The Exchange of Princesses (29 page)

But king/father and his wife don’t give up the fight: “We must wait for the future time when God, who sees our intentions and our suffering, touches her heart and makes you happier. To this end I shall, I assure you, most ardently offer up to Him my lowly prayers” (July 5).

From Elisabeth Farnese: “May God touch her heart, may He move her to everything that is for the best for her and for us as well. There is much talk of this state of affairs in Madrid, among other things it is said that it comes from here, and also that I myself have been the cause of it. I practice patience …” (July 7).

Louise Élisabeth is afraid. Suppose she were to be detained for months, for years, forever! She scribbles letter after letter. She gets no response. She’s watched day and night to assess the strength of her desire to mend her ways. It’s noticed that she has managed to spirit away a little pile of handkerchiefs and to find some water to wash them with. And she starts in again! At dawn, she’s caught in flagrante delicto: scantily dressed, barefoot, scrubbing and rescrubbing the handkerchiefs and hanging them on a window, where they flutter like flags of neutrality.

But she’s no more neutral than she is reconciled. She’s made of the same stuff as the young witches who get burned alive without the mercy of prior strangulation.

Luis lives in obsessive fear of the little notes Louise Élisabeth writes. They distress him mightily. Through the incoherent, babbled sentences he hears her voice, the voice of an unloved child, and it’s all he can do to keep himself from setting her free at once. He’s ready to institute arrangements to this end, if the king/father will approve them. He writes: “The Queen begins to make good progress and mend her ways but I think we shall have to make la Quadra and the little Kilmalok [
sic
] girl leave the palace” (July 8); “Father Laubrussel has told me that he believes it necessary to dismiss the Duchess de Popoli la Quadra and all but six
of the ladies-in-waiting the best-behaved of the lot who will remain with the Queen” (July 11); “The Queen makes good progress and does all that she is told” (July 12); “I continue to have the women’s quarters searched” (July 15); “The Queen is better and better so much so that I think that once her women are sorted out I shall be able to let her come back if Your Majesties concur” (July 16); “This morning I gave the Camarera [the Duchess de Altamira] the order concerning all her women and as soon as they have gone, I can assure Your Majesties that I shall call The Queen back with great pleasure” (July 19).

King/father gives his approval: “It seems to me that after the execution of your orders there is nothing else that should keep her apart from you. I rejoice with you in the boar hunt and your excellent kill” (July 20). Luis recalls the queen. He doesn’t hide his joy. With her “he lives through hell,” but what would he be without her? On July 21, he has her released from the Palace of Madrid and waits for her in his carriage. Her suntan has faded, and she’s covered with several layers of clothing: corset, chemise, underskirts, and frocks. Her feet are hidden. She’s so pretty that Luis is touched at the sight of her, pale and submissive under her rigid coiffure.

Preparations

News of the queen’s detention crosses the border, but it’s relatively muffled. At Versailles, in a July not so torrid as to set anything ablaze but hot enough to keep the gossip pots boiling, the insiders, those close to M. le Duc are delighted by the punishment inflicted upon the daughter of Philip d’Orléans.
There’s something rotten in the state of Spain
, more than one person thinks, but as Shakespeare is not M. le Duc’s cup of tea, nobody risks this pretty allusion. There’s general skepticism about the new beginning from the green bridge. “It passes understanding that this Luis I, who bangs away at anything that moves, seems incapable of banging his wife,” jokes M. le Duc. The ensuing guffaws are so loud and long that he himself finds them excessive.

Louis XV and the infanta are kept in the dark about the embarrassing affair. The infanta gets her dolls ready for Fontainebleau. Louis XV finds himself bored at Versailles,
which will nonetheless provide fertile ground for his future explorations.

In the months preceding the king’s arrival, the Palace of Fontainebleau is the scene of feverish activity. An army of servants replaces the carpets, which were taken up in the absence of the court, as well as the curtains, the chairs, and even the chandeliers, previously stored to protect them from dust. The furniture, still fitted with slipcovers, has returned. The announcement of the royal sojourn triggers an enormous operation of slipcover removal. The uninhabited château rediscovers its paintings, its Gobelin tapestries, its sparkle, its colors. Cleaning and refurbishing Fontainebleau, dusting off, one by one, the panels of the Saint-Saturnin chapel and its carved wooden reliefs — all this leaves the servants exhausted and anxious at the thought of incurring even the mildest reproach.

During this same period, the courtiers at Versailles are also hard pressed, with the difference that for them the strain is not physical but mental. Everyone’s fixed objective is to accompany the royal relocation to Fontainebleau; everyone is obsessed with getting on the list of those “named.” The courtiers squander most of July on maneuvering to make sure they figure among the elect, and then, if those efforts are successful, to see to it that their lodgings are not too bad — and especially that their bad lodgings are not in the homes of the local inhabitants, that is, outside the palace. To have bad lodgings in the palace is still tolerable — unfortunate, of course, but the essential thing is to be in the same place as the king.

Among the novelties of his new profession, Louis XV takes great pleasure in giving the guards the password
each evening, and — when stays away from Versailles are planned — in drawing up the list of those who have been “named.” For the youngster who detests society when it’s imposed on him, the act of “naming” amounts to eliminating the great majority of those courtiers he’s normally forced to put up with. For sojourns at Marly, he can make huge reductions, he can provide lists that make people mad with envy. For Fontainebleau, he has to expand the selection. In any case, what sets the spiral of courtly life in motion and springs the passions that arise from that motion is the ever-present possibility that the circle of the elect may shrink and, even inside the circle, the regularly maintained consciousness of how arbitrary every position of favor is. Lack of experience, a taciturn disposition, and a profound lack of interest — which stems from his melancholy — make the young boy as hard to figure out as Louis XIV was, though the reasons for the old king’s inscrutability were very different: concern for his sovereignty, well served by his megalomaniacal pride and strategic sense of stage-setting. M. le Duc advises the king. Like him, he wants the coming autumn to be especially sumptuous, utterly unforgettable.

Good and Obedient

The period of her detention has terrorized Louise Élisabeth. Now barely a quarter of her ladies-in-waiting remain to her, and the seven she’s been allowed to keep — among them the noblewomen Taboada, Montehermoso, Marín, Brizuela, and Bernal, who hate her — are in the pay of Philip V and Elisabeth Farnese. The Kalmikov sisters have been forced into marriages; nobody has any news of La Quadra. Louise Élisabeth has asked about her, in vain, and has since given up. The way her three favorites have vanished exacerbates her fear and leaves her feeling lost. She’s the object of close supervision, and messages exhorting Luis I to exercise severity arrive incessantly from San Ildefonso. But the Duchess de Altamira is sometimes absent, and as for the ladies who are Louise Élisabeth’s other custodians, she can always buy them. So she sees her chance, takes off her clothes in a flash, and heads for the balcony. Since she’s had access to sunshine again, her skin is lightly tanned. Wearing nothing but some
necklaces and bracelets, she opens the curtains and exposes herself. The air of impudence radiating from her and the golden shimmer of her skin could make whoever chances to see her believe, in his distraction, that the queen of Spain has been replaced by a Gypsy, and that the royal personage herself, incorrigible, unreconciled, has been definitively detained. But it’s indeed her, and these fits of hers are quickly suppressed. The king has little difficulty ignoring them, first because he’s exhausted, and second because, in his presence, Louise Élisabeth is completely docile — docile and glum. His letters to his father, therefore, are solely optimistic: “I am as contented with the Queen as Your Majesties can well believe for she does everything she is told this morning she asked my permission to go for a walk”; “The queen is getting along wonderfully”; “The Queen continues to do very well.” All that remains is the increasingly urgent, all-consuming request that Elisabeth Farnese not refuse to let him kiss her hand.

“I implore Your Majesties to be so gracious as to allow me to kiss your hands whenever I have the honor of appearing before you” (July 29).

“I cannot too much complain that Your Majesties who so love me will not give me your hands to kiss, the which costs you nothing and would bring joy to my heart, but at least tell me yes or no so that I can cease to importune you, justified though I am in my pleading, today I was at Chamartin and there I killed seventy pigeons” (July 31).

He’s practically certain that his father will grant his request; it’s the absence of a response from Elisabeth Farnese that tortures him: “I await with impatience the
Queen’s reply to my letter of yesterday” (August 4); “The queen says nothing about what I wrote to her the day before yesterday, no doubt because she will do what I have asked of her” (August 5).

The queen his wife will not give him her body to love.

The queen his stepmother will not give him her hand to kiss.

He walks on, clutching his hunting gun. In the night he follows bloody tracks, and at high noon he staggers, blinded by dust.

Pif! Paf! Poof!

The king’s departure is accompanied by music and great pomp. The infanta’s, on the following day, is not without style. Carmen-Doll is back in her hunting outfit. Dauphin-Doll has been “forgotten” under the bed. As for the chorus of dolls shut up in the trunk, it’s conceivable that they will never again see the light of day, since after being removed from the infanta’s apartments they’ve been stowed in the part of the attic known as the “trunk storeroom” — where dozens and dozens of trunks are lined up with no prospect of being reopened one day, no likelihood that their contents will ever be handled again and returned to the restorative circulation of things that go on trips. Their involuntary retirement resembles death. The prospect terrifies the wooden dolls so much that they’ve tensed up and, despite their robust constitutions, begun to split; they bear gaping wounds like stigmata on their legs and the middle of their foreheads. Their friends the cornhusk dolls have long since
perished, and it’s sad — and unhealthy — to remain shut up with their little greenish bodies, stuck to one another by the hair, gradually drying out. The dolls crammed into the trunk discover morbidity. Those that retain some sense of humor observe that their fate could be worse: they could have been thrown into a firewood chest, and then hello Joan of Arc!

Like the king, the infanta distributes, according to her mood, favor and disfavor, except that the beneficiaries of the former and the victims of the latter are her dolls. Which doesn’t mean that the situation is any easier to handle. Whereas the king replies with silence, the infanta drowns problems in a flood of words. She’s often to be found in agitated consultations with her dolls, which sit before her in several rows like her ladies on their stools, decked out in their finest attire but plainly unhappy. The cause of their unhappiness is their not being invited along on hunting excursions. At Versailles and even more often at Fontainebleau, where hunting is really the sole and exclusive occupation, the infanta and her favorites are regularly included in the party (which creates friction among the ladies of her retinue, because some places in her carriage must be reserved for her chosen dolls). The other dolls rant and rave. But what’s to be done? “There will always be some of you who are disappointed,” the infanta reasonably explains. “I shall convey your concerns to the king. He is generous, and he heeds my wishes.” With these words, the infanta kisses the royal portrait in the medallion she wears. At Fontainebleau, her secret wish — to obtain a proof of her husband’s
love — grows more intense, for in a certain sense she’s never separated from him, never excluded from a hunting party or a concert. But the royal presence is always surrounded by a multitude, always the center of a male entourage that is itself controlled by M. le Duc.

The infanta spends more and more time soothing her dolls’ feelings. She asks them why, given the unending stream of musical events and festive gatherings they’re invited to, they’re never in a dancing mood and sometimes even fall ill. The sad dolls are impenetrable, like the Sphinxes on the Grand Parterre, half women, half beasts, lying in calm and mysterious repose above the Carp Pond and its delightful pavilion, to which the infanta will never go alone with the king.

One day, when the hunt passes near the town of Avon, she’s taken to visit a quarry; gaunt, dust-covered workers, armed with chisels and hammers, are breaking up blocks of sandstone. The infanta covers her eyes with both hands and wails that the quarrymen are hideous. She doesn’t listen when it’s explained to her that their work is frightfully difficult, for sandstone can’t be sawed but only smashed. Her good humor returns when she learns that the sound the hammer makes when it strikes the sandstone is classified, according to its sharpness, in one of three categories: excellent, good enough, and mediocre, or as they are called,
pif, paf
, and
poof
.