Becoming Marie Antoinette (43 page)

Just then, the lively gavotte ceased. I clasped the comtesse de Saint-Pol about the wrist and touched my finger to my lips. The relative silence between dances would threaten to betray our position.

“
Boutez en avant!
” the du Barry said tersely, invoking her motto. “Push forward.” As she stepped out of the shadows, the magnificent emerald-and-ruby choker about her throat caught the light, distilling it into thousands of fractured sparkles. The Barryistes dispersed, leaving only Zamor to trail after the comtesse on his short legs, until he too, was swallowed into the mass of revelers.

“
Mon Dieu!
” gasped the comtesse de Saint-Pol. “I had no idea the court wath tho exthiting!” But then, even behind her mask I could tell that her expression had grown dark with concern. “Wath that
treathon
?” she whispered. “Should we tell the king?”

I shook my head. “Unfortunately, I think there will be nothing we can do about what we heard tonight. Except despair. And hope—desperately hope—that it does not come to pass. The comtesse believes she can have everything she desires because she pleases the king. But,” I said, seeing, for the first time, my own power reflected in the du Barry’s machinations, “her influence will not last and she knows it.”

Less than two months after the celebration of my fifteenth birthday, Madame du Barry got her wish: After years of faithful service to the king, on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1770, the duc de Choiseul was invited to retire to Chanteloup, his château in the country. I was heartbroken; and I was angry. His political and diplomatic strategy had brought me to this place, elevated me from being the youngest archduchess of Austria to a breath away from becoming queen of France. My eyes wet with tears, I bade him farewell and thanked him for all he had done. I did not expect to meet his like again; certainly I would not find it in the ambitious and unctuous duc d’Aiguillon whom the king had appointed Choiseul’s successor. I had an inexplicable feeling that it was the comtesse du Barry who was the duc d’Aiguillon’s rumored clandestine lover. Basking in her triumph, she had moved into an even grander suite. Her new apartments were connected to the king’s own rooms by way of a secret staircase. Memories of my father’s long-standing affair with the glamorous Princess
Auersperg flooded my mind: my mother’s silent tears; the grim faces; the false smiles; the lies. I could taste my disgust.

I penned a brief letter to Maman on the state of affairs, telling her that the king had replaced Choiseul with the duc d’Aiguillon and held a
lit de justice
at which he suppressed the former Parlements, or judicial bodies from the various provinces. The Parlements had possessed the authority to assert themselves independent of any royal authority, which included blocking the crown from passing any laws. Papa Roi then ordered the creation of a new Parlement; his action was so autocratic that the Princes of the Blood, his cousins Condé and Conti, and the duc d’Orléans, refused to appear, in protest of the king’s overexertion of his will. For such insubordination, Louis banished them. A few ducs joined the protest as well, with the result that about a dozen of them had been exiled.

I understood nothing of politics, merely parroting what I had overheard and reporting it to my mother. My husband had a keener grasp than I, but even he was at pains to explain his grandfather’s actions. All I knew was that everything had begun with the dismissal of one of my few friends and Austria’s rare allies at Versailles. The loss of Choiseul made me more determined than ever to cut Madame du Barry down to size. But I vowed to do so with silence.

On the fourteenth of May, Louis Auguste’s brother, the comte de Provence (just fifteen days younger than I), waddled to the altar. His bride was the seventeen-year-old Marie Joséphine
Louise of Savoy, and I do not think it would have been possible for the comte to have found a shorter, squatter, smellier wife. One might have overlooked her hairy upper lip or her beetle brows, or even her coarse, ruddy complexion; but it would have taken a brave soul to surmount his adversity to her overwhelming bodily odor. Papa Roi was so repulsed that he wrote to Marie Joséphine’s family in Savoy demanding that they compel the girl to wash her neck, and for him to take such a decisive tack, her filth must have been truly repugnant! I felt sorry for her ladies-in-waiting. Had she not been assigned a bath attendant as well? But Provence was terribly glib about his prowess in the boudoir, boasting to the dauphin and me that he had been made “four times happy” on his wedding night. I tried to cheer my husband by telling him I doubted that they were even
once
happy! At least I made Louis Auguste laugh when I said that I was certain they could not have consummated their marriage because the pair of them were so rotund that they could not even have located each other’s nether parts.

Luckily for them, the Provences were not subject to the same degree of etiquette that we, or the king, were. The higher the rank, the greater the number of rules governing our conduct. Although no one could punish the dauphine for failing to follow the proper etiquette of one thing or another, my transgression would become the subject of gossip; and the rumors, as they flew from mouth to mouth, might change shape, magnifying, or even transmogrifying the slightest breach into a chasm.

One chilly morning, during my
lever
, I had gotten undressed and was standing behind a folding screen, waiting for my undergarments. According to protocol, I could do nothing for myself. It was the office of my First Lady of the Bedchamber to prepare my underthings for the Mistress of the Household, who would then hand them to me, one by one, as I dressed. But these attendants
would be superseded in their privilege of handing me my chemise by the appearance of a noblewoman of higher rank.

Shivering, I poked my head out from behind the screen, noticing that my Mistress of the Household had removed her glove in preparation to present my chemise. She was on the verge of handing me the undergarment when there was a scratching at the door; at Versailles, it was considered ill-mannered to knock.

My ladies paused to admit my visitor. It was the duchesse d’Orléans, the wife of a Prince of the Blood. So the duchesse began to peel off
her
glove so that
she
might have the honor of handing me my shift—when another
scritch-scritch
was heard at the door. My flesh by then was pebbled with cold, my nipples painfully erect.
Would they please hurry—the dauphine is freezing her derrière off
, I longed to cry.

My second visitor was my new sister, the comtesse de Provence, who outranked the duchesse d’Orléans. Already, I had had my fill of court etiquette for the day. “Oh, this is odious!” I exclaimed. “What a ludicrous inconvenience! Marie Joséphine,
vite, vite
! Quickly, I am about to perish from the cold!” I crossed my arms over my chest and rubbed them vigorously, hopping about to stay warm.

The comtesse de Provence, who was terribly nervous, as this was her first time attending my
lever
, hastened to remove her glove, but ran into difficulty peeling it over her plump forearm. “Here!” she cried. “I am so sorry.
Pardon!
” She grabbed my chemise and thrust it toward me, accidentally clouting me in the head and knocking off my mobcap. By that time I was so cold and so frustrated by the insanity of the entire charade that I lost my temper and scolded her for being so clumsy.

But when I came to know my new sister-in-law a bit better (for being the only young royal women at Versailles we were very much in each other’s company), I felt bad for having disparaged
her appearance as well as her hygiene. Marie Joséphine’s northern Italian accent was charming, and she kept us in stitches the way she would mispronounce something so that it came out sounding like a different word entirely, completely changing the meaning of what she was trying to say. She didn’t smell any better, but what I first mistook for a cold and embarrassed demeanor turned out to be awe. She had never seen anything nearly as grand as Versailles. In private, she was rather sweet-natured and agreeable. In one of my letters to Maman I told her that my new sister “likes me very much and has much confidence in me.”

But Marie Joséphine and I would never entirely be friends. Now that the dauphin’s next younger brother was married, my husband and I had found ourselves in a race to procreate. It would be our son who would inherit the throne of France—but what if we did not have one? What if Louis Auguste and I
never
had a son? If the squat and swarthy comtesse de Provence bore her new husband a boy, that child might very well become king one day.

One thing was certain. The dauphin and I would most assuredly lose the competition if we failed to consummate our marriage.

On this point, Maman had much to say. I knew she had corresponded with Papa Roi on more than one occasion to ask—no, the empress of Austria did not ask; she
demanded
—what was wrong with my husband, and that Louis had tried to assuage her fears by insisting that the dauphin was still quite young and immature when it came to certain matters. All I knew was that Louis Auguste was a strapping youth, and if the king expected him to grow any further before he reached maturity, I would have wagered a month’s allowance that the direction of his growth would have been out, rather than up, for his grand passion was not me, but food.

Maman had written me a letter from Schönbrunn dated the eighth of May, although I did not receive it until after Provence’s nuptials.