The Exchange of Princesses (19 page)

The young libertines are severely berated. Some of them get sent to the Bastille, others exiled by lettres de cachet requested by their families. In Paris, the jokes and gibes proliferate. Louis XV is surprised that he no longer has about him some of his most entertaining friends. The explanation he’s given is that they’ve been punished for wrecking fences on the grounds of the palace. The notion of “fence-wreckers” enjoys a good success both among the courtiers and beyond the court. The king accepts it without comment. Perhaps it’s the gentle Duke de la Trémoille who undertakes to explain the expression to him. He may even clarify the various positions for the king by embroidering the scene into one of the idyllic landscapes he’s working on.

However that may be, shortly after the scandal of the fence-wreckers, and in conjunction with it — though the king doesn’t know it — he becomes aware of a new disappearance that touches the very core of his existence: the Marshal de Villeroy, his tutor, is gone, he who was appointed by Louis XIV and never left the young king’s side, neither by day nor
by night, convinced as he was that his little charge might suddenly die, poisoned like his parents. For Villeroy, the enemy was Philip d’Orléans, who reciprocated the sentiment, as we’ve seen. The regent detested Villeroy. The limit was reached when Villeroy tried to prohibit private meetings between the uncle and his nephew; Villeroy had overstepped his prerogatives. But the regent couldn’t simply relieve him of his duties; he needed a pretext. The fence-wreckers furnished him with one, thanks to the presence among them of the marshal’s grandson.

Everything happens very fast. One afternoon, M. de Villeroy is carried in a sedan chair to the regent’s study, which opens onto the gardens. After an unpleasant exchange, he gets back into his chair, but the porters, instead of returning him to his apartments, charge off in the direction of the Satory pond. They pass under the queen-infanta’s windows and run along the Aile du Midi, and soon the old tutor finds himself inside a carriage, all doors bolted, all curtains down, being whisked away at a gallop into exile.

The king watches for M. de Villeroy’s return. He sends people to look for him. Hours pass. M. de Villeroy cannot be found. The king goes into a panic. Without M. de Villeroy’s protection, he’s going to die. The very air he breathes seems baleful. When night falls, his fear grows uncontrollable. He begs for his dear tutor, “Grandpa Villeroy,” to be returned to him. The presence of the regent, who has hurried to his bedside to reassure him, increases his terror. The boy has a hallucinatory vision of the poison’s icy path through his body. He believes he’s dying, even believes himself already dead. He continues to act and to be treated like a living person,
whereas he’s been poisoned to the marrow of his bones and has departed this life — like his great-grandfather, he sobs, like the dead man who addressed him and promised him he’d become a great king, and now he’s dead in his turn, without having had the time to become anything.

Two days later, when M. de Villeroy’s replacement Bishop André Hercule de Fleury arrives, the boy stops eating, won’t drink, avoids touching papers or letters addressed to him, is wary of breathing the scent of flowers and indeed of breathing at all … In his imagination, he dies dozens of times. The elegant prelate, a man of great gentleness already familiar to the young king, strives to save him from his nightmares. In Paris, word circulates that “the King appears cheerful enough in public, but in private he is sad and given to complaining and weeping at night.”

“Saint Ildephonse”

The heat and the difficulty of tolerating the stench of Madrid, which permeates even the park of the Buen Retiro Palace, have induced Philip V and Elisabeth Farnese to relocate to a cooler climate. They’re at Valsaín, in a hunting pavilion in the middle of the forest, chosen by Philip V for its proximity to the chief subject of his thoughts and the single outlet for his energy: the royal property known as La Granja de San Ildefonso — or “Saint Ildephonse,” as he calls it in his correspondence, in a Gallicized spelling indicative of his expectations for the palace (including a church) he’s building there. Philip V and his wife supervise the work from Valsaín. They have themselves transported to the site every day, climbing up the cedar-lined path that opens onto the foundations of the church. It will be magnificent, the jewel of his secret dream: to pray to God under the richly decorated ceiling, surrounded by frescoes of angels and glistening marble; and outside, to go upon the rocky, piney slopes of the Sierra de
Guadarrama. And between the two? Between the Lord’s glorious temple and barren nature? There will be the royal palace of San Ildefonso. Out of pure nostalgia, King Philip has modeled his conception on Versailles. He inspects the terrain and chooses the locations of the fountains of Diana, Latona, and Apollo; there will be rectilinear paths and statues of giant turtles identical to the ones he used to sit on as a boy. He pressures, hounds, verifies. His impatience delights no one close to him, especially not, for different reasons, the queen and Don Luis.

The
Gazette
offers some royal news: “On the 8th day of this month, the King and Queen are due to return from their château at Balsain [
sic
] to El Escorial, where the Prince and Princess of Asturias and the Infantes are expected on the 6th.” Some days later, a notice informs the readers that the king and queen have changed the date of their return. They’re going to stay longer at Valsaín. The decision has been made by the king, who wants to be there to accelerate the work on his new palace. The queen is discovering a bad side to her symbiosis with the king: his obsession with his rustic retreat. Nevertheless, in her view, delaying the start of their sojourn at El Escorial is not a disagreeable prospect, at least not for the foreseeable future. She feels no attraction to that monastery/palace, and despite her efforts to introduce comfort and decoration in the wing they live in, she doesn’t like it there. Besides, the more time she spends away from her daughter-in-law the better, because the girl’s company is nothing short of unbearable.

Louise Élisabeth doesn’t dance with her husband or anyone else, nor has she developed any interest in hunting, nor
does she even pretend to like music. Thus she absents herself from all three main activities of the royal family. “The Goiter Girl” has nothing in common with them. After barely six months, has she withdrawn from life at court, ignored the regular daily schedule, eschewed the seasonal relocations from one palace to another? Not yet, but she’s getting there, she’s well along the way. The bridges between the crown of Spain and the lost waif are fragile structures, but they’re not down. They can’t be, because the project that’s her reason for being there — namely her marriage to the Prince of Asturias and the royal offspring she’s expected to produce — is still in its early stages. The official messages lean toward the effusive. The good Father de Laubrussel writes to Cardinal Dubois:

The Jesuit in Spain and the cardinal in France compete in rosy-colored depictions. The Jesuit, because he’s blinded by
the conviction that God’s order and the order of the realm necessarily entail admirable, well-behaved personages, and the cardinal because he works with a cynical duality that allows him to report in all tranquillity the opposite of what he sees with his own eyes.

The Anguish of El Escorial

It’s true, Louise Élisabeth blithely chatters with her ladies in their language. The evening before they leave for El Escorial, all these girls are in a state of excitement that makes them especially noisy. They’re celebrating summer and their departure. The two Kalmikov sisters, their blond hair disheveled, give Louise Élisabeth fandango lessons. Dancing the fandango is just as easy as speaking Spanish, they tell her, trying to overcome her reticence. La Quadra has got hold of a guitar. And how about wine? There’s no wine? Louise Élisabeth sends a couple of her companions to the kitchens to fetch some, but when her door is abruptly pulled open, it’s not by ebullient young girls carrying pretty carafes but by the extremely haughty Mme de Altamira. The high spirits dissipate at once. In the frightened silence, Louise Élisabeth keeps on dancing; her snapping fingers make a dull, cold sound.

“El Escorial is a monastery, a place of prayer — a quiet place. Their Majesties do not deem it proper, Madame, that you should be accompanied by your ladies-in-waiting. You will find the necessary services already in place.”

“And the prince my husband, what does he deem proper?”

Mme de Altamira withdraws without responding.

They leave at dawn for the three-and-a-half-hour trip from Madrid to El Escorial. The Prince of Asturias’s coach is occupied by Louise Élisabeth, Mme de Altamira, and Father de Laubrussel. The infantes and their tutors are in the following coach. They traverse the hard-packed earth surfaces of Madrid’s few broad avenues. The thoroughfares are already clogged with vehicles, flocks and herds of animals, carriages, sedan chairs, donkeys laden with enormous bundles, street vendors, beggars … The prince is silent, as is his wife. Mme de Altamira is dozing. Only Father de Laubrussel is in a talkative mood: “What city can compete with Madrid? What capital can boast of being greater?”

“Paris.”

“I meant, my dear princess, more Catholic. Look at all the churches and monasteries and convents, look at all the spires! Madrid is literally bristling with them! What a joyous sight for the eye and for the soul! All those crosses pointing up to heaven! My God, I thank thee!”

Louise Élisabeth would like to sleep, tries, can’t, resigns herself to contemplating the harsh landscape, the shriveled oaks that come into view as they exit the city. Nothing to see, she observes. And she closes her eyes again so that at least no one will speak to her.

She must have fallen asleep. The sun is blazing, and the air feels almost as hot as the air in Madrid. Her throat tightens at the appearance of an enormous edifice of gray granite, isolated in the middle of a desert horizon. You can see it
from far away. Its endless walls, its paltry windows, its surroundings. Like a prison for homicidal highwaymen.

“El Escorial has one thousand two hundred doors and two thousand six hundred windows,” the prince announces.

“Two thousand six hundred windows, and no one standing at any of them!” says Louise Élisabeth.

“You belong to a world, Madame, where one does not stand at windows,” Mme de Altamira lectures her. “Unless, of course, when duty requires one to respond to ovations.”

“Alas!” the prince sighs.

Louise Élisabeth is sorry she woke up.

“A grand edifice born of a grand design,” says Father de Laubrussel. “This admirable royal monastery was built by Philip II, son of Charles V, to commemorate his victory in the Battle of Saint-Quentin.”

“A victory against whom?” Louise Élisabeth asks without thinking.

“Against the French,” the prince and the Jesuit answer in chorus.

“How jolly.”

“Philip II,” the Jesuit continues, “had another, more pious motive: to establish a royal pantheon.”

“Jollier and jollier.”

An ashen monk is standing at the entrance. Louise Élisabeth would like to go back the way she came. The interior confirms her premonitions. A succession of inner courtyards offers no vistas. The intensely blue sky adds no note of hope but rather serves as a reminder of an inflexible law, Louise Élisabeth confusedly thinks. Meanwhile, she’s made acquainted with the part of the palace reserved for
the Bourbons, whose spirit is as contrary as possible to that fostered by Philip II. But like the blue sky, the embellishments — the tapestries and silken carpets, the scenes of shepherds and shepherdesses, the painted or fresh flowers — all leave intact (where they don’t exacerbate it) the prevailing severity.

Their Majesties at Valsaín maintain a daily correspondence with the Prince of Asturias. The king writes: “I was well pleased to read in your letter of yesterday, my dear son, that you have arrived without incident at El Escorial, and I await news of your hunting …” On the same page, at the end of the king’s letter, the queen repeats, with very minor variations, her husband’s words.

The prince replies: “This afternoon after dinner I missed a rather fine fallow deer and we saw five very big deer, two fine and two others passable, but I was unable to get a shot at them …”

“I share your distress at the ill success of your first hunt, my well-beloved son, but perhaps you have been able to compensate for it today …”

And indeed there are good days that compensate for the bad: “I returned from today’s hunt with three deer. Let me tell Your Majesties everything that occurred …”

Philip V replies, “I am delighted, my well-beloved son, to learn of your fine hunting yesterday …,” and Elisabeth Farnese corroborates: “I am infinitely delighted by the fine hunt you enjoyed and hope that it will be followed by many others.”

While the prince hunts, Louise Élisabeth goes horseback riding. She ventures farther and farther upon the slopes and
folds of the Sierra de Guadarrama. Taking risks distracts her. She urges her mount through masses of fallen rocks and forces it to jump over crevices. Until one day her horse slips and sends her flying, and she strikes her head on a rock. She bleeds a great deal, but the wound isn’t very serious. As the bandage wrapped around her skull makes it look deformed, she thinks that her head is, once again, a fright. Immobile, her arms and feet covered according to Spanish custom, she lies with her eyes fixed on the eternal azure. She’s bored with her women. She’s bored with the gossip from Paris. She’d give several of her diamonds to hear the thin voices of the lemonade vendors under the trees of the Champs-Elysées, or the worn, enticing patter of the tarot card readers around the Palais-Royal. She’s bored. She’d give everything she has if only a great bird, one of the vultures or hawks that incessantly trace circles in the sky above El Escorial, would carry her away.