by Juliet Grey
I threw my arms about Armand’s neck and pressed my face to his chest. “Do not abandon me. I beg of you—what will become of me if you abandon me?” If he departed, leaving me nothing to look forward to each day but the temporary thrill of selecting my wardrobe from the gazette des atours and the applause that greeted my arrival at the Opéra, I was convinced I would go mad before I turned twenty.
He held me until my sobs subsided. “It must be this way, Majesté. In time you will understand why. And I am honored, touched beyond all measure that you hold me in such esteem. Surely,” he added with a hint of a chuckle, “I don’t merit such regard.” When I began to protest, he placed a finger to my lips. His riding glove smelled of almond and clove. “Shh. It is all for the best this way. The unrest in the country is much talked about in certain circles and it will come as no surprise that I have had to return to my estate.” He pulled away and regarded my tearstained face. “But perhaps you will give me a souvenir to remember you by.”
I reluctantly broke our embrace and fetched my riding hat from the little console table. Removing the white heron feather, I playfully stroked his cheek with it. “My panache,” I said softly, presenting the plume.
He took my hands in his and pressed his lips to them, not once, but three times. With a tinge of melancholy, he said, “Merci, Majesté. I will cherish it forever. And I will cherish, too, our friendship.”
He thought it was best if he departed alone, and so I waited while he cloaked himself; then I followed him outside and watched him mount his horse. With a quick kick of his heels and a spray of gravel he spurred his mare toward the Château de Versailles, growing ever smaller, until he was just a tobacco-colored speck on the horizon.
I dried my tears and stood for several minutes in the courtyard of le Petit Trianon. Armand had been right; that I knew. So, too, was the comte de Mercy. And the princesse de Lamballe. I had risked my untested heart on a handsome courtier because I was lonely and eager to be loved. But the passion, or even affection, that I dreamed of would not come from the duc de Lauzun and I could not hazard a scandal. It was a bitter cordial to swallow, but where was it written that this precious and lofty commodity called love was a queen’s prerogative? As Mercy had so succinctly reminded me, I had allowed myself to become distracted from my primary obligation. It was time to adjust the compass before my marriage was blown off course completely.
FOUR
The Covenant of Abraham
November 23, 1774
To My Most Esteemed Sovereign King Carlos III of Spain:
It is with the best authority that I tender the following information:
After four and a half years the marriage remains unconsummated. If the queen were to be as fertile as her sister the Queen of Naples (though the latter, being married to your son Ferdinando, has enjoyed the advantages of wedlock to a youth of fire and temperament), she should have sired a trio of niños by now.
As matters currently stand here, stains have been observed on the queen’s bedsheets, which proves that emissions are taking place outside the proper place.
I shall continue to keep abreast of the situation and inform you accordingly.
Respectfully,
Don Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, 10th Count d’Aranda
Ambassador Extraordinary and
Plenipotentiary to the Court of Versailles
Within the vast hive of Versailles, it was nearly impossible to maintain a secret. As we had done nearly a year earlier, on the first occasion when Louis had been persuaded to be examined by his physician—after considerable haranguing by two sovereigns, his grand-père, and my maman—we waited until the small hours of the morning when even the most inveterate of wagerers had laid down their cards and gone to bed. Our night rails masked by heavy cloaks, lanterns in hand we tiptoed up the narrow staircase that led to the King’s Apartments, the informal private suite that Louis had redecorated to his own taste. As we climbed the wooden treads our lamps illuminated the walls of the dark stairwell, casting an eerie glow on the unseeing glass eyes of my husband’s hunting trophies, the antlered heads of half a dozen majestic stags and a pair of wild boar. Although I had joined the hunt on occasion, I would never get used to it. What must these noble creatures have thought in their final moment when the fatal blow came? To display their heads on the wall, stuffed with sawdust, was an insult to their dignity.
We crept noiselessly across the thick Aubusson that carpeted the floor of Louis’s library, a room decorated entirely in pale blue and gold. It was twice the size of the others in the private apartment, for it had to accommodate his eight thousand volumes. Unlike me, my husband was a great reader and possessed not only the classics of antiquity, countless treasures of history and verse that stood like so many Spartan soldiers in serried ranks, spine to spine with his initials embossed in gold, but Dante and Shakespeare and Hume and hundreds of volumes in English—even spicy novels like Tom Jones, which Maman would have a conniption if she caught me perusing—and the writings of some of our own philosophers whose views were often anathema to the Crown. I knew my husband had read Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau. I would not have said Louis’s mind was quick, but it was curious.
He turned the gilded handle on the library door and led the way into his study. The eyes of the Dutch humanist Erasmus in Holbein’s portrait seemed to follow us as we crossed the room, wending our way about the globes and maps and armillaries that so fascinated my husband. Louis’s passion for order was evident everywhere: atop the enormous writing desk neat piles of portfolios on one side awaited his perusal; on the other, a stack arranged just as tidily represented those he had already reviewed. There must have been hundreds of documents, and I had never been invited to take so much as a peek at a single one. My role as a mere consort was clear—which made this clandestine appointment all the more vital.
As we approached the king’s bedroom, with each step Louis grew more anxious. I slipped my arm through his. “Sois courageux,” I whispered. “Be brave. The remedy might be simple.”
We entered the chamber and Louis rested his lantern opposite the canopied bed. He began to pace, while I clutched my cloak to my chest and stole a glance through the draperies. The late autumn night was clear; the crescent sliver suspended in the indigo sky reminded me of the hair ornaments that became all the mode after my childhood music master Herr Gluck presented his Iphigénie at the Paris Opéra.
Moments later, a discreet scratching at the door announced the arrival of Monsieur Lassone, the king’s premier médecin, or first physician. Even in the dead of night he was clad from head to toe in his habitual black suit with a pristine white jabot at his throat. Rising from his reverence, the doctor read the expression of terror on the king’s face. “Please, sit,” he said gently, gesturing to the bed.
Louis hesitated, then perched tentatively on the edge of the embroidered coverlet. I sat beside him and took his hand in mine. Before the médecin could ask a question, I volunteered, “Things have been no better. It is not the king’s habits of exercise—not his enthusiastic hunting, nor his … his gourmandizing, that are the problem. He gave them up when you advised him to do so last year, and our … difficulties have remained the same.”
The doctor took a step back and regarded the pair of us with paternal concern. “And what difficulties are they—exactly? How then, would you describe their nature?”
I glanced at my husband. “I … can’t,” he whispered.
Monsieur Lassone lowered his chin to his chest and studied the king gravely. “What is it, Sire, that you cannot do? Is it that you do not have the words to explain, or that you are unable to …” He hesitated, searching for the best way, even for a man of medicine, to address the sovereign of the realm on the most sensitive, but vital, subject facing the House of Bourbon—the future of the dynasty itself.
Even in the golden lantern light I could see Louis’s full cheeks flush a deep shade of carmine. He lowered his gaze. “I love my wife,” he began, so softly I could
barely hear him. “But every time I try to … to do my duty … nay, not a duty, for I wish to make love to her … I find that my …” his voice trailed off, and he placed his hand lightly in his lap, as if to protect himself. “It hurts, monsieur le médecin. I cannot account for it, for the will is there. It begins with a throbbing, and as my desire increases, the pain becomes so sharp, so intense, that it is impossible to bear and I cannot continue.”
For months Louis had been telling me “It hurts,” but would say nothing more, refusing to discuss it. I felt relieved that he was finally confiding in Monsieur Lassone. But was there a remedy? My chest felt constricted. I realized I was holding my breath.
Louis turned to face me and took my hands in his. “Do you remember the day we met, Toinette, that first afternoon in the forest of Compiègne?”
I nodded. How could I have forgotten? He had been dressed like a tradesman in a suit of brown ratteen with an unadorned tricorn. Even his shoe buckles had been of plain silver. He’d hung back by the coach while Papa Roi embraced me like a daughter long lost to him. And all during the ride to the hunting lodge of Compiègne, the dauphin hadn’t uttered a word that wasn’t prompted by his grand-père. I attributed his reticence to shyness; after all, by virtue of my proxy marriage in Vienna a month earlier we were already married, and yet we were complete strangers to each other.
“When I first saw you, I thought you were the most beautiful creature on earth, and I … it …” he emphasized, moving his palm to his pénis, “it became the way it does when it … when it grows … when I prepare to make love to you … and when …” he blushed deeply, “whenever I think about you—or look at you. Which is very often, you will admit. And whenever that happens to me—to it—the discomfort and then the pain become so awful that I can no longer bear it.” He tugged off his nightcap and placed it protectively in his lap, covering his privates.
A spontaneous cry escaped my lips; I raised my fist to stifle the sound. “And all this time—for more than four years—I thought you found me so repugnant that the very sight of me made you flinch.”
Louis looked aghast. “My poor queen. The torment I have put you through. When quite the opposite is the case.”
I pressed his hand to my lips and bathed it with my tears, even more ashamed of my girlish tendre for the duc de Lauzun. “I understand now,” I murmured, weeping. “But don’t you see … I was so afraid you would send me back to Austria.”
A man of science, Monsieur Lassone appeared at a loss in the presence of such sentimental confessions, but by now he clearly comprehended that something quite tangible must be the source of Louis’s inordinate physical discomfort. I could see that he dared not tell the king of France that his condition was not normal. At length, after my husband and I had managed to compose ourselves, his doctor asked him to disrobe.
Louis balked, but I insisted. I am not the daughter of the pragmatic empress of Austria for nothing. To afford the men their privacy I took a chair by the window and allowed Monsieur Lassone to reposition a large floral screen about the foot of the bed so that he might examine the king in strictest confidence.
I waited anxiously. From the opposite side of the screen, I could hear Louis petulantly kicking the side of the bed with his large feet, an annoyed boy rather than a head of state, grumbling that Monsieur hadn’t managed to get his wife with child in three years, despite his boasts of sexual prowess; and yet no one was up in arms about Stanislas Xavier’s failures in the boudoir.
“With your permission to reply, Votre Majesté, that is because Monsieur is not the king of France,” the doctor said calmly.
“But he will be the next king of France if we don’t produce an heir, mon chou,” said I.
Louis groaned as Monsieur Lassone touched him, poking and prodding his delicate anatomy. After several more minutes, the médecin offered his diagnosis. “Well, I think I have discovered the source of our woes.”
I rose from the padded armchair and stepped behind the screen.
“Non!” Louis cried.
“Shh, I am your wife,” I murmured, taking his hand in mine. “Ailments and illnesses, and even unpleasant news are facts of life. If there are obstacles to be overcome, there is strength in doing so together.”
Pulling away, my husband hid his face in his hands, mortified that I should see his naked flesh. Monsieur Lassone placed his fingers beneath the king’s penis and gently raised it. As our amorous efforts had always taken place under the sheets and brocade coverlet, and we never would have dared to remove our nightshirts, I had never seen a man’s private parts before; it looked like a bone with a funny little nipple at the tip.
“Vos Majestés, I regret to inform you that the king is suffering from a condition known as phimosis,” Monsieur Lassone began. “As you can see, the prepuce, or foreskin, does not retract from the member. This would render the act of copulation, or even the occasion of an erection, an immensely painful event. Am I correct, Sire?”
Crimson with embarrassment, Louis slowly nodded his head. Louis stared dolefully at his penis as if it were a young child that had disappointed him. He crossed his hands over his lap, unable to withstand further humiliation. “Ça suffit,” he said weakly. “Enough. I don’t want to hear any more.” A large tear trickled down the side of his face, followed by another, and another. I read the thoughts between his falling tears: Tant pis—too bad—if it was not considered manly to weep. With such a deformity, he might as well have not been a man at all.
I wondered why this issue had not been diagnosed during Louis’s childhood. He had once told me of submitting to the humiliation of having been stripped naked at the age of five and having his limbs examined for their soundness. No mention was made of this phimosis at the time, unless the report had been suppressed. Could it have been because the pénis of a boy of five was tiny enough that the doctors didn’t take notice of an abnormality, were too busy looking at his arms and legs and spine, or were too embarrassed to poke about the privates of a prince? Or perhaps, as his older brother was then dauphin, the médecins didn’t concern themselves with what they saw, or wished not to alarm the royal family; and consequently, little thought was given to any future difficulties he might have in the boudoir and how they might impact upon the kingdom? Or, c’est possible … maybe maybe the physicians believed that his situation might resolve itself as he grew older.
“Is there a remedy?” I inquired softly. “We cannot go on as we are if the pain renders His Majesty incapable of sustaining … well, France must have an heir! And I very much want a child.” I looked imploringly into the doctor’s eyes. “What can be done for the king?”
Monsieur Lassone steepled his fingers and brought them to his lips. He remained lost in thought for a moment or two. “There is only one remedy, Your Majesties, which would entirely alleviate the issue of pain on erection and copulation. And that is circumcision.”
Louis’s hands closed over his nightcap, his knuckles whitening. “The Covenant of Abraham? Will you turn me Jew?” he exclaimed.
The médecin cleared his throat. “Although I can, ahh, recommend certain positions that might be more comfortable than the traditional one, without the procedure you are condemned to endure this excruciating pain in what should be, Your Majesty, a highly pleasurable experience. Especially with a beautiful wife. The recuperation period would span less than a month and there would be few sacrifices expected of you. You could not ride or hunt, and as you enjoy both to excess, perhaps the coming winter would be the best time …”
The physician’s voice became an incoherent drone. Louis’s eyes widened; he clutched his penis and cods more tightly, as if to protect them from imminent torture and a procedure that would undoubtedly be bloody, agonizing, and, given his lack of confidence in sterilization procedures and the unhygienic conditions pervasive at Versailles, perhaps even fatal.
My husband and I had grown close enough over the past few years that I could safely hazard a guess as to what he was thinking. Would th
ey really do this to him? No doubt he envisioned the cold knife, soaked in vinegar to sanitize it, pressing against his most tender flesh the way he insinuated the blade of his penknife into the rigid carapace of an oyster shell to shuck out the succulent meat, slicing—
“Non!” The king exclaimed.
“Well, it is not a decision to be taken lightly,” Monsieur Lassone admitted. “It is not imperative that Your Majesty undergo such an operation, and I must advise you that there are as many risks as there are rewards.” As if he anticipated my question, the médecin added, “There will be blood. I would be remiss in my duty if I did not tell you that it is quite possible that His Majesty could lose a good deal of it.”
Louis blanched and I clutched his hand. The stakes and consequences were higher than any decision we had ever faced. On one hand, my husband would be risking his life; on the other, the future of his dynasty.
“You need not arrive at a determination tonight. It is of course a weighty one, which must be thoroughly discussed between you—”
The king raised his hand to call for silence. “I’ll do it,” he said quietly.
FIVE
Pastimes and Polignac
According to my husband’s ministers, Louis XV had left France’s treasury in a woeful state. The expenditures of the royal family, and even those of the thousand courtiers who resided at Versailles, were paltry, they said, when compared to the disbursements necessary to rule the nation, but the deluge must be stanched somewhere. Mon mari began his reign as Louis le Desiré—the Desired One—a sobriquet his subjects bestowed upon him in the hope that he would restore morality and economic sanity after decades of flagrant excess during his grandfather’s reign, and he was anxious to retain their goodwill. But he quickly learned that the business of governance often resulted in disappointing, if not outright angering, a substantial portion of the populace.