A whisper reaches my ears that one of the ladies has said she is grateful she is not in love with the Swedish count—how helpless one is before him, she says, be she lady or queen.
Yolande de Polignac asks if we are to have music this afternoon, and I reply, “I am waiting only on my Gluck—and Axel von Fersen.” I can confide in her almost as well as I can in him, but the nature of my confidences changes, depending on whose ear is inclined toward me. With Yolande, I am my most wicked self—imperious, a bit greedy for what is not yet mine, full of criticism for others, and making light of their vanity and pitiable judgment. While I will not flaunt my power, my pride is that I can give her anything she wants.
As I muse, in the midst of many, my fingers travel up and down, over the gray fuzzy nodes of pussy willow, and I recall how recently in the dead of winter, my fingers visited the hard beads of my rosary as I prayed for deliverance.
With the count (as with my child), I am my best self, I feel my deeper urges, experience delight through all the levels of my psyche at the beauty of a buckle or of a song. The fingers of the musician at the keyboard have never seemed more nimble or true, as when I listen with the count at my side. The hues of the flowers in their vases, the floral forms and postures, never please me more than when he is near. Ah yes, flowers like people have a distinct carriage of their heads and lifting of their leaves. When Fersen stands beside me, elegant, amiable, intelligent, and kind, I have no impulse to criticize or complain of anything or anyone; with every breath I want to enjoy, enjoy. Secure in my happiness, I know that he will never ask anything of me.
And here is my friend Axel von Fersen, of Sweden, come again as he has come countless times to my entertainments. I simply smile and nod; the crowd parts—they disappear from view, they melt away as his figure commands all my sight. He fills the frame of my seeing as surely as if he were a painting commanding all my focus.
Far from fixed in the eternity of art, he moves toward me, through the golden light of the afternoon, among the March blossoms, past the vases whose very forms break the heart with their grace, his face fairer than any lily. The colors in the carpet before his feet are more vibrant than they ever were before.
I am not the least afraid—though today he is more compelling than ever before in his appearance, but I think just so every time I have the pleasure of looking at him. Because he approves of me, his perfection improves any inadequacy I may have ever felt about myself. I meet him on equal terms, with equal joy. All is perfectly proper; no one can claim that they themselves have been greeted by me with any less joy. I please them all, assembled here today, the princes, the ducs and comtes, my ladies, and it is effortless.
“And tell us all the news, for our number and our happiness are complete,” I say to him so all can hear, “now that you are among us.”
He clicks his heels together softly, brings his hand to the knot of lace at his throat, slightly bows, and speaks, “All of my news is good, for the desire of my father has come to fruition. I have many kind friends to thank. The King of Sweden has spoken to the Comte de Rochambeau, and my dreams of military service will be given opportunity.”
“You have received an assignment,” I say with a smile, but I can feel a cloud pass over my brow. I actually touch my forehead as though to wave it away. Yolande is at my side. She whispers in my ear, as is her privilege, but I cannot hear what she says, though her very lips tickle the porches of my ear.
He is wearing a coat of bright claret, a color I have always favored, and while I drink no wine, I am always pleased when others drink claret so I can admire its color in the lifted crystal, when the sun passes through the liquid.
Again he bows his head. “If it please Your Majesty, I have been appointed the aide-de-camp of the Comte de Rochambeau.”
There is a buzz in the room, or have bees entered my brow, mistaking it for a hive.
The Comte de Rochambeau is the commander in chief, and he embarks for the American colonies forthwith. My heart panics. Express panic as pleasure caused by the presence of all assembled, for their eyes are upon you—thus, my dramatics master instructed me, before I floated onto the stage from the wings, so long ago, when I was a daughter of the Danube.
Yolande whispers in my ear, “The Americans have done nothing but cause trouble since they came into existence.”
“You must bid my little daughter farewell,” I say to Axel von Fersen, “and take your leave of her before you sail. Perhaps she will then be old enough to form a phrase with her own lips.” I feel confused. I fear the room will begin to spin, though my eyes are fixed on nothing but his eyes. The Princesse de Lamballe is suddenly at my other side.
“Ah, look,” she says with great spontaneity, “it is the Chevalier Gluck, come to entertain us with exquisite music.”
I shift my gaze only enough to see that my old friend has arrived. My Gluck seems to pant, as though he has come in haste; his hair is badly powdered, and much of its natural color shows through. His short stocky figure is always most welcome, but my eyes pass from him back to the elegant count. Modestly, he waits till I address him again, but I cannot.
Yolande asks him, “And what time, in the morning, do you sail? We are so sorry to think that this must be farewell for a while.”
Could she have said in the morning?
“I apologize to Her Majesty and to all my friends that I have come late to our gathering only to announce that I leave early in the morning. But Chevalier Gluck is here, and let us not delay further the moment for music.”
He looks at me in such a way that tells me he understands my sorrow, that he must go, as it is duty, that we must go forward with our gaiety, which is also our duty.
“I claim my privilege to go first,” I say, “for after Gluck has played for us, no mere amateur will dare to sit at the harpsichord.”
“Because the performance of the amateur springs from love,” the count says to me, and smiles with exquisite grace, “such music always moves me most.”
Slowly I sit myself on the hard little bench. When I was a child in Vienna, Gluck told me the bench needs to be hard so that our backs are never seduced to slump. I spread my skirt about me, a lavender one today, which evermore I shall associate with death. At each elbow is a round puff of the pale purple. “Yes, an amateur is one who plays for love,” I say quietly. “And I hope there will be some charm in my effort, for all of you who are so kind as to listen.”
I place the tips of my fingers on the smooth, flat keys. How cool they are in their repose, waiting to speak at my touch! “Listen with your hearts then, for I play with mine, and forgive my fingers should they stumble.” Indeed, I feel uncertain, but I lift my eyes to him and begin.
I sing an aria from Dido. My fingers ply the keys well enough, but my voice betrays my feeling and trembles. To steady myself—to perform, perform—I imagine the dramatic reality, the world of Dido, and not my own distress. I sing her words, “Ah, what a happy thought led me to admit you to this court,” but the word for court is slurred and sounds almost like coeur—heart. Yes, I have admitted him into my heart; it matters not whether he attends my court.
Though I look only at him, his eyes are modestly turned downward. For my sake, no action of his ever betrays the bond between us. All is done in such a way as to efface himself, to belie the fact of the special position that he holds in my regard. No egotism mars his natural compassion; he asks for nothing. My eyes fill with tears. And if they see my tears—I do not care!
When I rise from the keyboard, I indicate to my old music master that now he is to entertain us, and he does, playing Rameau’s “The Mysterious Barricades.” Alas, the barricades that hem me in are anything but mysterious. Rameau’s music boils with energy, played in the brightest of the major keys. I fade into the group, and soon Fersen, without displacing anyone, is standing beside me. I hear him breathe deeply: it is the opposite of a sigh.
“I hope you will write letters to your friends in France when you are in America?”
“Nothing would please me more. For those who are true friends, however, distance—I know Your Majesty agrees—cannot separate their spirits.”
He glides away. I circulate among my guests. “Is it not wonderful news?” I say brightly. “And I understand Lafayette is going, as well.”
At the moment of farewell, I hold out my hand to the noble count. He bends and kisses it, glances up just once, his soul in his lifted eyes; then he raises his head and chest, squares his shoulders, smiles, softly clicks his heels, turns, and leaves the room. My eyes follow his back—straight without stiffness, all ease, all grace—and he rounds a corner and is gone. I listen for the sound of his feet on the marble stairs, but I hear no hint of his passage. The back of my hand hums with the whisper left there by the feather of his kiss.
LATER IN THE EVENING Yolande comes to me and tells me I do not look well.
“I have a bit of fever,” I say truthfully. I will not give her any news of my heart.
When she asks to see the backs of my hands, I give her the one that Fersen did not kiss.
“Those red spots on your fair cheeks suggest measles,” she replies, her voice full of concern. “Several people not at the musicale are reported to have the disease.”
“Was it not a delightful afternoon?” I feel hot and listless.
“I overheard a most interesting exchange between the Duchess of Fitz-James and our count.”
“Do tell,” I urge and feel brighter, interested.
“She said, ‘What is this, Monsieur? You are deserting your conquest for the sake of American liberty?’ And he replied, with perfect composure, ‘If I had made a conquest, do not imagine I would desert her. Because I am going away quite free of connection, I am leaving—so much the worse for me—with no other person feeling any special regret.'”
“He displays not a hint of pride,” I reply, well satisfied with my friend’s discretion.
“And yet, I think,” she replied with a toss of her dark head, “that he would certainly be able to give bliss to any lady who wished to bestow favor and true trust upon him.”
I smile at my friend with perfect equanimity, but I do not find her remark amusing.
“Indeed, I have heard testimonials of just such happy ladies,” she adds, examining her nails, adjusting a diamond bracelet I have lately given her because I saw her admiration for mine with the lapis clasp and my cipher.
I glide away and look out the window. Had she been able to do so, Yolande would have goaded me to seal with the count, ere he left. It needs no seal: my confidence in his devotion cannot be shaken by gossip. “When summer comes again,” I say, watching the gardeners transporting carts of roses toward their planting beds, “perhaps we shall take nocturnal walks again, among the bosquets and fountains, as we did when I was pregnant, with fragrant music wafting on the breeze.”
“Madame Vigée-Lebrun, the painter, tells me there is no music more gay than Mozart’s. Vaudreuil finds all her opinions about aesthetic matters to be worthy of attention.”
“I’m told Mozart came and went during my pregnancy, declining the offer of a position of some sort.”
“Many say that he exceeds Gluck as a composer.”
“He is just my age. I heard him play, as a child. The Empress gave him—Wolfgang—a splendid suit that my brother Max had outgrown.”
Memory presents the scamper of small feet across the large room at Schönbrunn, his running toward my mother, his confident occupancy of her lap. Yes, I would love to cuddle a little boy, my own cherub-child with plump cheeks and stubby wings in my lap.
How life has changed for me, how I have grown, since I envied Mozart as he kissed the Empress!
“I suppose he has grown up, now, as we all have. Really, I do not feel well,” I tell my friend. “I must send for the doctor.”
COVERED WITH THE MOST hideous red spots imaginable, I have removed myself to Trianon and have dwelt there—night and day now—for three nights.
When I first look at myself in the glass, I weep at the sight of me. I open my mouth to inspect my tongue, to see if even it has become spotted, but before I can see, I burst into laughter. What would Axel von Fersen think now of my beauty!
I send for the four most amusing of my male friends and tell them they shall be my nurses, and their duty is to make me laugh throughout this siege of spots. Baron de Besenval, though a colonel in the Swiss Guard, tells the most delicious stories, complete with witty dialogue. Does the King care? Not at all—whatever pleases me, pleases him. My only regret is that he and our daughter must stay their distances till I am free from contagiousness.
Count Esterhazy, my favorite of the four, for he loves me most, tells me that the whole court and half Paris is laughing, and what if the King should come down with measles—would he have four ladies to nurse and amuse him? Toward such barbs I present the tough skin of a rhinoceros. I could not have survived the onslaught of obscene pamphlets continually circulated about me had I not learned to ignore all but what I myself know to be the truth. The King hires spies to try to find the origin of such horrid printing, but I know he cannot stem the tide, for all his fury and indignation.
TONIGHT, THE KING stands under my window—deemed a safe distance by the doctors—and speaks with me and tells me how much he misses me and how our little one is faring. Thriving, he says, though now she has only her wet nurse’s milk. My God! How I long to nurse her! In her letters, my mother reminds me endlessly that I thrived on nothing but the milk of Joseph Weber’s mother. Milk is milk, she claims. My breasts are aching hard with unused milk. She fears that nursing makes another conception for me less likely, but I doubt the science of such a belief.
It is God’s will to make me fertile or not, in his own time, just as He warms the earth and makes her fertile when He would have her so. Nor do I look superstitiously to the stars for guidance; the things of this earth and the goodness of trees and flowers and grasses where I myself can walk bring joy to my spirit. The gardens of this earth speak to me of paradise and give me hope. Why should I send my imagination questing for answers about the ways of the universe?
“I plan to have a hamlet built close by, such as peasants and humble folk inhabit,” I tell the King. Dressed in dulcet tones, my words drop down to him, waiting below among the new-planted rosebushes. My breasts feel as though they will burst.
“What do you envision?” he asks.
“There will be a mill where wheat is ground into flour, and a millpond where folk can fish, and I will have cottage gardens and rustic cottages.”
“How do you see the cottages? Small?”
“Quite small. And appearing to be old—painted with cracks in their plaster and with thatched roofs so that they will blend with nature. The cottages to be constructed of beams and plaster, with casement windows, and houses for doves. With spiral wooden staircases to open balconies, with clematis twining up their pillars. I have seen such a village at Chantilly, looking as though it has spent such time with nature, though human work has weathered, mellowed, and blended the village with the trees.”
“The stars are winking at us.”
“I do not look up, when I can look down into the face of my dear and generous husband.”
Swayed by my tenderness, he shifts his weight from foot to foot. “Perhaps you’ll need a lighthouse in your hamlet,” the King whimsically remarks, “lest anyone be lost at sea?”
“At sea?”
“I imagine your pond expansive enough to suggest a miniature sea.”
For that good thought, I throw down a bouquet of spring lilacs to my husband and bid him bury his nose therein.
Almost I look forward to the time when he shall plow me again. Suddenly a gurgle of laughter falls from my lips. When yet I lived at home and I was sent a portrait of the Dauphin at his plow—was that what was meant? That he would someday plow my body, be my husbandman who brings forth abundance from the fields he tills?
“I shall dress as a shepherdess,” I say. I am gl
ad that the dusky night masks my spotted face.
“And I as a shepherd.”
I blow him a kiss.
“Surely I strive always to be a good shepherd to my people,” he says, and I hear the goodness in his voice. “They bear such heavy burdens. If only the nobles would join me in bidding the farmers and laborers to rely on us, for succor. But the nobles are outraged at the thought of paying equitable taxes.”
I feel his distress for the people, but I cannot think of any advice to offer. For myself, I wish to live more simply—not only because it suits me but also for the sake of the people. My Hameau will celebrate life as the peasants live it. I twist the diamond bracelet around my wrist. “Nevermore,” I say, “give me gifts of diamonds. I will not have such jewels when they could buy a ship for our navy or bread for the hungry.”
And yet I know the hamlet will be very expensive to construct. Earth will have to be moved, and a stream diverted. Still this embellishment of the land does not seem sinful in the way the embellishment of my wrist or my throat with diamonds would be. Its reality will embody and celebrate the ideal of simplicity. I wish that the Princes of the Blood had the noble heart of my husband, but it is only their titles that bray their nobility. I wish that he could be surrounded by men like Axel von Fersen.
“The burdens press heavily on the shoulders of the peasants,” the King adds sadly, “when I would give them peace and prosperity.”
Act Four
THE DEATH OF THE EMPRESS OF AUSTRIA
On 11 October 1780, I write to my most dear Mother.
I have been more than a bit worried during the last three weeks because my daughter has had pain and fever, at the eruption of several new teeth. You will be proud that even though she experienced considerable pain and suffering, she showed always sweetness and patience. I am touched to the quick by her courage. Because of my dear mother and my dear daughter, who bears her name, I feel inspired to the marrow of my bones to always take courage, no matter what life may bring to me.
Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette Page 30