Moreover, there was Louis’s notorious indifference to his own appearance.
Wigs were often slipping off his head; wig powder was ever sprinkled about his shoulders; his shoes grew muddy as soon as he stepped outside; he had a habit of toying with the edges of his jacket to allay his social anxiety, and buttons were constantly popping off his clothes. Our attitude to vestments—that may have been our principal difference. Even taller than the king and very slender, I was aware that I was referred to as
“le beau
Fersen,” and I admit that I attempted to live up to that designation by remaining as fastidiously dressed as the fanciest courtiers. How content I would have been to offer a touch of my dandyism to the French monarch! But his sloppy mien and his childlike pranks made me love him all the more. As soon as he spoke to me, in his slightly high-pitched, well-modulated voice, I was entranced. Certainly not by his words, which were of singular plainness, devoid of the flourishes and embellishments of courtly talk, but by the kindness and the warmth of his eyes, which looked at you with the most benign gaze imaginable, and above all by his utter simplicity and common touch. It is well known that Louis XVI was one of the most skilled horseback riders of his day, that he loved hunting and other physical occupations such as welding and blacksmithing, and specialized in the making of keys. He went far further in his rustic pursuits. Whenever he glimpsed workers repairing a roof or a wall at Versailles, for instance, he would run toward them, cast off his jackets, pull up his sleeves, and join them at their work. Overlooking appointments with ministers, counselors, ambassadors, what have you, he would labor alongside them until they left at day’s end. While his courtiers denoted him, a tad disdainfully, as
“Louis le Vertueux,”
“Louis the Virtuous,” because of his utter lack of interest in womanizing, the simple citizens he so enjoyed working with referred to him lovingly as
“le roi travailleur,”
“the worker king,” or
“le bon papa
,” “the good daddy.” Never have I known of a ruler more at ease with his humbler subjects, better able to make them feel equally at ease in his presence. One should note that the queen was a bit miffed by her husband’s
democratic predilections. As soon as he came back from his physical labors, grimy, disheveled, reeking of sweat, beaming with happiness, she would ring for his valets and cry out,
“Bon Dieu, nettoyez et habillez le roi! Nettoyez le!”
Let me add that the king’s egalitarianism was joined by a most gifted intellect. Louis XVI was a scholar, one of the best-read men of his day, and would have been quite as happy studying books around the clock as he was repairing roofs alongside his subjects. Writing about the king to my sister Sophie, a most intelligent woman, I could not emphasize enough that he was one of the most gifted Latinists of his time, that he was equally fluent in English. He knew reams of Milton by heart, and had even translated many of that poet’s verses into French. He could also recite long passages of Racine’s plays, sometimes enlivening the nightly
coucher
with surprisingly expressive recitations. European history was an open book to him, and he was a consummate geographer and cartographer. It came as no surprise to learn that this studious, reclusive man loathed crowds. The queen having once persuaded him to attend the opera ball, although he was masked and cloaked beyond recognition he fled after a half hour. How could this earnest fellow have enjoyed the persiflage that was at the heart of such events?
Another of the king’s singular traits was his passion for numbers; he counted all the time; he went to the thermometer affixed to one of the palace’s windows every few hours to record that day’s temperature, and announced it to his entourage. The day would not end without his having noted in his journal, and also announced to his courtiers, how many partridges, pheasants, or other game he had killed at his daily hunt. He looked at the clock constantly in the after-supper hours, and went to bed at eleven o’clock sharp every night. The queen and her ladies, who along with the Comte d’Artois enjoyed sitting up at their whist and backgammon games until the predawn hours, often played a prank to
make sure that the king went to bed even earlier: one of them would sneak up to the clock in the queen’s drawing room just before the family gathered there after supper, and move the clock an hour forward. After amiably playing a few games of cards, the king unfailingly said good night at what he thought was 11 p.m. to retreat into his evening prayers and his deep, contented sleep, leaving the queen and d’Artois to gamble until long past midnight and make sly comments about the monarch’s virtuous, drowsy nature. There was an edge of disdain about Toinette’s attitude toward her husband, in fact, that I thought inappropriate and for which I’d have sternly reprimanded her had I been in the position to do so. (“Toinette”: so I’d refer to her in my enamored musings long before I dared to thus address her.)
Before ending this brief portrait of the couple who would soon become central to my life, I should clarify the gossip about the royal couple’s initial marital problems, which concerned the fact that they did not consummate their marriage for an entire SEVEN years. It was simply a case of juvenile ignorance. Imagine the fourteen-year-old girl and sixteen-year-old boy forced into bed without any marital instructions whatever beyond the minimal information that big sow of an empress, Maria Theresa, had offered her daughter. Having given birth to a whopping fifteen children, Maria Theresa was the kind of royal mother who trotted out her offspring two or three times a month, whenever truly important guests came to dine, leading them to believe that she was as accomplished and devoted a mother as she was a ruler. But this appearance of “loving attention” was another instance of her talent for public relations—in reality she totally abandoned her progeny to the whims of their numerous tutors and governesses. She was far too busy attempting to carve up Poland, or stopping Russia from invading Finland, to instruct even her favorite daughter on the techniques of bedding. She had been vigilant about only one aspect of her daughter’s life—her marriageability, thus recording for posterity the
precise moment of Toinette’s first period—5:15 p.m. of Thursday, February 14th, 1770, two months before she was shipped off to France. Otherwise, “Be lavish with your affections!” is all she would intone as she wrote the dauphine throughout the terrible years during which the young couple could not consummate their marriage.
Let’s be blunt about their problems: the dauphin had no trouble getting an erection, but experienced terrible pain as soon as he’d begun the coital act. After a few minutes he apologized, kissed his bride’s cheek as he bade her good night, and retired to his own bedroom. This went on for seven dreadful years! The lack of significant stains on the princely sheets was a matter of public knowledge throughout Europe. In France anti-Austrian feelings already ran high, and courtiers enjoyed making lewd jokes about Viennese wenches having a saltpeter effect, giggle giggle, who could get it up properly with an Austrian? Within two years of the dauphine’s marriage, fishwives started shouting at the poor girl as her carriage passed through the streets, “Are you a woman or not? Give us an heir!” This private debacle and public opprobrium did much to deepen Marie Antoinette’s depressions. The d’Artois, who already had children, and the Provences, who had trouble conceiving, took equal delight in snickering behind the young royals’ backs. “Be prodigal with your caresses, etc.,” Maria Theresa continued to intone.
After seven years of this nonsense—by this time Louis XV had died and Marie Antoinette was queen—her oldest brother, Emperor Joseph II of Austria, who ruled in consort with his mother, decided to investigate a nuptial predicament that was threatening the very balance of power in Europe. Those Hapsburgs are blunt people, good at man-to-man talk. Joseph appeared at Versailles and, after scolding his little sister for her frivolous behavior and presciently warning her that “there will be a cruel revolution if you don’t take steps to prevent it,” asked Louis some brutally forthright questions. He then wrote the following report to his brother, Leopold, in Vienna: “[The king] has normal
erections; he introduces his member, stays there without moving for about two minutes, then withdraws without ejaculating and, still erect, bids good night. This is incomprehensible because he sometimes has nocturnal emissions, but while inside and in the process, never…. Oh, if I could only have been present once, I would have taken care of him; he should be whipped so hard that he would discharge like a donkey…. Together they are total fumblers.”
Fumblers indeed! The youngsters’ ignorance was such, Joseph was astounded to learn, that they’d thought their little rubbings could induce pregnancy. Having summoned a doctor and listened to his diagnosis, Joseph convinced his brother-in-law that he suffered from a readily curable condition called phimosis: Louis’s foreskin was abnormally tight, causing serious pain whenever he attempted coitus; but this could be perfectly remedied by a brief operation that caused a minimum of pain. So after some weeks of demurring Louis agreed, was given a big shot of brandy, and within some twenty minutes of the surgeon’s ministrations, voilà! He came out of it with an absolutely normal peenie. The young couple set to work again. Within a few months the dauphine reported to her ladies-in-waiting that her period, which she referred to by the Austrian euphemism “General Krottendorf,” was two or three weeks late; and then she felt the first little waves of nausea, and shortly thereafter the doctor came and confirmed it all. “Mama, mama,” she wrote the empress, “I’m pregnant at last!” Provence brooded and withdrew into his billiards game. Artois stopped smirking for a few weeks. The kind young king exulted. Over the years, he had fallen passionately in love with his wife.
The irony is this: notwithstanding the affection that Marie Antoinette lavished on her, the royal couple’s long-awaited first child, Marie-Thérèse, known as Madame Royale, would grow up adoring her father but disliking her mother. When she was six or so, she was playing next to her mother while Marie Antoinette was telling her confessor, Abbé
Vermond, about a very serious riding accident she’d just had. The abbé asked the child if she realized her mother had almost died. “I wouldn’t care,” said the little girl, who would later be noted for her haughtiness and aloofness. “I wouldn’t see Mother anymore and I’d be very happy because I could do as I pleased.” The queen wept over this incident for a long while.
W
ELL NOW,
I’d like to interrupt my reflections on France’s royal family and say a word about their home: I defy you to find anyone in Europe who detested Versailles more fervently than I did. How scathingly did I convey this loathing in my letters home to Sophie! I need not dwell on the presumptions and arrogance, the delusions of grandeur, that led XIV to commission such an elephantine habitation—Versailles Palace could accommodate five thousand persons! But even the site is a monstrosity, a large murky swamp that, however diligently the authorities dredged it, continued to emit a fetid stench and breed an infestation of insects—few were the court beauties whose white throats were not spotted with red pustules from their bites. What was indeed most striking was the discrepancy between the gleaming gilded grandeur of the palace’s outer surface and the filthy, insalubrious conditions that prevailed inside it. Many courtiers as well as visitors (the French populace had full right of entry to the palace as long as they kept away from the royal apartments) had a habit of snacking as they ambled through Versailles—a lamb chop here, an apple or pastry there—and bits of food could be found scattered throughout hundreds of rooms: in the upholstery, under the edge of carpets, in the bottom folds of curtains…. Well, the rodents had a ball. No courtier ever loved a palace as much as rats loved Versailles. They mostly feasted at night, and every morning their droppings were serpentinely scattered throughout the
Schloss
, to be swept into closets or under the carpet by
indolent domestics. All kinds of diseases were obviously spread by this negligence. Beyond the habitual ailments that yearly decimated hundreds of courtiers—typhoid, smallpox—various respiratory and digestive illnesses were spread by the nightly visitors. Versailles habitués were constantly wheezing, coughing, aggravating the dire conditions created by the vagrant barefoot children, prostitutes, and inebriated courtiers who pissed and defecated in corners of the grand galleries.
Versailles’s rats were night creatures. Come daylight and the mice prepared for their
grand bal
, having caused court ladies, for over a century, to react with various degrees of hysteria. Mademoiselle de la Vallière, the gorgeous, ill-fated blond waif who had been among the first of Louis XIV’s favorites, used to leap up on the top of her spinet in fear of the creatures, creating cacophonous sounds as her feet hit the keys. The XV’s wife, Marie Leczinskaya, is said to have jumped up on chairs at the sight of the mice, emitting shrieks that her husband, in his first, enamored years, found adorable. On the other hand Marie-Thérèse, legal wife of the XIV, was so used to all forms of critters that she amiably swallowed whatever spiders floated on her hot chocolate.
But Versailles’s filth did not repel me as much as a more vexing blight: its sheer stench. Coming from a nation in which cleanliness is looked on as being close to you-know-what-ness, in which even those not fortunate enough to own a bathing vessel take a daily plunge into the nearest pond, the first time I walked down the Galerie des Glaces amid its great crowd of unwashed nobles I came very close to fainting. I had the wits to head for a corner of the gallery; I collapsed right behind a large chair, rolled up like a child, my kerchief held close to my face, recalling that Toinette, brought up in the same principles of hygiene as I, was thought to be bizarre for insisting on a daily bath. So there I was behind my chair when a kindly woman, someone’s chambermaid, came to my aid with a whiff of smelling salts—never did the scent of lavender seem more paradisiac than at that moment. Upon fully coming to I
decided never to enter this space again without covering my face with a large handkerchief, as the queen was often seen doing. Suffocation if not asphyxiation, I decided, was the essence of Versailles. Think of it: the palace that the rulers of Europe’s greatest capitals—Saint Petersburg, Vienna, Stockholm—most aspired to emulate was a vast compound reeking of filth and befouled with ordure.