The Exchange of Princesses

by Chantal Thomas

  “And the two babies inside the golden frame in the foreground, who are they?” Louis XV asks.

  “Two children of Apollo, that is, of your great-grandfather, who died while still in the cradle.”

  A shadow passes over Louis XV’s face.

  The regent rises to his feet. Was there ever anyone more worthless in war than Marshal de Villeroy? Not very likely! Listening to him go into transports over the battle paintings and ceiling frescoes is unbearable. Moreover, the regent finds the fashion for painted ceilings hideous. Plus he needs to change his shirt — the one he’s wearing is soaked through. Since he doesn’t have any clothes at Versailles yet, he has a young worker borrow some for him from the palace storage rooms. As he’s taking off his jacket, a folded note drops from his pocket. With his nose on the paper, he reads these words:

  The king’s a child; the monster at his side,

  Renowned for poison, incest, atheism,

  Abuses unrestrained the sov’reign power.

  Thy former greatness, France, for aye has died!

  New kings, new gods besmirch this century’s dawns,

  And there beneath thy feet the chasm yawns.

  His heartbeat returns to normal. He finds insults of this sort everywhere, under his plate at table, rolled up and stuffed inside his boots, slipped beneath his pillows, daubed in big letters on the facade of the Palais-Royal. No sooner are they erased than they reappear. Every time, the effect on him is like so many stings. It’s as if he were walking through a cloud of horseflies or wasps; for a moment, he can believe he’s escaped, but they’re only gathering in ever greater numbers, vicious and unrelenting.

  His neckband and jabot loosened, his shirt billowing out of his breeches, the regent dodges into the War Room, the Salon de la Guerre. He moves a chair and sits down heavily before one of the high, open windows that look out onto the water terrace and, farther off, the Grand Canal, which leads to the bloodred horizon and the setting sun. If he leaned out and looked right, he could see the Neptune Fountain.

  The lawns are in bad shape, likewise the groves; the Grand Canal needs to be cleaned; the Clagny pond is an infection. This water feature, the so-called Stinking Pond, located between the Swiss Lake and the menagerie, deserves its nickname more than ever. As for the menagerie, the regent doesn’t care to know what may have gone on in there during the past seven years. Dubious couplings between wading birds and cobras, Sultan chickens and leopards, marmosets and their keepers, unheard-of crossbreeding, interesting monsters? Most of the fountains and ponds in the park are dry; in the ones that still have water, the women of Versailles do their laundry. The budget allotted to him for the maintenance of the palace and its gardens has been calculated down to a bare minimum, and even less than that. Had the suggestion of the Duke de Noailles been followed and the palace razed, he would feel no regrets. None whatsoever! Going back to Versailles is going back to the marsh. In the Hall of Mirrors, the king’s venerable tutor drones on. The regent is willing to let that mummified representative of the old court, that doddering, ridiculous pedant, that arrant coward in combat, that stuffed jackass Villeroy yammer on at his ease.

  He, the regent, has his own version of the Sun King.

  What does he see? His father on his feet, assisting at the dinner being served to Louis XIV, who always ate alone. On his feet? Not always. But on the occasions when the king deigned to invite his brother to take a seat, the ritual was conceived in such a way as to be even more humiliating. The king would make the offer; Monsieur would nod and bow. A stool would be brought. But Monsieur had to wait. He couldn’t sit down until the king made a gesture, to which Monsieur would immediately respond with another humble bow. Then and only then could he take the proposed place. And if the king “forgot” to make the gesture? Well, in that case Monsieur had to stand there like a sentry with the stool beside him. What else comes back to the regent? The smile on the king’s face when he congratulated his brother on his shoe buckles, on a piece of lacework, on some ribbons, on his wig (on such occasions, crazy for wigs as he was, the king would hide neither his displeasure nor his envy … Come to think of it, the regent thinks, what’s the best use for the late king’s wig closet, what should replace the wigs?). Some things he’d rather forget: his father beseeching the king in order to obtain position or advancement for one of his favorites. And the complacency of Louis XIV, who was all too happy to make his brother a person of no account. Monsieur, an ineffable coxcomb manipulated by his male lovers or by those whom he desired as lovers, a man absolutely without willpower, a purely decorative prince. Monsieur, whom Louis XIV in his later years, when his vigilance had lost some of its sharpness, used as a spy to keep him informed of breaches of etiquette, unjustified absences, botched genuflections before the king’s sacred bed-altar, sniggers and scoffs, gossip about Mme de Maintenon, licentiousness.

  Louis XIV, a master of castration, had emasculated the nobility as he’d emasculated his brother. There was King Louis XIV, the admirable incarnation of virility and the spirit of conquest, and next to him, there to make him look good and act as his foil, his milksop brother, ridiculously shaking his ribbons, his curls, his jewels, his baubles.

  And he, the regent, is that mad, effeminate creature’s son.

  And there’s worse, there’s always something worse: The king’s a child; the monster at his side, / Renowned for poison … The note and its hateful words serve to remind him. When they all died, one after another, in nightmarishly rapid succession — first the grand dauphin, then the Duchess of Burgundy, then her husband the duke, and then their elder son the Duke of Brittany — so much death, it seemed, couldn’t be natural, and suspicions were focused on him, the primary beneficiary of the massacre, suspicions that corrode his existence and make him fear, in his darkest hours of generalized doubt, that the young king is not completely indifferent to such rumors; that he too, little Louis, may not trust him, may see in him the murderer of his mother, his father, his brother, and may be afraid for himself … Was that the reason why he asked the boy to stop calling him “Monsieur” and to address him thenceforth as “Uncle,” so that the affection implicit in family ties might contribute to discrediting the suspicion of crime? In reality, as the regent knows, the king’s upbringing has revolved around death; he’s been brought up in the certainty that there are people whose sole desire is to poison him. The arrogant Villeroy, incarnation of ill will, first-class coward, disastrous warrior, and depraved reader of The Book of Venoms, has inculcated in his pupil an obsession with cyanide, with powdered glass, with odorless, colorless arsenic.

  A delegation of the citizens of Versailles comes to ask the regent’s authorization for a fireworks display to salute the little king’s return. He refuses. This day, it seems, will not end. He remains unmoving, a heap of weariness and disgust. He stares at the immense pale blue sky above the meticulously designed garden and beyond it the lines of bushes and trees, the jumble of vegetation ready to rejoin the woods. He loathes Versailles. He loathes hunting and has no interest in gambling. He’s enthusiastic about opera and painting, he appreciates good conversation and humor, all of them things that can be grafted upon life at Versailles but do not constitute its core. In the beginning and forever, Versailles is a monument to the chase, to the violent pleasure of hunting as a way of relaxing from the exercise of power. With the transition from Louis XIII to Louis XIV and the expansion of the original hunting lodge into the new palace, power had won out over hunting, but the chase retained an extremely important place in the royal schedule. The religious ritual of royalty, on the one hand; on the other, the gallop in pursuit of the deer. Hour-by-hour meticulousness, on the one hand; on the other, the taste of blood. Etiquette versus the distribution of guts.

  Night falls at last, and with it the pitiless dark that is the lot of country life. The regent wants to return posthaste to Paris. When he looks back at the palace from his carriage, he sees the windows of the king’s chamber shining out of the darkness, sparkling with
the light of flickering candles. Those emergent, luminous points, so weak and fragile in comparison to the nocturnal mass surrounding them, bring back to his mind both the fear of going blind and the monarchy’s uncertain future.

  One thing is certain: he too will be obliged to move back to Versailles. He’s going to have to spend many a night in utter boredom. He thinks about the satirical joke that’s making the rounds: “The regent has been exiled to Versailles by order of Cardinal Dubois!” Yes, he’ll be chained up in that desert of ennui, and not, as now, en route to Paris, already inhaling the rarefied air of pleasure.

  The Basket of Delights

  It’s true, what they told the infanta. The plan is for her to join the king two days after his departure from Paris. The Gazette confirms it: “The Queen-Infanta arrived here on the afternoon of the 17th, and the King, having gone to welcome her, escorted her through the Grand Apartment to the one prepared for her use.”

  She kneels, he lifts her up, kneels in his turn, takes her hand. He repeats the formula: “I am delighted that you have arrived in good health.” Or maybe he ventures a variation: “I am glad that your journey has been completed without incident,” or even, “I am overjoyed to receive you in Versailles, birthplace of your father, His Majesty the king of Spain.” Then again, his mood probably isn’t good enough to tempt him into such improvisations; in fact, it would be more in character for him not to say a word. But he’s smiling, and the happiness he felt as he trod the paving stones of the Marble Court again hasn’t dissipated. This air of joy further enhances his beauty. The queen-infanta doesn’t take her eyes off him. True to herself, she babbles, managing brief pauses for him to make some reply, and then chattering on more volubly than before, all the while being careful not to trip on the carpets.

  He escorts her to her apartment. They go through the seven rooms of the Grand Apartment, previously the residence of his great-grandfather. The place where the young king lays his head at night is the same as the one from which the dying voice predicted to him, “Darling boy, you will be a great king …” The queen-infanta is lodged in the queen’s apartment, formerly occupied by Louis XIV’s wife, Maria Theresa of Spain (the infanta Maria Theresa, whose painted portrait Mariana Victoria couldn’t look at) and then by the dauphine, the very young Duchess of Burgundy, married at the age of twelve. Thus young Louis escorts the little girl to the very chamber once occupied by his mother. And whereas in the park he desires to find everything as it was before, and the uncut grass, the uneven ground, the rust, and the cracked or broken statues and basins do not prevent him from believing that nothing has changed, here within these darkly paneled walls, in the room where his life began and where all the furniture and every nook belong to his prehistory, it doesn’t seem to him that he recognizes anything. The strangeness is oppressive. A sudden panic seizes him, and he feels the hollow presence of oblivion like an intolerable weight. He goes away. He turns his back on the newly ventilated chamber, on Maman Ventadour, submerged in emotion and distracted by the things she must take care of, on the infanta, on the infanta’s ladies — and on a painting titled Departing for the Falcon Hunt: three or four women prepare to mount richly harnessed horses. One of the women, in the left foreground, attracts the eye. She has long black hair and is wearing a wide red skirt and a red riding coat. She’s as slender as a reed. The necessary immobility of her painted figure appears like an unreal standstill in the life of a creature whose element, like a dancer’s, is pure movement. She’s the Duchess of Burgundy.

  When all is said and done, nobody misses the Louvre. Mme de Ventadour is thrilled with her apartment (“Sire, we are very comfortable at Versailles, I see the King very often and he enjoys our meetings and so do we. He does me the honor of coming to play in my rooms, I have Mme. de Maintenon’s former apartment and also the Duke of Burgundy’s, which adjoins the Queen’s”), and so is the infanta with hers. She’s occupying the queen’s chamber, which suits her completely. She’s also much nearer to the king than she was at the Louvre, and more visible in her role as his wife. Versailles is certainly very big, but not too big for her. In those vast rooms, faced with those immense skies, her being expands. “My house!” she repeats, laughing. At the same time, she must once more start from scratch. She has to take up again the task of adapting, of marking out her territory. As she had during her journey, Mariana Victoria has the sensation of being on unstable ground, of advancing into the completely unknown. She pays attention, strains to remember what’s said to her, repeats the new sounds and words. She demarcates the boundaries of her realm. She creates a world to her measure, transports her moss forest to Versailles. And confidently makes new conquests every day.

  The king often plays in Mme de Ventadour’s apartments. He also spends time in the infanta’s. On one occasion, Mariana Victoria has an inspiration. Her governess, still outraged, writes, “She even tried to retire while the King was playing in her chamber because she wanted him to see her in bed.” The king looks up from the game of snakes and ladders and feels afraid of this infanta in whom, suddenly, he no longer sees a baby.

  The infanta loves her bed. It’s higher than the one she had in the Louvre, but that’s been remedied; an order has gone forth for a “little ladder made of pine wood in the manner of a footboard, covered in red damask,” so that she can “climb up to her bed.” The infanta becomes maniacal about her little stepladder, which raises her to such a queenly height. She spends a great deal of time climbing up and down that ladder. She also uses it as a miniature, multilevel theater to display her favorite dolls, according to their current hierarchy. Those that have fallen into disfavor and find themselves buried in the trunk are enraged. Some of them break their wooden heads against the wood that imprisons them.

  The carved and gilded balustrade that surrounds the infanta’s bed has had to be solidly attached, for she loves to lean on it and watch the passing parade of men with multicolored calves, the pageant of pleats and flounces and trains sweeping the parquet.

  To the sum of her delights, her small pleasures and great joys, she can also add the boat trips along the Grand Canal, and the marble corridors where she takes off with all the strength in her little legs and runs or slides until she falls down. (Mme de Ventadour panics. The infanta is picked up and laid down, her temples rubbed with eau de cologne. The moment her guardian angels get distracted, she dashes away again.)

  She loves to accompany the servants when they close the shutters in her chamber and draw the curtains and bring night to the Palace of Grandeur.

  She loves to bend over the fountains and pull algal blooms closer to her with the aid of a hook.

  She loves to be tickled by the lace frills of Maman Ventadour’s “fontange coiffure,” and just before she falls asleep, she likes Marie Neige to sing her a Spanish song while caressing her cheeks with the heavy tresses of her hair.

  She loves the Water Avenue.

  She loves to stop in front of the fountain with the statue of the little girl and make faces at her.

  She loves to crawl on all fours under the table in the council chamber, and in the park to slip out of sight, into the darkness of the many bits of forest that have been left standing and marked off by wooden fences. She prefers the bamboo forest for the music of its foliage.

  She loves to be the center of the world. She loves to slip out of sight.

  She loves rainbows and fireworks.

  She loves to watch herons take flight and is fascinated by hedgehogs.

  When, for the thousandth time, she’s pressed on the subject of Spain and asked if she misses her country, she loves to pick up Carmen-Doll, hide behind her, and reply in her shrillest doll voice, “Yes and no.”

  She loves it when, at the turn of a path, in the morning light, at sunset, or anytime, anywhere, the king appears.

  She loves the idea that the king loves her, she loves to be able to write to her mother, “My dear Maman, the King loves me loves me with all his heart.”

  In Versailles, as
previously in the Louvre, the infanta never goes to sleep without first being sure she’s left enough room beside her in the bed for her king. Tiny as she is, she sleeps close to the edge on her side.

  The king’s schedule has become more studious. Under the direction of the regent and Cardinal Dubois, he receives lessons in the politics of the kingdom, in economics, and in diplomatic relations with foreign countries. The infanta, under the same teachers who taught the king as a young child, learns to read and write. She’s burning with impatience to be able to read and answer her parents’ letters. At the bottom of her governess’s letters, she adds samples of the present state of her writing skills. When she sits at her little desk and copies her lines — Com bi na tions of vow els and con so nants form syl la bles: KING DOM DO MI NO PA RIS BI DA SO A — she fully accepts the seriousness of her task. To be illiterate in a situation of exile is a terrible thing. The infanta is conscious of that.

  One Tuesday, which is the day when the king receives ambassadors, he brings her his own writing notebook. With her fingertip, she follows the letters drawn by the beloved hand. She redoubles her efforts, doing her utmost to write exactly like him. An excess of tender feeling gives her a tendency to bear down too hard on her pen.

  She also takes lessons in dancing, music, singing, deportment, and drawing, but in her eyes they count as mere amusements.

  When she’s good, her reward is permission to pay a visit to the king, sometimes even during his morning study hours. In such cases, she sits quietly in a little armchair while he repeats his history lesson or does equitation exercises on a wooden horse. She’s constantly on the point of asking a question.