A
NTOINETTE
: Just a moment.
She surveys her work critically, tries to snip the thread, and throws the scissors on the floor.
I give up! I hate these things! You couldn't cut butter with them, let alone someone's throat.

L
OUIS
: Dearest ...
He reaches across the table to touch her hand.

A
NTOINETTE
: I'm sorry. Ignore me. It's just that I'm freezing to death. You'd think they could at least keep the fires going.

S
ERIOUS
O
NE
: When you get upset like that you get spots all over your face.

A
NTOINETTE
: Thank you.

 

She sighs and returns to her sewing; Louis retrieves the scissors from the floor and, with an expression of deep concentration, begins cutting a large piece of paper into smaller pieces.

For a while there is only the sound of snipping and coughing, and then other sounds, muffled at first but growing louder and louder, rattling chains, plodding footsteps, sliding bolts, keys turning in locks; the candles gutter as a heavy oak door bangs open, stage left. Enter the Tisons, the elderly couple hired to "look after" the royal family, each wearing a long white apron and a red Jacobin hat. As Citizeness Tison removes the Dauphin's soup bowl, Citizen Tison stands directly in front of Antoinette, blowing smoke in her face.

Antoinette stares fixedly at her work and keeps on sewing.

 

L
OUIS
: Excuse me. I don't think the boy was finished yet.

C
ITIZENESS
T
ISON
: He doesn't think the boy was finished.
She spits in the bowl and hands it back to the Dauphin.
A thousand pardons.

L
OUIS
: Please. He's just a little boy. He hasn't been well.

D
AUPHIN
: It's all right, Papa.
He covers his mouth to stifle a cough.
I had plenty, really I did.

C
ITIZENESS
T
ISON
: Papa—that's a good one.
She elbows her husband.

C
ITIZEN
T
ISON
: Will there be anything else?

 

He and his wife make their exit without waiting for an answer, slamming the door behind them. Once again there is the sound of turning keys, sliding bolts, rattling chains, plodding footsteps, fainter and fainter.

The Dauphin breaks into uncontrollable coughing; Louis puts his head in his hands.