Becoming Marie Antoinette (37 page)

Before long, however, I was employing another one of Mesdames
tantes
’ skills:
médisance
—the art of the snide remark, at which the aunts excelled.

It was a sultry night in late spring. The tall windows had been opened to the parterres; any breeze would have been welcome, as we were sweltering in our silks and brocades, and many courtiers had begun to perspire beneath their wigs, creating rivulets in their white lead makeup.

At times like these it was infinitely more fun to be an observer
than a participant. I hovered near the wall of Madame Victoire’s Large Chamber with two of my attendants, the duchesse de Picquigny and the comtesse de Mailly. We snapped open our fans for a bit of privacy, although from time to time we languidly used them to cool ourselves. “Don’t they look like a couple of broken statues?” I whispered to my ladies, pointing to the ruined maquillage of two elderly marquis. I believe they were ministers of some sort.

The comtesse de Noailles sidled over to me, frowning with disapproval. “Remember, madame la dauphine, you must greet each of the players,” she murmured in my ear.

“But I greeted them last night. Every one of them was here—and seated in the same chairs, too!”

Now she was at my elbow. “But they are very distinguished guests, and you offend them not only by ignoring them, but by refusing to mingle.”

“
Bzzz
,” I hummed, for the benefit of my ladies-in-waiting. “
Mon Dieu
, she is like a housefly.” I pantomimed swatting at a fly that was buzzing about my ear, my elbow, my head.

But Madame Etiquette would not be shooed away so easily. “The marquis de la Chapelle and the marquis de Saint-Cyr have served the kings of France since the sixteenth century; you insult their ancestors as well as the gentlemen themselves by hanging back by the wall, and giggling with your ladies like a group of village maidens at a country dance.”

But a bit of mockery at the expense of a few terribly self-important souls had not really been my aim. What I craved, in truth, was to return, if only for a few hours a day, to a time when not so much was expected of me. I missed the way my sisters and I played together during those golden days at Schönbrunn. I was fourteen; where was the harm in being giddy?

——

One afternoon, when the abbé Vermond arrived for our hour together, he was brandishing a letter. “From your mother,” he said. I jumped up from the floor, where I had been teaching the princesses Clothilde and Élisabeth to play at knucklebones. I had not heard from Austria in weeks. “
Gott sei dank!
” I exclaimed. “Thank the Lord!” I broke open the seal and retired to a chaise to savor the correspondence. But as I read Maman’s words, the corners of my mouth inverted from an elated smile into a rueful frown.

My eyes widened with each phrase. If there was a single gray cloud in a sky of purest blue, my mother was sure to find it and predict rain. “How does she know this?” I shrieked.

Vermond gave me an inquisitive look. “Is something amiss, madame la dauphine?”

“Well, Maman was right that I should be careful where I place my trust,” I muttered. “Apart from you and Mercy, I have no friends here. I can’t say what reason they may have to inform upon my habits, but there must be someone in our midst who wishes me ill and might even have a desire to see me humiliated.” I slapped the letter against the palm of my hand. “I am met with rebukes such as these, and what does the Judas get for betraying me?”

The abbé looked anxious. “Surely no one at Versailles wishes you ill, madame.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I regret to say, monsieur l’abbé, that I cannot entirely believe you. Did you not admit to me last week that there were members of the Bourbon royal family that had spoken against my marriage?”

The abbé’s cheeks colored so deeply that the blush blended into the russet hue of the whiskers alongside his ears. “I thought I asked you not to repeat my words, madame la dauphine. And surely you don’t suspect—”

“No, I don’t,” I interrupted. “Though perhaps it is why Papa Roi does not accept invitations from his cousins the duc d’Orléans and the duc de Chartres to attend events at the Palais Royal.” But the threat to me lay closer, I believed. Much closer. Not a relation
to the king, but someone I saw every day. I ticked off the number of waiting women whose motives were dubious by drawing lines with my fingers in the layer of dust on the pink marble tabletop. My rooms were filthy. The aristocratic attendants at Versailles were too haughty to perform menial labor, and the servants were too busy to be terribly fastidious about cleanliness. The duchesse de Ventadour gave me dark looks; I was sure that the comtesse de Bois-Passy gossiped behind my back with the comtesse de Perigord; if the maids who changed the linens were not lining their pockets with
écus
by disclosing my still-virginal state to foreign ambassadors or to courtiers who paid well just to have the latest
scandales
before anyone else heard the news, then why did I draw their rude smirks?

Beneath my skirts I wore a pair of pockets tied about my waist in which I kept the keys to my jewel chests, to my escritoire, and to the drawers in which I locked away the journal I’d begun writing under the abbé’s instruction back in Vienna, as well as the letters I was in the process of composing. I wrote with relative frequency both to Charlotte and to my former governess the Countess von Brandeiss. I was now convinced that my keys were taken from my pockets at night while I slept none the wiser behind the bed curtains. My mother’s letter had put me into such a fit of pique that abbé Vermond’s efforts to reason with me came to naught.

Learning whom to trust at court was a perpetual obstacle course. The ladies and gentlemen of my household had been assigned to my retinue and I had no notion of why they had been selected or who had chosen them; most likely their three-hundred-year-old coats of arms entitled them to serve a dauphine. I might
hope
to secure their loyalty, but I did not
expect
it.

There was one person I needed to win over more than any
other. And once I did so, I hoped that the tongues would cease to wag. Therefore, if the dauphin would not come to me, I would bend my hours to his will and come to him.

My husband’s workshop lay about a mile from the palace. I had chosen to walk there, rather than ride in a carriage, because I knew the decision would disgruntle several of my ladies. They hated to soil their hems and slippers, and shunned the sunlight with even greater vehemence, despite the benefit of fashionable silk parasols. In this way, my unnecessarily large entourage winnowed itself, leaving the most friendly of my attendants, as well as a few hardy souls possessed of a sense of humor (except for that mother hen, the comtesse de Noailles). I was thus spared the backbiting comments I often overheard, even from my own women, as they whispered behind their fans that I was transgressing some aspect of etiquette. Their red lips, perfect Cupid’s bows, unleashed as many darts as kisses. Were they unaware that their voices echoed off the hard surfaces of marble, stone, and mirrors, and bounced off the soaring ceilings? Or did they intend for me to hear their barbs and jests that passed for wit at my expense? The worst had brought tears to my eyes that I had been hard-pressed to conceal: “
l’Autrichienne
,” their nickname for me—a corruption of the French word for an Austrian woman and the word for a female dog.

The long walk to the dauphin’s smithy and forge cleared my head, banishing much of my ill humor. I had forbidden all idle conversation and the charming weather had a salubrious effect on my soul.

The workshop was housed in a modest hut with a quaint thatched roof that could have easily been mistaken for a laborer’s cottage. “
Bonjour
, kind sir!” I called out gaily as I stepped through the door. “Would it be too much trouble to build something for me?”

Startled, the dauphin spun around from his work table. An iron ring of keys clattered to the stone floor.

Clad above the waist only in his chemise and a linen vest, my husband looked so surprised to see me, and even more so by my request, that I moved to embrace him, but my touch only made him pull away. Momentarily miffed by his rejection I nearly forgot the reason I had come to him.

“I would like you to design a little chest for me—about yea high,” I said seriously, describing it with my hands. “Large enough to house my correspondence—but I wish to conceal it as well.”

The dauphin thought for a few moments, his lips twisting about in contemplation. Then, mopping his brow with his lace cuff, he seated himself on a high stool set before a slanted draftsman’s table, sharpened a fresh quill, dipped it, and began to sketch a pretty cabinet with a cunningly placed false drawer. In the corner of the sheet of paper he drew a cylinder and scrawled a few notations beside it. “This,” he said proudly, tapping the diagram with the nib of his quill, “is a lock that no one will be able to pick!” He then sketched the decorative elements for the chest—roses, upon my request—and we made our way to the rear of the hut, where together we selected the variety of woods he would employ; ash and cherry, rosewood, ebony and birch. I slipped my arm through his, enjoying the deliciousness of a shared venture, especially one that would in itself conceal secrets. Louis Auguste’s enthusiasm was so palpable that he didn’t even recoil from my touch.

Two weeks later, beaming with delight, the dauphin presented me with the finished cabinet. It was a masterpiece of marquetry. Recognizing that the little correspondence chest had begun to strengthen our fragile bond, I resolved to evince an interest in my husband’s other favorite pursuit.

So one day, I joined the dauphin on the hunt. I secretly commissioned
a riding habit consisting of a blue jacket with white facings, piped in red trim and embellished with silver buttons; a red skirt; and shiny black boots. A jaunty white panache, the gift of a snowy egret, fluttered gaily from my blue tricorn. I surprised the royal hunting party in mid-morning by riding up to the pink marble portico of the Grand Trianon in a carriage filled with all the necessaries for a proper
fête champêtre
on the grass. Liveried servants traveling behind me hopped off their postilions and began to unpack the chests, setting up the pavilion and the little wooden chairs, and unpacking the wicker hampers that were filled to bursting with bread and cheese, cold meats, ripe strawberries, and iced wine.

I adjusted the angle of my hat and lifted a spyglass to my eye. In the distance, I spotted the dauphin and the king on horseback and waved to them. “Surely you are fatigued from your exertions!” I cried gaily. “Come enjoy an outdoor repast!”

They rode up, perspiring profusely. The dauphin dismounted, removed his tricorn, and mopped his brow with the sleeve of his coat. A pair of grooms helped the king from his horse and led the mount into the shade where it would be fed and watered with the other horses. I had no doubt that as soon as they had eaten, the men would be eager to resume the hunt, so that they could kill a few more animals before Mass.

Papa Roi tucked a serviette into his neckcloth and allowed himself to be served a slice of peppered beef. “What an angel of mercy you are,
ma petite
!” He glanced at his grandson who was greedily devouring a roast leg of chicken. “Isn’t she, my boy?” Louis Auguste nodded, never diverting his gaze from his greasy fingertips. Later, Papa Roi invited me to sit in his lap and feed him a strawberry. I took the stem between my fingers and playfully placed the fruit into his mouth. The king chewed thoughtfully on the berry, not at all, thank goodness, the way he had
devoured the food Madame du Barry had fed him, and then pronounced me “absolutely charming.” I could see why His Majesty was still considered the handsomest man at court, despite his advanced years. His smile always appeared genuine. When he looked at you, it was with such avidity that you felt there was no one else in the room, even when it was so crowded with people that you could not see the walls or the floor. That is the hallmark of a fine monarch, I thought.

“Tell me, what is it you wish for?” he asked me.

I smiled broadly and toyed with the yellow rose I had tucked into my bodice. “To please you in all things,
Grand-père.
” It was the truth, but there was so much more I left unsaid.

“Such a sweet sentiment!” he exclaimed. Then he whispered something in my ear, nodding discreetly in my husband’s direction. “But you know you must also please
him.
” For a moment we observed the dauphin’s absorption with his repast. Papa Roi sighed heavily and patted my hand. “This is a good beginning.”