by Edward Carey
“And something more: You must gain an appointment for Doctor Curtius to cast the queen’s face. We should like to have the queen from life. And all other essential people. But the queen most of all, she who is all fashion.”
“Yes, madame, I shall try. Madame, may I ask a question?”
“You may.”
“How is Edmond?”
A reddening on the great mass of face, a rumbling of the mountain, the chin twitching, but the flame was quickly put out as she spoke.
“My son is with his wife.”
“Madame,” I said, choking suddenly, “I wanted to marry him. Could you not tell?”
“You! You!”
“How I wish that I had!”
“Your wishes—what are they? They are nothing. Edmond did not wish to be with you. How could he? Who ever should? How could my son be with a foreign servant! Do you have no idea how the world works?”
“I am going to the palace,” I said. “I have been invited.”
“You shall ever be our kitchen rat, Marie.”
I loathed her utterly, then and always, without end. Can I describe my hatred for her? It would poison these pages. I shall leave it out.
The night before I left, Jacques, like the old monkeys, began to hit the Monkey House. He smashed its walls with his fists, he smashed the fake wooden furnishings, smashing in one direction, then another, kicking his legs and moaning in pain. He screamed as he did it; his riot dance could not be controlled. He moaned like a tortured animal. With my leaving, his fragile world was being upturned. Nothing would convince him that he wasn’t being abandoned.
My master nervously let the storm exhaust itself; the widow went upstairs to calculate the damage costs. When his anger was spent at last, we put the house back in order. I swept up the broken pieces.
“Jacques,” I said, stroking his great head, “it is just for a little while. But I do thank you, very much, for your tears.”
The next morning I set out with Mercier, a little more threadbare those days, with Curtius, and with Jacques limping behind, carrying the trunk containing my clothes and Marta and Father’s jawplate and my drawings, which being kept in a kitchen drawer had survived the widow’s tempest. People stopped when my master walked past them on the boulevard, taking off their hats and bowing, as was usual then: “Good morning, Doctor Curtius.” “What wonderful weather, Doctor Curtius.” We made for the Place Louis-le-Grand, where Doctor Mesmer had once worked—what a vast space it was, it made me rather fearful, I wanted to cling to the sides of it—but Mercier gently tugged me on. I was bought a ticket for the carrabas, the eight-horse Versailles coach, which people called the chamber pot.
As he lifted me into the coach, Jacques whispered to me through clenched teeth: “Don’t let anyone hurt you. Tell Jacques if they do.”
“It’s nothing but a colossal servants’ hall,” Mercier said. “Don’t tarry long there; it never does anyone good to tarry there. But, Little, even I must admit: a great adventure.”
“Dear Little,” my master said, “my own girl, you shall be so much missed. I shall call you Marie today. Marie, who shall do the hairs now? Who will sit beside me? Who shall I tell of my progress?”
“Good-bye, sir,” I said, “thank you.”
And then the chamber pot was off.
Holding Marta in my lap, I watched Paris going nonchalantly about its business. The coach went far away from the Boulevard du Temple and the Monkey House, from Ticre’s printworks, to the Porte de Versailles, out into the fields, and everything I saw was new to me and I was alone. I was to be teacher to Princesse Elisabeth. Versailles beckoned.
On Paris I turned my back.
BOOK FOUR
1778–1789
A CUPBOARD IN VERSAILLES
It begins when I am seventeen, it ends when I am twenty-eight.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
In which I have a brief interview with my new employer, and am shown to my lodgings.
I saw it some time before I reached it, and as we advanced in the coach it grew bigger and bigger and then still bigger and bigger yet, taking the sky away. So strange, when we finally did stop, to see ordinary humans there, of the size I was used to. It was a whole city made of a single building. How to navigate such a thing? It rearranges everything you’ve previously understood about size. I felt like poor Jonah, one of Mother’s people, only this whale before me was golden. Was ever such a place possible? And how could I be coming to live inside it? Mother, I wanted to call. Look, look where I am! I am at the palace. I have been invited inside.
A footman in blue livery came for me. My trunk, he said, would be delivered separately. I was to follow him. He guided me over cobbles (the size of great tombstones, where people might lie down in the gap between them and never be seen again), through gates (taller I think than any building in Paris), through a servants’ entrance (an opening as of some vast sphincter), along corridors (guts), past rooms and people (food being digested). The valet advanced at great speed. I trembled at the vastness of it all; everything loomed upon me, all the people and all the space. For a moment, distracted by a group of loud people, I lost the valet entirely, but he found me and told me, with a strict clipped voice, that I must cease to delay him further.
Look up: painted ceilings. Look down: wooden floors with patterns. Look ahead: the back of a valet dressed in blue, getting farther away. Look about: people, people everywhere. Finally, in a quieter passageway, I saw that one of the windows was cracked. I was so glad to have seen that; I felt like I had a chance then. The valet opened a door. “You’re to wait here,” he told me. “Do not touch anything.” Then he closed the door and left.
I looked about. I was somewhere on the ground floor, a room filled with expensive, distinguished, furious objects. I had never before considered that carriage clocks could be disapproving, nor had I supposed a candelabra might resent lighting me. I had never stepped upon a carpet that did not wish me there, nor felt the enmity of a marble mantelpiece. Nor had I come upon a gold-braided stool whose fat little feet seemed aimed at my ankles. Not before I entered this room.
In the Monkey House, I had lived on a theater stage. Now before me was a real carriage clock, not a piece of wood clock-shaped, but one that clicked away genuine seconds. Here was an actual marble fireplace, not wood got up in paint to give the impression of marble. Here real people lived, not imitations of people contrived from wax. But I felt then, and do still now, that I was much more at home among hastily contrived theater props than with functioning objects built by masters. I stood in the center of the room, stared at by these objects for a full half hour, until at last another servant entered: a pale young woman who began to busy herself about the room. She did not look at me, as if I were not there at all.
“Am I to wait here?” I asked.
But the servant said nothing.
“Will she be coming soon?”
Still nothing.
“What’s your name?”
Now she shook her head.
“Might I sit down?”
“Please,” she said, her look very troubled. “I’m not to talk. It’s not allowed.”
“Who can I talk to?”
“I’m only a bit-maid. You mustn’t ask me anything.”
The door opened; the servant stood frozen. The voice of an old, imperious lady came from the doorway.
“Have you been talking, Pallier? Don’t ever let me catch you.” And the servant was instantly gone.
Slowly the old woman walked around me and lowered herself onto one of the sofas. “Why you are here,” she said—and it took me a moment to understand that she was not addressing the sofa—“I cannot conceive. With luck it shall last only this day, and then we need never share the same room again. Madame has her little whims from time to time; the only consolation is that Madame is certain to find something else that interests her more than you, for you don’t look very interesting at all. She will be here shortly. You are to bow, to call her ‘Your Majesty’ or ‘Madame El
isabeth.’ You are to carry out her instructions precisely, whatever she asks. But do not touch her, you must never touch, that is not permitted.”
I heard the noise of running. A moment later, in came red-faced fourteen-year-old Elisabeth.
“Ah! There you are at last!” said Elisabeth. “How lovely!”
“Your Majesty,” said the old woman, prompting.
“Your Majesty,” I said, bowing.
“I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve thought of nothing else since I saw you! Of all the things we shall do together. My own person, my very own body, that’s what you are! My sister Clotilde—married now, to Charles Emmanuel of Sardinia; oh, and I’m to be married soon too—she never had her own person, not like you anyway. But here you are! I shall write to Clotilde and tell her. They tell me she’s grown very fat. How I miss her! Well then, what shall we do? Shall we draw? Shall we hide and seek? Shall we go on a visit? I must tell you about my visits.”
“Your Majesty,” I whispered, “I thought we were to—”
The evil carriage clock chimed and the little princess went very white. Her round face twitched; her gray eyes began to moisten.
“The time, Madame Elisabeth,” said the old woman with great severity.
“Oh no, no, no,” whispered Elisabeth.
“Your aunts, Madame Elisabeth,” came the old woman again.
“I have to go now. I’ve got to go, my dear person,” Elisabeth told me. “My aunts must not be kept waiting at all, they hate that more than anything, Grandfather always kept them waiting and they abhorred it. I’m so glad you’re here. You’re very precious to me. I’ll see you later. How wonderful that you’re here! Show her to her room, will you, dear Mackau?”
With that, the little princess was gone and I was left with Madame Mackau. “No doubt she’ll fail again,” she muttered as soon as the door was closed. “I won’t show you,” the old woman said without looking at me. “Don’t think for an instant that I will show you. Wait here.”
The old woman left and a few moments later a different servant appeared.
“Follow me, please.”
We went outside the room a little way and stopped before a very tall and wide double-doored cupboard fixed into the wall. My trunk had been placed beside it.
“You may open a door.”
I opened one.
“It is a cupboard,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “so please you, it is your cupboard.”
“I’m to leave my things here?”
“You’re to live here.”
“In a cupboard?”
“You sleep here. You spend your time here. When she wants you you’re nearby. You sleep on that shelf, and leave your things on the one above. You’ll find it is plenty deep enough.”
“A cupboard?”
“Yes indeed. A cupboard.”
A cupboard is the resting place of objects; a bed is the thing upon which humans lay themselves down. I thought this was understood. But there were contrary ways in Versailles and I must learn them; my master had taught me this when we first came to Paris. It is necessary to learn the rules of new places. Perhaps this was not so very different from the windowless room I inhabited in the dead tailor’s house. I wondered if people were kept in all the cupboards of the palace, if their drawers were pulled open only when they were required. What happened, I wondered, if your cupboard drawer was never opened and you just lay there starving, hoping you might soon be required again? Would you live on flies or spiders? Later I would come to learn that servants throughout the great houses of Europe were often billeted in cupboards, for convenience’s sake, to be close to their employers. George III of England stacked his servants in a chest of drawers outside his bedchamber; the Duke of Urbino kept a servant in a desk; the Barons of Bavaria suspended their servants on custom-built coat hooks; it is said that the Duchess of Blois had a beloved maidservant who lived for forty years in an empty water closet.
I felt such a sympathy for objects that day as I lay down upon a cupboard floor. How dark it was in there.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
My little bit of palace.
My cupboard doors could be opened from both the inside and out; there was a handle on both sides. Still, shut up there on my bed-shelf, I felt I might as well be in a coffin. Waking after a short slumber, I hammered on the doors in a terror that I’d been buried alive. I dreamed I was dead deep in the boulevard ditch. Even after I remembered where I was, I kept checking the handles to make sure I could get out. What a miserable night.
On my second morning at the palace, I was ushered into the same disapproving room. The old lady soon returned, and then at last Elisabeth, accompanied this time by a man in religious robes.
“Well, my person, we shall pray now.”
We prayed as instructed by her confessor, the Abbé Madier. I thought him rather a greasy piece of humanity; had God made him so? “Oh divine heart of Jesus! I love you, I adore you, I invoke you, for all the days of my life, but especially for the hour of my death. O vere adorator et unice amator Dei, misere nobis. Amen.”
Afterward she said to me, “You pray wonderfully well.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty.”
“There’s someone I want you to meet, someone very dear to me.”
The person she fetched now likewise lived in a cupboard, but this cupboard had velvet lining and was portable, and in fairness should probably be called a box. This person was made of painted plaster. Not very big—about a foot in fact—and not particularly accurate, this was an idealized human, simplified and sentimentalized. He was made to represent the Savior of mankind. I’d met him before of course, this fellow, or hundreds like him; he was very popular and very common, an old favorite of my mother’s.
“You cannot hold him,” Elisabeth said, “but you may look upon him.”
“I have a doll,” I said. “She’s called Marta. Would you—”
“I sometimes spend hours with him. I feel he’s alive and is listening to me.”
“No,” I said. “He’s plaster. He’s only painted plaster. He can’t hear a thing.”
“I shall put him away now.” Jesus was returned to his box, but only after being kissed. I thought I should like her to kiss me like that.
“It is wonderful that you have called me here,” I said. “I thank you very much.”
“That is not necessary.”
“I think we will do very well together. We are like twins, you and I.”
“I do not think that we look so very alike,” she said. “There may be a passing resemblance, perhaps, I have heard some comment upon it. But you have, forgive me, rather a nose, don’t you? And a chin, upon my word! They rather peek out and are, all in all, a little alarming. But you must not worry; I don’t mind how you look. No, though there may be a similarity, I don’t think we can look so very alike, can we? I’m the king’s sister. Oh, don’t look so sad. What a silly creature you are. How can one feel sorry for something with such a face? I like you much better when you don’t look so glum. Come now, I have something else to show you.”
She took me to a room decorated with many very amateur drawings, particularly of crucifixes and saints. “Oh, but look at all these drawings!” she said with enthusiasm.
I looked at them and turned to Elisabeth.
“They’re mine!” she said. “I drew them.”
I said nothing.
“What do you think of them?” she asked.
“I think, Your Majesty, please forgive me,” I said, “I think we must begin our studies right away.”
“My person?”
I paused, but I felt I had no choice. “You do not . . . look, really, do you? Not yet. I’m sure you shall. My master taught me to look, and it took a great deal of bread before I could see anything at all.” Her face was exceedingly red. “I should not lie to you, Your Majesty,” I said. “If we are to progress together, if I am to be useful, there ought not to be lies.”
“I am Princesse Elisabet
h of France.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Well!” She stamped her foot.
I could not tell what she would do. There was a long silence. At last she said, “I’ve had enough for today.” I was sent back to my cupboard.
When I was not needed, I had been instructed that I should spend as much time in my cupboard as possible. It was understood that on occasion I might need to venture out, but I should never go farther than the bucket in the side room. It was a large cupboard and the shelf was not so very much smaller than my bed at the Monkey House. A person can get used to nearly anything.
It was comfortable enough in there, and I had so much time to think, more than I’d had before, and some of that thinking was inevitably about Edmond and how there would be no room for him to lie with me in that coffin-cupboard, and that that was perhaps how it should be, since he’d been stolen from me. I wished that I had one of the heads I had sculpted of him, I felt that might have helped me a great deal, but the widow had destroyed them all. I was not to think of Edmond anymore. I was to put him away. He was not my business.
I did try very hard not to think of Edmond, but they left me alone such a lot that Edmond was the place I most liked to visit, though he was so married. I wondered if he ever thought of me. How strange he would find it to learn that I was in Versailles, employed royally. I’d tell him that royal employment was not half so splendid as he might suppose.
If I stayed too long in there, however, I started wanting Edmond too much, until it felt like the ghost of him was growing around me, eating at my brain and slowing my heart. If I lay there alone too long, I might be haunted to death by that shop mannequin whose shape I so longed for. So I forced myself to look forward, to try to vanquish the ghost, to busy it away.
In Versailles, I could have candles whenever I asked; there was always an abundant supply. Lying there, I could listen to the noise of the palace, to the soldiers marching outside, and in the night, to the rats running along the corridors, and, outside, to the screeches of the feral cats who lived off the waste created by the great building.