The Exchange of Princesses (31 page)

She enjoys her life at Fontainebleau. Once again, she’s the daughter of the king and queen of Spain. From them — through the intermediation of Maman Ventadour — she receives letters she’s proud of. Moreover, the dimensions of the palace ensure that not a day passes without a chance either to receive a visit from the king or to cross his path. She has even discovered one of her young husband’s secrets. Once she saw him stop in front of the statue called
Nature
, circle it, and look at it very closely. The creature’s body comprises several rows of breasts. The king went away dreamily … And she feels certain that he, like her, was perplexed by that abundantly endowed female form, by that exuberant
Nature
. And on another occasion when he passed by
Nature
, not alone this time but with friends, she was particularly happy to notice that he had nothing to do with the pleasantries inspired in the other boys by the image of so formidable a nurse.

The happiness of early November, the pleasure of chestnuts, the rich aromas of roasting game and of the heady wines she’s allowed to taste, barely wetting her lips, are all the more captivating in that she’s also prone to uneasiness, to the premonition of a threat: she feels it very precisely when M. le Duc, while addressing Mme de Ventadour, pats her, Mariana Victoria, on the head. This absolutely infuriates the child. But when M. le Duc isn’t there and she has managed to forget him, the infanta is content; she tends to her hedgehog, waddles like a duck behind the ducks waddling on the banks of the Carp Pond, jumps into piles of dead leaves, and crouches down to the level of the big gourds, obese things
busily growing under their foliage, touching and mingling and piling up on top of one another in an excess that fascinates her.

Carmen-Doll is wearing an orange, crocheted cape with a hood. The infanta works over a pumpkin, carving a fairy nook for her favorite. She provides the little room with silver furniture from a dollhouse given her by the Duchess d’Orléans. After Carmen-Doll is settled in, she and Mariana Victoria drink chocolate with whipped cream together. The pumpkin walls are as smooth as silk.

The infanta has two preferred trees: in the forest, the magnificent century-old oak known as the King’s Bouquet, which she venerates; and in the park, a younger and less robust oak, under which she has ordered the placement of a little bench. Every day she goes and sits on that bench. The day before she quits Fontainebleau, she refuses to leave the tree, she wraps her arms around it. Next, pointing at the rough trunk, she strokes the bulging bark and says, “The tree is crying,” and then, touching the bump, “See how thick its tears are.”

Petition

Father de Laubrussel is touched by Louise Élisabeth’s situation and well aware of the fact that her return to France is not desired, not by the d’Orléans family and not — most assuredly not! — by the Duke de Bourbon. The priest writes a letter for her, addressed to the king and queen of Spain:

All Louise Élisabeth has to do is to copy the letter. Each time she tries, she blots it frightfully or writes a word wrong
and has to begin again. She grows impatient and gives up. She decides to send Father de Laubrussel’s original letter, after adding her signature in one of the lower corners, a crossed and twisted scratching from which the
l
of Élisabeth emerges like a piton with a weird eyehole.

The Die Is Cast

Having returned from Fontainebleau much taller and stronger, Louis XV keeps to a flexible schedule. He enjoys going to bed late and puts back the hour of his rising to whatever time he pleases. But how does he occupy himself during the long winter evenings? Not with reading, or with listening to music, or with going to the theater. He gambles. He has discovered games of chance. The necessity of relying on good luck and accepting bad luck suits his melancholic convictions and his religious fatalism: action serves no purpose. The die is cast. From all eternity. As he has no notion whatsoever of the value of money, Louis XV loses his louis d’or with great unconcern. “Trifles, trifles!” he says. Under their makeup, the other players go through all sorts of changes. They miss the days, not so long ago, when the boy’s preferred amusement was lead soldiers.

Although the infanta has, in accordance with custom, followed close upon the king (“The Queen-Infanta left here
on the 27th of last month to return to the Château of Versailles, where she arrived the same day,” the
Gazette
informs its readers on December 1, 1724), and although she has indeed returned to Versailles, the palace of Glory that she shares with him, she can’t catch up with the way he lives. The older he gets, the more he escapes her. She doesn’t participate in his daily life, she’s cut off from all his pleasures and activities. If it weren’t for the Mass, she would never see him. But there are
Masses
, plural, and plenty of them. The palace chapel is an extremely busy place. In the royal tribune, the infanta’s armchair is always ready to receive her, and the king’s, which faces the altar, faithfully performs its duty as well. Thus her husband almost never appears before her anymore except when he’s in prayer, a vision so beautiful that it consoles her for all the hours when she lives the life of a foreigner. If Mariana Victoria’s aura is starting to fade on the profane stage of the court, in the Lord’s house the adorable infanta — the little girl-queen of France, the mystical bride — radiates. And all the more so now, when she’s preparing for the momentous event of her first confession.

Her confessor is Father de Linières, who is also confessor to the king. When she talks to him, making an effort to concentrate on the spirit of confession, trying not to omit any sin, no matter how venial, digging for all her faults, for even the temptation to a temptation, she’s entranced by images of the beloved, by individual features of his absolutely beautiful person, by subtle, ravishing details: the shadow of his eyelashes on his fair cheeks, his perfectly drawn lips, his dark, luminous eyes, his proud bearing, his muscular calves in bright red, apple green, daffodil yellow stockings. “His
calves are flower beds,” she whispers to her confessor, perhaps in the mad hope that he’ll report her observation to the interested party. Father de Linières, who has been listening to her with folded hands and a smile of absolution on his lips, gives a start. He addresses the infanta with great firmness. He preaches to her of married love, emphasizing that it is above all a love in obedience to God and in conformity with dignity, with its ultimate purpose being the continuation of a lineage and therefore the perpetuation of the monarchy. It’s not about calves, the priest concludes.

The Wolves

Snow blankets town and country. People hole up in their dwellings. To protect themselves from the cold, to escape the wolves. They’ve left the woods, they’re causing terrible damage to the flocks and even attacking the sheepfolds. They advance as far as the fields that surround Madrid. At night they venture into the narrow, deserted streets and pounce upon solitary passersby.

Shut up in her room, Louise Élisabeth stares at the pallid horizon. Her fire’s out. She rings. Nobody comes. It’s been a long time since she last looked at herself in a mirror. She thinks, “If a servant brings me some firewood, I shall seize the opportunity to ask for a mirror.” A little voice like a broken machine whispers, “You may as well look for your reflection in a stick of firewood, my dear girl …” It’s also been a long time since anyone spoke to her, not even so much as a few words about the weather. Her only contacts with the world are the brief visits she gets from the royal
family. Or rather, intrusions. The monarchs arrive unannounced: the spectral king, dragging his feet, his eyes inhabited by diabolical visions; and Elisabeth Farnese, her face and throat glistening with cream, her double chin heralding the heavy necklaces that hang down to her belly, the belly of a woman who’s always pregnant; Elisabeth Farnese, with her too-long nose, her duplicitous smile, her vigorous health, which flourishes in perfect union with her meanness; Elisabeth Farnese, who delights in dropping in on the second dowager queen to hear her news. Louise Élisabeth would like to be able to ask,
What news could I have, as a prisoner in the Buen Retiro, completely at your mercy?
Instead she extracts herself from the sofa where she lay drowsing and makes her reverences to Their Majesties. Don Fernando, the Prince of Asturias, has also come, and he gives the girl a sign of greeting. He remains mute, determined in his desire for revenge. He too detests Elisabeth Farnese, but that hatred strengthens him, whereas Louise Élisabeth, anxious about her fate and stupefied by solitude, merely crumbles.

The little voice that commands her to wash handkerchiefs, always more and more handkerchiefs, and advises her to remove her clothes so that she’ll be comfortable, swings between relative discretion and emphatic presence, and in the latter case bombards her with such exhortations as “Go on, leave this room, go get yourself laid, go to the kitchens, the stables, the chapel, surely there will be some monk, some scullion willing to put it in you, go on, my little hussy, my queen, why add chastity to the sum of your misfortunes?” And then the young girl rings and rings, tries to get someone to open her door, and sometimes, to her surprise, it so
happens that a male servant heeds her call. He doesn’t have time to inquire as to what service is wanted before she jumps on him, it’s a furtive, violent thrill for her, a pleasure that saves her from the doldrums, it would be better if the first man were followed by another one, who would plunge into her like his predecessor, with the same voracity, the same blindness, the same murderous intensity. “If I may give you some advice, you poor thing,” drones the voice, like a music box without music, “do not cling to the few sprigs of reason still growing in your head. Put your trust in the wild weeds that so abound in there.”

Perhaps because the way they take to return from the hunt passes not far from the Buen Retiro, the king and queen stop there to pay her a visit. They’ve just come from a battue of wolves. Their clothes, their boots bear traces of blood. To Louise Élisabeth, they look curiously excited; their eyes are glittering.

The Infanta’s Confession

From the
Gazette:
“The Queen-Infanta made her first confession to Father de Linières, Confessor to the King, and on the following day went to the Parish church and heard Mass.” The infanta confessed some plausible faults, trifling venial sins, including gluttony; a feeling of impatience with Maman Ventadour; a moment of distraction during her studies; two naughty pokes in her jester’s ribs. She has stopped cutting up the exquisite paper figurine of the King of Absence, whose wife she is, into scraps like coats of arms. And in any case, she keeps him for herself. “His calves are flower beds, his earlobes are cherries, his hair sparkles in the sun, his cheeks are a pair of white Communion wafers.”

“Dear Majesties of Manure …”

Louise Élisabeth is sick and tired of jesuitical formulations. In her head, she begins a letter to the king and queen:
Dear Majesties of Manure, Your Most Filthy Excellencies, you Vultures, you killed Don Luis, my husband, you crushed him under the weight of the crown, it fell back on top of him as a gravestone
.

Louise Élisabeth rips up the letter and crushes the paper into a ball. Three kittens fight over it. In any case, she’s drunk all the ink. Her words on the page are transparent. Just scratches.

When the Veil Is Torn

Louis XV doesn’t have time to say to himself, “I’m dead, I shall join Don Luis in Paradise,” before he falls into a deep drowse accompanied by fever. He nearly falls off his horse. Practically carried to his bed, he sleeps like a person in a coma. Sometimes he groans, and his groans are repeated and amplified by M. le Duc. The latter passes a sleepless night. He bounces between his apartments and the king’s bedchamber. His long arms and legs generate a wind of panic. He cries out, “What will become of me? In all this, what about me, what’s to become of me?” The king is bled at the foot, without much result. M. le Duc shakes the sick boy, imploring him to live. A second bleeding, again at the foot, is tried. M. le Duc propels himself out of the king’s chamber like a whirlwind and shouts, “If he escapes alive, he must be married!” He assails the physicians, strikes dogs and servants, and comes within an inch of clouting the young Duke d’Orléans, who’s waiting, petrified, to see what course his
cousin’s illness will take. After the second bleeding, the king’s fever diminishes; in his sleep, however, he seems to be suffering still. But in the morning of February 21, the king wakes and “finds his head quite clear, his drowsiness gone, and his fever steadily declining.” His progress continues into the afternoon. That evening, the king falls “into a calm, untroubled sleep that lasts nine hours without interruption.” The next morning, February 22, joy is unconfined. M. le Duc, his nerves frazzled, knocks back a bottle of champagne. The infanta and Maman Ventadour, who have spent the past two nights between prayers and tears, likewise sleep the sleep of exhaustion, a calm, untroubled sleep.

The following day, at the first news that the king’s health has returned and that he can receive visits, the infanta can no longer keep still. She
must
see the king. An effort is made to calm her, the convalescent’s fatigue is offered as an excuse, but nothing affects her resolve. Tapping her foot, she repeats that her husband is waiting for her, that she
must
see the king. Mme de Ventadour herself takes the infanta to him. But the duchess doesn’t cross the threshold of the king’s chamber; she leaves the little girl alone with her beloved. So that she may all the better savor her happiness? It’s more likely that the duchess has doubts about their welcome. The screen of deceitful words that have, from the beginning, run from letter to letter, nourishing her sentiments, arousing her emotions, and obstinately comforting her in the elaboration of her fiction — that screen suddenly shows its inadequacy. It doesn’t work anymore. She’s written and written, she’s sent dozens, hundreds of letters in an effort to stymie the truth and outlast it; but the truth, reinforced by M. le Duc’s
explicit determination to see to the king’s remarriage, can no longer be eluded. Such sophisms as “Your husband does not come to call upon you because he is entirely absorbed in very grave matters,” or “your peace and quiet are sacrosanct to him; he does not speak to you, but his silence is in this case a special mark of his interest,” reveal themselves for what they are: shabby camouflage meant to dissemble the young sovereign’s total lack of feeling for the infanta and his strong desire to have done with this absurd charade. Mme de Ventadour capitulates; her feverish and overactive enterprise of self-delusion is at an end. She sees what’s there: a little girl dazzled by love for a boy, a boy whose antipathy for the girl sets him on edge, a story of unrequited conjugal affection disguised as youthful romance to mask the cynicism of a political arrangement.
Barbarity with polite smiles
, the duchess says to herself, struck by a metaphor that springs into her mind as though someone has just whispered it to her; and in this brusque rending of every veil, this sudden collapse of all the illusions and lies she has used to build her daily refuge and the circumstances of her survival, she recalls a moment whose power to horrify her is undiminished: the moment when she, a radiant beauty with an idealistic temperament, recently wed to the deformed, perverted gnome who was the Duke de Ventadour, ought to have admitted, “My husband is a monster.”