Versailles (6 page)

So the girl eats what's put before her, and all of a sudden there's a dear little tabby cat sitting at her feet, going
meow meow how could you do it?
Meaning how could she ever have managed to swallow a single bite, the wolf having gotten there first and carved her granny up into dinner.

But did I say
girl?
What I meant was woman. Queen, actually. When I said girl I meant Queen of France.

Then the wolf says in a serious tone, "Undress and get in bed with me."

I admit, I was credulous. I admit I played too much roulette, cavagnole, lansquenet. The word most often used in describing me was "pleasure," as in "Antoinette lives for pleasure."

Will a lion roar in the forest, when he hath no prey? Will a young lion cry out of his den, if he hath taken nothing?

I think I was casting about among the millions of things I was surrounded with to find just one, JUST ONE LITTLE THING that would somehow stand for the whole. One thing to fix my eyes on, to still my racing heart. A silver snuffbox such as got stolen daily by the hot-fingered riffraff the place was full of? A diamond bracelet? An especially fine apricot?

God knows I was nice enough, kind enough. (I
was,
too.)

God knows it drove me mad to watch my cross-eyed sister-in-law's belly get bigger and bigger, in preparation for the day not so very far off when she'd spread her legs and out would pop the Due d'Angoulême.

And meanwhile in the Orangerie the potted trees put forth their sweet white blossoms. And meanwhile my husband kept shooting and hammering and forging; I kept piling more and more feathers on my head. Trying to redress some imbalance, I suppose, like the spurned lover who turns to opiates or chocolate or drink.

It was the fashion, then, to complain about everything. It was the fashion to say, "Oh, if only I were in Paris," unless that's where you happened to be, in which case you'd say, "Oh, if only I were at Versailles." Whereas meanwhile I lived for pleasure.

For example, my "lovers." Count Esterhazy, with his sly Magyar eyes, who shot bread pellets at me when I was laid low with measles. The Prince de Ligne, who told me my soul was as beautiful and white as my face. Women, too. I was to have had unnatural relations with women, wild orgies at night under the stars while my husband slept the deep sleep of the innocent. My wedding ring disappeared, and it was whispered that it had been stolen by a witch from the Massif Central. To keep me barren, it was whispered—as if supernatural forces were actually required for such a thing.

"Where shall I put my petticoat?" the girl asks the wolf. "Where shall I put my stockings?"

"Throw them on the fire, dear. You won't need them anymore."

Though who knows how these things happen? Maybe there
was
witchcraft at work, only not on my womb. Maybe witchcraft was behind the previous summer's crop failures, which led to the following winter's grain shortage, which led to the flour wars of May. The same year my cross-eyed sister-in-law prepared to give birth, and a fortune was being poured into Rheims Cathedral to refurbish it for my husband's coronation. Seamstresses busy stitching gold fleurs-de-lis on everything in sight. Cobblers busy making the violet boots with high red heels in which my husband would totter toward the altar. Bird catchers busy catching the hundreds of birds that would be let loose to beat their poor wings against the vaulted arches, as the Archbishop of Rheims tipped the Holy Ampulla full of coronation oil over my husband's head. "May the King possess the strength of a rhinoceros. May he drive the nations of our enemies before him like a rushing wind."

Because, really, who knows why it never rained during the summer of 1774? Why the soil turned to dust and when the rain finally came, the worm got into the bud? Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it? You might just as well say a witch put a spell on the sky.

I admit, I was oblivious. I liked to go to the races with my charming brother-in-law, playfully dispute the merits of Glowworm, King Pepin. Who knows why one horse triumphed, another came up lame? I liked to watch the little silver ball in the roulette wheel leap from number to number like a flea.

And on that May morning when a crowd of peasants poured through the gates at the Place d'Armes, filling the Forward Court with their furious voices and pale upturned faces, with their rumbling stomachs and loaves of moldy bread, who knows why I didn't see among them the invisible hand of the future, wielding a bloody knife?

It wasn't because I was too stupid. It wasn't even because I was unwilling to face facts. No, it was because I was completely uninterested in food—always had been, always would be—and off somewhere else, sequestered as usual, no doubt taking a walk. Alone for a change, alone and thinking things over. The happy days of my childhood and the gardens of Schönbrunn, the way the sweet woodruff grew thickly around the base of each shade tree in a collar of lace. May wine, Carlotta told me, this is what's used to flavor May wine, and she picked a flower and made me taste it, but it was so bitter I had to spit it out. There was still snow on the mountains; our mother galloped past us on her favorite stallion, seated astride like a man. Calling out in her wild imperious way,
Guten Morgen, meine Schatzerl!,
the sound of hoofbeats continuing to thud behind her long after she was gone. How warm the air, yet with a smell like melted snow. Carlotta put her arms around me and laughed. Inside my body, my soul stirred. Changeless, changeless, as if that could compensate for all the rest.

"Oh, grandmother! What big teeth you have!"

"Oh, grandmother! What big—"

Presently the Queen takes a walk.

Around the Latona Fountain, where the stone frogs perch with their poor sad mouths eternally wide open, hoping against hope for a drink that never comes, and then across the bright springy turf of the Tapis Vert and toward the Grand Canal.

There was the smell of newly cut grass and boxwood, the sun at my back, pleasantly warm and the canal extending before me like a blue sparkling avenue all the way to a place where a person might fall off the edge of the world if she wasn't paying attention, which, I admit, I wasn't. Woodsmen were busy chopping the trees that hadn't made it through the previous winter, talking to each other in that easy way of the peasant class, making jokes, singing, until they saw me approach and clammed up, growing busier than ever. In those days I think I was still more admired than despised, though perhaps also (unbeknownst to me) pitied a little, pity being the prelude to contempt.

"
Bonjour,
" I said, and came to a halt near one particularly industrious pair of broad-shouldered youths. "
Comment
pa
va?
" I inquired, whereupon in keepingwith the protocol they threw themselves obediently, if not a trifle clownishly, at my feet. The smell of sap, of wood chips and sweat and the sweet May breeze, combined with some oddly exhilarating aroma the canal was giving off, a mix of algae and trout spawn, was going to my head. "Please get up," I said, knowing that as they did they couldn't fail to catch a glimpse of slim white ankle. Even the Queen of France should be allowed to forgo her stockings on a warm spring day.

I know what you're thinking. But NO NO NO!—I would never be untrue to Louis, though I'm also willing to admit I liked to flirt, especially if the man had a long humorous mouth and clear blue eyes like the taller of the two, and so I made a joke of my own at the expense of our current Finance Minister, Turgot, a sort of rude play on words involving
impotence
and the single property tax, or
impôt unique,
he'd recently instated.

"It's a bad idea," the shorter of the two young men said. His eyebrows ran together over the bridge of his nose, giving him a grave, unforgiving look. "God's will, not the farmer's lack of it, is behind a poor harvest. The rich merchant buys what little grain there is and makes the baker pay for it through the nose, and then the baker turns around and charges the hungry woodcutter an arm and a leg for a single lousy loaf crawling with bugs. "

"No worse than that icebreaker," replied Blue Eyes, referring to Minister Turgot's machine, an ill-starred contraption that not only failed to break up the floes at the head of the Seine the previous February, but also was said to have capsized in a tantrum of whirling impedimenta, taking several of its operators down with it.

"The machine was only responsible for three deaths," said Eyebrows. "The tax will starve thousands."

"Turgot won't last," I said. "I am sure of it. Even now, wakened by the spring sun, the wheat anticipates the thresher's blade."

I could see the new leaves on the beech trees, pricked and moving this way and that like the ears of animals. Listening, listening ... What is the Queen saying? What impropriety is she committing? The sun had gone behind a large dark cloud; the wind was picking up.

"And then?" said Eyebrows, lifting his axe, clearly impatient with the conversation and ready to get back to work.

"And then we shall have someone even worse," said Blue Eyes, grinning sardonically.

Suddenly a gentle rain began to fall, dotting the canal with millions of tiny bright eruptions, like flung pearls. On my cheeks and eyelashes, my ungloved hands, my uncoiffed head—for a moment I stood there, face uptilted and open-mouthed like one of Latona's frogs, and then all at once the sky filled with millions of tiny bright birds, beating their wings like mad to outrace the approaching storm, and for some reason I felt extremely happy.

"Your Majesty should find shelter," Eyebrows said, his gaze fixed on his axe blade, which he was in the process of sharpening with a whetstone. "Your Majesty might take a chill."

Blue Eyes bent to retrieve his own axe, and it occurred to me that he was trying to hide his amusement. The three of us were, after all, more or less the same age, and I was clearly in excellent health—had circumstances been different we'd no doubt have linked arms and run laughing into the beech grove. Though maybe he, too, had grown bored with the conversation. Maybe he wanted me to leave so that he could relinquish all pretense of continuing to work in what had by now become a fairly steady downpour.

"In any case," I said, "I had better get back to the chateau. The King will be looking for me."

Except of course he wasn't; he was off hunting in the densely wooded area somewhere near the Pond of the Iron Nail, and returned, as I did, drenched to the skin. "Got one," he told me, simultaneously making a note of the fact in his diary, but one
what,
I never had a clue.

Meanwhile the Prince de Poix, supported by the royal guards, had managed to disperse the angry mob, promising them good quality bread at two sous a loaf. Shortly thereafter the rain stopped, as quickly as it had started. I changed into Masked Desire, my latest Rose Bertin creation, and traded gossip with the Princesse de Lamballe (always an uneven exchange, given her fundamental aversion to speak ill of anyone, living or dead), and, more gratifyingly, with Artois, who told me the so-called inedible loaves wielded by the mob had in fact been cut open earlier and painted green and black, to make them look moldy. I played the harp; I did some needlework. I dined indifferently on the first asparagus of the season, likewise the first
fraises des bois,
cunningly baked into tarts shaped like hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs, each berry no bigger than my baby fingernail. I made eyes at this man, that man. I triumphed at roulette. Eventually I went to bed.

Can a bird fall in a snare upon the earth, where no gin is for him? Shall one take up a snare from the earth and shall have nothing in it?

Shh! Shh! Blow out the candles, offer a prayer. The body of the Queen of France is tossing and turning on her bed of needles and pins.

The body of the Queen of France, tossing and turning, and there deep inside her, what?

Lights and liver? Bones and blood?

No. The body of the Queen of France and there deep inside her the soul: the girl, taking a walk. From the gardens of Schönbrunn to the Grand Canal of Versailles; from the taste of sweet woodruff to the smell of rain and fish. A straight line connecting the two prime coordinates that, if only she'd paid better attention to her studies, she could have used to locate the third, without which her life would always lack dimension.

Every life has a shape. Even the lives of dogs, though they're born embodying theirs, unlike humans. Even Eggplant, his big round eyeballs rolling from side to side under his silky eyelids, snoring and twitching and dreaming at the foot of the bed. Even a sparrow, a trout, a flea.

Of course death is never a coordinate, not for humans at least.

Which is why it's wrong to say that a life gets cut short.

Thy will, oh False One, has betrayed me.
My power revoked at thy behest.
More I would, but cannot save thee
From thy cruel extravagance.

 

"When I am laid in earth
May my words create
Desolation in thy breast.
Forget me, ah! while I enjoy thy fate.

A spring evening,
1777.
Jeanne Bécu Du Barry's estate at Louveciennes. The moon is full and a light breeze is blowing. A perfect evening, in other words, were it not for the fact that the French economy is growing weaker by the minute, war is brewing in the Low Countries, and the King and Queen still haven't managed to consummate their marriage. The Queen's eldest brother, Joseph, recently arrived in Paris, is paying Madame Du Barry a visit. He's traveling incognito (in the guise of "Count Falkenstein"), liking to view himself as a cloak-wrapped stranger who appears from out of nowhere, performs good deeds, and only later is revealed to be Holy Roman Emperor. When the curtain rises Joseph can be seen looking out an open window, stage left, moonlight illuminating the serious expression on his face. He's wearing a toupee, and what's left of his own hair is
in
a long pigtail down his back; his eyes are protuberant, not unlike Eggplant's. Jeanne meanwhile reclines on a striped sofa, center stage. As buxom as her guest is rake-thin, she is bursting from a flowered
dressing gown and has her hands literally full, eating a roast chicken.