Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antionette

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  So I amuse myself. What else can I do? It suits me to clothe myself in fun, even if at its edges there is nothing but the black lace of desperation.

  I have the theater, I have my balls, I can gamble and dance the night away.

  An Englishwoman, Georgina, the Duchess of Devonshire, joins us in gambling. Though not a queen, she is the English version of myself. Married to a cold husband, she delights in fashion. But it is her charm and grace that make her shine. Like myself, she loves Yolande de Polignac, whom she calls “Little Po.” Like myself, she loses large sums of money and covers her wild distress with hysterical gaiety.

  We three adore each other.

  Sometimes we gamble all night. There’s no need to lie alone in bed, waiting. What is the fruit of rejection, of loneliness? Only slow tears seeping from the corners of my eyes. How utterly silent they are. I only notice them when they draw across my temples into my hair.

  But the King has given me my Trianon! My own little house, a key with my name on it. He flouts the convention that women can have nothing significant, no property, of their own. For that I am grateful to my impotent husband. And I remind myself that I must be of good cheer.

  Sometimes now he grows hard. He makes a halfhearted attempt to enter. I have hope. The endless parties are nothing more than a visible enactment of my gaiety. He needs—the world needs—to know that I am happy, that no foot is more light or definite than mine, that no smile is more ready or dazzling.

  Now there is Trianon to decorate, and around my little pleasure house all the gardens to rebuild in the new Chinese-English style, which replaces regimented greenery with the riotous abundance of blossoms. He has been good to me. With good humor, endlessly, he opens his purse to me.

  OCCASIONALLY, I still hunt with my husband. This bright day, as I sit in the moving coach, I look at the houses of the peasants, and I wonder what it is in their lives that most brings them joy. Perhaps it is the sunshine, which also brings me joy. Glancing out the window, I see a blond boy—four or five years old—standing in the doorway. His face is dirty. We’ll hunt nearby. His cottage is thatched, and a clump of violets blooms on his roof. Suddenly the coach swerves. The boy no longer stands in the doorway.

  Under the hoofs! I hear someone cry, and I scream for the coach to stop.

  Bursting through the coach door, I fly from the vehicle to run back to him, crumpled in the sandy road, and I lift him in my arms, shaking him gently to revive him. Suddenly his eyelids raise, and I look into the bluest eyes I have ever seen.

  “He is mine! I will have him!”

  I am amazed to hear myself shrieking. The child clings to me as much in fear as in desire. Naturally, he is crying. But he is unhurt. Not a single hoofprint has nicked or bruised his arms or legs or his broad fair forehead, not in the least. I know that he has run into the road because he heard my heart calling for him.

  A woman emerges from the roadside cottage. She says she is his grandmother, and his mother is dead. Yes, now he will be mine. The grandmother says five others are inside, like him.

  She is told I am the Queen and that I would like to take him. Yes, that was my urgent whisper—make it happen: he will be mine.

  In dulcet tones, as though I were calm, I promise that she and all the others will be cared for, forever, if she will give him to me. (My need for him is desperate. I have no child of my own. Why else was he sent under the hooves and wheels and then sheltered by the invisible hand of God?) Yes, I am hysterical. My hands are shaking as they do when I shake the dice, for high stakes. Here, indeed, are high stakes. A child. A boy.

  She has no objection if I take Jacques with me to Versailles. Now. Forever.

  The horses’ heads turn back for Versailles. I send a messenger to the King. All the way back, I hold Jacques in my lap. Passive with wonder, he merely clings to me.

  ONCE HOME, he is washed and dressed in white, the color of innocence. I tell him that the Dauphin and I wore all white when first we went to Paris. Jacques is to share the food from my plate. Now. Just as Mops used to do, when I was a girl in Vienna, and no one was looking.

  Let the market women see what I have now! Jacques! There is no more beautiful child, dressed in white, of fair skin, hair like ripe hay, eyes as blue as the cornflowers growing out of the dust.

  Yes, I will see to his education. Yes, he is to be brought to me as often as is possible.

  But one day I do not see Jacques at the table, and I do not send for him. They bring him less often. Jacques will always be a part of our household. I will always speak to him with kindness.

  But Jacques has not redeemed my life.

  Jacques is not really mine.

  THE QUEEN’S BED

  At first the dream is pleasant: I am young, only four or five, and I am visiting the cottage of my wet nurse and her son, Joseph Weber, who is just my age, and who suckled, as I did, at the bountiful breast of his mother. The Empress has made sure that I know something of the peasant life, that I be a part of their joys and sorrows, that I know the furniture and the food and the fabrics that contain their lives.

  In the dream, I am made welcome as I step inside the cottage of my dear nurse, but no great fuss is made of my presence. I often come here to play with Joseph Weber.

  Then I remember how he cried a few days before I left Vienna to come to France to be married. But in the dream, his face, red with grief, becomes flushed with anger.

  Then he holds out his hand to me, and for a moment he is Artois, my brother, whose newborn child is third in line for the throne. Artois, the young father, is asking me to dance, but no—I am a child who has come to play in a humble Austrian home, and all the adults with their watchful, critical eyes have gone. Little Joseph Weber holds out his hand to assist me. I step up easily, light as an airborne milkweed seed, onto his parents’ feather bed. Our bare feet sink up to the ankles in the soft down, and then we hold hands and begin to jump in unison.

  Higher and higher we jump, breathless and panting, our heads so close to the low ceiling I begin to fear injury. Our jumping then becomes ragged in its rhythm, and when my face is low, his is high, just under the square beams of the ceiling, and his face has been transformed into that of an angry peasant woman. Not his mother’s face with the smooth round cheeks, but a French face, the face of hardship and of the scheming marketplace.

  Now the figure above me becomes one of a bat or harpy, and she cocks her muscular arm to knock me flat on my back. Her beak and talons tear at my body. She massages my bare breasts—oh yes, they are large and attractive, she says, and what man who is a man would not want the abundance of your body?—her fingertips hard as horn explore my secret places, and I awake with a little yelp, such as a puppy might make when her toe is accidentally trod upon.

  It is my own hand and my own fingers on my breast and in my body. Slowly I withdraw them from these forbidden places. Lying curled on my side in my own ornate bed, I place the palms of my hands together, press my cheek into the pillow, and pray.

  INDECENT VERSES

  While I am walking in the lower garden, not too far from Trianon, where work is progressing on the new garden and on the grotto of the Belvedere, I decide to walk into the Bosquet of Enceladus, which depicts a man in agony.

  Today I visit agony, for my amusement.

  Enceladus has tried to scale Olympus, and he has been cast down. He lies, all smooth and golden on an island, and he is half-buried in rocks, the textures of which are as rough as art can make. The fountain is a study in contrasts—the smooth, gleaming metal of his body and the rough rocks that represent the wrath of nature.

  The King is with me, and at my elbow, he says, “It is a lesson in the vice of pride. We must control our ambition, and that of others.”

  “You mean the nobles, who feel entitled to receive every privilege and obliged to return nothing.”

  “Yes. We must not be greedy.”

  Does the King mean to criticize me? Does he suggest my expenditures seem unbounded?

>   “I need pretty things,” I reply, “as you can imagine.”

  “But your wardrobe allowance is a hundred and fifty thousand livres.”

  “And my debt with Rose Bertin is five hundred thousand livres.”

  At this moment, I am tempted to say that in the old days the du Barry ran up a bill with Rose Bertin of 100,000 livres a year just for ribbons and lace, when suddenly we both see a pamphlet that has been stuck among the green leaves of a topiary trimmed to resemble a large green vase. The King plucks the pamphlet—a poem—from the bush.

  Its title is “Les Nouvelles de la Cour.” The drawing depicts a sad Queen. Between every stanza, the words repeat the question “Can the King do it? Can’t the King do it?”

  His face is scarlet with shame. My eyes fill with tears and mirror his shame, but we continue to read what has been written about the novelties of the court. The most pure and innocent Princesse de Lamballe is maligned: the verses suggest that with her little fingers she has done the work of the King. My mother, the Empress of Austria, is blasphemed as one who does not care who fathers the successor to the throne, as long as the deed of impregnation is finally done. I cannot look at my husband.

  The King rips the pamphlet to shreds and throws the pieces into the basin of water that surrounds Enceladus. In his gleaming misery, we both see the mirror of our own. Who dares to throw us down and trample on our dignity?

  Suddenly the King says, “I will pay your debts for you, Toinette. You and your Rose will construe whatever fashion pleases your fancy.”

  “My mother hopes my brother, the Emperor, will travel here. She thinks he has advice for us, that he will help us.”

  “Yes, of course he must come.” The King smiles at me. He is glad to think of something other than obscene libelles. There is a graciousness in my husband’s forehead when he releases tensions. Smiling, he tries to make my moment a happy one.

  “When Joseph comes, I want the entertainments to be lavish beyond anything he has ever had mounted in Austria.” My gaze roams over the clenched body of the statue, follows the spout of water rising into the air from the Titan’s tortured mouth into the beautiful blue of the sky. “During his visit, my brother must never be bored.”

  MADAME, MY MOST DEAR MOTHER

  My joy is not complete, but progress has been made. The King is less lazy. One night he knocked at the door—so to speak. The next, he opened it a crack. I praised him to the skies, with the most endearing phrases. He wept for joy, and I wept with him.

  Last night, he has been two-thirds of a husband to me. He says that he does not think the dreaded operation on his member, which we have only just begun to talk about, will be necessary, and I heartily agree, as I do with all his judgments concerning the marital bed, for I believe that all my restraint will pay off in the future. I know he wants to be fully man and fully king. I sympathize, and I myself do not know entirely what is best to do, but my little Polignac tells me that I can think of our state as consummated, or almost consummated if not complete.

  Unfortunately, the King confides that his body is experiencing a drought, and the fluids are not emitted even when he is asleep. I continue to hope and to pray, and I am sure my dear Mama joins me in this.

  MADAME, MY VERY DEAR DAUGHTER

  I write from Vienna, on the second day of the New Year, 1777. This year you will be twenty-two. You have been in France and married some seven years. In a month, the Emperor will arrive at Versailles. How I wish that I could join my son in his visit to our beloved Queen of France.

  I know that you will speak to him with the trust and love he deserves to receive. Loving friendship between the houses of the sovereigns of Europe is the only means by which we can ensure the happiness of our States, our families, and the peace of Europe.

  Speak to your brother about your connubial state with frankness. I know he will be discreet and will be capable of giving good advice. Seeking his help is of the utmost importance to you.

  DAWN

  My friend the Comte de Neville has recommended I become acquainted with Marmontel’s Histoire des Incas, so that I might have some idea of the customs of the New World. There, life is actually conducted much as Rousseau has described it should be, in his philosophy. People behave in a simple, natural way. They are in tune with nature; they worship nature, which I do not find at all incompatible with the love of God, who created all that is. Those people have their own version of Genesis, of how God made light and set the great ball of light we call the sun into the heavens.

  Like the Incas, the Princesse de Lamballe and I, chaperoned by the Comtesse de Noailles, other friends, and our bodyguards, will venture forth to a remote area of the estate where no building is to be seen. Made comfortable with cushions and cloths to spread on the ground, with natural snacks of fruit and cheese, berries, nuts, and milk, we will behold the dawn.

  The Princesse de Lamballe is happy that I have chosen her, and not the Duchesse de Polignac, to accompany me. I am not sure my Yolande would like this sort of excursion. Almost I wish I could go entirely by myself. When I hunt, sometimes I cause my mount to run so fast that for a few brief moments I am alone among the mighty trees of the forest. Often I would have liked to sit alone on the grass, very quietly, and be still, just to think, and to tell myself about the shades of green to be seen in the leaves and grasses and moss, and what birds I see fly by. Sometimes I considered sitting directly on the grass itself—though I have never done so—without benefit of cushion, or I consider the possibility of sitting on a clean, smooth rock, with my feet washed by an icy stream, though actually I do not like cold water. I would do it for only a moment, if I did it, and then wrap my feet in a warm towel.

  This night, when we shall greet the dawn, we start out at three in the morning without ever having gone to bed. This way I avoid the tedious ritual of my official lever, of being clothed in glacial ceremony. Because I want to experience the darkness, we set forth while the sky is still inky. Louis has granted permission for this excursion on the basis that his sleep will not be truncated in any way. It is the princess who takes my hand, and I think for a moment what a good friend she is, one who never says no to my ideas about how we shall amuse ourselves, though she has no suggestions herself.

  “Thank you, dear friend,” I say, “for agreeing to sit outside with me and wait for the sun.”

  “I think we already know all there is to know about sitting inside,” she responds cheerfully.

  “As is my duty as well as my pleasure,” the Comtesse de Noailles adds, “I must make sure everyone sits at a proper distance from Your Majesty, even in the wilderness, with myself beside you, ready to serve in whatever way you wish.”

  “I would like the sky to be pink at dawn,” I say to her. “Would you arrange that?” I am teasing her, of course. She always overestimates and overstates her abilities. Sunrise has its own protocol, and the Comtesse de Noailles has no power in its realm.

  If the sunrise party is a great success, I shall have Leonard weave ribbons of the proper hues into my tresses and create a sunrise in my hair. Aurora, the word comes to me, a beautiful word. Suddenly my feet are racing over the grass, and my slippers are wet with dew.

  On a whim I order the servants to douse the torches, and now we move in true darkness. For a moment I am blinded by blackness. I hear the rustle of the grass and the call of an owl, a sound I have not heard once all the years I have lived in France. My feet would like to hesitate, but I do not allow them to be cowardly. I feel a pebble under the sole of my slipper, and a wiry briar pulls at my skirt, but I do not pause. Holding the hand of my friend, we sail like twin ships over undulations in the land, places where a small slope rises up or drops down. Because Nature is not always symmetrical, the terrain delightfully surprises us. Rapid walking in the dark is an adventure for the feet. I raise my hand for silence, so that all may hear the sound of our slippered feet moving through grass. We become mysterious as a flock of ghosts. At the crest of a long grassy slope, I stop.


  “Here we pitch our tents,” I exclaim.

  The cloths and cushions—sleek satins in shades of pink, gray, and silver—are spread. I inquire which direction is east. Like the Incas on that distant continent, we settle ourselves and face east to wait for the appearance of the sun.

  “And what happened,” Provence poses the question, “when Apollo allowed an inexperienced driver to hold the reins of the chariot that brings the sun?”

  I am not altogether pleased that he refers us to Greek classicism, when I am in the mood for Incas and Rousseau.

  Artois interprets the import of his brother’s question. “He is speaking in political riddles, my dears. He refers to our illustrious ancestor, Louis XIV, the Sun King.” When no one comments, Artois adds, “And those who have held the reins of state after him.”

  Together, they are questioning the fitness of my husband, their brother, to rule, and I know it well, but I decline the riposte. Louis does not need my defense against his aspiring brothers. I’ve seen my own brothers playfully banter and jostle for position, like young ponies.

  Just now a golden plank of pale sunlight appears at the bottom of the sky. I will allow nothing to mar the glory of the moment. With perfect composure, I reply, “When Apollo allowed an inexperienced driver to ferry the sun across the sky, he lost control of the steeds of state; the sun collided with the earth and a great fire followed. The earth was scorched and burnt.”

  Frankness settles the question.

  Now the sky shows bands of rose and lavender, and the entire east begins to pinken. The radiance and majesty of it all! No one speaks, but I hear even the guardian of etiquette, Madame de Noailles, sigh in wistful appreciation of the quiet spectacle in the sky. A single stray cloud floats past, and its puffy edges are outlined in gleaming gold and silver.