The Exchange of Princesses (11 page)

Whether in or out of bed, the infanta continues to feel the swaying of the coach in her body, a pitching and tossing that doesn’t stop and keeps her slightly dizzy.

The “miracle” takes place because for the queen-infanta, the ardor of her people and the extraordinary festive radiance of her passage through France shine like a magnification of the ardent, unconditional affection her governess lavishes
upon her. All along the way, Mme de Ventadour points out things to her young charge — the sky, a seagull, a few boats, a house, the road, some cows, a turkey, a mill, and so forth — and names them in French. She says her own name, Ventadour. The fascinated infanta repeats it. She hears it like the promise of a magical sojourn, endlessly open to the
vent d’amour
, the wind of love: “I will be good and obey Maman de Ventadour. She loves me very much, and I love her too, also I thank you for the pretty fans and the rosary. I am sending you some sachets. My health is very good.”

The mean-spirited could point to a few hitches. In Bordeaux, the infanta’s coach crashes into the large entrance gate of the city hall (a shock largely compensated for by a visit to Château-Trompette, the fireworks show over the Garonne River, the bonfires in all the streets, and the precious “Naval Palace” in miniature presented to her by the citizens of Bordeaux; there she also sees oysters for the first time and speaks to them because they’re alive. But once the conversation has begun, swallowing one of them is out of the question!). In Chartres, she can’t stop herself from crying out in horror at the ugliness of the bishop. But it’s principally in Étampes, twenty miles or so from Paris, that things really do not go well. The event is recounted in a detailed report on the “passage of the Queen-Infanta.” She is to stay at the Three Kings Inn, and the streets have been paved and covered with sand for her entrance. Desgranges, the master of ceremonies, halts the coach in which the infanta is riding with Mmes de Ventadour and de Soubise. The mayor, in the company of all the representatives of the bourgeoisie, some
former aldermen, and officers, wearing their robes and coats and great white collars, declaims his speech:

Apart from making some false moves and trying some questionable initiatives, the infanta also has to suffer her share of colds, toothaches, and a series of exhausting ceremonies. But nothing very dramatic; her exhilarating trajectory absorbs all incidents. There are no more black pigs on the road, and at the end of it there’s her king of diamonds, awaiting her arrival.

The Infected Blood of the Orléans Family

Louise Élisabeth is better. Her illness is harmless. The demands for her presence at balls, hunts, and suppers begin again. She continues to refuse everything. She says she likes to go to bed early and get up likewise, which puts her out of phase with the activities of the court and indeed of the country. At mealtimes, she systematically claims to have already eaten, and this is no lie, for she shares a family trait particularly striking and repugnant in her mother, namely that of eating anywhere and at any time, and of eating to make herself ill. Her older sister, the Duchess de Berry, was a champion in this field. They “guzzle” and “gobble,” to use the terms employed by their grandmother, the Princess Palatine. That lady, always attentive to questions of proper dress and respect for traditional forms, recounts an incident involving the Duchess de Berry, who on the day after her marriage, at a supper given in her honor at Versailles, “guzzled” and “gobbled” such quantities of food and drink that
she had to leave Louis XIV’s table and run to vomit in the anteroom. Shortly afterward, still according to the Princess Palatine, her granddaughter was afflicted by a malady:

It’s a habit of gluttony that doesn’t consist simply in overindulgence, but in stuffing herself because of a morbid need to regurgitate everything; in gobbling so much she could burst.

Now that people are reassured about Louise Élisabeth’s health, they put up with her whims. She doesn’t want to appear at table or at the ball — well, that’s not serious. She’s very distracted at Mass and doesn’t have the best rapport with her confessor, who is however the most charitable of men — that’s more serious, but still tolerable. On the essential point, the determination that
she doesn’t have smallpox
, the king and queen are immensely relieved. And even more so the prince her husband, the boy-bat. Her in-laws’ fear that she would contaminate their descendants with “infected blood” has been assuaged. Louise Élisabeth has
practically never left her bed since she arrived at the Alcázar. Entrenched in the dark depths of an apartment she hasn’t yet investigated in detail, she exploits her illness as long as possible to prevent her husband — and even more the king and queen — from paying her a visit. In order to make her attitude very clear, she instructs one of her physicians to inform her new family that she’s not afraid they’ll catch a smallpox rash from her,
she’s afraid of catching a rash from them
. “Look at the state they’ve put me in,” she says, lifting up her chemise and exposing her slender body, which is still covered with traces, still “reddened” here and there. The physician doesn’t dare transmit the message. Like everyone else, he trembles before the imperious Elisabeth Farnese. But some well-intentioned persons convey the message in his stead. The ill will Elisabeth Farnese feels toward “the Goiter Girl” is redoubled.

Louise Élisabeth has made friends with some of the maidservants. They’re the ones she rings for when nocturnal tasks need doing, after those crises during which she tosses her medicine vials and whatever else in her chamber displeases her out the window. This makes an infernal noise when the objects shatter on the paving stones of the courtyard; the people on the floor below hers shrink from the sound and go back to sleep. Instructions along the lines of “Make sure that’s all right with the Princess of Asturias” are no longer questioned. The princess is convalescing, and her appetite’s returning.

The king and queen, after a hunt in which they’ve killed an entire family of boars, parents and piglets, have part of the kill prepared for their daughter-in-law. Louise Élisabeth
is sent some baby boar stew. Disgust — no longer, as formerly, swollen glands — prevents her from swallowing. The animals’ dark blood won’t go down her throat, but will soon go through the window. The prince has chosen to accompany the royal meal with a gift: a third hunting gun. He comes to offer it in person, and Louise Élisabeth thinks he’s prepared to fire the weapon by way of obliging her to confess she’s cured.

“I love him with all my heart” (Mariana Victoria)

On Sunday, March 1, after a journey of more than two months, the infanta’s cortege is arriving at its destination. Before they reach Paris, there’s a planned overnight stay in the Château de Bercy, where the regent and his son the Duke de Chartres are waiting for her. It’s a bad day, rainy and windy. Fat drops of watery mud spatter the windows of the coach. Inside, Mariana Victoria, wrapped up in a woolen shawl, is bawling. She’s got a bad toothache, too bad for her to be able to play the heroine and give her father the gift of her suffering. The child is taken out of the coach and presented to the regent, who rejoices that she’s made the trip safely. He doesn’t so much as look at the weepy, struggling little thing. In any case, his sight is getting worse, a problem that renders reading difficult and makes him fearful of going blind. He bows in the direction of the wails and instructs his son to say a few words of welcome. The oaf pronounces two or three banalities about his complete accord with the
paternal emotions hitherto expressed and with the unanimous joy of France upon seeing Her Majesty. He speaks of a medal engraved in honor of herself and the king and recites its Latin inscription. What in hell’s the use of that, the boy thinks, he may as well recite it in Chinese, but all at once the little girl, whom a tooth cavity has been tormenting for days, no longer feels any pain. She grows calm, smiles, bursts out laughing. The Duke de Chartres, nineteen years of age, has been endowed with a peculiarly unstable voice, which features sudden leaps from deep tones to shrill pipings, from the high-pitched to the gravelly, as though a mature man, a chirping girl, a quavering oldster all coexisted in him. This isn’t the normal voice break (for which he’s too old); it’s like someone divided into several persons. The disparate voices are triggered by a mechanism over which their host has no control. Gossip suggests that the cause of nature’s joke on the duke can be explained by the boy’s precocious familiarity with venereal diseases. The regent couldn’t care less about an explanation. He has a musical ear, and his son’s composite voice exasperates him. It makes him feel greater aversion toward the boy. Its effect on the little girl, by contrast, is magical. “Again!” she says, eager for the Duke de Chartres to keep talking to her with those voices that seem to jostle one another in him.

The Duke de Chartres would prefer to remain silent. Out of the question, replies Mme de Ventadour, firmly but respectfully. She’s found a way of calming the infanta, as exploitable as her fascination for Los Trufaldines — the troupe of Italian comic actors whose lodgings were a few steps from the Alcázar in Madrid — and she’s not going to
let it pass. Supported by the regent, Mme de Ventadour arranges for the Duke de Chartres to sit at the infanta’s bedside and say to her whatever comes into his head. “Again, again!” the infanta implores him. Her laughter echoes through the big house.

The following day, after kissing her king’s portrait, the infanta goes to meet him. The interview takes place at Grand-Montrouge. She’s wearing a silver and sea-green dress trimmed with fur and adorned with a collar and clusters of rubies. The king is there to welcome her at her carriage door. Someone opens it; she steps down. According to a contemporary report: “The Queen falls on her knees to greet the King, and the King himself kneels as he raises her up.” Red as a cherry, the king says, “Madame, I am delighted that you have arrived in good health.” The infanta rises to her feet. Louis XV’s beauty takes her breath away. She’s never seen anyone who compares with him. Even in her reveries while contemplating her fiancé’s image, she’s never been able to create a boy so perfect. She’s suffused with love. And the feeling that pervades her is the very revelation of joy. She who has just left behind family and country puts herself entirely in the hands of this lord and king whom God has chosen for her. The little girl succumbs with great delight. The sight of the young king — his beautiful eyes, his elegance, his fluid movements — staggers her. An aura of perfection surrounds his first apparition, and that aura will reproduce itself, identically, at every one of her future meetings with Louis XV. He appears, and the ambient light gains in brilliance and warmth. Mariana Victoria feels a strange pang, a pang that merges with the most exalted happiness.

At the same moment — the moment when they see each other for the first time — a bolt, though not of the same passion, transpierces the king. Like his fiancée, he’s touched to the quick. He takes her hand, raises her up, kneels down. He has often done this. At the age of twelve, he’s already an artist in politeness and the refinements of courtesy. With his youth, and with a grace inherited from his mother, the bewitching Duchess of Burgundy, and developed daily by the Marshal de Villeroy, who will not rest until his charge walks, dances, eats, and rides horseback better than anyone in the kingdom, Louis XV is a combined incarnation of the child-king and courtly love. The infanta’s enchantment is understandable. And it would be a fairy tale if the young monarch would succumb to the little girl’s charm in like manner … Framed by the door of her carriage, the infanta looks too little to him, even minuscule, but that’s not what he registers immediately; no, what strikes and wounds him in that first moment is that she appears before him clasped in Maman Ventadour’s arms, plainly
adored
by the woman who, in his heart, occupies the place of his mother. In Maman Ventadour’s very greeting he senses the new distance between her and him, he intuits the exclusive, fanatic, blind-to-everything-else way his former governess cares for her “Mariannine.” The infanta is stricken with love for her king; the king is laid low by jealousy. As he dreaded, the duchess loves the little princess more than him. Death carried off his real mother, and now the infanta has robbed him of the woman who took his mother’s place. He’s orphaned again. He feels like crying, feels his face flushing while he pronounces words any automaton could
mouth in his stead: “Madame, I am delighted that you have arrived in good health.”