The Exchange of Princesses (27 page)

Louise Élisabeth staggers to the royal bedchamber. The Kalmikov sisters, each bearing a torch, open the door wide and announce, “Her Majesty the queen!” Louise Élisabeth, with a woolen blanket draped across her shoulders, a sort of coronation cape for a shepherdess, mumbles, “
Estoy borracha como una cuba
” (I’m as drunk as a skunk). The king parts the bed curtains and holds out to her a white, fragile, exceedingly delicate hand, a hand limp and impotent.

Spies in the Queen of Spain’s Household

M. le Duc rejoices. Philip V’s abdication is excellent news. The daughter of a dethroned king is easier to send back discreetly, without risking a war. He’s going to make sure the Princess of Asturias, henceforward queen of Spain, is closely spied upon. He must know whether or not she has any influence with King Luis. Decidedly, ever since the death of Philip d’Orléans, good fortune has smiled upon M. le Duc. This doesn’t prevent him from strolling around as rudely as ever, with the same expression of discontent, of fury about to explode — or in fact exploding. His passage is marked by invective and blows from his cane. Valets, servers, chambermaids, and even pages, who because of their high birth should be better treated, all fear him. The panic that overcomes the infanta as soon as she catches sight of him is felt by everyone who’s in a position of weakness. For that’s his talent: to put you in a position of weakness. Ever since her illness, Mariana Victoria feels like a target. The daughter of
a king who’s not a king anymore, the wife of a king from whom she never stops waiting for a gesture of attention, a word of love, she’s able to hold out because of her pride, and because the force of her will has not been in any way diminished; but the source of her vitality is no longer the same. She’s lost her carefree attitude and her self-confidence, as well as her desire to dance in place, to sing upon awakening, to win every heart. Mme de Ventadour is her refuge. The infanta tries with all her might to believe the duchess’s letters, according to which the king is overjoyed to hear her spoken of and loves her more and more with each passing day. Letters in which Mme de Ventadour assures her correspondents that the couple formed by Mariana Victoria and Louis XV is a miracle of harmony. The infanta manages to delude herself again, but a new need, redoubtable because insatiable, has begun to grow in her: she wants proof. Just once, outside of well-ordered ceremonies and courteous exchanges, formal congratulations and condolence visits, she wants an impromptu look, an impromptu gesture from the king, she wants him to feel an irrepressible urge, she wants something that will say to her, just once, “I love you.”

Flying Pebbles

In the correspondence between Don Luis and his parents, the most noticeable effect of Philip V’s abdication is that now there’s an exchange of majesties: the royal son continues to address them as Your Majesties, whereas now the royal father and royal stepmother, Elisabeth Farnese, refer to the royal son as Your Majesty or His Majesty.

In celebration of the new reign, the Carnival is especially brilliant, featuring masked balls, comedies, sugared almond battles, bullfights, and an auto-da-fé on a par with the other festivities. Louise Élisabeth never sobers up. She displays herself in La Quadra’s arms. They’re both wearing scarlet mantillas and identical white masks, adorned under the eye slit with a heart-shaped beauty spot. The men send them armfuls of flowers and shout full-throated obscenities at them.

The king avoids displays of public joy — and joy in general. At court, the celebrations are rather more formal:
equestrian shows, ballets, operas. Don Luis and his wife attend a performance of Calderón’s
Fieras afemina Amor
(Love Effeminates Savage Beasts). She sleeps; he, looking lost, observes the exploits of Love, who like Orpheus’s lyre tames wild animals. Luis doesn’t tame them, but he hunts them whatever the weather. It even seems that bad weather exacerbates his passion. He writes to his father: “It was so windy that little stones came flying up into our faces and blinded us, the hunt ended before I could shoot anything except two partridges” (February 14, 1724), and then a few days later: “At El Pardo this afternoon, I fired at a deer from a distance, the ball went through him and we followed him for nearly a league, he leaving a great abundance of blood in his trail and even leaving a clot of blood as big as a hat the night came we had to go back and so he was lost.”

He entered into his night.

Luis doesn’t weep. It’s not weakness on his part if the world flings stones in his face and forces tears from his eyes.

The Enjoyment of Terror

Louis XV prepares to leave Versailles, where he’s been dreaming of the festivities to come in the summer — the summer of his fifteenth year — that are going to make a glittery saga of his sojourn in the Palace of Fontainebleau. He’s in a hurry to step onto the White Horse Courtyard, to run up the stairs four at a time, to admire the Deer Gallery, decorated with deer hunted in the forest of Fontainebleau. He will embellish with his own trophies the gallery built by Henri IV. He’ll cram it with dozens, hundreds of sets of antlers, with innumerable stuffed heads. In the end, no one will be able to penetrate into the gallery anymore. He’ll go there alone, in secret, at dusk. He’ll slip through the intricate tangle. The massive antlers, the heads, rising up everywhere and multiplied by the mirrors, will neither wound nor hinder him. They’ll remind him of the only
lived
moments of his existence. Since his first hunt with hounds, last spring at Rambouillet, he can conceive
of no stronger sensation than that of galloping along the trail of a deer amid the loud barking of the pack, the calls of the hunting horn, the ecstasy of speed, and the shafts of light piercing the foliage, that fever of power and risk, the joy of a hand-to-hand struggle with nature, of a loving combat with animal life. To destroy it? No, the hunter thinks, he’s bound to his prey. The fear he causes it can turn around very quickly. It’s the matter of a second, a fall from a horse, the charge of a wounded boar, or like the accident that befell the young Duke de Melun at Chantilly only a few weeks ago, an antler that rips you open. The young man was wounded in the side, so deeply that his liver was pierced. He’d been carried into one of the rooms of the château. And the king had witnessed his friend’s death agony.

Some thought that the youthful monarch would suffer emotional repercussion from this tragedy. He no doubt did, but not enough to calm his frenzy. For the dark side of that activity, so readily defended by appeals to fresh air and good health, is not unknown to him. It is even, perhaps, what he was first taught in the course of the bizarre shooting sessions during which he’d be placed, pistol in hand, inside a gigantic aviary and instructed to shoot without even aiming. The slaughter would end in a dizzying whirl of flight and demented rustling and falling birds, while the boy, without ceasing his fire, would cry that he had had enough. But his master-of-arms would reply, “You have to savor the enjoyment of terror right to the end.” Those sessions, had they really taken place? Did they form part of his old dreams? Marked for death from the start, Louis has grown up in fear.
It constitutes his deepest connection to all the events of his life. And perhaps he remains indifferent when fear doesn’t intervene. On the other hand, his interest is aroused whenever an event, an activity, a person has anything at all in common, however remotely, with the panic in the aviary — with the enjoyment of terror.

Scandalous Girl

Louise Élisabeth needs La Quadra’s fingers, but they don’t suffice to calm her. She’s not in love with that girl. It just so happens that La Quadra and the Kalmikov sisters are more indulgent than the others, and they have fun ideas. They know how to cool her down properly.

She’s lying stretched out with her thighs spread; one of the girls fans her crotch.

She’s lying stretched out with her legs pressed together; one of the girls penetrates her with little flicks of her tongue.

She’s lying with her limbs in disarray, arching her back and crying out as if possessed; one of the girls, or the three of them, rubs her labia with pieces of ice.

Louise Élisabeth teaches them some lewd French words, words spoken in the fairgrounds theaters of Paris or by the prostitutes of the Palais-Royal, words she didn’t know she knew but which occur to her in private, just as the little infanta, in public, finds herself naturally inclined to
rhetorical emphases that date back, through her father, to Louis XIV.

King Luis makes an effort to remain deaf to the rumors, to cut off Mme de Altamira’s complaints or other well-intentioned persons’ attempts to inform on the queen. But there’s a limit, and it’s crossed when Louise Élisabeth allows herself to ask La Quadra, in front of witnesses, “Would you agree to pimp for me?”

Shocked, the king, who is on the point of going to Valsaín, writes to his father that he’d prefer to see him alone — without Louise Élisabeth:

He’s resolved to travel alone so that he can really talk to his father.

Once he’s in Valsaín, he perceives the impossibility of a private interview and resolves, despite his embarrassment, to reveal to both the king and the queen a small fraction of the abyss he’s sinking into. They listen to him with similar expressions of disgust and incredulity. Their Majesties extract from him a promise to conduct himself with firmness. On the eve of his departure, the former king, in accordance with the rite, gives his son his hand to kiss, but the
queen, not for the first time, refuses to offer hers. Luis finds this refusal, at a time when everything is slipping out of his control, intolerable.

As soon as he’s back in his palace, he informs Their Majesties of Louise Élisabeth’s behavior: “Although the Queen is better, she is not yet what I wish her to be but I promise Your Majesties never to desist in my undertaking” (April 13, 1724). He has a moment of optimism:

Louise Élisabeth writes to her mother. Having finished the letter, she rereads it, crumples it up, and eats the sealing wax.

The torments of his marriage are not all that the king must suffer; there are, in addition, affairs of state. The Spanish have not taken long to realize that their hopes for him were a utopian dream. It’s true that Luis I was born in Spain, that as a small child he was nourished on Spanish chocolate, and that his first language is neither French nor German nor Italian. It’s also true that he’s a boy of great piety and totally
without malice. But it has become equally obvious that his chief virtue is obedience, a characteristic hardly conducive to governing. At every turn, he asks Their Majesties for advice.

There are also his recurrent entreaties on a theme as agonizing as his wife’s follies, namely Elisabeth Farnese’s refusal to give him her hand to kiss. “I shall not be content until the Queen accords me the just favor that I have requested of her … which costs her nothing and which is at this moment the only thing I ardently desire.”

On one of the mornings when his wife speaks to him, he’s surprised to hear her ask him what his plans for the day are.

“Well, first we attend Mass together, then I have the Council of Messages, then dinner, and after dinner I shall go hunting.” A faint smile appears on Luis’s face: “Yesterday I killed a hare, a woodcock, a jay, two owls …”

Louise Élisabeth diligently bites her fingernails and says, “You are, Monsieur,
un as de la tuerie
, an ace at killing.”

The king gives her a disconcerted look. Not only does she seem to be taking an interest in his life, but she’s making a play on words besides.

“In fact,” she adds, “what does ‘Asturias’ mean?”

“It is a region of the kingdom, Madame. In the north.”

“Suppose we go there to see why it is that we’re called the Prince and Princess of Asturias? Let’s take a trip to Asturias — it would be educational!”

“We should have to get authorization from His Majesty my father.”

“But aren’t you the king, and am I not the queen?”

“Yes, I am the king and you are the queen, but the king my father is my master and yours as well.”

The people have no need of overhearing this conversation to know that nothing has changed. All decisions continue to issue forth from Their Majesties; the young king is nothing but a puppet. A lampoon reads,

The project of a trip to Asturias is abandoned. A visit to San Ildefonso seems more judicious. Louise Élisabeth once again asks to go along. Her husband replies, “I am not certain that you would be welcome, and even less so your ladies. I have promised that you will conduct yourself decently; I am waiting for Their Majesties’ consent.”

A note more resigned than pleased invites Don Luis to come, accompanied by his wife, but without her throng of servants.