Becoming Marie Antoinette (27 page)

We paused in front of a plot of carrots. A brown rabbit darted out of view as a slight breeze caught the edge of the sister’s wimple and fanned it away from her face. She had lovely skin. Perhaps there was a kind person underneath it. After all, who would choose to walk with God instead of with kings if she lacked a
pure heart? Soeur Thérèse-Augustine tilted her head to peer up at me and pointedly asked, “Are you a frivolous girl?”

“N-no, madame,” I stammered, although Maman might have disagreed. “I believe in God and His Miracles and I attend Mass every day.”

“I am glad to hear it,” replied the sister, giving her royal father a hard look. “There is entirely too much frivolity at Versailles.”

“And speaking of Versailles,” said the king, “we must make haste. Rag, Piggy, and Snip, and the rest of the family, await the arrival of the dauphine; and I am sure she will want to avail herself of a good night’s rest. For tomorrow night,” he added with a lascivious glint in his dark eyes, “she will repose in her bridal bed!”

Soeur Thérèse-Augustine glowered at her father. “Lust. It is always about lust with you, Papa,” she muttered. She took my hands in hers and held them firmly. “
Prenez soin
,” she told me, looking deeply into my eyes as if she were searching for something behind my irises. Her voice was low, for my ears only. “Be careful, my child.” She gestured toward the apiary. “Do you see those bees? They are industrious and fruitful; from the nectar of flowers, they make honey with which we sweeten our tea. Each bee knows her place and what is expected of her. The queen has a natural, innate ability to control them.” She stole a brief glance at her father. “But there are other hives, hives in which the ruler has lost control because he cares only for his own pleasure, rather than the industry at hand—the industry of governance. And so the bees no longer know their place. When a bee is not occupied with his own task and with the collective industry of making honey, he does not know how to use the hours in his day. An idle bee will sting.”

Her warning was like a gust of ill wind. Several minutes had passed before I was able to put it, and the nasty little shiver it had provoked, behind me. So I fastened onto another element of the
recent conversation—an exceedingly odd remark uttered by His Majesty.

“Begging your pardon, Papa Roi, but who are Rag, Piggy, and Snip?” We were once again in the royal coach, the road from the Carmelites a ribbon of brown behind us. It had begun to rain. Spatters and dashes darkened the earth and beat erratically on our roof. Rag, Piggy, and Snip! Of course, they must be three of the king’s beloved dogs; after all, back home we considered Mops a member of the family—or I did, at any rate. Poor Mops. I wondered what he was up to. Had he arrived in Vienna yet? Did he miss me as much as I did him? Was Maxl still trying to feed him marzipan? I was sure my pug, were he with me now, would take to Rag, Piggy, and Snip immediately. Unless they were pigs, and not dogs. Mops tended to cower whenever he came near a pig.

“Rag, Piggy, and Snip are my aunts,” the dauphin said sullenly. They were the first words I’d heard him utter all day. “They all live together in one wing of Versailles.”

“
Ses maris aussi?
” I was glad to be able to engage my husband in conversation. Sticking to subjects he knew something about and could discourse upon with ease seemed like a tactful way to draw him out of his diffidence and lethargy.

“They have no husbands,” replied Louis Auguste. “
They
never married,” he added with a note of envy that made me wince.

“But why does Papa Roi call them by such silly names?”

The dauphin looked to his grandfather for an answer; clearly my question had been either too ponderous or too taxing.

The king laughed jovially. “Aha, then,
ma petite
! You will meet them soon, and you will just have to guess for yourself!”

The sky darkened ominously, becoming increasingly overcast as we neared our destination. As the king wished to show off the pride and joy of France that was Versailles, we had entered the palace grounds from the north, bypassing his favorite hunting
lodge, the Grand Trianon. The six horses clip-clopped along sylvan lanes for more than a mile, until we reached the château itself. Perhaps the atmosphere would have been a bit more gay if lanterns had been hung out to welcome us as we rode through the streets. I found myself suppressing an astonished gasp at the gloominess of the view. What a contrast to the flower-bedecked balconies of Strasbourg! The canals that (to hear King Louis rhapsodize about them) I had imagined as meandering pools of liquid blue were choked with mud. The figures on the allegorical fountains extolled by the abbé Vermond were cracked and chipped and the basins themselves were littered with debris: apple cores, empty wine bottles, shards of splintered wood; I even spied the fragments of a lady’s silk fan. Ornamental statues lay on the wet grass where they had been left to repose after toppling from their pedestals who knew how long ago.

It was midmorning when the carriage clattered through the gilded gateway—designed by the great Mansart, said the king proudly—and the horses turned into the gravel expanse of the Ministers’ Courtyard. The dove gray façade of the château was stained brown with rain. In my mind’s eye I had envisioned Versailles as a veritable fairyland, to which the grandeur of our Hofburg, and even Mama’s beloved Schönbrunn, paled in comparison. My head had been filled for the past two years or more with the notion that the French court was the most sophisticated and glamorous in all of Europe. Instead, I was about to enter an edifice that at first blush appeared both shabby and unkempt.

I was grateful that neither my new
grand-père
nor my husband saw fit to solicit my impressions of the great palace. Then again, I doubted that the dauphin thought one jot about my reaction to anything. I sighed heavily behind my fan, hoping that the château would look much prettier in the sunlight.

But I was only fooling myself. The decrepitude was so shocking, particularly as I had been inculcated to expect no less than
paradise, that it only served to deepen my longing for Austria. Why, Versailles was a pigsty compared to Schönbrunn! I blinked back a threatening flood of homesick tears. It would serve no good purpose to weep; Versailles would be my home from now on and I would do well to appreciate it.

Our entourage entered the palace through a side door and I stepped over the well-worn marble threshold onto the black and white tiled floor of a high-ceilinged vestibule. Noticing my beleagured expression, the comtesse de Noailles told the king, “I am certain
la dauphine
must be exhausted. Perhaps she should be conducted to her apartments right away.”

Louis complimented my
dame d’honneur
on her astuteness and turned down a long corridor, beckoning for us to follow him. Several women in formal court maquillage, their faces primed with creamy white lead, large circles of rouge on their cheeks, reddened lips, and black
mouches
, swished past me along the black and white tiles, swiveling their heads to catch a glimpse of my appearance before gliding on, tittering to each other behind their fans. Was that the Versailles Glide? I stopped, mid-step, to admire their grace. Could I do as well? Dare I try it now? Yet perhaps my maiden efforts might be scoffed at, and I would be more successful if I were not so fatigued. Tomorrow then, I promised myself.

A few feet farther along, I spied a very grande dame, attired entirely in lavender silk with the powder in her hair tinted to match, who had paused for several moments beside a magnificent vase of porphyry mounted on a pedestal as high as I was tall. At first I thought she was engaged in rapt contemplation of the enormous urn, hands by her sides clutching her vast skirts as she raised them ever so delicately above her well-turned ankles. Then she stepped away, leaving a pool of liquid on the golden parquet where she had been standing.

I raised my hand—first as if to hold my nose, but I quickly
transformed the gesture into one of polite surprise, placing it over my open mouth. I hoped I had successfully disguised my disgust and managed instead to feign sweet curiosity. How could such splendor and squalor exist in a single place? Even in Vienna, which the abbé Vermond once confided that he found provincial compared to Versailles, we had no end of chamber pots and we availed ourselves of them in the privacy of our rooms! “Madame, is it the proper etiquette to piss in the corridor? And in the presence of the king?” I asked the comtesse de Noailles.

She gave me a cool look as if to say,
What a silly question
. “
Il n’est pas défendu
,” she replied succinctly. “It is not forbidden.”

I had expected to float through the airy rooms but our efforts to reach my residence were impeded by a number of obstacles. With an imperious twitch of her skirts, Madame de Noailles shooed aside a gray and white tabby that nonchalantly meandered across our path in search of something. Her owner? A morsel to eat? I noticed that the cat wore a silver bell about her neck, suspended from a chain of diamonds. I thought of Mops and a lump came to my throat.

With equal dexterity my
dame d’honneur
brushed aside a ribbon seller. What was a tradesman doing inside the palace, as if the passages traversed daily by the highest personage in the kingdom, one whose right to rule had been sanctioned by God, were no grander than a marketplace or town square?

We jostled past clusters of courtiers engaged in animated conversation, as though the halls of the palace were a modern-day Roman forum or Athenian agora. Some paused to regard us with varying degrees of curiosity; others, to my astonishment, with scarcely a jaded blink. And yet we passed several nobles who, it seemed, had been waiting for hours just to glimpse
la dauphine
, and who greeted me with broad smiles, although such yellow-toothed grins were rendered slightly macabre by their painted
lips. Were they always so splendidly attired, I wondered, or had they dressed so grandly to welcome me? At the Austrian court, we only glittered that much on gala days.

My suite of rooms was on the ground floor overlooking the gravel courtyard. Just outside my windows the palace guards were practicing exercise drills. How was I to get any repose with the incessant
tromp-tromp
of black leather boots on the pebbled ground? But the rooms were only my temporary quarters, the comtesse assured me. After the wedding ceremony my trunks would be moved into the dauphin’s apartments, which, although they were situated on the same level, were much farther removed from the bustling entrance to the palace. Workmen, their linen smocks wet with perspiration, were busily installing several boxed hedges outside the windows to mask some of the cacophony and obscure my temporary rooms from inquisitive eyes. Well, it was only to be for one night.

I made sure to thank the king nonetheless for the lovely accommodations. “I am certain I will be quite happy here,” I assured Papa Roi. “Surely I will want for nothing here; and with such kind people to attend me,” I added, with a sweep of my arm that encompassed my magnificently attired attendants.

“Your happiness and comfort are my greatest concern,” the king replied, and from the gentleness in his voice and the warm expression in his noble face I could believe it. My
grand-père’s
familial welcome gladdened me, especially in contrast to that of the dauphin, for Louis Auguste, trailing behind us, remained silent. Would it always be this way, I wondered. Yoked to a sullen and indifferent husband who lacked even the rudiments of polite conversation? The dauphin evinced no interest in knowing anything about me. “Did one of the cats make away with your tongue?” I gently teased. His full cheeks reddened into a blush. Gazing up at him, I took his hand in mine and gave it a little squeeze. “I meant
what I said before. You need not be afraid of me.” Then I playfully pantomimed chomping my teeth together. “I do not bite.” My husband looked relieved, as if he truly might have thought I was capable of it.

But the dauphin’s reticence did not disappear, even at supper. According to the comtesse, the extended royal family was present that evening, as well as the highest-ranking members of their various households, seated at the lengthy, and lavishly spread, table according to rank. The king was at its head while I, the guest of honor and their new relation, was accorded a place at the opposite end. To my right, the comtesse de Noailles, avid as ever to catch any faux pas I might commit, reminded me to ask her and her alone any questions I might have with regard to the given etiquette of a situation. If I did not observe another of equal rank doing something, I was not to do it myself. I hastened to mention that I was the first woman in France and as such had no social equal.

“
Exactement
,” the comtesse replied. “You must rely entirely upon me to be your arbiter of what is and what is not
comme il faut
.” She had explained to me during one of our lengthy carriage rides that the Sun King had rebuilt Versailles more than a hundred years earlier, transforming a modest hunting lodge into a vast château that would rival all others in Europe for grandeur. The multitude of nobles thronging the corridors and state rooms and generally milling about resided here, the comtesse now clarified. “When he transformed Versailles it was Louis XIV’s express intention to keep the aristocracy in his sights, and under his thumb. Of course, everyone was aware of the king’s intentions, but it created a way of belonging and of knowing one’s place in the world. And,
naturellement
, every courtier is eager for royal preferment because it sometimes translates into gifts of property and perquisites of power—a ministerial appointment, for example.

As for the king—by doling out such largesse, or removing it at whim, he preserves the loyalty of influential members of the nobility.”

The way I understood it, the Sun King’s establishment of rigid court etiquette, down to the most ludicrously minute detail, kept the aristocracy too busy remembering such things as how deeply to bow to one another to consider revolt or revolution. Instead, the king let them argue over the tiniest particulars of protocol, such as the proper length of a cloak on a given occasion; and he awarded them honors that cost the crown nothing to bestow, yet meant everything to a courtier: hence the right to hand the king, or the dauphin and dauphine, a water basin or a chemise.