by Juliet Grey
Sick of being scolded like a child, I rose from the daybed and began to rearrange the flowers in my vases, glumly plucking the brownish blooms with dolefully drooping heads. “What an old hen you are! You sound like Maman! Do you never dance? Do you never gamble? Or have you forgotten what it is like to be twenty-one years old?”
“It is different for women,” Joseph insisted calmly. “You are too old for such unseemly escapades. Why must you feel the need to rub shoulders with a crowd of libertines and loose women when you know it is irreparably harming your reputation, and, by extension, the king’s?”
I raised my hand to make him stop, but my brother, still deprived by Maman of the ability to rule the Austrian empire, sought at the very least to govern me. “None of this behavior becomes you. It is the chief cause of offense to those who are sincerely attached to you and whose thoughts run in respectable channels.”
I snapped the head off a peach-hued rose and inserted the short stem in my bosom, admiring the way the blossom complemented the cream and salmon satin bodice. “And who might you mean by that? You? Maman? Mercy?”
My brother nodded. “And someone who dares not challenge you because of his own shortcomings.” Tossing me a glance, he added, “Look at you, adorning yourself like a cocotte. Have you heard a word I’ve said? The king is left alone all night at Versailles while you defile yourself by mixing with the canaille of Paris!”
He made a shallow bow. “And now, madame, with your kind permission, I will withdraw. I find myself exhausted from my efforts to usher you from darkness to light.” He drew a deep breath. “The air in here is stifling; don’t you ever feel suffocated?”
I laughed. “You are too used to Maman and her open windows, even in the dead of winter. But if I didn’t burn perfumed pastilles and fill my rooms with flowers you would truly find yourself gagging, for Versailles must be the most odiferous place on God’s earth.” Joseph donned his gray tricorn. “Where are you off to, then, in your quest for fresh air? I can show you the improvements I am making to the grounds of le Petit Trianon. We can have another picnic!”
My brother shook his head. “Merci, ma soeur. But I have more mundane pursuits in mind: the waterworks at Marly. Perhaps I can glean something from your civil engineering that I can take home to our backwater empire,” he added wryly. “You are welcome to accompany me.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Weirs and dams and reservoirs and such? Pas pour moi. I’ll take strawberries and champagne instead by the Belvedère or beneath the trees in the Bois de Boulogne.”
Joseph shrugged. “Tant pis. Perhaps, then, I should invite your husband.”
Stung, I replied, “Not if you expect clever conversation, for if you find mine frivolous, I can assure you, his is mostly nonexistent. If you wish to enjoy Marly in solitude, by all means, ask the king to join you.”
Having reached the door Joseph stopped and turned. “Why did I waste my breath this morning? Your ears are fully open to the barbs of those who wish you ill, but your mind is utterly closed to one who has nothing but your welfare at heart.” With an audible click of the latch, he was gone.
TWELVE
Beauty Is Always Queen
The Emperor of Austria stood on a hilltop above the banks of the Seine watching the fourteen whirring paddle wheels of la Machine de Marly and wishing he’d thought to bring some cotton swabbing to stuff inside his ears. A foreman whose accent was so thick the emperor could scarcely understand him had provided him with a comprehensive tour of the complex, explaining that it could add over a million gallons a day to the reservoirs when it was pumping at full capacity, supplying the water not only to Marly, but to the châteaux and grounds of Versailles. Could Austria do as well? Joseph wondered. After all, la Machine de Marly was the invention of the Sun King’s engineers nearly a century ago. He doffed his hat to blot the perspiration from his forehead, daubing away the sheen with a monogrammed square of Belgian linen—once known as the Spanish Netherlands, those low countries were now Hapsburg territories as well—and cupped his hand to shade his brow. He imagined a painter setting up his easel here; what light he would have, and what a prospect, gazing down over the waterworks and that gleaming white villa that resembled a large mausoleum, so incongruously close to the machinery. How did its residents sleep at night with the perpetual din? On second thought, with the little château looking as it did, perhaps they were dead, consigned to perpetual sleep.
Joseph’s painterly eye strayed to an interruption on the horizon; another incongruity. Two figures: a woman, on the tall side, in a billowing white gown with a corona of lemon-blond curls that cascaded nearly to her waist, shadowed by a turbaned youth dressed in the Oriental style with a pair of blousy white pantaloons and a pink vest. Mincing a step behind his mistress, he wielded a parasol to shield her delicate skin. The emperor, an adventurous man who would never tell his little sister that one of the reasons he had selected an unprepossessing hotel and traveled incognito was because he had heard much about the celebrated brothels of Paris, stepped onto the winding path that led down the hill toward the grounds of the “mausoleum.” This duo was too intriguing for him to ignore.
Minutes later, he was bowing to the strangers. “If a foreign visitor might introduce himself, Count Falkenstein at your service, madame,” he said, removing his hat.
The woman turned her large blue eyes on him. “Your accent is Austrian,” she remarked. “I have heard its like before.” There was an effortless charm about her, a ripeness, a worldliness, and although she looked as though she might be only a few years his junior, she bore all the hallmarks of having once been an exceptional beauty. Joseph found himself instantly mesmerized. “It has grown warm early today,” she remarked. “I am sure you must be thirsty. May I offer you some refreshment?” Her voice was sweet and musical with a hint of a lisp. Gesturing to the neoclassical villa, she added, with a dazzling smile that must have brought countless men to their knees, “My home, Louveciennes, is close at hand, so don’t bother to make small talk and protest that it will be too much trouble.”
She began to lead the way along the path, but stopped after a few steps. “If I may confess something to a complete stranger, monsieur le comte, the cobbler made these new shoes a bit too large and I am afraid I will slip out of them. Would you mind if I took your arm so that I do not take a tumble down the hill?”
The emperor recognized flirtation when he saw it, not merely in the woman’s shining cobalt eyes, but in her faintly suggestive language—“take a tumble”?—yet he would play the gallant for her. “I should be loath to see you thus compromised, madame,” he said, as he offered her the crook of his elbow.
Upon entering the little château, he immediately noticed that it was no mere country villa, but a palace in miniature, teeming with servants wearing liveries of crimson and pale yellow. A nude statue of Diana presided over the entrance hall. The boiseries accenting the walls were gilded with pure gold leaf. Enormous crystal chandeliers illuminated every room.
“Zamor, will you order some lemonade for our guest?” said the woman to her nut-brown page. The turbaned stripling bowed and disappeared, his footsteps noiseless on the thick carpets.
Motioning for her visitor to seat himself on a carved divan upholstered in turquoise striped satin, the châtelaine sank luxuriantly onto a low stool beside him, affording Joseph as fine a view of her décolleté as of her opulent collection of bronzes and porcelain objéts d’art. “It’s all very beautiful, n’est-ce pas?” she said. Her extravagant gesture encompassed the surrounding wealth. “Everything you see here I owe to the generosity and benevolence of the late king, Louis Quinze—to me he was truly ‘le Bien-Aimé.’ ” When Joseph arched a quizzical eyebrow, the hostess smiled warmly, slyly murmuring, “Pardon, monsieur; I thought you recognized me. I should not have been so bold to imagine that my fame had reached the lesser nobility of Austria. Infamy, some would say, depending on whom you asked. I am Jeanne du Barry.”
Joseph was sure his eyes reflect
ed a half-dozen consecutive thoughts, but he merely said, “Then I imagine you are no great friend of the current king and queen.”
The comtesse’s melodic voice was bitter at first, becoming melancholy as her narrative continued.
“When le Bien-Aimé realized he was dying and knew that his soul must be shriven, he could not make his final confession until he banished me from court for the harlot I was. He had raised me to the nobility; made me a comtesse, invented a coat of arms for me—even changed the date of my birth so that everyone believed I was a few years younger. But au fond, I was no better than Jeanne Bécu of the rue de la Jussienne, natural daughter of a provincial friar and a seamstress. I had known many men before Son Majesté, yet he was always gracious enough never to mention my past—although Mesdames, his daughters, and la dauphine, Antoinette, made sure that no one forgot it.”
Joseph eyed the comtesse sympathetically. “Then do I take it that you and the dauphine never—”
“I wished to become her friend,” his hostess said tersely. “At least in the beginning; when she first came to Versailles, and knew no one. I would have been glad to take her under my wing. But, hélas, she turned out to be a condescending little prig, with her haughty German morals—no doubt learned at her mother’s inky skirts—and refused to have anything to do with me after my initial overture of amity.”
Joseph chuckled at her rather accurate reference, both to his little sister and to the empress. “We have a word for that back home—hochnäsig. It means ‘high nosed.’ ”
“Whatever you call it, I suffered grievously, I assure you.” Madame du Barry pursed her full, sensuous lips into a petulant, rather kissable, moue. Joseph felt his thigh begin to twitch. “When the time came for me to leave court forever, I learned that the carriage was not to transport me here to Louveciennes but to a convent. I was certain that it was the new queen who forced her husband into signing the lettre de cachet consigning me to that bleak fate.” The comtesse’s eyes grew moist. “Because I had been privy to state secrets, I was dispatched to a place where I could not make trouble for the Crown.”
Madame du Barry gazed down at her white skirts, smoothing her palms along the fabric. “I remained in the convent at Pont-aux-Dames for an entire year,” she said, her tone embittered once again. “But even after my release I was ordered to keep at least ten leagues’ distance not only from Paris, but from Versailles; as Louveciennes is clearly within the environs of the palace, I was unable to return to my beloved villa until last October.” She forced a laugh. “Quite a lot of dust had settled in the chandeliers.”
Joseph continued to regard the former favorite, wondering if she had always been so unguarded, especially at the vipers’ nest of Versailles. The woman who sat beside him clearly retained a good deal of anger toward the royal family; but she hardly seemed the manipulative Jezebel of his sister’s correspondence. Now, at any rate, she was a creature who dwelled in the past, surrounded by relics of her former triumphs. His first impression of Louveciennes had been correct after all: it was a mausoleum. Parched from having spent the better part of the afternoon strolling about Marly, he downed his entire goblet of lemonade in a single gulp, but his hostess saw that his glass was refilled immediately.
“A few weeks ago I received a visitor,” the comtesse continued, her voice strained and tense. “An old friend—the duc d’Aiguillon, who still owes me much for his appointment as Louis Quinze’s Chief Minister.”
Changing the subject for a moment, she gestured to a three-tiered stand of gold-rimmed Sèvres plates laden with delicate, multicolored macarons. Joseph tentatively helped himself to a crunchy pillow of pink meringue and almond flour, filled with violet-flavored cream.
Tinged as it was with sadness and regret, the du Barry’s voice was also spiked with a distinctly acidic note. “After all this time, the duc finally gained the nerve to tell me what no one else ever had.”
Joseph noticed her increased agitation; as she spoke, she twisted a sapphire set in vermeil about her finger. What purpose could the comtesse have in sharing such a discommoding encounter with him? “When the old king was dying, the Grand Almoner of France, Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon, refused to grant him absolution or to perform the last rites unless le Bien-Aimé punished his paramour, by turning a prostitute into a penitent.” The comtesse blinked back tears. “Madame la dauphine, or the queen, I should say, knew nothing about it, as it turned out, although she delighted in my disgrace. To this day I am certain she believes her husband was responsible … when all the while it was my own beloved—Louis Quinze himself—who, as the moment of judgment neared, feared that his soul would never fly to heaven if he did not consign his maîtresse en titre’s body to a convent. And so, monsieur le comte, for years I have borne this misplaced animosity toward your countrywoman. I have so recently been disabused of my thoughts that, although Her Majesty can never hear the words from my lips, as I cannot return to court, at least I may apologize to a fellow Austrian for my hasty judgment.”
Joseph swallowed hard, debating whether it would be kinder or crueler to continue to dissemble in the face of Madame du Barry’s intriguing confession. He rose and paced about her sun-drenched salon for several moments, pausing to gaze out the tall mullioned windows toward the waterworks in the distance. He realized, then, that he heard nothing of la Machine from inside the château. At length, he spoke. “Forgive me, madame la comtesse; you have been so candid with me this afternoon, baring your soul and sharing your most intimate recollections of your years at court, particularly as you have confided the nature of your difficult relationship with the Queen of France, under the assumption that you were addressing an unknown foreign visitor.” The du Barry artfully posed by the room’s majestic hearth, draping her arms across the marble mantelpiece, as if to martyr herself to the verbal assault she undoubtedly anticipated.
“Comtesse, I am not Count Falkenstein. The Queen of France is my youngest sister. Allow me to properly introduce myself.” He bowed deeply to his hostess. “I am Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria.”
Madame du Barry released a little gasp as the color rose to her cheeks. Not only was she surprised by her visitor’s identity—but that he should pay her such homage when he need not have so much as inclined his head to her. “I am the one who must beg your forgiveness, Sire. I have been so indiscreet.” Her eyes darted about the room, surveying her treasures, as if she expected to be relieved of them at any moment. She sank into a deep reverence. “I ask your prudence, Your Excellency,” she added anxiously. “I beg you not to convey my remarks and opinions of the queen to Her Majesty. I enjoy my life here and do not wish to poke the hornet’s nest.” Her fair skin remained a charming shade of rose; perspiration beaded on her brow and settled upon her ample poitrine.
“My fan,” she breathed, and hunted for the delicate lace-edged accessory. After finally locating it, her high color diminished with her mortification, and she expressed a desire to return to the open air.
“I should be very grateful if you would show me your gardens,” Joseph said. They stepped into the golden light of the late afternoon and the emperor offered his arm to the former royal favorite, a woman whose abundant attractions were still in evidence even at the age of thirty-three.
Now that she knew who he was, her coyness of an hour or so earlier evanesced, replaced by awe, out of practice from mingling with monarchs, and genuinely touched that such a great man had spent so much time in her presence and treated her with such kindness. How unlike his sister was this Hapsburg! “Oh, no, Sire! I am not worthy of such an honor,” the du Barry exclaimed, glancing at his upturned palm. She murmured that she was content merely to be the aging châtelaine of Louveciennes, dispensing baskets to the village poor.
But the emperor gallantly took her arm and slipped it beneath his. “Please—please,” he insisted. “Beauty is always queen.”
“How could you visit that creature?” I gasped, shocked that my brother had spent the afternoon in the company of my former
rival. “Maman will be appalled when she hears of it. If you wished to have paid a call on anyone in the country it should have been the dear old duc de Choiseul, rather than the woman who orchestrated his downfall.” Joseph assured me that he had encountered the comtesse du Barry quite by chance, yet I could not help but be envious that he had whiled away precious hours in her presence, time I wished he had spent in my own company. “I suppose that, like countless courtiers, as well as Papa Roi of course, you succumbed to her allure,” I sighed. “Grown men seem to become hopeless under her spell.”
My husband, whom I had invited to join us for a stroll and a picnic of strawberries at le Petit Trianon, shook his head like a wet dog. “I never saw it, I assure you,” he insisted.
“You wouldn’t,” the emperor replied. “You two are a pair of children, and wouldn’t have understood the ripe appeal of a true woman in all her feminine glory if she fell into your laps. You were blinded, ma petite soeur, by your jealousy and self-interest, and you, mon ami—well, you are just blind to the charms of women in general!”
“I am not!” Louis protested somewhat petulantly.
“Before I utter another word about your marital state—as you are too curious to know my opinion of your notorious du Barry to listen to anything else—frankly I found her rather plain. Toinette, you have far more pleasing features, an equally charming figure, and infinitely more grace.” I turned as red as a berry. “Which is why I cannot fathom your childless state.” Joseph turned to address the king. “I have spoken of the situation quite candidly with my sister, but I should like to spend some time alone with you, Sire, observing every discretion, I assure you, and forgetting for those hours that we are sovereign brothers. Consider instead our ties of blood and my experience of women.”
At this suggestion Louis’s complexion turned somewhat chartreuse, but I encouraged him to take advantage of Joseph’s worldliness. Perhaps he had some sound advice, I reasoned. After all these years of rien, things couldn’t become any worse.