Read The Exchange of Princesses Online
Authors: Chantal Thomas
Pif! Paf! Poof!
she repeats, echoing what she’s told.
Pif, paf
, and
poof
enchant her.
She uses them to conclude her three-part discourses.
Pif, paf
, and
poof
are also the syllables she uses to assess the quality of her days and her joys, the degree of a person’s charms, or the goodness of a dish.
On one particularly
pif
morning, when the infanta is in a boat headed for an encounter with a swan, a cry from the bank informs her that the king is on his way to her apartments.
He’s dressed in purple and wearing a cap with no feather. His set features convey deep mourning. He bows and kisses the infanta’s hand. Is he about to recite the
Madame, I am delighted that you have arrived in good health
refrain again? Before the little girl can get that maddening thought out of her head, the measured voice, the bated, bating voice, the voice that needs not express in words the order,
Stay where you are, come no closer
, announces, “Madame, it is my sad duty to inform you that your brother, His Majesty the king of Spain, Luis I, is deceased.”
During the following days, the infanta is the object of the greatest consideration. At the funeral service held in honor of the poor young king, everyone’s attention is focused on Mariana Victoria. She doesn’t need to eavesdrop on hallway conversations to deduce for herself that the death of Luis I is going to bring Philip V back to power. She will be, once again, the daughter of the king of Spain.
Pif! Pfísimo!
Louis XV is touched by the suddenness of Luis I’s death, by their proximity in age and situation, and by the fact that they shared a name and were the orphans of two equally astonishing sisters, a similarity that may have gone even further than he suspected. At his first interview with Don Luis, Count
de Tessé, the French ambassador to Spain, observed in him the “same difficulty or timidity in speaking that takes the king by the throat …” Louis XV prays a great deal. They pray together, he and the infanta. She asks her late brother to intercede with the Lord, to take advantage of their new propinquity and whisper to Him, “My God, make the king of France, my cousin, love Mariana Victoria, my little sister, a good and kind girl. Make him love her as she loves him, with all her heart. Amen.”
At the same time as the news of Luis I’s death, reports circulate about the edifying behavior of his queen, “
la reina Luisa Isabel de Orléans
.”
“This evening I shall be in Paradise” (Luis I)
On Assumption Day, while all the church bells in Madrid are ringing out and the
madrileños
are covering statues of the Virgin with cornflowers, calla lilies, and white roses, the king loses consciousness. He immediately reports the episode to his father: “This morning at the second Mass I suffered a little fainting spell, and this so frightened the Queen that she became ill and vomited, but now, thank God, I feel there is nothing amiss.” A few days later, at yet another Mass, Luis faints again. Only briefly, but he takes to his bed. He feels bad, though he presents no alarming symptoms. “I am resting, I have a cold, this morning I suffered a little fainting spell, but I feel better since going to bed, and I end by begging Your Majesties to believe me your most obedient son.” When headaches, fever, and copious sweats begin to take hold of him, he’s bled at the ankle, and the bleeding leads to the discovery of several smallpox lesions. Children are removed from his vicinity. People are assigned to look after
Louise Élisabeth. As soon as she hears the word “smallpox,” she scents danger. From the roughness of her treatment, she gathers that the elder king and his scheming wife have issued orders for a double burial.
Luis is going to succumb to his disease, but she won’t escape either. She doesn’t budge from her apartments. She’d like to be forgotten by everyone. Today she’d gladly consent to confinement in another château, in the royal palace of Aranjuez, for example, or in El Escorial, or in the Alcázar of Seville … but that’s out of the question. Her presence is required in situ, in the Buen Retiro Palace, at her husband’s bedside. The king/father’s orders are perfectly clear; he himself has learned of his son’s sickness while shut up in San Ildefonso. “Despite the King’s exhortations, the Queen has desired to remain at the Buen Retiro, where she is almost always in the royal chamber,” the
Gazette
reports. Louise Élisabeth is practically alone at her husband’s side, and when his condition worsens, every time she steps into his room she has the impression that she’s walking toward her own grave. The lesions now cover his entire body, with the exception of his eyes. The king is declared to be “without any hope except in a miracle,” and while his long blond hair is being cut — its beauty strikes Louise Élisabeth as never before — he uses what remains of his breath to dictate a testament in which he returns all power to his father and implores him to take care of the young queen. Afterward he still has a few lucid moments, enough time to announce, “This evening I shall be in Paradise.” From then on, Louise Élisabeth never leaves his room. People outside those four walls praise her exemplary conduct; she alone knows under what threats, equal to
or worse than smallpox, she is condemned to the sacrifice. “There is nothing that has not been done to increase the likelihood of her contracting smallpox,” Count de Tessé writes in a letter to France.
Count de Altamira, the lord chamberlain, decides to send for five physicians, who confer together for three hours before declaring themselves in favor of a supplementary bleeding. Not at the foot this time, but at the arm. The lancet slices into Luis’s meager flesh, his blood flows, his heartbeat slows down. His fingers are curled tightly around a crucifix; his tormented eyes search out those of Louise Élisabeth. To Father de Laubrussel, a man as sensible as he is kind, the bleeding seems dangerous: there’s a risk that the smallpox, which has reached the suppuration stage, will start its cycle anew. “We tremble for the King,” he writes in a letter to Tessé dated August 29, “but we have no say in this matter, and our only recourse is to pray to God to let the remedy succeed, contrary to all our fears.” The remedy does not succeed, and God refrains from intervening.
She’s at the dying boy’s bedside. A section of the bed curtains is open. The king, his head resting on sweat-drenched pillows, moans. His moan is soft and deep, a song of strangulation in the breathless dark. Louise Élisabeth bites her fingernails. All at once, it’s too much for her. She bounds to her feet, shoves aside clerics and guards, overturns console tables and statuettes, and then begins to run; the carpets become elastic under her feet, she runs and runs, she’s young and strong, her whole future lies ahead of her, she has nothing to do with that recumbent effigy, nothing in common with the ghostly husband who’s pulling her into the
grave; she runs. Her goal is to reach the stables, jump on a horse, and ride to Paris, to the Palais-Royal, she’s almost at the entrance to the stables, she spots her own black horse, but two men block her passage, forcefully gather her up, and haul her into the antechamber of the royal apartments. “If you please, Madame, return to your place by His Majesty’s side,” the nearly dead boy’s lord chamberlain tells her in an amiable tone. “This … foray of yours is due to nothing other than your generous sensitivity. Far be it from me to reproach you for that.” Before she can utter a word in reply, her escorts give her several pairs of slaps, striking her with all their strength in front of the Count de Altamira, who distractedly arranges an orchid flower with the tips of his fingers. At a sign from him, the batterers desist and the Duchess de Altamira slips into the antechamber; then she brings the stunned, bruised Louise Élisabeth, who has one swollen eye and a bloody mouth, to the bed where Luis I lies, ready to depart for Paradise.
The King’s illness having grown considerably worse during the night between the 28th and 29th days of last month, His Majesty made his confession on the 29th, and toward evening of the same day received the Viaticum from Cardinal Borgia’s hands. Two hours later, he was given some potions as ordered by the Physicians who had been summoned for consultation, and prayers were ordered in all the churches: the Relics of St. James, those of St. Isidore, and the miraculous images of Our Lady of Atocha and Our Lady of Solitude were exposed to the veneration of the people, and extraordinary alms were distributed to the poor … The King died at half-past two in the morning of the 31st, in the eighth month of his reign,
after having given all the signs of a perfect resignation to the will of God … On the first day of the present month, King Philip and his wife betook themselves from San Ildefonso to their Palace in this City, where the assembled Council of Castille implored His Majesty to put on the Crown again in order to console the Kingdom for the loss which it had just suffered. On the same day, the body of the late King was embalmed, after which it was exposed in his bedchamber until three o’clock in the afternoon, when it was borne with the customary ceremonies from the Buen Retiro to El Escorial, accompanied by the Grandees and the principal Officers and Lords of the Court. The Queen his widow, who hardly left his side during his illness, has repaired to an apartment separate from that of the late King her husband, where her grief is commensurate with the loss of the Prince who loved her so tenderly. (From the
Gazette
, Madrid, September 5)
Elisabeth Farnese will maintain that Louise Élisabeth shouted with joy when her virginal, tormented husband — the too-docile son, the seven-and-a-half-month king, the poor Luis — gave up his soul to God. The former queen, now once again the reigning queen, will further declare that her daughter-in-law had gone on to utter horrors that would not bear repeating. Could it be possible that scraps of abominable litanies rose to the young girl’s lips at that moment, that she spat them out in all their filth, without any shame, indifferent to the aghast faces of those around her? But perhaps it was Elisabeth Farnese herself who couldn’t refrain from such an explosion of outrageously inappropriate euphoria at the king/son’s death, for it brought unhoped-for change
to her life: king/father would return to the throne, and so would his queen.
Louise Élisabeth catches the disease and begins to show symptoms. Elisabeth Farnese doesn’t hide her relief; should the girl survive as dowager queen of Spain, the new queen foresees new scandals. The depraved little baggage puts all manner of things into her mouth and will do the same with her sex. “It will be such joyful news both for France and for Spain,” writes Elisabeth Farnese, “when someone comes to us one fine day and tells us that the Queen is with child, or that she has given birth.” Despite the lack of care (maybe that’s what saves her) and the violent hostility shown her — her ladies treat her quite nastily — Louise Élisabeth gets better.
As far as Philip V and Elisabeth Farnese are concerned, she’s responsible for the death of Luis I. They long to be rid of her, to send her back to France, and not only because she’s a source of scandal; they want to drive her out of their sight like a criminal whom they lack the power to eradicate from the surface of the earth.
Louise Élisabeth, Mlle de Montpensier, the Princess of Asturias,
Reina Luisa Isabel de Orléans
is fifteen years old. She’s a widow, she’s loathed by her in-laws, she bears the title of second dowager queen of Spain (because the first, Maria Anna of Neuburg, is still living in Bayonne), and she can expect no help from her own country, where, in the words of a diplomat of the time, she is as much desired as “a bundle of dirty linen.”
The Feast of Saint Hubert, Patron of Hunters
Hunting fever is at its peak. Incense burns on Diana’s altars. The Feast of Saint Hubert occasions an incredible deployment of colors and music. The king’s hunt and those of M. le Duc, the Count de Toulouse, the Count de Conti, and other princes of the blood unite. This day’s hunting mobilizes about a hundred hunting-horn blowers, more than nine hundred dogs, a thousand horses.
Le vin, la chasse et les belles, voilà le refrain de Bourbon
(Wine, hunting, and beauties, that’s the Bourbon refrain): the words of the House of Condé’s fanfare “La Bourbon” fill the air.
The infanta becomes infatuated with a hedgehog.
Through the Eyes of a Courtier
M. de Tessé, after a visit to Louise Élisabeth, writes to M. de Morville:
I had the honor of kissing her hand and found her much grown, and more slovenly and dirtier than a serving wench in a tavern. I remember the late dauphine used to say that princesses were so beautiful in all descriptions of them that anybody who approached one must find something else entirely. Between you and me, monsieur, if such a person were doing business in one of the third-floor establishments on rue Fro-menteau or rue des Boucheries, I doubt that a crowd would gather there to bring her their pennies. (November 3)
A second dowager queen, but a whore of the first order. He has an unheated imagination, the old Count de Tessé, who deems Louise Élisabeth too dirty and slovenly to attract the patrons of a low-end brothel. As for attracting them, perhaps not; but as for satisfying them, she has the requirements.
The Smoothness of the Pumpkin
Fontainebleau awakens in mist. A milky white blanket lies over the ponds, the gardens, the woods. The infanta is at her window. She adores this cloud-wrapped world and the way the sun soon fritters it away. She lets herself be dressed, babbling the while, and then, without interrupting her monologue, she begins her morning tour. The rooms are still in darkness, lit only by the flames flaring up in some unextin-guished hearths. With some assistance, she clambers up on a wooden chest and there she sits, dangling her legs in the air. The wooden chests at Fontainebleau serve the function of her stepladder at Versailles. They put her at a good height for observing the courtiers’ various movements and especially for spotting the specific form of agitation that precedes an appearance of the king. On such occasions, she gets down from her wooden chest and hurries to her apartments to be made up and more fetchingly arrayed.