The Exchange of Princesses (22 page)

On Christmas morning, after midnight Mass, the family is gathered in the king’s chamber. Enormous logs stamped with fleurs-de-lis are crackling in the fireplace. Like the others, the infanta is fascinated by the blaze. It’s beautiful, irresistibly beautiful, totally spellbinding. She sees fantastic images emerge from the flames, but she can’t help thinking it’s her dismembered fir tree that’s going up in smoke.

“If wild boars could reason” (Louise Élisabeth)

According to a notice in the
Gazette
, dateline Madrid, December 29, 1722: “The Princess of Asturias was indisposed for several days by erysipelas of the head, but after being bled a few times, she has completely recovered her health.” This trivial bit of news doesn’t hold the attention of anyone in France, not even her parents. Especially since she’s said to have already recovered. Nobody in Spain is interested in the state of her health either, with the exception of the prince, who frets about it. With reason, because no sooner is Louise Élisabeth cured than she has a relapse. Her condition changes the royal program for the month of January, which included a hunting sojourn in El Pardo, a few leagues from Madrid. The planned hunt goes on, of course, but Louise Élisabeth is not in the company. She remains in the palace in Madrid with the infantes, Don Fernando, Don Carlos, and Don Felipe. Ever since her arrival, the princess
and the infantes have formed a single, anonymous, vaguely childish, often sickly unit. And so, no Pardo for Princess Erysipelas. A happy respite for her. It’s cold in the forest, it will be pleasant to remain close to a fire and play riddling games with her women.

Her only obligation is to write to her husband. And curiously enough, her juvenile words, her raggedy little notes, have been preserved; first by the prince himself and then by someone else, no doubt out of consideration for a royal personage. The prince would awaken each morning, hoping to receive in his mail one of those cream-colored envelopes addressed to
Monsieur le Prince
in the princess’s capricious handwriting. If one came, he’d open it excitedly and read it with a contented heart.

He puts down the letter, draws the curtain aside, and looks out at the landscape, which the mist has erased. If wild boars could reason … and why not bucks and does, wolves,
dormice, moles, rats? He loves Louise Élisabeth. Her character — sometimes despondent and desperate, sometimes playful and jocular — pleases him; there’s something about it that also disturbs him, like this crazy notion … if wild boars could reason … He picks up the note, reads it again, and carefully puts it away with the others.

The End of Regency

The regent is stricken. He tries to struggle against the superstitious idea that with the death of his mother, a knell has rung for him. Cardinal Dubois is getting visibly thinner, and his leaden-gray complexion frightens people. The Duke de Saint-Simon, incapable of deluding himself about the way in which his duel with the contemptible politician has ended, doesn’t come often to court. No one is in good spirits. Minds are dozing, bodies going numb. Apart from the end of the plague in Marseille, there’s hardly any news to comment on. Chimneys draw badly. Eyes sting. Because of the cold, the king and the queen-infanta are kept in their respective apartments as much as possible. They make the passage through the Hall of Mirrors to the royal chapel in sedan chairs, side by side, with their feet on hot water bottles. To their right and left, scattered courtiers, their backs against the mirrors, are wearing fur-lined cloaks over their dark clothes.

The infanta has been placed on a rug. Her ladies sit around
her and work on their tapestry. Mariana Victoria plays with some wooden toys sent from Nuremberg by the crate: châteaus, horses, elephants, carts, farms, princes, peasants, huts, fish, roosters, trees, boats, priests, nuns, soldiers, peacocks, turtledoves … A miniature world that reflects her own universe. She lowers a drawbridge and with infinite patience has crowned heads, dwarfs, dignitaries, and clergy cross over it in proper order, followed in disorder by pages, laundry maids, chambermaids, grooms, ducks, and dogs — everyone and everything that can walk. Next come trees, fountains, turrets, and other bridges placed end to end, for the drawbridge can hold no more. There’s an enormous traffic jam. No one can enter or leave the bridge. The infanta howls.

During this time, the king is busy with his great army of toy soldiers. He much preferred the real soldiers in the siege of Porchefontaine. It was great, he thinks, when he gave the order to start the attack and the battalions went into motion, like waves stirring the surface of still water. It was even better after the fighting was over and he went upon the battlefield in person, bent over the wounded, and heard the last sigh of a soldier who was a particularly good actor. He remembers the death agonies, the sometimes comic efforts of soldiers all too pleased with the recreation. To one of them, who wasn’t even trying to pretend, the king said, “Monsieur, you have not earned the Cross of the Order of the Moribund.” And the soldier, shaken by the boy-king’s contempt, searched his mind in vain for something historic to say. The king abandons his toy soldiers and lets himself slide toward the morbid sweetness of melancholy.
He wonders — he who hates to talk — about the final, fatal seconds of life, about whether some defining phrase may be reserved for each of us to speak at that moment. As in the case of his mother, the Duchess of Burgundy: “Today princess, tomorrow nothing, after two days forgotten.”

Mme de Ventadour was the person he questioned about his mother, back in the days when she was indeed Maman Ventadour. Now, because their apartments in the palace are so close, he has become her darling little king again and enjoys spending time in her rooms, dining there, possibly even making her his confidante. Mme de Ventadour’s love for the infanta doesn’t bother him so much. He’s grown used to it, or maybe he has obscurely perceived that Madame’s death was a blow to the infanta’s self-assurance; maybe he sees that Versailles, where he feels at ease and sometimes even happy, represents a movement toward his ascension and toward her decline. In any case, whether the confidential relationship between him and Mme de Ventadour is reestablished or not, he no longer interrogates her about his mother. He no longer needs to. By virtue of the stories his governess has told him, his mother is forever the singular young woman whose whims were sufficiently strong or piquant to subjugate the will of the Sun King, as inflexible as ever, but lacking in vitality and in the ingredient for which no fine exterior can substitute: a zest for life. The Duchess of Burgundy possessed that treasure and shared it with all who came near her.

She loved lights at night, loved dancing by those lights, and constantly desired the king to throw new parties for her
delectation. But she also loved the night for the night, for its shadows, for the fear and the refuge they provide.

Louis XIV accorded her every right, as did her husband. The boy would never tire of hearing tales of her eccentric behavior. Like running alone through the gardens in the dark, jumping with both feet onto a carriage seat, or dancing on the tables at a banquet … And today, in this palace where he’s treated like a king only in order to teach him to obey, his mother’s frail ghost continues to run through the mossy undergrowth and the deserted groves. When he’s too bored, he appeals to her Etruscan dancer’s grace to invent for him some strange gesticulations, some dances of rebellion. When she died, the Duchess of Burgundy took her zest for life with her. She didn’t have time to pass it on to her son.

The infanta asks for her sewing scissors and some white paper. She cuts it into narrow strips that form strange designs when they fall to the floor. The daylight is fading, and what’s left of it is concentrated in the whiteness of those sheets of paper. The infanta cuts faster and faster, the strips pile up on the parquet. The ladies admire her fine work.

The king catches cold while hunting. All the same, he attends Mass, where he faints. In the conflict-ridden and crepuscular period that is the end of the Regency, the young boy’s illness, now when he’s so close to his majority, causes the beginnings of a panic. “The King our master is in good health now but he almost made me die of fright yesterday
when he fell ill at the end of the mass he was in the royal tribune with the queen … there was a crowd of people around him” (Mme de Ventadour).

The day of the final Regency Council meeting arrives. The king attends without visible emotion. The participants put on cheerful faces and display full confidence in the reign that’s about to begin. Tomorrow is the king’s thirteenth birthday. Tomorrow he will reach his majority.

Carnival

The princess is having fun. Masks give her an exciting freedom. She and La Quadra are dressed up as men, the two Kalmikov sisters as peasants. The princess and La Quadra harass them and pelt them with confetti. But the daughters of the people, supported by some other followers, fight back. The battle degenerates. Louise Élisabeth is ready to unsheathe her sword.

Don Luis keeps his distance. He stays in the palace and writes laconic notes to his father, such as, “after supper there will be a water fight and sugared almonds the Queen casts herself at His Majesty’s feet as do the Infantes …”

“I want” (Louis XV)

On February 15, Louis XV turns all of thirteen and is henceforward an absolute monarch.

In jest, Cardinal de Fleury shows the king a flea that has had the audacity to laze around on his pillow and says, “Sire, you are now of age, you can decree this creature’s punishment.”

“Hang him!”

The clever retort makes people laugh, but not exactly wholeheartedly. What if the king should decide, on a whim, to apply to those around him the punishment he decrees for a flea? “M. d’Ombreval?” — “Hang him!” “M. de Romaine?” — “Hang him!” “Mme d’Ambran?” — “Hang her!” At such a rate, the branches of the great oaks in the park would soon be weighed down with macabre fruit.

The king takes pleasure in saying, “I want.” Sitting on every chair as though upon his throne, he assumes a reflective attitude. Long silence. Then he begins: “I want …” Everyone
waits for what’s next, including him. He’s surer about what he doesn’t want. Thus he agrees to go to Paris, but in spite of all Philip d’Orléans’s persuasive efforts, the king will go neither to the state theater, the Comédie-Française, nor the Opéra. And when compliments are addressed to him, he replies not a word.

The first meeting of the King’s Council takes place on the appointed day. The youngster appears as stone-faced as ever. He hasn’t brought his little cats with him and so has no handy distraction, no living creatures snuggled against him, no warm fur to stroke. He will never again bring them along when he has to appear in his official capacity. He’ll have to find in himself the solutions for his boredom. Not that he has any. Perhaps at some point the judgment he pronounced back when he was still a little boy crosses his mind again. A cat had killed one of his pet birds, and as in the case of the flea, he was asked, “Sire, what punishment must the cat suffer?”

“Have him attend a meeting of the Regency Council.”

The king announces that he wants to create an Order of the Mustache, reminiscent of the games he used to play at the Tuileries and his organization of secret governments. Those to whom he grants the order will have access to him. Work on drawing up the order’s statutes is hastily begun, even though everyone bears in mind that the whole thing may be a joke and participation in it risky. In particular, the nobles of the Order of the Holy Spirit (known as the Knights of the Blue Ribbon) cannot bear the thought of being mixed up with members of the Order of the Mustache.

After the attempt to establish the Order of the Mustache, Louis XV makes a more concrete decision: he has the most beautiful interior courtyard of his apartments decorated with twenty-four plaster deer heads. He’s very proud of his Deer Courtyard. He stands at a window, contemplates his Cour des Cerfs, and tells himself that “I want” can sometimes produce effects. And then he shuts himself up in the little room with the dogs’ heads and caresses them one after another, seized by a deep despondency.

Only the urge to go hunting really touches him. It prevails over all the rest, over his duties as well as his diversions. In someone who must soon assume power, this dominant taste seems rather troubling. The public has already noticed it. Philip d’Orléans deplores it as well. Without directly contradicting his charge, the regent does all he can to make the occupation of king intellectually attractive to him. But between a series of lectures on past wars or on the meaning of history and a bird hunt in the forest of the royal château at Marly, the boy doesn’t hesitate. Even though from the outside, and even in reality, the king’s attainment of his majority hasn’t changed the actual functioning of the government, and even though it’s true that Philip d’Orléans is still master of France, he knows he’s lost ground. The enemy faction, led by M. le Duc, never stops nibbling away, if not at his prestige, then at least at his ascendancy. M. le Duc respects the limits of his role, his conduct is beyond reproach. He contents himself with inviting the king to splendid hunting parties at his Château de Chantilly. And Louis XV is delighted to accept. How can he, Philip d’Orléans, stand between the king and his desires? They’re desires typical in a boy of
his age. “We are here to wait upon the king’s pleasure,” the regent declared at the beginning of his regency, and he’s convinced, deep down, that it’s the truth.