The Exchange of Princesses (13 page)

The gazetteers pick up the incident: “When His Majesty departed to return to the Tuileries Palace, the Queen-Infanta wishing to accompany the King to the royal coach, His Majesty desired her to remain in her apartments.” The expression “lord and master” is judged excessive by the Spanish. The infanta’s status, although she’s married on paper, is de facto preconjugal and will remain so until she reaches the age of twelve. She’s a fiancée whose marriage contract has been signed in advance. As far as the infanta is concerned, what pains her is that her impulse has been thwarted; she has and will have but one desire: to go farther. The terms “lord and master” fill her with delight.

A ball that same evening reunites her with two of the regent’s daughters, the Princesses de Beaujolais and de Chartres, both distinctly older than the infanta. She’s in high good humor and treats them like children younger than herself. She worries about whether they’re tired, holds them by the pleats to keep them from falling. When they leave,
she kisses them and declares, “Little princesses, go to your houses, and come see me every day.”

The king goes to bed frightfully depressed. The prospect of festivities adds the finishing touch to his despondency. To be sad by yourself is no fun, but to be sad in the middle of a city wildly celebrating your supposed happiness, a city where hundreds of people congratulate you on your good fortune, makes you wish you were dead.

At the same moment, Cardinal Dubois is in his study, dictating the following letter to Elisabeth Farnese in the disgusted boy’s name:

At that very hour, the infanta, who has been tenderly tucked into a brand-new bed, is too titillated to notice she’s tired. She can’t fall asleep. But on that night, the night of her entrance into Paris, there are others who aren’t sleeping either. The little queen fires people’s imaginations. Starting
with the toy merchants. At the Green Monkey on Rue des Arcis, at the Purple Monkey, and even more so at the Royal Chair, on the premises of Juhel, purveyor to the royal children, morale is excellent. A four-year-old queen of France, what a godsend! They can hear the louis d’or clinking at the mere thought of the orders they’re going to be assailed with. In these circles, the royal child’s passion for dolls is already common knowledge, in the same way that, when such and such a great lady cannot resist jewels, it quickly becomes known. The place reserved for Carmen-Doll has not passed unnoticed.

But also, at the other extreme, as far as you can get from cute, pricey toys, poor children who will never own a toy of any kind are tossing and turning on their pallets; the unprecedented situation — their queen is a little girl — has set them spinning. Is the reign of children at hand? Might not Louis and Mariannine, now in power, bring about their liberation? Poor children, exploited, starved, beaten, the last of the lowliest — are they to be first, as it says in the Gospel? The wind is cold, the darkness total. Hidden in a corner of an attic, or shivering under a bridge or in the doorway of a church or on a building site, they dream awake. The chimney sweeps, the street sweepers, the shuckers and peelers of vegetables, the kitchen hands, water carriers, floor wipers, shoe scrapers; the waiflike spinners, the watery-eyed menders, the unwashed goose girls, the laundresses with chapped hands; the mistreated, clubbed, whipped, trampled, harassed cohort of little beggars and beggaresses — they dream in the darkness with wide-open eyes. Will the world turn upside down? Will the boy-king and the queen-infanta
accomplish a swift coup d’état? Is society going to set poor children free from servitude, from the little labor camps where they wear themselves out toiling away everywhere? The born slaves, the unpaid laborers, the infinitely exploitable, the barely surviving gird their rags about them and begin to hope.

The infanta familiarizes herself with the Louvre Palace. In fact, she finds her apartment too small and expresses the fear that her bedchamber won’t be able to accommodate the great number of courtiers who are coming to celebrate her. Mme de Ventadour holds her writing hand as she inscribes a letter to her parents: “I have the prettiest things in the world.” For her part, Mme de Ventadour adds, she’s sometimes concerned because “after a journey of some 400 leagues, it’s still necessary to make so many appearances, but she does all that and tolerates it marvelously and is the admiration of all France, our King loves her passionately but he’s busy at every moment.” It’s certain that he won’t be coming to play with the infanta, and the ardor she brings to arranging her dolls as she settles in is not something he desires to share.

Once again, the regent has failed to follow the Duke de Saint-Simon’s advice. Saint-Simon had advised him to keep the children apart in order to arouse their curiosity about each other, to stimulate a wish to know each other better. He’d suggested that the king continue to live in the Tuileries and that the infanta should be shut up in the abbey of Val-de-Grâce with a severely reduced entourage — no
ladies-in-waiting, no officers, no guards. She should be allowed to leave the abbey once or twice a year for a fifteen-minute visit with the king, which he would reciprocate, and she should have no public role. Let her remain mysterious so that her future husband may dream about her. Well, “dream” — Saint-Simon doesn’t really go that far. It’s enough for him to propose a system of upbringing that will give the boy-king and the queen-infanta the possibility of escaping the unhappiness of knowing each other too well, and of being condemned to mutual boredom, or mutual contempt, or even mutual loathing. Should they see each other often as children — and therefore as weak, error-prone, always ready to do something “childish” — their vision of each other would be forever tarnished, according to Saint-Simon, by the absurdities and imperfections characteristic of extreme youthfulness. His arguments prove utterly fruitless, but at the moment, Saint-Simon couldn’t care less. Although ultimately captivated by the Spanish countryside and the Spanish sense of honor, and though he’s socially enhanced by the title of grandee of Spain, he’s returned to Paris much diminished financially and even reduced to less than nothing. That rascal Dubois has skinned him alive. Saint-Simon’s embassy has ruined him. The disastrous state of his finances makes other matters quite secondary, including that of how a slow and sure blossoming of love in the hearts of the future bride and groom might best be arranged.

The infanta has therefore been lodged not in the same palace as Louis XV, the Tuileries, but just next door, in the Old Louvre, which amounts to the same thing. She’s occupying Anne of Austria’s former apartments, whose renovation
has required months of relentless work. Between Anne of Austria’s death and the infanta’s arrival, those apartments, situated in the gallery directly overlooking the Seine, have never been lived in, except by Louis XV during the summer of 1719, when the Tuileries was in dire need of being cleaned from top to bottom. Apart from that brief interlude, the apartments served as a meeting place for various academies of fine arts and shortly before their renovation for the infanta’s use were requisitioned for the so-called
Opération Visa
. Holders of banknotes issued by the Scottish banker John Law were granted a final extension of the deadline for exchanging them — at a loss, of course — for valid currency. It was here that such people were to apply — in the gallery, under the handsome coffered ceilings painted according to the wishes of Anne of Austria. The
Visa
offices must have resounded with cries and serious altercations between the swindled and the government’s representatives, between the victims of theft and the thieves’ employees.

A few weeks before the infanta’s arrival, the
Visa
offices closed. The gallery in the Old Louvre was prepared to receive her. For her, nothing would be good enough. She’s lodged on the ground floor (the upper floor being reserved for the numerous domestics in her service), and that’s a sign of kindness, or of practicality, since she’s thus exempted from having to climb stairs. Between the Louvre and the riverbank, the rectangular garden created by Le Nôtre has been restored. The delicately sculptured flower beds have returned to their original design, and at the extreme eastern end of the garden, the water fountain set in a pretty circular
basin is flowing again, refreshing a green arbor adorned by four statues representing “Diana’s Companions.”

The apartment — doors, drapes, screen — is covered with red damask embellished with gold stripes. The same fabric covers the carved and gilded wooden chairs, the large and small armchairs, the folding stools, the large and small tables. In the bedchamber, there are twin beds: the infanta’s, surrounded by a balustrade — which it is forbidden, on pain of lèse-majesté, to touch — and Mme de Ventadour’s, with no balustrade; both beds are covered in the same red damask. For the infanta’s wardrobe, eight tall armoires have been built, their dimensions contrasting with the “little low stool or kneeler” and the “little oaken prie-dieu, two feet tall, with twisted uprights.” The best silversmiths have decorated the silver and vermeil tableware all over with the arms of France and Spain, and flourishing between them the fleur-de-lis. The painter Antoine Watteau’s powder boxes, adorned with children at play, represent his final tribute to the fugitive grace of the things of this world.

On Tuesday March 3, the infanta is brought to the ceremonial hall. She spots the king at once; he’s standing in the middle of the room with a doll in his hands. She goes up to him and kneels; he raises her up and hands her the doll. The infanta takes the doll and curtsies. The doll’s as big as she is, but nothing can hinder her movements at this moment. A charged silence greets the event. The courtiers observe the two children, and especially the doll, with dismay, for the doll is not simply a doll but a baby doll, and a ghostly baby doll
at that. It’s dressed in princely garments, and the delicate features of its waxen face exactly reproduce those of Louis XV’s older brother, the Duke of Brittany and dauphin of France, who died at the age of five from smallpox, the same disease that killed their mother and father. The king, only two years old at the time, cannot remember his brother, but the people on hand recognize him. Looking a bit awkward, the king remains where he is, his hands still on the cumbersome doll, while the people before him restrain their emotion. They see again the delightful little boy who was the Duke of Brittany, and some of them even remember the pathetic incident that occurred on the day following his death: the child’s favorite dog climbed the stairs to the tribune where his young master was wont to attend Mass and there in the chapel, in the middle of the religious service, began to howl.

The courtiers stare at the tiny face, the slightly turned-up nose, the big eyes, the round cheeks. Madame nearly faints. Mme de Ventadour would like to cry aloud. Everyone wonders who could have had the idea of making a doll with the late prince’s death mask. As for the king and the infanta, they content themselves with going through the ceremonial motions. Mme de Ventadour frees the infanta from the doll. Louis XV and Mariana Victoria take each other’s hands and go with great pomp from the Louvre to the Tuileries, where the young king shows his companion the park of his palace. Mme de Ventadour, half-paralyzed, follows close behind them, holding the cadaverous effigy at arm’s length.

In Paris it’s related that the king has made the infanta the gift of a doll that cost thirty-five thousand livres. The macabre resemblance receives no mention. Those Parisians with
a taste for death, in addition to the quite satisfactory number of executions that follow the arrest of Cartouche and often take place at night, have yet another bizarre public spectacle to take in. An eighteen-year-old girl, with an annual income of thirty or forty thousand livres, the most beautiful body, and the loveliest skin, but topped by a death’s-head, wishes to get married. She’s exhibiting herself near the Porte de Saint-Chaumont. People fight one another to get a look at the girl with the death’s-head.

On Wednesday, the infanta, in accordance with the honors due to a queen of France, receives the foreign ministers of various countries, followed by the representatives of the principal institutions and the highest officials of the realm.

On Thursday, it’s the parliamentary deputies’ turn. At first, miffed at not having been invited to the wedding celebrations, they wished to avoid this audience. They were recalled to their duty and obliged to betake themselves to the Louvre. The representatives of the
Parlement
make a declaration to the little infanta: “The King’s letter, Madame, has informed us of your arrival; his example and his order encourage us to offer you the respects that are your due.” The infanta responds to these insinuations of hostility with an ingenuous smile. The deputies of the
Parlement
are followed by those of the
Chambre des comptes
(the Court of Accounts) and the
Cour des aides
(the Court of Aid).

On Friday, the infanta receives the deputies of the Great Council; those of the
Cour des monnaies
(the Currency Court); the Duke de Tresme, governor of Paris; and the provost of merchants.

On Saturday, the final day of this implacable program, the infanta receives the rector of the University of Paris and then a delegation from the Académie française. She’s favored with a speech both spiritual and erudite, to which she listens while sucking her thumb, with Carmen-Doll lying on a purple velvet cushion at her feet.