Becoming Marie Antoinette (13 page)

After a brief and whispered conversation between them, the
players concurred that the only way to demonstrate the technique would be if they performed it themselves. Monsieur Aufresne doffed his tricorn and lowered his bulk to the floor, while Monsieur Sainville, with all delicacy, knelt beside him and placed his palm over his colleague’s enormous gut. The slender actor explained how to breathe from the belly rather than from the lungs, instructing me to watch his hand rise and fall while Monsieur Aufresne inhaled and exhaled deeply, as he spoke several sentences in order to demonstrate how one sustains the sound without risk of injury.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t see it. “
Excusez-moi, messieurs
,” I said, begging their pardon. I scuttled over to Madame von Lerchenfeld’s chair, interrupting her reading. I had assumed she was enjoying one of her devotional works, but curiously, she snapped the book shut as I approached her. “I can’t understand how to breathe properly because Monsieur Aufresne is so”—I puffed out my cheeks and surreptitiously pantomimed a rounded gut—“
dickbäuchig!
How can I tell whether his belly has expanded?” I whispered.

The countess placed the book in her lap and clapped her hands in three sharp raps that echoed off the paneled walls of the Rosenzimmer. “
S’il vous plaît, messieurs!
” She asked them to switch places so that I could better discern the breathing technique as it was demonstrated on Monsieur Sainville’s considerably slimmer frame.

After watching the men for several moments I was determined to experience it for myself. The actors could never touch the royal person, but who was to prevent me—except my pinch-faced governess, whose attention I now imagined was immersed in some lurid novel—from lying down on the floor and feeling my own belly? So there I lay, swallowed up by my skirts, on a hard wooden floor, while above me an artificial garden was forever
in bloom. However, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t discern whether I was breathing correctly because my corset and stomacher restricted the movement of my torso—the very raison d’être of these accoutrements, but of no use to me now.

Too distracted by the roses overhead, I closed my eyes and practiced my phonetics. The actors had given me a few sample sentences to repeat. “
Le petit chien est bleu
”—the little dog is blue—I intoned with tremendous deliberation as I puffed out my lower belly, pushing it against my stays, then gradually deflated it as I spoke.

“Antonia, what is the meaning of this!”

My eyes flew open and I was treated to a view of somber black brocade festooned with lilac furbelows, my mother’s skirts. I sat up with a start. Maman was shadowed by the duc de Choiseul, his customary benign smile replaced with a grimace of consternation. I will long remember their mutual expression of horror at the sight of Monsieur Sainville in a recumbent position on the polished floor, while his stout colleague bent over him in what must have appeared to be a somewhat compromising pose with his ample derrière, clad in dun-colored breeches, poking skyward like the rump of the rhino in the royal menagerie.

In a tone that could freeze fire, Maman announced that the lesson was over. Immediately.

Countess von Lerchenfeld had jumped up from her chair as though her skirts were ablaze. She colored furiously and endeavored to hide her book inside a pocket. Luckily for her, Maman’s gaze was fixed on the pair of actors, who scrambled to their feet with as much dignity as they could muster and quickly donned their hats. With a “By your leave, Your Imperial Majesty” and a considerable amount of bowing and awkwardly ingratiating smiles, they departed the room in great haste.

“Actors,” said the duc with icy disdain. There was a hardness
in his eyes I had never before seen. “I had not believed it when it was first reported to me. The news defied everything I have come to recognize as Your Imperial Majesty’s piety and correctness—particularly as it applies to your daughter’s preparation to become the dauphine.”

I rose to my feet and smoothed my skirts. Never before had I seen Maman speechless. Her fleshy chins trembled with apprehension.

“I-I was against it from the start,” the countess stammered. Maman’s glare could have penetrated iron.

The French diplomat wrung his hands. “Your Imperial Majesty, the court of Versailles, and most specifically His Most Christian Majesty, are extremely distressed to learn that you have engaged a pair of strolling players to educate the future queen of France. I have staked—”

“Yes, I know,” Maman snapped. “You have staked your lengthy career on Antonia’s union with the dauphin. There is no need to remind me, monsieur le duc.” After several moments of hideously tense silence, my mother summoned her redoubtable equanimity. “It was my studied estimation that a pair of native-born speakers would be more appropriately suited to improving my daughter’s French. True, they are actors—”

“
Undesirables
,” the duc interrupted. He shook his head. “Versailles regards this decision, madame, as a particularly egregious faux pas. In fact,” he added, measuring his words in a way that sent shivers along my spine, “when it is coupled with the archduchess’s continued deficiency in intellectual pursuits and her poor acquaintance with basic academics, Louis has begun to question your judgment—as well as Madame Antonia’s suitability to become dauphine. It will take a good deal of delicacy—and persuasion—to convince him otherwise.”

I had never seen my mother look so pale.

A
UTUMN
1768

My summer nights at Schönbrunn were consumed by cavagnole, sitting at card tables opposite countless Viennese courtiers playing round after round of the wretched game until my eyes were dry with sleeplessness. The hardest part was the arithmetic, for the player who placed the winning bet would receive sixty-four times his stake from the banker. I had to learn how to multiply countless combinations of currency, taking into account that the numbers on a cavagnole board ranged from one to seventy. However, even after paying the winners, it was really the banker who stood to reap the largest sum at the end of the evening, for he got to keep all of the losing bets. Yet the long nights were worth the effort; I was making Maman proud with my newfound skills. The empress of Austria was a woman who applauded those who took risks and I was proving myself quite the little gambler, bold in my bids when it counted and reticent at all the right moments.

By autumn we were back at the dreary, massive Hofburg, and because the bald spots near my hairline had finally grown in to Maman’s satisfaction, she deemed it the proper time to engage the prominent hairdresser we had all heard so much about. The duchesse de Gramont, sister to the duc de Choiseul, had dispatched her own
friseur
, Sieur (short for “monsieur,” they told me) Larsenneur. According to the duchesse, “Larsenneur dresses the best heads in France,” a recommendation that was sure to please my mother. If it broke her heart to concur, even tacitly, with King Louis’s view that the Austrian empire was incapable of supplying the necessary talent to prepare me for my new role, it was her private sorrow. My marriage was the greatest diplomatic alliance of her reign. For such grand stakes, she would try, however much it stuck in her throat, to swallow her pride.

Sieur Larsenneur arrived in Vienna with a massive number of leatherbound wooden trunks, identifiable in the grandest way. Even the Hapsburgs did not have their initials engraved on silver plaques affixed to the lids of their baggage! And for a man who did nothing but dress hair day after day, the monsieur had such a serious demeanor that I found him slightly absurd—as if coiffures were the most important things in all the world. Through the gauzy haze of retrospect, I suppose my little reddish-blond head
was
of international proportions!

Equally striking was Sieur Larsenneur’s fancy for elaborate
perruques
. His hair was always hidden beneath a curled and powdered wig and he was most fastidious about maintaining them. Each
perruque
conjured a distinctive personality and I entertained myself by imagining that he gave them names and, in the privacy of his narrow and unadorned room, would converse with them as though they were his companions.

On the appointed day, Maman summoned me to one of the Hofburg’s smaller but no less grand salons. So many chambers in the palace resembled each other, in their ivory-colored paneling
accented with gilded moldings and heavy crimson draperies, that someone could easily become disoriented wandering amid the labyrinthine residence. As I entered the room my eyes widened in surprise, for it seemed as though every courtier in Vienna was present, wishing to see how this famed
friseur
would transform my curls into an elegant style befitting the dauphine of France.

Attired in a satin suit the color of oysters with a finely embroidered waistcoat, the hairdresser was announced to the assembled throng in a voice so stentorian one might have imagined him to be the most important man in Vienna. And that brisk November morning, I suppose he was. After making a low court bow to each of us, Sieur Larsenneur assured Maman that when he was finished with me, I would be the envy of every young girl in Europe. With an astonishingly haughty manner for a tradesman, the
friseur
informed us, “In Paris I am called
Le Chevalier des Cheveux
—the Cavalier of Hair—for I rescue the distressed tresses of damsels.”

So puffed up was he with his own conceit that I nearly burst out laughing in front of the whole court; but feeling the sharp rebuke of my mother’s gaze upon me, I tried to stifle my giggles behind my hand. When a chuckle erupted nonetheless, I had to bite the inside of my lower lip in order to regain my composure.

Maman instructed me to sit upon a low upholstered stool that would afford Sieur Larsenneur the best view of my head from all sides. After circling me a few times, he requested Maman’s permission to touch the archduchess’s person. No sooner did my mother assent than Sieur Larsenneur removed the lilac-colored ribbon and tortoiseshell pins that held my hair in place, allowing my locks to tumble down my back. A tingle coursed along my spine as he ran his hands through my hair to determine its weight and texture. In a single moment my hopes became rosier: perhaps the Frenchman could indeed work miracles.

“
Les cheveux, les cheveux
,” the
friseur
muttered to himself as he
rubbed a lock of my hair between his slender fingers. “The hair, the hair.” Keenly observing Sieur Larsenneur’s furrowed brow and murmuring lips, the courtiers leaned forward onto their toes and rocked back on their heels as one body, with the same sort of fascination they might have displayed were they witnessing the spectacular feats of a lion tamer. Baron Neny, florid and corpulent and prone to pronouncements that, to his immense delight, invariably proved correct, maintained a commentary on the hairdresser’s every movement, from brushing out my long hair, to teasing it off my forehead and drawing it tightly back until I thought he was about to pull my scalp off, to—finally—plaiting the length into a queue that began at the nape of my neck and hung down my back like the tail of a piglet. Then, with a grand flourish the
friseur
draped a large white cloth about my body, pinning it shut. He opened a pot of pomade scented with attar of roses to mask the pungent smell of the bear grease, scooped a bit into his palm, and rubbed his hands together before smoothing them over my new coiffure. “Almost,
madame l’archiduchesse
. Almost!” he breathed, his hands fluttering in anticipation of the completion of his masterpiece. “We are now to put on the finishing touches!”

From his monogrammed leather satchel Sieur Larsenneur withdrew a device that resembled a bellows and puffed a very light dusting of powder onto my hair—not even enough to conceal the shade of blond beneath it.

“
Ach! Zehr gut; zehr schön
,” Baron Neny intoned pompously. “Very good. Very pretty. It is such a simple style—deceptively so. And so decent; so elegant.” A roomful of courtiers nodded their heads in immediate agreement.