Becoming Marie Antoinette (18 page)

With the exception of the communal meal, Maman and I were left to ourselves. Every evening, as we lay upon our hard cots, Maman lectured me on my religious obligations, which I was not to neglect, even as dauphine of France. She made me promise before the cross that at the court of Versailles, I would attend Mass twice daily, and always carry my Bible—the one Papa had given me, bound in white leather with my initials engraved in gilt.

But didn’t the royal family of France attend Mass twice a day as well, I wondered aloud.

“Yes, of course, little one. But they don’t mean it. Just like the Neapolitans,” she added dismissively. “However, the French court is the most urbane in Europe. There, gossip takes precedence over God. You must develop the resilience of a willow and the sturdiness of an oak, resisting the temptations to become as frivolous and jaded and lazy as the lot of them.”

Every day at Marizell, although I should have much preferred to stroll through the convent gardens, we visited the shrine inside the dark and dreary basilica and knelt before the silver grille that Maman herself had donated to the sisters. Behind the bars and ornate scrollwork—as though she were in jail—the wooden statue of the Blessed Virgin had rested in her niche since the twelfth century. And every day that week Maman and I offered her a silent prayer, eyes shut tightly, heads bent so low that our lips touched our raised, clasped fingers—fingers that clutched our rosaries. I think Maman prayed for peace throughout our empire, for Catherine the Great and “the Devil” Frederick of Prussia to keep behind their own borders, and for Our Lady to give me a bosom that would please the dauphin of France.

I prayed that he would love me.

——

After our return from Marizell the months seemed to fly by. Since the arrival of Louis’s formal request for my hand I had begun to tick off the days on a calendar. It was now 1770, the year of my marriage. The short days of winter would soon lengthen into spring. In no time at all it would be Easter. The seasons were changing, yet my body was not, much to Maman’s consternation. Although I had turned fourteen the previous November 2, Générale Krottendorf remained elusive. Twice a day at Mass my mother prayed for her arrival, numbering it among her orisons for the security of the Hapsburg empire.

Yet even as the time drew nearer, the fact of my impending marriage remained little more than a hazy illusion. True, I had seen the clothes I would wear as dauphine of France, fingered the sumptuous fabrics and admired the colorful jewels; but this lavish trousseau was represented by dolls, which I continued to regard as playthings.

Because my handwriting remained so abysmal, and my attentiveness to any form of written communication equally lackluster, the abbé Vermond had instructed me to write daily, maintaining a journal (in French,
bien sûr
) of my thoughts and impressions.

These musings might be private, but they were not secret, as I had to show him the journal every day to prove that I was fulfilling the assignment. “However, your thoughts shall go no farther than my eyes,” the abbé assured me.

January 21, 1770

Before long, the entire Hofburg had the news. It had buzzed from room to room, from the kitchen to the stables, from the royal wardrobe to the ministerial offices, like a bumblebee in a
rose garden. Maman embraced me with tears in her eyes, declaring that she was now the happiest woman in Europe.

I was no longer a girl, but “half a woman” in my sister Charlotte’s words. The consummation of my marriage in mid-May would make me wholly a woman, and then, within another year’s time, a mother—the culmination of everyone’s greatest wish, not least my own, for I could not wait to have children to coddle and cuddle and cradle.

But in all the excitement of Générale Krottendorf’s first visit, my mother, as well as our maidservants, omitted to inform me about the pain. Why did they neglect to mention that my stomach would feel as pinched as if I had ingested poison, and my back would feel as though I had spent the night sleeping on the floor? And that every few hours the blood-soaked rag between my thighs that made me walk like a waddling duck would need to be exchanged for a clean one?

Still, I felt that I had finally succeeded in Maman’s eyes. She swanned about the state rooms wearing a beatific smile, my hand tightly clasped in hers, demanding that everyone curtsy to the future dauphine. “We are so proud of her,” she kept exclaiming, in a tone that managed to be both imperious and maternal. And then, with an abruptness that startled me, “You will sleep in my chamber from now on,” she declared. It sounded more like a command.

I shuddered. “With you?”

“Who else? We have much to discuss, and the time has finally arrived.” To my questioning glance she replied, “They are not the sort of subjects one speaks about in the light of day or in the state rooms of a palace.”

Her boudoir terrified me. After Papa died, Maman had her beautiful draperies removed; sunny yellow damasked silk was ripped down and replaced with grim black velvet panels that puddled to the floor like liquid gloom. This suffocating cocoon,
smelling of camphor, became my bedroom for the next two months. Poor Mops was left to his own devices in my apartments; he must have wondered where I’d gone off to every night.

A bed had been brought into Maman’s chamber for me. I was close enough to hear her snore. As I lay shivering in my white linen nightdress, staring at the plasterwork on the ceiling with open-eyed terror, I was treated to a nightly diet of lectures designed to improve my moral fiber and to prepare me for my future role. These one-sided conversations were accompanied by a lengthy list of precepts. To be certain I would remember them, Maman had taken the trouble to write them down for me. She extracted my promise to reread these regulations for my conduct every month, lest I forget to apply them to my daily life.

“You must always present the appearance of acquiescing to your husband in all things, Antonia. Remember, you will enter the House of Bourbon as an honored guest.”

“
Oui
, Maman.”

“And never give the impression—or God forbid,
say aloud
—that ‘we do such and such better in Vienna.’ ”

“But I would never—”

Maman ignored my protest. It was evident that she didn’t trust me. “At the same time, do not forget that you are, first and foremost, a daughter of Austria. Your sister Charlotte has that booby of a husband wrapped around her little finger, and the interests of her homeland always take precedence over the Neapolitans’.”

I wondered how I was supposed to be the servant of two masters. Charlotte was cannier than I; I lacked her guile, as well as her alluring forearms.

“And you are not to read novels or similar treatises of a morally repugnant nature. Such books may be all the rage among the French, but their principles are already corrupted and past redemption.”

Read novels?
I had no intention of reading
anything
. I hated to read, much to the continued consternation of the abbé Vermond.

“Vermond will approve your reading material,” my mother continued.

“But if monsieur l’abbé is to accompany me to Versailles as my ‘reader,’ then why do
I
need to read anything at all?”

Thus went our nocturnal conversations. And every night she expressed her grave concerns regarding my susceptible nature.

“You are too eager to please, Antonia.”

“Oui, Maman.”

“That is exactly what I mean.”

Although the room was dark I was certain she was frowning, her forehead furrowed with worry. But resignation was overpowered by resolve. In her view there was so much more to impart and so little time remaining. Maman not only lectured me nightly on the subject of my character, but was anxious to ensure that my body as well as my mind would obey her instructions.

“Always allow your husband to take the lead. But if he does not do so, then you must be prepared to school him.”

“School him in what, Maman?”
How was I supposed to follow as well as lead?

“The promptings of the heart,” she replied euphemistically.

“But what if we do not love each other the way you and Papa did?”

Maman sighed heavily. Her breath hung like a storm cloud in the suffocating air of the chamber. “Don’t be obtuse, Antonia.”

“But I don’t know what to
do
,” I protested. Did the arrival of Générale Krottendorf signify that my body was supposed to feel certain stirrings? Desire, perhaps? All I knew was that the birth of a son, an heir to the throne of France, was the most desirable thing in the world to Maman, or for that matter to King Louis.

During those interminable sleepless nights in Maman’s boudoir, as time crept inexorably toward my wedding day, her
lectures assumed a more graphic tone. “You must view my union with your father as the exception and not the rule. Passion is not only rare but it is as fleeting as beauty. More important is a mutual respect between spouses. It is of far greater importance to be good than to be comely. If you and your husband can learn to look into each other’s hearts, your marriage will be far more successful than if you merely regard each other’s faces.”

Then she explained where babies come from. To the consternation of my mother, the soul of pragmatism, I was alternately repulsed and frightened. Dying in childbirth was not uncommon. And
what
was supposed to go … 
where
?

“Antonia, don’t be ridiculous. It is the most natural thing in the world. Your body will tell you exactly what to do.”

But what if I didn’t know how to listen to it? If there had been a note of tenderness in Maman’s words—some semblance of sympathy—I could have borne it better. But her voice was gruff, exasperated. After all, she had given birth sixteen times, so for her, nothing could have been more routine. With my coming she had even killed a pair of birds with the proverbial single stone, summoning her dental surgeon to extract a painful tooth while she endured the pains of labor. In the dark, I examined my body with tentative, fleeting palpations. No bosom, yet. Still. I suppose I had expected it to mushroom overnight after Générale Krottendorf made her maiden appearance. That’s what happened to Charlotte. She had gone from coltish girl to voluptuous woman in a matter of weeks.

My torso was narrow and slender, my abdomen ever so slightly rounded, yet nearly as flat as my chest. How would a baby ever fit inside my belly? And the dauphin would do
what
? I touched myself down there, where the flesh was soft and moist on the inside, and on the outside where the skin was like that of a peach, downy and delicate. Two fingers wide, Maman had
guessed. Maybe more. And perhaps the length of my hand, fingertip to wrist. I tried to picture something matching those dimensions inside me, but I had a difficult time getting past the strangeness of the whole idea. After all, that was where things went
out
—liquid things like blood and urine—so how was something the size of a link of wurst going to go
in
?

The whole picture became even more of an exercise in futility because I had not a face to put with the sausage, so to speak. When we had inquired (on more than one occasion) as to his looks, the abbé Vermond had assured us that Louis Auguste had a “very pleasing countenance.” King Louis’s ambassador, the marquis de Durfort, insisted coolly, between pinches of snuff, that beauty was in the eye of the beholder. “Then I demand to behold him,” my mother exclaimed. “Is the youth deformed? What has His Most Christian Majesty to be ashamed of that he refuses to send a portrait?”

Meanwhile, I tried to make certain that my final thoughts, as I drifted off to sleep each night, were of Louis Auguste. In my mind’s eye he was tall and noble, with a playful expression in that “pleasing countenance” of his. And of course he would move with uncommon grace in a ballroom. The courtiers of Versailles—dozens upon dozens of glamorous men and women in patches and paint, sparkling with jewels from their necks to their shoe buckles—would become bilious with jealousy when the dauphin took my hand to lead me onto the gleaming parquet in the Galerie des Glaces, the Hall of Mirrors—our reflections magnified not merely in the numerous looking glasses and the weighty crystal pendants of the myriad chandeliers, but in hundreds of envious eyes.

V
IENNA
, M
ARCH
1770