Marie-Anne’s woman, Leone, comes in, shaking off snow and bringing with her news from the street. “Such a crowd, such a crowd. I’ve never seen so many people in my life! And all drunk with happiness and love.” She stops and looks timidly at her mistress. Today there was a service of Thanksgiving at Notre-Dame and all afternoon the streets were raucous. By fall of night the crowds have dimmed and the chanting is replaced by drunken singing and the crash of fights.
“I want the truth,” snaps Marie-Anne. “I’m strong enough for it.”
“They clamored for the king . . . oh, how they clamored for him. He appeared in a window—the crowd was such I couldn’t see him myself. But my! The roar when they saw him. Louder than the bells of the Bastille; louder than the largest thunderclap. Something to hear, indeed, and something I will never forget. Such noise! Such joy!”
Marie-Anne stays by the cold window, refusing food and drink though I make sure she has a pot of something hot beside her at all times. I have a maid bring a heavy blanket from one of the bedrooms, but even wrapped in the sumptuous pelt, she looks frozen and sad. The window is nothing but a thin piece of black glass between her and the icy night. She is not looking well, drained like a sack of curds pressed of whey. Her face is gray and black circles rim under her eyes.
I can’t bear to see her like this, so frightened and vulnerable. Louise was always the one who would comfort us in the nursery, sing us a song when we had a toothache, pat away our tears when our toys broke. We need her now. She lives near this house, just across the Seine, but it doesn’t matter: she is as far away as if she were on the moon. I put the idea of inviting her firmly away, and pray it doesn’t bubble up in my chatter. I caress my stomach.
“He’s coming,” she says. “I know it.”
To dampen her hopes would be far too cruel. But it is as my husband said: what the king has done, he cannot undo. “Of course he will come, Marie-Anne,” I say. “He loves you more than anyone, and cannot be apart from you.”
The clocks chime eight and it is already well dark on this bitter winter night. Marie-Anne continues her vigil by the window and stares out into the black void of the courtyard, willing a carriage to appear. There has been no letter from him, only a short note from Richelieu saying that the king regrets all that happened. Even Richelieu does not visit us, though he too has returned to Paris. Marie-Anne says she understands and that in a similar circumstance she would not take the risk. “It wasn’t friendship,” she says dully. “Only ambition.”
“You must come away. The drafts will kill you.” I am seated by the fire, my arms outstretched in supplication to the flames. Even the ring of braziers can’t fight the cold that comes in from the icy night. The clocks chime nine into cavernous silence. We are in the Gold Room, where my mother used to sleep, and her ghost hovers around us now. Perhaps Pauline is here too.
Then we hear the sound of the gates being drawn, sweeter than anything that Couperin ever composed. A carriage rolls into the courtyard, fighting through feet of snow, the horses neighing and trumpeting in the thin air. Marie-Anne puts her two hands straight onto the cold glass. “Diane, come here!”
In lantern light against the pale snow we see a man descend, wearing a vast old-fashioned wig under a tricorn hat. “It’s him,” she whispers. “He came. Only days in Paris and he comes. I knew he would. I knew he would not forsake me.”
Marie-Anne’s confidence is infectious. I hug her and laugh happily. “He comes! You were right, you are always right. This is not the end. He loves you too much. He loves you
so
much. Come, we must get you ready. You can’t receive the king looking like this. Some rouge, the pink and silver gown. I will entertain him while Leone—”
“No,” says
Marie-Anne, pushing a strand of hair back into her cap. “I will greet him like this. I want him to see what they have done to me. What he has done to me.”
A footman opens the door and announces that the doctor has arrived.
We are cured. Life can begin again.
Marie-Anne
EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE
December 1744
A
ll of them,
the hated, the pernicious, the fence-sitters, the black vultures, they are all to go: the Duc de Bouillon, the Duc de Rochefoucauld, Balleroy, the hated Bishop of Soissons. Even the priest Perusseau, though a part of me regrets that one. Five
lettres de cachet
will heal my bruises quite a bit. Only one man will remain, and on this the king stands firm: Maurepas. He claims that with Fleury gone, only puerile Maurepas will do.
We reach a compromise: Maurepas will stay but it is he who will personally ask me to return to Court. Perhaps humiliation, rather than destruction, will prove the best revenge?
I allow the king to kiss me, and when he puts his arms around me my body responds like a flute to breath and I shiver in pleasure. I pull away even though I want nothing more than to melt into his arms and lie with him and erase all of this ugliness in passion and love.
“Go,” I say to him. “I’ll come to you at Versailles. Soon the butterflies will open their wings again.”
The next day Maurepas arrives and I receive him in my bedroom. The last few months have been a nightmare but I have come through, and though I am once again in the sun, I am so very tired. Maurepas is brisk and his manner is confident, but in his eyes I see an interesting mixture of fear and defiance. Around us gifts lie strewn on the floor: pots of jams and oils, a goose pâté,
a new chair, a box of coconuts from Saint-Domingue, a fine silk shawl. The news is that I am victorious, and suddenly the whole world is my friend again. Diane sits on the new chair and spoons herself a pot of raspberry jam, her eyes on Maurepas. Aglaë sits beside her, nervous and worried.
“I propose a truce, madame,” says Maurepas in his oily voice. “It appears the king needs both of us.”
“No.” I am without hesitation, for I have thought long and hard of what I will say: “The king needs me, but the king only
thinks
he needs you.”
Underneath his powder the man blanches slightly.
“You have something for me?” I ask imperiously.
He hands me a note and my hand brushes his bare fingers. I shudder.
It is the king’s wish for you and Madame the Duchess your sister to return to Court and retake your places on Saturday next. He would be pleased if you did not refuse him this request.
I do not enjoy the moment as much as I had hoped. When Maurepas leaves I lie in bed and cry, though I am not sure why. I am so tired, so very tired. All I want to do is rest. I believe my soul is exhausted, more so than my body. It’s freezing in the room—in the whole house. I find it intolerably cold. Diane and Aglaë fuss around me. I can’t hear them properly but I don’t really care, I’m so exhausted and speaking is more than I can manage. I must rest. When I took the letter from Maurepas’s bare hand I felt as though evil entered me . . . Does the Devil work through men like Maurepas? I feel Diane’s hand on my cheek but I pull away from her, and then there is a hard kicking in my stomach even though I am not pregnant.
But I will have a son, not a son like Maurepas, but a good son. My son will be a prince, a son of the king. I must go to the king, on Saturday I will go. I will wear my pink and silver dress, his favorite,
and I will find a hothouse rose for my hair, even if it costs me a hundred
livres
. A hothouse, yet this house is so cold. Now there are more people around the bed, talking, talking. My head is starting to throb and their words are like little lances piercing my brain. I call to them that they must help me, but they don’t help me and then I am wet with blood, and the blood reminds me of the jam that Diane was eating, and then suddenly, though I am not sure how this is possible—perhaps Richelieu will know, or a priest—I am in the garden at Tournelle, lush with roses and buzzing bees, and there is JB, which is strange because he is dead now and just a name carved in stone.
But look, Louis the king is here. My love is here. I think the bees are dead. They have drowned in honey, or red jam, but my insides are on fire and there are too many people in the room. I drink from a copper cup but the liquid burns my throat, and where is Louis? Why am I not at Versailles? Is it Saturday yet? I hear voices that I have not heard for a long time and I feel great waves of love coming from the crowd gathered round my bed. I hear Louise’s voice and I want to tell her that I know, I know . . . but what is it that I know?
Now I am floating down a dark stream. Perhaps it is a canal—at last I am in Venice. Are the canals in Venice filled with black velvet? Hortense is holding my hand and I want to say to her,
Hortense, you are a hen but you are my sweet hen and I will love you forever.
I can’t get the words out because the black velvet waters come rushing over me, and oh, how wonderful it is to drown in black velvet. Everything disappears in the dark and the last thing I see is Sybille, the witch from the rue Perdue, and she looks at me with all the sadness in the world and suddenly I understand why she could not tell me more of my future.
Louise
HÔTEL DE MAILLY-NESLE, PARIS
January 1745
T
he house is
shuttered against life and the cold, the gifts lie forlorn in the bedroom, and the servants creep around. The death of Marie-Anne, and of dreams and hopes. Hortense is as white as pain—will she ever be the same? Will any of us? We are all here in the house on the Quai des Théatins, our childhood home; we were estranged, but Marie-Anne’s tragic death has brought us back together. I visit daily and we huddle in the comfort of the familiar.
Diane gave birth to her child just days after Marie-Anne died, and now she alternates between laughing and crying, as we all do. The child is small and crumpled; she was going to be named Pauline but now she is Marie-Anne.
“But Paris is not safe for children,” says Hortense. We are silent, remembering our first memories, the vast bosom, the milky smell of the sheets, the manure and the peat fire of the house in Picardy.
Diane dips her finger in a honey jar and gives it to the baby. The child sucks blindly.
“Is honey good for a baby?” The two mothers ignore me.
“But the country—Madame d’Houdancourt’s children did not thrive well there,” protests Diane.
“Yes, but that was Brittany. So cold! Picardy is not the same, my little Freddie and his sister are doing just fine.”
“No, I want her close by me. I want her here with me,” says Diane stubbornly, wiping her finger on the child’s cheek.
Diane’s
odious husband visits, but he is surprisingly tender with her and coos over his little baby daughter. He comes with his two children from his previous wife, a quiet little boy and a girl with pale, corn-colored hair and no eyelashes. At first they peer with solemn shyness at the little swaddled bundle, but soon they are treating the baby as their doll, playing with her in their innocence, unaware or uncaring of the great death that has just happened. Their smiles and giggles and the cries of the new little Marie-Anne are all reminders to us that life goes on, even in the midst of such sorrow. Madame Lesdig is here too, fussing and calling both Diane and the baby her little chicks, and all the visitors and the commotion help to dampen and bury the pain.
There is talk of poison, of Maurepas, but the words are hollow and it comes to nothing. The doctors found she died of an infected stomach, worn out, they said, by the rigors of the last few months.
The king does not visit. Will he come? The unasked question, unanswered as well, hangs in the nursery and covers the house with wishes and longing.
I hope he doesn’t come. I’m not an old woman but I feel like one: though I should be beyond such cares, I still don’t want him to see me like this. But the question, though unanswered, is clear, for I know he won’t come. He always ran from anything unpleasant, like a mouse from the jaws of a cat.
“He won’t come. I know him—he won’t come.” I remember him at Saint-Léger after the death of Pauline. He was torn asunder by her death, but too soon he was able to bury the pain deep inside him and then it was as though she had never even lived.
“He loved Marie-Anne so much,” says Hortense. She is going back to Versailles today, back to her duties with the queen, back to her life that will continue on without Marie-Anne. The new
dauphine
arrives this month; Diane’s husband will travel to escort her to France. Life, the great life of that palace, of that world, will continue in Marie-Anne’s absence.
Hortense embraces me and promises to seek me out more
often when she is in Paris. “We must—
must
—stay closer. We can’t let anything keep us apart. Not again.” Hortense cries as she speaks and I know her words are sincere. She is right. Petty struggles, silly feuds, all of it, in the end, what does it matter? We were sisters; we should have loved each other.
Little Marie-Anne starts to cry and whimper at the world. I pick her up and carry her around the room, show her the snow outside in the winter streets, whisper to her of all the things that she will do and see in her life. I gaze into her wide, unseeing eyes. Her little fingers wrap around mine and I feel a pang for the unborn children that could have, should have, been mine. Only God knows why.
I hand her back to the nurse; Diane snores gently on the bed. I take my leave of the house—I’ll visit often, and care for this child and nurture her as she grows. The carriage wheels heavily through the snowed streets. Tomorrow I will go to Saint-Sulpice and pray for Marie-Anne’s soul, with none of the spite and hate of my previous prayers. I will pray for Marie-Anne, for my sister, for the woman who caused me the most pain of my life.
There are things in this world we cannot forgive, nor should we.
But I can forgive her.
I can.
Hortense
PARIS