Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow

by Juliet Grey

  Praise for BECOMING MARIE ANTOINETTE

  “Full of sumptuous and well-researched details … Becoming Marie Antoinette by Juliet Grey, the first novel in a new trilogy, gives readers a more sympathetic look than usual at the ill-fated French queen.”

  —Examiner.com (five stars)

  “In her richly imagined novel, Juliet Grey meticulously re-creates the sumptuous court of France’s most tragic queen. Beautifully written, with attention paid to even the smallest detail, Becoming Marie Antoinette will leave readers wanting more!”

  —MICHELLE MORAN, bestselling author of Madame Tussaud

  “This is historical fiction at its finest.”

  —A Library of My Own

  “Fans of historical fiction will eat this one up. It’s engaging, smart, and authentic. Grey has done her homework.”

  —January Magazine

  “Grey possesses the rare ability to transform readers to a past only accessible by imagination. Becoming Marie Antoinette is sure to appeal to lovers of quality historical fiction.”

  —The Well Read Wife

  “[A] lively, well-written promenade through pre-Revolution France … It’s history with a spoonful of sugar—and that’s never a bad thing.”

  —The Decatur Daily

  “A thoroughly enjoyable novel, brimming with delightful details. Grey writes eloquently and with charming humor, bringing ‘Toinette’ vividly to life as she is schooled and groomed—molded, quite literally—for a future as Queen of France, an innocent pawn in a deadly political game.”

  —SANDRA GULLAND, bestselling author of Mistress of the Sun and the Josephine Bonaparte trilogy

  “C’est magnifique! A very entertaining read, one that I was hard-pressed to put down … [I] am waiting (ever so impatiently) for book two in the trilogy.”

  —Passages to the Past

  “Smart, yet extremely engaging … Becoming Marie Antoinette will please fans of historical fiction.”

  —Confessions of a Book Addict

  “A great read that is sure to be requested by lovers of historical fiction, especially those who enjoyed Michelle Moran’s Madame Tussaud and other novels about the French Revolution.”

  —Library Journal

  “Everything is so vividly described that you feel as though you are right there experiencing it all. This novel is very well written and it captivates you from the very beginning.”

  —Peeking Between the Pages

  “It is a captivating and well-thought-out book, and one that raises this woman of history to the point of a living person, which the reader finds easy to identify with and relate to.”

  —The Book Worm’s Library

  “Readers will see Marie Antoinette in a whole new light.… A sympathetic and engaging read that presents the French queen in a manner seldom found in other novels … Anyone interested in French history will savor every page of this novel.”

  —BookLoons

  “[A] fine fictional account of this very real, audacious world and the transformation of a naive, unsure girl into a formidable worldly leader! Superbly done!”

  —Crystal Book Reviews

  “A lusciously detailed novel of Marie Antoinette’s rise to power and the decadent, extravagant lifestyles of eighteenth-century Versailles.”

  —Shelf Awareness

  “Well-researched and lovingly written with sparkling details—this new trilogy is not one to be missed by any lover of historical fiction.”

  —Stiletto Storytime

  “Completely enthralling. Although this is written as a work of fiction, every person and event was researched and so the two blend seamlessly.”

  —Ex Libris

  “This novel was by far the best I have read that tackles such an interesting and misunderstood queen. Grey weaves fun scandals into the history we all know.”

  —Mostly Books

  “A lively and sensitive portrait of a young princess in a hostile court, and one of the most sympathetic portrayals of the doomed queen.”

  —LAUREN WILLIG, bestselling author of the Pink Carnation series

  “Wonderfully delectable and lusciously rich, an elegant novel to truly savor. Juliet Grey’s Marie Antoinette is completely absorbing.”

  —DIANE HAEGER, author of The Queen’s Rival

  “Maria Antonia, Austrian princess. What an amazing person. I absolutely loved each detail that Grey put into her. I could feel her emotions, and her struggles as she grew from Maria Antonia to Marie Antoinette, Queen of France.”

  —Reviews by Molly

  “A truly engaging novel with fantastic historical details, well-fleshed-out characters, depth and emotion. I can’t wait for the second and third books, and even though I know how it will end … I keep hoping it won’t.”

  —The Loud Librarian

  “Very well written, with fantastic descriptions of life in Vienna and Versailles. Grey has done quite a bit of research, as she explains in her author’s note, and almost everything she uses is true to history. She does an excellent job of matching the personalities of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.”

  —Medieval Bookworm

  “Meticulously researched, Marie Antoinette comes to life in this first in a trilogy about her life. The reader will never look at the French Revolution in the same way again.”

  —That’s What She Read

  “A very entertaining and rich read, filled to the brim with historical detail. Recommended to readers of historical fiction of all stripes.”

  —Raging Bibliomania

  “Grey’s novel has a little bit of everything: the glitz and glamour of the French court, young love, and international politics. The most enjoyable aspect of the book is seeing Marie find her own way and becoming her own person.”

  —Historical Novels Review

  Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

  A Ballantine Books eBook Edition

  Copyright © 2012 by Leslie Carroll

  Random House reading group guide copyright © 2012 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. RANDOM HOUSE READER’S CIRCLE & Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52389-1

  www.randomhousereaderscircle.com

  Cover design: Thomas Beck Stvan

  Cover photograph illustration: Alan Ayers

  v3.1

  All Queens should resemble the wives of Louis XIV and Louis XV, who knew no other passions than that of doing good … A Queen who is crowned for no other purpose than to amuse herself is a fatal acquisition to a people charged to defray the cost.

  —Anonymous enemy of Marie Antoinette, Spring 1774

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One: Queen of France

  Two: Le Grand Mogol et le Petit Trianon

  Three: The Bees Will Buzz

  Four: The Covenant of Abraham

  Five: Pastimes and Polignac

  Six: Coronation

  Seven: Summer Idylls

  Eight: Whispers and Rumors

  Nine: Excess Is Never Enough

  Ten: Indulg
ence

  Eleven: A Visit from Abroad

  Twelve: Beauty Is Always Queen

  Thirteen: A True Wife at Last

  Fourteen: Wherein I Am the Consummate Hostess

  Fifteen: An Acquaintance Returns

  Sixteen: Motherhood

  Seventeen: Sick and Sick at Heart

  Eighteen: Good-byes

  Nineteen: My Greatest Dream Fulfilled

  Twenty: May God Forgive Me

  Twenty-one: Schemers and Dreamers

  Twenty-two: The Slave’s Collar

  Twenty-three: Duplicity

  Twenty-four: Who Is the Spider and Who Is the Fly?

  Twenty-five: We All Have Much to Prove

  Twenty-six: Justice

  Twenty-seven: Punished

  Twenty-eight: Reversals

  Twenty-nine: We Attempt Mitigation

  Thirty: Our Thoughts Divided

  Thirty-one: Struggling for Life

  Thirty-two: Confusion Reigns

  Thirty-three: Stay or Go?

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Glossary

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Reader’s Guide

  Prologue

  JUNE 21, 1786

  On this day the sun casts the longest shadows of the year. But in the cobblestone courtyard of the Palais de Justice, they are made that much deeper by the looming scaffold erected two days earlier—plenty of time to allow a prodigious crowd to assemble, provisioned with thin blankets and enough cheese, bread, and cheap wine to sustain them. Some have come to the Cour de Mai lured by the sounds of the workmen hammering wooden boards into a raised platform that in itself betokens something sensational. There is nothing like a public exhibition to take their minds off an empty pocket. Or an empty belly. It doesn’t even matter who will take the stage.

  Others know precisely what, and who, they are waiting for, even though officials have refused to announce the date and time of the spectacle in order to discourage the formation of a mob. The justices of the Parlement might have known better, for that’s precisely what they’ve wrought.

  Inside her narrow cell within the Conciergerie, the prisoner has lain awake since dawn on the straw pallet that serves as her bed, her stomach thrumming with anticipation, the armpits of her shift moist with sweat. Although she has made friends with her jailers, Madame and Monsieur Hubert, she has deflected their sly inquiries about her husband and her lover. For now, her mind is not on their fates, but on her own. She, too, has heard the hammering, but she hopes it has been in vain, that there will instead be a lettre de cachet exiling her to some remote precinct or consigning her to a convent for the rest of her days. Until now she has been certain she could never endure the solitude, the hypocrisy, of an existence amid godly penitents of her own sex, the comforts little better than what she currently enjoys at the hands of the State.

  Having lapsed into the twilight between sleep and wake she is rudely startled by the rapping of a truncheon against the wooden shutter covering the small barred window set within the door. The panel affords her a modicum of privacy from the inquisitive eyes of the prison guards. “Allez-vous,” a gruff voice commands.

  Nothing more? From the tone of those two curt words the woman tries to parse out her destiny. Has she detected a note of cheer? Perhaps the hours ahead will secure her release. Perhaps there will be no convent. Perhaps there will be no punishment at all. The people—the people believed in her innocence. At the trial, she could see it in the spectators’ faces; they expected an acquittal instead. Perhaps these past three weeks behind the stone walls of the Conciergerie have been enough to satisfy the authorities.

  “Get dressed. And hurry.” The guard lingers outside her cell. She patters across the cool earthen floor in her bare feet and reaches onto her tiptoes to slide open the shutter, peering through the bars at the soldier. He grins back through tobacco-stained teeth. “Bonjour, ma belle.” He flatters her; she knows she is more handsome for her thirty years than pretty.

  For modesty’s sake she slides the shutter back across the bars, allowing just a sliver of light to illuminate her toilette while she makes her ablutions at the only furnishings in the cell, a small trestle table and a ladder-back chair. She splashes water that has been sitting all night in a porcelain bowl on her face and poitrine, under her arms, and between her legs. She removes her nightcap and runs her fingers through her tangle of brown curls. In a moment of vanity, she inserts a gold hoop into each ear, lending her the defiant appearance of a gitane. Appraising her image in a shard of mirror, she is pleased. Then she quickly rolls on her hose, securing them with garters of black ribbon, shoves her feet into a pair of worn leather shoes, and slips her stays over her chemise, lacing them tightly in front so that her bosom juts prominently from the contours of the simple morning dress she hastily dons. A wool cape the color of drying blood, trimmed in silver passementerie, crowns her slender shoulders. Sliding open the wooden shutter, “Suis prête,” she announces. “I’m ready.”

  The guard, Lieutenant Gabin, ominous enough in his uniform—the deeply hooded blue cape that all but obscures his features—unbolts the iron door and leads the way, down the steeply winding back stairs, the usual path by which the woman descends each morning to take her breakfast—a cup of chocolate and a crust of bread—with the Huberts. He enters a room opposite the jailers’ apartment. The woman, close on his heels, follows him, but no sooner does she pass through the open door than she hears it slam shut behind her, and the jagged scrape of an iron bolt imprisons her in the chamber as though she is an animal needing to be caged.

  Her heart leaps into her throat as she wheels about to face the sound, only to be brutally spun around again, seized under the armpits by a pair of gendarmes. Her toes scrabble against the stone floor and kick at her captors’ shins as she is hauled into the adjacent Hall of Records, where the men bind her hands and arms with cording. But they have not silenced her mouth, and she spews invectives like vomit, calling them curs and sons of whores, insulted when they only chuckle at her distress.

  Tossing her head about in search of a champion, her eyes light on the saturnine face and burly figure of Monsieur Breton, the Court Clerk, and suddenly she recalls a conversation with her jailer; Monsieur Hubert had informed her that the secretary would be reading the official pronouncement of her sentence this morning. Surely if there were to be a reprieve she would not have been treated so violently. Aware now of what is to come, her anguished cries echo off the walls and columns of stone.

  “Non, non, I will not listen to that wicked verdict! I refuse to bend my knee while you read a judgment rendered by a corrupt Parlement bribed by my enemies to rule against me!”

  No sooner do these words issue from her lips than her tormentors attempt to force her to her knees. But she is determined to resist them, and is far fiercer than they have anticipated. She fights back with every ounce of strength until she is caught by the elbows and suspended between the guards like an unruly brat while her legs, kicking angrily beneath her skirts, ineffectually pummel the air.

  Monsieur Breton’s words are never heard, drowned out by the screams of the accused. Her efforts to break free of the gendarmes leave her exhausted, and she is nearly hoarse from shouting when she is dragged out of doors into the bright sunlight of the courtyard. A halter is thrown over her neck and she is tethered inside a cart that draws her to the scaffold like a calf driven to market.

  What a rabble has gathered to witness her disgrace! If her hands were free she would lift one to her eyes to shield it from the sun. She would gaze at the rooftops and into the windows of the houses across the rue from the Palais de Justice, for at every fenêtre people are pressed against the glass, ogling her. It is not merely the canaille, the riffraff of the capital, who have come out to see her shamed, but members of the aristocracy from which she descends, who paid heavily for the privilege. She does not know what a brisk trade t
here has been selling prime places both in and out of doors from which to witness the execution of her sentence; does not notice a finely dressed gentleman standing behind one of the windows in the company of a particularly attractive young lady. The courtesan’s back is pressed firmly against his torso and thighs as one of his hands absentmindedly toys with her breast through her blue silk bodice. In the duc de Crillon’s other hand he holds a quizzing glass, usually an accessory for operas and dances, but today it offers a better view of the accused and of her public punishment.

  Below the duc, the shadows lengthen as the hour nears noon. The cart draws to a halt near the foot of the scaffold and two gendarmes in their blue coats drag the accused up the wooden staircase to the platform where the bourreau, the executioner, awaits. As she fights them every step of the way, they nearly lose their footing, and when they reach the summit she scans the crowd, seeking a friendly face among the thousands of ruddy cheeks and broad grins, among the countless children pressing against the entrance gates and gilt-tipped iron railings that rim the courtyard.

  “Save me!” she implores. “Save an innocent woman, a descendant of France’s former kings!” Her eyes are wild with panic and she jerks her body to and fro in an effort to break loose from her bonds. Her cries of despair rend the air, but the people—her countrymen and -women who these past few years she has foolishly accounted her friends—have come for a show.

  Like a magician revealing an illusion the bourreau whisks a black velvet cloth across a table, and at the sight of his instruments of torture, the accused woman unleashes another torrent of abuse against the judges of the Parlement and the Cardinal de Rohan.

  But her shouts are drowned out by the din of the crowd as the guards begin to disrobe her. For this they must first cut the cords that bind her arms. The steel blade of a knife flashes, drawn from a gendarme’s leather sheath, and in an instant her wrists are free and her nails fly, aiming for the faces of her captors.

  “Don’t worry, ma chère,” the executioner soothes, in a tone one might use to calm an unruly child, but she is sobbing too loudly to hear him. He removes the whip from the table. “It will all be over very soon.”