Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow

by Juliet Grey

  But little could compete with the thrill of dozens of thundering hooves spraying up the dirt as the challengers flew by, and the excitement of cheering for the mount I had wagered on. “Allons! Allons!” I would cry, shouting the name of the horse I had chosen until I lost my voice. I would return to the palace spattered with mud, my gown much darker and my purse, more often than not, much lighter than when the day began.

  “The newspapers used to be filled with stories about your kindness and generosity of heart, yet they have suddenly changed their tone,” my mother lamented. “I now read of nothing but horseracing, of turning night into day with masquerade balls and gaming parties that last until dawn, so that I can no longer bear to look at them.”

  The manicured gardens and airy salons of the Petit Trianon had by then become my haven and provided the solitude I sorely craved when the comtesse d’Artois began her confinement, for the anticipation surrounding Marie Thérèse’s impending childbirth merely accentuated my own superfluousness.

  I was already commissioning improvements to the little château itself, inspired by Louis XV’s dining table that could disappear entirely out of sight. Every window would have cleverly constructed mechanical blinds that remained embedded in the sill until it was time to employ them. When I desired privacy the blinds would be unfurled from within their hiding place, revealing a mirrored exterior. Anyone rude enough to come sniffing about my business would be confronted with his own curious, envious reflection.

  But when the time came for the comtesse to be delivered of her child, I departed the quiet comforts of le Petit Trianon and my private gardens there, swallowed my humiliation, and according to custom, attended the birth with the other members of the royal family. As it was the first week of August, her bedchamber was already stifling hot. It was made stuffier by the fifty or so noblemen and -women in their silk-satin suits and wide skirts who crowded into the room to formally witness the birth; but the doctors and Monsieur Laportère the accoucheur (for the nobility of Versailles considered themselves too grand to use a female midwife to deliver a child) refused to open a window for fear that the slightest breeze might endanger the health of both mother and infant. It was the Bourbon way. Maman, who had given birth sixteen times, and who was a great believer in wide-open windows—the chillier the better—would have scoffed at the antediluvian methods of the French physicians.

  In the enormous bed, propped against numerous down-filled bolsters, tiny Marie Thérèse looked like a child swimming in a sea of white linen. She was soaked with perspiration. Her dark hair clung damply to her forehead; sweat beaded upon her upper lip; and her dressing gown was discolored with stains. Although she was nineteen years old, she had such a girlish mind that rather than fear the dangers of childbirth she had only been delighted to hear in her final weeks that she would not be forced to swallow any “black medicine.”

  “What can I do to help?” I asked the accoucheur, willing to cool my belle-soeur’s forehead with a damp cloth, fetch her a glass of lemon water, sit at the bedside and hold her hand—whatever would allow me to fix my thoughts on her, rather than on my own conjugal woes. All eyes were upon me as well. I knew they were waiting just as eagerly for me to display some show of weakness. It was written in their expectant glances and narrowed gazes. How would the childless queen react to the birth of an heir not her own? But I knew that as long as I remained occupied I could push these distractions from my mind.

  The afternoon dragged on as the sun drenched the parterre in amber light. Outside the windows fat black flies flitted and hummed about the sashes, seeking a point of entry and a respite from the heat. The clock on the mantel chimed three times.

  According to the doctors, Marie Thérèse’s labor was an easy one; unusual, they said, for a first child, and I hoped that I would one day be as fortunate. She suffered only two or three strong pains toward the end and then scarcely a minute later Monsieur Laportère announced that the baby’s head was crowning.

  Soon we heard the lusty cries of the newborn. “It’s a boy—a healthy boy!” the doctor proclaimed. The cord was cut and tied and the infant, resembling both of his parents with a head of downy dark hair, was held aloft, squinting and kicking blindly, for all of us to see. The comtesse d’Artois dragged her arm across her brow and declared with a profound sigh of relief, “Mon Dieu, que je suis heureuse!—how happy I am!” As the first of the Bourbon wives to bear a child—moreover, a son—one who might someday sit upon the throne of France, her eyes shone with triumph, humiliating both me and her older sister with her proud gaze.

  I searched the cheering throng of courtiers—how many of them adored the new father, the handsome, carefree comte—for my husband. He was standing beside his brothers, offering Artois a hearty clout on the back. Louis’s expression registered nothing but a benign complacency. Did the king not notice the sorrow in my eyes? Or recognize the import of the tiny Bourbon’s birth? Already, only minutes in the world, the boy had a title, the duc d’Angoulême.

  What would Louis write in his journal for today, August 6, 1775? True, it was primarily a hunting diary that recorded the day’s kill. But I recalled at that moment what he had written after our wedding night. Rien. Nothing. When nothing indeed had transpired in the marital bed.

  Should I simply leave matters to Providence and wait submissively for some happy outcome? How many more nights of nothing would there be? We had been married for more than five years and a third, by now the sovereigns of France for fifteen months, and our nursery was empty while Louis’s youngest brother and his wife, still in their teens, welcomed into the world—for now—a future king.

  I pressed through the crowd of ogling, chattering, nobles cooing over the infant duc, while the comtesse de Polignac murmured, “Her Majesty is feeling faint, please give her some air,” parting the way for me to exit the birthing chamber, followed by the princesses de Guéméné and de Lamballe, their wide taffeta skirts rustling in tandem as we glided through the corridors of the château toward the Queen’s Apartments. I blinked back the tears that stung my eyes. The halls remained thronged with visitors who had been waiting for news of the birth since the early hours of the morning. As the word spread that the comtesse d’Artois had borne a healthy son, the celebratory whoops and hollers echoed through the high-ceilinged galleries, ringing in my ears like the din of innumerable church bells.

  When I sailed around a corner through the Salon de Guerre into the Galerie des Glaces with my ladies at my heels, the aroma in the room, for everyone wore a tremendous amount of scent, underwent a sudden and startling transformation—from lilac and tuberose to that of mussels and brine.

  “And where is your son, Majesté?” This rude address came from a poissarde who had traveled to Versailles with a delegation of fishmongers, still reeking of the marketplace. Her uncombed curls tumbled from a discolored mopcap and her striped apron was spattered with blood. And yet, not much older than I, she was vain enough, or perhaps thought to emulate her betters, by staining her cheeks with large circles of cheap red wine as a substitute for rouge.

  “Yes, why, after all this time is there no dauphin?” Brandishing a knife used for filleting the belly of a fish, another poissarde, older and stouter, took up the cry. The princesse de Lamballe turned pale and clasped my arm. Beneath my gown my legs were trembling, but I would not let these querulous fishwives see my fear. So sympathique were my attendants that we could communicate with the slightest gesture. A nearly imperceptible tilt of my chin commanded them to make haste with all due speed for my apartments and the safety of my inner rooms, which lay behind a secret panel in my bedchamber. But as we glided through the Hall of Mirrors with such velocity that we caught the air beneath our skirts, the poissardes gave chase, angry fists raised against me, whistling and hollering insults and obscenities.

  “You dance until dawn with men other than the king!”

  “You play hand after hand of cards when you should be opening your legs!”

  “Who do you frolic
in the bushes with at dawn, Majesté? And who is in your bush at night?”

  “Will the comte d’Artois be the father of your child, too?”

  “They say she loves riding in his carriage. No wonder they call it ‘the devil,’ for he will give his brother horns!” From one mirror to the next the reflections of the fishwives’ crude, mocking gestures simulating the act of copulation dogged our quickening pace, as their cries grew bolder and more shrill. My ladies and I had no royal bodyguards to protect us, and the sentries stationed by the doors to the State Rooms stood in useless awe of this antagonistic army. Although I was queen, the manners of the court in many ways remained a mystery to me. I could not put on my own chemise in the morning until it passed through three sets of aristocratic hands, or drop one of Monsieur Fargeon’s aromatic pastilles into the bathing tub of my own volition, and yet the palace was open to the public and anyone could observe the daily life of the royal family. It was an ancient prerogative of the fishwives of Paris to gather in the halls of Versailles whenever there was a royal birth. Yet I was appalled to discover that as long as the poissardes made no direct move to attack me, the guards permitted them to stampede through the Hall of Mirrors, terrorizing their queen!

  “Remember their names,” I muttered to Gabrielle de Polignac, indicating the sentries, “for I will speak of them to Louis. Is this how they protect la reine de France?”

  At last we reached the end of the Galerie des Glaces and sped through the Salon de la Paix, turning in to my pink and gold bedchamber with the poissardes hard upon us, the terrifying sound of a hundred wooden sabots thundering upon the parquet. Clutching at our trains to tug yard after yard of fabric through the doorway before we were beset upon, for who knows what they might have done had they caught up with us, we four—Lamballe, Guéméné, Polignac, and I, breathless with fear and soaked with perspiration—unlatched the heavy doors and pressed our weight against them, bolting them shut, just as the fishwives reached the threshold. They pounded on the doors, hurling angry slurs and frustrated cries accusing me of entertaining my ladies in my bedchamber with all manner of unnatural acts, until finally we heard the raised voices of the sentries commanding the vicious hags to disperse.

  Trembling from my fingertips to my knees, I begged Gabrielle to unlace me so that I could lie down, and when her dexterous fingers had completed their ministrations I prostrated myself across the gold brocaded bedspread and wept loudly and freely, staining the silk with my salty tears.

  EIGHT

  Whispers and Rumors

  NOVEMBER 1775

  Thanks to the comte de Mercy’s clever interior staircase connecting my bedchamber with the king’s private apartments, Louis could arrive at any hour without his movements being known by anyone except Monsieur Cléry, his chief valet de chambre. My husband would turn a handle on a panel in the inner stairwell and it would open into my room, and once the little door was closed, it discreetly blended into the gold brocade wall covering. The privacy was a blessing but it did not turn Louis into a confident lover. He tugged the fabric of his nightgown above his midsection and straddled me as if I were a horse. I tried to yank my own nightshirt out from beneath him, while he whispered apologies as if they were endearments, his breath, smelling of clove-scented tooth powder, warm on my chest and face.

  Placing his hands beside my shoulders to steady his weight on the feather mattresses, he struggled to insinuate himself between my legs, but after several seconds of frustrated fumbling, he released an uncharacteristic roar.

  “Shh!” I was afraid he would frighten the royal bodyguard and they would burst into the room, pikes at the ready.

  “I can’t do this,” he grumbled.

  “Yes, you can,” I soothed. I reached for him, not knowing myself what to do to prepare him in the right way—I seem to be lacking in nature’s gift of fire—but I thought if I were to stroke him gently, perhaps he might become less panicked over the whole business.

  “Non—don’t touch me,” Louis protested. “Please.”

  I propped myself against the silken bolster and buried my face in my hands, squeezing my eyes tightly shut so I could think more clearly. Light danced behind my lids in streaks of pink and yellow. Every dilemma had a resolution. This one came to me in a burst of inspiration, recalling some of the vile caricatures I had seen of myself and the duc de Lauzun or the comte d’Artois. Because of our known fondness for riding, we were depicted in an obscene sexual posture, with the gentlemen mounting me as if I were a mare. Louis’s physician Monsieur Lassone had even mentioned that he might be more comfortable in certain positions.…

  I clenched my fists, imprinting my nails into my palms, ashamed of what I was about to do. Maman would probably scold me for behaving like a harlot; this would hardly have been her interpretation of cajoleries. Moreover, would God forgive me for asking my husband to imitate the image on a lewd cartoon, the theme of which was adulterous, if it might lead to the consummation of our marriage? Positioning myself on all fours and raising my night rail to expose the bare cheeks of my derrière, in a strangled whisper I urged Louis, “Come, why not try it behind me then?”

  He gasped, clearly appalled. “Like dogs or horses? Toinette, what has come over you?” Stung, even though I had anticipated as much, I hung my head in humiliation, my coiffure weighing me down, then scrambled, mortified, onto my side.

  I scrubbed away a tear and took a moment to compose myself. Haranguing him would only make things worse. “Forgive me, mon cher, I don’t know what else to do. I have been patient. I have been gentle. We could speak to Monsieur Lassone again … the circumcision. I would have thought, after the comtesse d’Artois had a son, you might reconsider.”

  Louis shook his head vehemently. “My concerns remain the same. He may be my brother but where the fate of the kingdom is concerned, Stanislas and his coterie are as vile as any bowl of leeches.”

  He was right. Not too many months ago, Monsieur had endeavored to ingratiate himself into my circle of intimates, hoping to become as welcome as Artois. But I had allowed myself to be persuaded by the pretense of amity; and while I had gone out of my way to be cordial to Monsieur and Madame, my kindness had been repaid with spite. They had enlarged their own coterie, comprised primarily of former Barryistes, whose chief occupation was to invent and disseminate hurtful propaganda. There was no disguising it anymore: Louis’s brother had a weak and dishonorable character.

  I sighed heavily, feeling my stomach turn queasy. “Then what is your remedy?” He turned away, shrugging his shoulders. So that was my answer. We would continue as we were, then, trying, failing, drifting apart, rather than solving our dilemma together as we must. I feared that after so many years we had reached the apex of our effort, and like two lines on an artist’s canvas we had finally converged at a midpoint, only to split apart, as we headed for the horizon.

  JANUARY 1776

  One frigid winter afternoon I returned to the palace utterly exhausted, and so chilled that I no longer felt any sensation in my toes, the soles of my white leather boots being too delicate to withstand any time at all upon the icy ground. Abbé Vermond was already waiting for me; I was late for our customary hour together. When I was dauphine he would read to me from a devotional or from the Lives of the Saints in order to improve my mind—one day, soon after our arrival at Versailles, I’d become so bored by the rigid court etiquette that I slipped a copy of the lurid novel La Princesse de Clèves inside his prayer book just to see him blush when he began to perform his duty.

  The music room was as silent as a mausoleum. “Have you been entertaining my ladies?” I inquired gaily, approaching his chair. The past few years had not been kind to the poor cleric; streaks of gray now frosted his curly russet hair, and his shoulders were beginning to sag where his carriage had once been as perfect as a soldier’s.

  “I brought you a gift from Paris,” I whispered in his ear, pressing a bag of sugared almonds into his hands. “I know how much you love them.”

 
His cheeks flushing slightly, Vermond nodded his head in thanks and immediately untied the ribbon. “How are things at the Palais Royal?”

  I looked about the salon. In one corner the princesse de Lamballe, settled upon a tabouret with her furbelowed ivory satin skirts billowing about her, was embroidering a section of a fire screen. The comtesse de Polignac was seated as far from her as possible without placing herself anywhere near the abbé. Each of them had a coterie of pastel-clad ladies about them, like the stigma of a blossom surrounded by its petals.

  “Yesterday’s fire did quite a bit of damage,” I told the abbé. “It evidently began where the trials are held, and unfortunately it spread very quickly to the shops because it was too hard to fetch the buckets of water with so much snow on the ground. As soon as I heard the news, I gave two hundred louis for the needy and displaced.” I chuckled bitterly. “From the moment of the fire the same people who had been repeating the talk and the songs against me were praising me to the skies.” The Parisians who frequented the salons and coffeehouses of the duc d’Orléans derived a sense of pleasure from criticizing me or those I favored; it seemed as much a form of entertainment to them as a novel or a performance at the Opéra. And in many ways they were complicit in their own jest, deriding Monsieur Léonard for driving a six-in-hand from Paris to Versailles every morning to dress my hair, yet demanding that he duplicate his creations on their own aristocratic heads.