Becoming Marie Antoinette (9 page)

The spirits, it transpired, were for me. After thoroughly washing his immense hands, Monsieur Laveran dipped his forefinger in the brandy and massaged my gums with it, a procedure he repeated several times until I assured him that I could barely feel his fingertip.

“
S’il vous plaît, ouvrez la bouche, ma petite archiduchesse
,” he said. I obediently opened my mouth as wide as it would go.

Then, clasping one of the gold loops with an ugly-looking pair of pincers, he placed it around one of my teeth and squeezed with what I was convinced was all his might, pressing the band down into my gum line. Clutching the arms of the chair, I flinched and squirmed, my derrière involuntarily rising off the cushion. I yelped, but the sound was strangled by the presence of his hand inside my mouth. He repeated the process with every single tooth. When he handed me a mirror to appraise my appearance I was startled to see that my mouth resembled a double row of tiny ivory bandboxes, each encircled by a golden ribbon. There was a minuscule lock at the center of each tooth. My mouth felt heavy and numb, and tasted of nails, and I wanted to cry. The brandy had worn off. When the clock struck the hour of one I realized that I had been sitting in the breakfast chair for four hours, with more torture to follow: Monsieur Laveran had yet to insert the horseshoe-shaped bandeaux.

“Now, these will expand the arch made by her teeth so that they no longer push against one another,” the dentist explained to Maman and Madame von Brandeiss as he pressed one of the bandeaux against my lower teeth. He took a length of golden wire, and began to thread it through the horseshoe’s perforations. The wire was looped around the back of each tooth, leaving the sharp ends sticking out of my mouth until Monsieur Laveran snipped them off and secured them, with a tight twist, to the tiny lock on the golden band encircling the tooth. I never believed that I had thirty-two teeth until I counted every single excruciating twist and snip. The seconds ticked by ominously. I would willingly have been anywhere else but that chair. A
thousand
geography lessons could never have been so painful.

By the time the dentist had completed his work—through
considerable squirming, flinching, and countless silently shed tears on my part, as well as admonitions from Monsieur Laveran to keep still or the process would only take longer—the mechanical clock had long struck four. Outside the Hofburg the sky had become a palette of blue and gold, the final burst of winter sunlight that heralded the violet dusk. As I had missed both luncheon and tea I was ravenous, but could not imagine ever eating again. My jaw felt bruised from stretching my mouth open all day. The gold bands dug into my tender gums. The screws on each tooth punctured the inside of my lips until they began to bleed. Clutching the mirror I appraised my appearance. “Be brave, Antonia,” my governess murmured. But I did not see the future dauphine of France; I saw a monster. I tugged at the bloodied yellow cloth about my neck, inadvertently tightening the knot. Yanking it over my head and hurling it to the floor, I ran from the room and did not stop. When I reached my apartment, I flung myself upon the canopied bed. Tucking Poupée in the crook of one arm and Mops beneath the other, I ducked my head under one of the bolsters and sobbed like an infant.

Although Madame von Brandeiss came to fetch me, I refused to come down for supper. My mouth was puffed up like a fish’s. I was ugly and I was miserable. All alone, it was easy to pity myself; had any other princess undergone such physical torment to prepare to wear a foreign crown? Yet by the time my tears had run their course I was able to convince myself that perhaps it was better to view my predicament like a Christian martyr: Tribulation could only strengthen the soul.

That evening, a gentle rap on the door drew me out of bed. “Who is it?” I whispered.

“Me. It’s important. Toinette, open the door.”

I obeyed. Charlotte stood before me, clutching her white cambric nightdress about her, honey-blond curls spilling out of her cotton bonnet. She proffered a bowl-shaped glass half filled with
amber liquid. “Drink this,” she urged. “It will help numb your pain.”

I brought the snifter to my nostrils and inhaled the fruity, slightly astringent aroma: brandy. “But I don’t like spirits,” I protested.

“Then think of it as medicine,” my sister replied.

So I swallowed the brandy in a single searing gulp. But Charlotte still looked unsatisfied. “What?” was all I needed to say before I saw her lip begin to quiver.

“Maman announced something at dinner. I wanted to tell you myself before you heard it from anyone else.”

We seated ourselves side by side on my bed as we had when we were younger, swinging our legs and letting our bare feet graze the floor.

My sister clasped one of my hands in hers. Several moments elapsed before she could speak. “I suppose it was inevitable,” she said, choking on a sob.

I grabbed her other hand. “What was?” My stomach tumbled over like an acrobat losing his balance on the wire.

“My portrait—the one Monsieur Ducreux is completing. It is being sent to Naples. To the king.” Her voice broke. “To Ferdinand the … Ferdinand the idiot. It’s been settled between Maman and his father, the king of Spain—I am to replace Josepha as his bride.”

The room began to spin. “No, it cannot be so! Not you, too!” I threw my arms about Charlotte’s neck and pressed my head against her bosom. Without stays she had become soft and round. Although she would not turn sixteen until August, she had grown into a woman. Fertile. And therefore ripe to become a queen.

I searched for an argument against the match. “But you do not even speak his language!”

“There is no need,” Charlotte replied dolefully. “Court,
Parliament—like everywhere else, business is conducted in French; it is the common language of diplomacy. And I will have an entourage of good German maids to converse with in our native tongue. Even His Sicilian Majesty does not speak the language of Dante and Petrarch. We have been informed that he knows only the local Neapolitan dialect.” She wrinkled her nose as though she smelled week-old fish. “It is the patois spoken by the peasants.”

Charlotte apologized to me then, sorry to have teased me in front of the duc de Choiseul on the evening of his arrival at the Hofburg. Despite Maman’s kind words about her talents and abilities, Charlotte admitted that she had felt a bit envious of my destiny, astute enough to realize that Monsieur Ducreux had come to Vienna on my account and that painting
her
portrait as well had at first been no more than a subterfuge, intended to deflect attention from the import of my role in Austria’s future. Yes, Charlotte acknowledged, someday we would all become queens of somewhere—but I, the baby of the family (except for Maxl, of course), the girl everyone viewed as the silly goose, would eventually preside over the most elegant court in Europe, while her own fate would be far less glorious.

“So now
I
am being dispatched to a noisy backwater in order to shore up Maman’s ties with the Spanish Bourbons, just as you will one day bring the support of the French branch of the house to our Hapsburg family tree.” Never one to control her temper, my sister’s tirade began to gain both volume and speed. “Do you know that when King Ferdinand learned of Josepha’s death, the ninny staged a mock funeral procession through his palace in Naples? He dressed one of his footmen as a woman and stippled the man’s face and arms with chocolate to mimic the ravages of the pox!” At my aghast expression, Charlotte paused for breath. “Oh,
ma petite
,” she sobbed, “you cannot begin to imagine how miserable I will be.”

“What sort of monster is this king? How can Maman let you go?” But I already knew the answer. We were expected to hold our heads proudly, roses in full bloom on the stems of our swanlike necks, and submit to whatever destiny Maman arranged for us. But it didn’t begin to lessen the pain of parting. I was still grieving over the death of our sister Josepha. And we both knew that once Charlotte reached Naples it was entirely possible, if not probable, that we might never see each other again. “I can’t bear to lose
you
, too,” I told my sister, clutching her shoulders as if I might keep her there, at the edge of my bed, with the sheer power of my embrace. Oh, if only it were so! “It will be very grim here, after you’ve gone. And you must write to me every day.” I managed a faint laugh. “You must promise to tell me what it is like to be a married woman.”

We sat on the bed facing each other with our bare legs tucked beneath us. Charlotte reached over and touched an errant curl that had escaped my nightcap. She twined it about her finger, drawing closer. “I will also confess that I don’t envy that lion’s cage in your mouth!” she said, endeavoring to inject some levity into the bleakest moment of our lives.

I hunted about for a handkerchief and wiped a wayward tear from the tip of my nose. “And there is so much more to come,” I said. “One day you might not recognize me! Now Maman intends to engage two French actors performing at the Burgtheater to teach me proper diction and elocution.”

I mimicked what I imagined I might sound like after the players finished with me, enunciating every syllable and elongating each vowel with comical precision. “
Bon-joooour, Vo-tre Maaa-jes-téeeeee; je suuuuuuiiiis l’ar-chiiii-duuuuu-chesse Maria Antonia d’Au-triiiiiche.
”

I saw that my silliness cheered Charlotte, so I continued to regale her with our mother’s elaborate system for turning an ill-educated caterpillar named Maria Antonia of Austria into a
dazzling butterfly.
Un papillon
. “Monsieur Noverre, the great ballet master, has been invited to forsake the duke of Württemburg’s court at Stuttgart and come to Vienna to improve my dancing. Not only that, the sister of the duc de Choiseul is dispatching her own
friseur
to alter my hairline somehow. At least you,” I said to Charlotte, squeezing her hand, “have been judged perfection.”

“Perfection for an ugly and indolent idiot who entertains ambassadors in the commode,” Charlotte replied bitterly. “A
hideous and stupid
indolent idiot.” A ponderous sigh escaped her lips. “Oh,
meine kleine Schwester
—my dear little sister—if I cannot find happiness in marriage, I hope at the least to learn that your union with the dauphin of France will be filled with radiant joy and many, many babies.”

I nodded vehemently. “I love babies.”

She glanced at my favorite doll. “Then may your rooms be filled with the joyous babble of real ones.” Charlotte cradled Poupée in her arms. “Her face is dirty,” she observed, then licked her finger before using it to remove a black smudge from the poppet’s wooden cheek, a gesture Madame von Brandeiss had employed on my own face with a handkerchief a hundred times a year. Charlotte straightened the doll’s yellow dress and fluffed her white fichu and cap.

I gazed lovingly at Poupée as if she were the child I would someday hold and coddle, whose every gurgle would send me into raptures. “I want sixteen of them. Just like Maman had.”

My sister blushed. “Me too. Sixteen. So I have many others to love instead of my husband. And every one of them will be fat, healthy, and boisterous. With big pink cheeks and chubby limbs.”

From that minute, and for the next few weeks until Charlotte’s proxy wedding on the seventh of April, the pair of us treasured every moment we were able to share. Monsieur Ducreux had yet to complete my sister’s portrait, which would be sent to
Naples in advance of her scheduled arrival there on the twelfth of May. Meanwhile, I had to endure the constant discomfort of the bandeaux and the wires that encircled my teeth like a golden fence; there was no thought of the painter commencing his portrait of me until the braces were removed. Once a week, Monsieur Laveran would inspect my progress, often tightening the tiny screws that held the wires until I was sure I felt my teeth shift, despite his repeated assurances that the process was not nearly as immediate as I imagined it.

While the plans for Charlotte’s wedding proceeded with undue speed I was being put through my paces like one of the white stallions at the Spanish Riding School. One morning after breakfast we were joined by a fragile, plain-looking woman in a deep blue gown whose powdered hair set off an equally chalky complexion, relieved only by a pair of narrow, dark brows. Her colorless face also appeared barren of any humor.

Maman made the introduction. “Antonia, this is the Countess von Lerchenfeld. She will be superintending your studies from now on.”

What?
My mother might just as well have placed her hands about my narrow waist and squeezed all the air out of me. The past several weeks had brought me nothing but sorrow. First I discovered that I would lose my precious Charlotte to a world over the mountains and a man-child not fit to reign over a stable; and now my beloved governess was being replaced—the one constant I had counted on. “I don’t understand, Maman.” My eyes filled with tears, and I fought to blink them back. Maman had begun to chide me for childish displays of emotion that, on the brink of womanhood, she deemed me too old to indulge. In truth, Maman disdained excessive sentiment at any age.

Stubbornly, I stood my ground. “Madame von Brandeiss was so kind.” I wanted to add, “I love her,” but I didn’t dare.

“Indeed,” said Maman, ignoring my trembling lip. “She is kind. And her kindness, as well as her general deficiency in the subjects of history, science, and the classics are, I would hazard, two of the reasons your head remains so empty at the age of twelve. You will not find the Countess von Lerchenfeld quite so lenient.” Her expression softened. “Nor will you find her an ogre if you concentrate on your lessons. I have instructed the countess to drill you every day in French, history, geography, and penmanship. Your studies with her will commence in the Rosenzimmer after Mass this morning.”

We had been raised to acknowledge that Maman’s word was incontestable. Madame von Lerchenfeld, with her outmoded starched cap that crowned an equally inflexible demeanor, had spent the past two months “finishing” Charlotte, in preparation for her role as queen of Naples. Prior to that she had been the Mistress of the Robes for our older sisters. Charlotte assured me that the new governess was no ogre, but she was no Countess von Brandeiss either. And if Charlotte had survived the woman, I could do no less, or I would never hear the end of it from my sister.