Becoming Marie Antoinette (44 page)

J
UNE
1, 1771

The comte de Mercy affected a low bow as he entered my music room. As he rose, he realized that he was clearly outnumbered, not only by French, but by females. A
cercle
was just breaking up; and the capacious chamber, with its delicate white boiserie moldings enhancing equally creamy walls, resembled a hothouse of exotic and fragrant blooms—suffused with the scents of orange blossom and rosewater, frangipani and jasmine, lilac and lily of the valley.

I recognized the telltale signs that the ambassador wished to speak with me: the tight set of his jaw, despite a placid smile, and an expression of benign complacency in his eyes that masked the avidity to complete his errand.

I asked the comtesse de Noailles to shoo everyone from my apartments and motioned for Mercy to make himself comfortable. While we waited for the stragglers and servants to depart,
the ambassador seated himself on a chair that had been abandoned by one of the ladies at the
cercle;
the ice blue satin brocade looked terribly dainty beneath his suit of tobacco-colored moiré.

“May I?” he asked me, reaching into a pocket for a small enameled box.

I nodded. “Where would you gentlemen be without your snuff?”

The comte snapped open the lid, and took a pinch of brown powder between his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t suppose Your Royal Highness would care for a bit?” he teased.

We waited until the doors were closed around us. “I am always honored by your visits, monsieur le comte.
Dites-moi
, to what do I owe the pleasure today?” The ambassador frowned. “I don’t like that look. It heralds bad news. I am in no humor for bad news.”

“Well, then, it doesn’t have to be,” he said brightly, crossing one leg over the other. “Now, you tell me, madame la dauphine, what is this nonsense I have been hearing about your refusal to speak to the comtesse du Barry.”

My spine stiffened. “For one thing,
monsieur l’ambassadeur
, it is far from nonsense. The duchesse de Gramont—”

“Is a seasoned courtier who can fight her own battles,” the comte de Mercy interrupted. “Your mother and I applaud your loyalty to one of your ladies, particularly in light of her relation to the duc de Choiseul and his connection to our interests. But the duc is gone. And the Gramont is forgiven. And you began to snub the comtesse weeks before the Gramont affair took place. I understand that you received Madame du Barry here in your apartments.”

“That was before I found out what she was,” I replied stubbornly, drawing a circle in the carpet with the toe of my slipper.

“She is the king’s favorite,” Mercy said evenly.

“She is a whore,” said I, with venom in my voice.

The comte took another pinch of snuff with what sounded like an angry inhalation. He rested both feet on the rug. “Who told you that?”

At this I could not resist a laugh. “Why, comte de Mercy, is this a catechism? I have a stable full of priests for that, not to mention our dear abbé Vermond!”

But he would not be deterred from his course. “I asked who told you this, madame la dauphine?”

“Someone who is an image of propriety. Someone Maman herself urged me to consort with as frequently as possible. Someone with impeccable morals.”

The ambassador placed his hands on his knees and pitched himself toward me. The ruby he wore on his pinky finger flashed, caught in a sunbeam. “Who?”

“Why, Madame Adélaïde.”

He sat back against his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. Then he rested his elbows on his knees and steepled his hands together in contemplation. After some length, during which I began to look forward to my next appointment, he spoke. “Madame la dauphine, I wish you to listen very closely to what I am about to say. Your mother was wrong. Mesdames are not the positive influence she had expected them to be. Your allegiance is, and must always be, to the king above all others. You are the king’s first subject and if it pleases him for you to be pleasant to the woman he loves, then—no matter what you think of her, of her morals, or of her past—your obligation is to the king.”

“Mesdames
tantes
told me we should save His Majesty from himself. When the
king
is behaving immorally by flaunting such a wanton woman before the entire court—what sort of lesson does that teach his subjects?”

The comte de Mercy shook his head dolefully. “You are still
only fifteen years old, madame la dauphine. Too young, and still too newly come to Versailles to be so proud.”

“I am my mother’s daughter,” I said, with a touch of defiance. “And if she does not wish me to spend so much time in the company of my aunts she should be delighted to hear that since the marriage of the comte de Provence, I have been hosting the evening card parties in the dauphin’s apartments owing to our new rank as the senior couple.” This meant that I now spent far fewer hours in Mesdames’ rooms. In truth, I was glad of it, for my aunts were more than twice my age and cared naught for anything but gossip.

The ambassador pressed his fingers to his temples. “I believe you should know, madame la dauphine, that your mother has, for the sake of—” He paused abruptly, as if he had caught himself about to say something he should not reveal, or else had changed his mind about what he intended to say in the first place. “Your mother,” he repeated, “firmly believes that you should resume an acquaintance with the comtesse du Barry. You spoke to her once when she visited your rooms to bring you a wedding gift—perhaps you even said a word or two to her on another occasion over a round of cavagnole or a hand of cards. It would not be such a terrible thing to countenance the favorite again.”

I narrowed my eyes, doubtful that he was telling me the truth about Maman’s desires. After all, his talents lay in convincing people to do things that would not necessarily benefit them. I had already informed Maman,
It is pitiful to see the king’s partiality for Madame du Barry, who is the most stupid and impertinent creature you can imagine. You can be well assured that I shall commit no fault either for her or against her
.

“It would make the king happy. It would make your mother happy.”

“I cannot believe, for one thing, that Maman would give credence
to the superiority of a woman of the streets, no matter whose bed she warms. For another, she raised her daughters with unparalleled propriety.” The ornate gold clock on the mantel chimed the half hour. “I regret that our interview must end,” I said, rising from my chair. “I am late for a visit with my new sister.”

The comte de Mercy stood and bowed in farewell. As I escorted him to the door, I continued our conversation, for I wished to have the last word. “Did you know that for two months prior to my proxy wedding in Vienna, I spent every night in Maman’s bedchamber so that she could lecture me on how to maintain our good German morals in the licentious French court? And to always honor the teachings of our Holy Mother Church. And now you come here this afternoon and ask me to abandon them?” It was all I could do not to stamp my foot. Instead I raised my chin and straightened my shoulders because I knew that
I
walked the higher ground, not the former Mademoiselle l’Ange from the rue de la Jussienne. And even if Mesdames were chattering old magpies, they were also chaste women, and they most assuredly cared deeply for their father and wished to see him one day enter the kingdom of Heaven. “You tell me it would make the king happy were I to speak to the comtesse, and yet he has never made that request of me directly, nor chastised me for ignoring her. Maman spent months instructing me to
avoid
the debauchery of Versailles and yet you say she would be pleased if I countenanced the du Barry—quite the opposite of what she taught me—and you cannot give me a reason for it. So my answer, monsieur le comte, is
non
. I will not speak to Madame du Barry.”

The comte left my rooms defeated in his embassy, perhaps for the first time in our long acquaintance. But how could I violate everything I had been inculcated to believe—with only the flimsiest rationale to salve my conscience?

——

“
Mon Dieu!
” The bookcases that the comtesse de Provence had commissioned to be built in their apartments had been the talk of Versailles for the past few weeks. I pretended not to hear the rude comments comparing our scholarly interests, in which I emerged unfavorably—such as the jibe from the duchesse de Valentinois, another intimate of the comtesse du Barry, in which she asserted that the Provence’s comprehensive library conferred her with far more “spine” than the dauphine—a dig at my lack of intellectual rigor as well as my refusal to wear a corset.

The sawdust had been swept away, and the lacquer had dried, revealing a masterpiece of décor. The giltwork alone was stunning, and the carved and routed embellishments
nonpareil
. I set my gift of a large beribboned basket of oranges in the center of the room and sought out my new sister who was superintending the unpacking of her library. Wooden crates with her initials burned into them covered nearly every square inch of the room. As the covers were pried off, an army of servants hastened to remove the straw packing.

“
Stai attento
! Be careful!” she shrieked in Italian, as a particularly diminutive maid struggled to lift a heavy, leatherbound volume from one of the crates. It slid out of its large velvet pouch and tumbled to the floor with an audible thump. “
Stupido
! How dare you touch my Catullus with your dirty hands?”

Marie Joséphine’s double chin trembled with rage. Even the dark hairs above her upper lip stood on end, so offended was she by her servant’s clumsiness. I stood agape, having never seen her like this. Where was the amiable and diffident creature who despaired of putting a foot wrong at her new court?

The comtesse looked up and caught my eye. Smoothing her hands on her saffron-satin skirts—an unfortunate hue for a sallow complexion—she cocked her head coyly, and offered a wan
smile. “Forgive me, sister,” she said in her lilting Savoy accent. “You are lucky that you are not a reader, because it is such a headache to organize so much.” She gestured flamboyantly at the numerous crates and the multiple bookcases that lined the walls. “And everything must have its proper place or I will never be able to put my thumb—my finger, I mean—on it when I need it. There are the Greek books and the Latin ones, the history, the poetry—and I have one shelf just for Dante.” Her hands flapped like the wings of a sparrow and flew to her heart. “Ah, Dante!” she exclaimed, casting her eyes heavenward. “Have you read him?” I shook my head. “I didn’t think so. You are welcome to borrow a volume—if,” she forced a chuckle, “your hands are clean. Do you read Italian?”

Meeting her artificial smile with one of my own, “Only French and German,” I replied.

I glided back to the dauphin’s apartments with uncommon speed, my thoughts fixated on a single purpose. I made a grand sweep of all of the rooms with a discerning eye toward the décor and was disappointed with the shabbiness of what I saw. The apartments had not been redecorated since the dauphin’s late father was a youth. Carpets, curtains, hangings, and upholstery, once vibrant, had long since grown faded and dingy; furniture was nicked, some pieces having been scratched and gnawed for years by the claws and teeth of generations of overindulged dogs and cats. My own general inattentiveness since my arrival at Versailles had not ameliorated matters. I had been too lax; in that, Maman was right, and the advent of the comtesse de Provence threatened to usurp my place—at present, as the arbiter of interior décor, and someday, perhaps as the mother of the future king of France if things remained the same in my
lit matrimonial
.

I turned to address the comtesse de Noailles. “Madame, I should like to have a library built in these rooms. Please arrange
for Monsieur Gabriel to come and see me so that we may draw up the plans.”

Madame Etiquette arched an eyebrow. “Monsieur Gabriel? But he—”

“
Oui, oui
, I know that he is the
premier architecte de France
. If he can design the opera house in which the dauphin and I were wed, if he can design le Petit Trianon, then surely he can build me a room full of bookcases!”