“I implore Your Majesties to be so gracious as to allow me to kiss your hands whenever I have the honor of appearing before you” (July 29).
“I cannot too much complain that Your Majesties who so love me will not give me your hands to kiss, the which costs you nothing and would bring joy to my heart, but at least tell me yes or no so that I can cease to importune you, justified though I am in my pleading, today I was at Chamartin and there I killed seventy pigeons” (July 31).
He’s practically certain that his father will grant his request; it’s the absence of a response from Elisabeth Farnese that tortures him: “I await with impatience the Queen’s reply to my letter of yesterday” (August 4); “The queen says nothing about what I wrote to her the day before yesterday, no doubt because she will do what I have asked of her” (August 5).
The queen his wife will not give him her body to love.
The queen his stepmother will not give him her hand to kiss.
He walks on, clutching his hunting gun. In the night he follows bloody tracks, and at high noon he staggers, blinded by dust.
FONTAINEBLEAU, AUGUST–NOVEMBER 1724
Pif! Paf! Poof!
The king’s departure is accompanied by music and great pomp. The infanta’s, on the following day, is not without style. Carmen-Doll is back in her hunting outfit. Dauphin-Doll has been “forgotten” under the bed. As for the chorus of dolls shut up in the trunk, it’s conceivable that they will never again see the light of day, since after being removed from the infanta’s apartments they’ve been stowed in the part of the attic known as the “trunk storeroom” — where dozens and dozens of trunks are lined up with no prospect of being reopened one day, no likelihood that their contents will ever be handled again and returned to the restorative circulation of things that go on trips. Their involuntary retirement resembles death. The prospect terrifies the wooden dolls so much that they’ve tensed up and, despite their robust constitutions, begun to split; they bear gaping wounds like stigmata on their legs and the middle of their foreheads. Their friends the cornhusk dolls have long since perished, and it’s sad — and unhealthy — to remain shut up with their little greenish bodies, stuck to one another by the hair, gradually drying out. The dolls crammed into the trunk discover morbidity. Those that retain some sense of humor observe that their fate could be worse: they could have been thrown into a firewood chest, and then hello Joan of Arc!
Like the king, the infanta distributes, according to her mood, favor and disfavor, except that the beneficiaries of the former and the victims of the latter are her dolls. Which doesn’t mean that the situation is any easier to handle. Whereas the king replies with silence, the infanta drowns problems in a flood of words. She’s often to be found in agitated consultations with her dolls, which sit before her in several rows like her ladies on their stools, decked out in their finest attire but plainly unhappy. The cause of their unhappiness is their not being invited along on hunting excursions. At Versailles and even more often at Fontainebleau, where hunting is really the sole and exclusive occupation, the infanta and her favorites are regularly included in the party (which creates friction among the ladies of her retinue, because some places in her carriage must be reserved for her chosen dolls). The other dolls rant and rave. But what’s to be done? “There will always be some of you who are disappointed,” the infanta reasonably explains. “I shall convey your concerns to the king. He is generous, and he heeds my wishes.” With these words, the infanta kisses the royal portrait in the medallion she wears. At Fontainebleau, her secret wish — to obtain a proof of her husband’s love — grows more intense, for in a certain sense she’s never separated from him, never excluded from a hunting party or a concert. But the royal presence is always surrounded by a multitude, always the center of a male entourage that is itself controlled by M. le Duc.
The infanta spends more and more time soothing her dolls’ feelings. She asks them why, given the unending stream of musical events and festive gatherings they’re invited to, they’re never in a dancing mood and sometimes even fall ill. The sad dolls are impenetrable, like the Sphinxes on the Grand Parterre, half women, half beasts, lying in calm and mysterious repose above the Carp Pond and its delightful pavilion, to which the infanta will never go alone with the king.
One day, when the hunt passes near the town of Avon, she’s taken to visit a quarry; gaunt, dust-covered workers, armed with chisels and hammers, are breaking up blocks of sandstone. The infanta covers her eyes with both hands and wails that the quarrymen are hideous. She doesn’t listen when it’s explained to her that their work is frightfully difficult, for sandstone can’t be sawed but only smashed. Her good humor returns when she learns that the sound the hammer makes when it strikes the sandstone is classified, according to its sharpness, in one of three categories: excellent, good enough, and mediocre, or as they are called, pif, paf, and poof.
Pif! Paf! Poof! she repeats, echoing what she’s told.
Pif, paf, and poof enchant her.
She uses them to conclude her three-part discourses.
Pif, paf, and poof are also the syllables she uses to assess the quality of her days and her joys, the degree of a person’s charms, or the goodness of a dish.
On one particularly pif morning, when the infanta is in a boat headed for an encounter with a swan, a cry from the bank informs her that the king is on his way to her apartments.
He’s dressed in purple and wearing a cap with no feather. His set features convey deep mourning. He bows and kisses the infanta’s hand. Is he about to recite the Madame, I am delighted that you have arrived in good health refrain again? Before the little girl can get that maddening thought out of her head, the measured voice, the bated, bating voice, the voice that needs not express in words the order, Stay where you are, come no closer, announces, “Madame, it is my sad duty to inform you that your brother, His Majesty the king of Spain, Luis I, is deceased.”
During the following days, the infanta is the object of the greatest consideration. At the funeral service held in honor of the poor young king, everyone’s attention is focused on Mariana Victoria. She doesn’t need to eavesdrop on hallway conversations to deduce for herself that the death of Luis I is going to bring Philip V back to power. She will be, once again, the daughter of the king of Spain. Pif! Pfísimo! Louis XV is touched by the suddenness of Luis I’s death, by their proximity in age and situation, and by the fact that they shared a name and were the orphans of two equally astonishing sisters, a similarity that may have gone even further than he suspected. At his first interview with Don Luis, Count de Tessé, the French ambassador to Spain, observed in him the “same difficulty or timidity in speaking that takes the king by the throat …” Louis XV prays a great deal. They pray together, he and the infanta. She asks her late brother to intercede with the Lord, to take advantage of their new propinquity and whisper to Him, “My God, make the king of France, my cousin, love Mariana Victoria, my little sister, a good and kind girl. Make him love her as she loves him, with all her heart. Amen.”
At the same time as the news of Luis I’s death, reports circulate about the edifying behavior of his queen, “la reina Luisa Isabel de Orléans.”
MADRID, AUGUST 15–31, 1724
“This evening I shall be in Paradise” (Luis I)
On Assumption Day, while all the church bells in Madrid are ringing out and the madrileños are covering statues of the Virgin with cornflowers, calla lilies, and white roses, the king loses consciousness. He immediately reports the episode to his father: “This morning at the second Mass I suffered a little fainting spell, and this so frightened the Queen that she became ill and vomited, but now, thank God, I feel there is nothing amiss.” A few days later, at yet another Mass, Luis faints again. Only briefly, but he takes to his bed. He feels bad, though he presents no alarming symptoms. “I am resting, I have a cold, this morning I suffered a little fainting spell, but I feel better since going to bed, and I end by begging Your Majesties to believe me
your most obedient son.” When headaches, fever, and copious sweats begin to take hold of him, he’s bled at the ankle, and the bleeding leads to the discovery of several smallpox lesions. Children are removed from his vicinity. People are assigned to look after Louise Élisabeth. As soon as she hears the word “smallpox,” she scents danger. From the roughness of her treatment, she gathers that the elder king and his scheming wife have issued orders for a double burial.
Luis is going to succumb to his disease, but she won’t escape either. She doesn’t budge from her apartments. She’d like to be forgotten by everyone. Today she’d gladly consent to confinement in another château, in the royal palace of Aranjuez, for example, or in El Escorial, or in the Alcázar of Seville … but that’s out of the question. Her presence is required in situ, in the Buen Retiro Palace, at her husband’s bedside. The king/father’s orders are perfectly clear; he himself has learned of his son’s sickness while shut up in San Ildefonso. “Despite the King’s exhortations, the Queen has desired to remain at the Buen Retiro, where she is almost always in the royal chamber,” the Gazette reports. Louise Élisabeth is practically alone at her husband’s side, and when his condition worsens, every time she steps into his room she has the impression that she’s walking toward her own grave. The lesions now cover his entire body, with the exception of his eyes. The king is declared to be “without any hope except in a miracle,” and while his long blond hair is being cut — its beauty strikes Louise Élisabeth as never before — he uses what remains of his breath to dictate a testament in which he returns all power to his father and implores him to take care of the young queen. Afterward he still has a few lucid moments, enough time to announce, “This evening I shall be in Paradise.” From then on, Louise Élisabeth never leaves his room. People outside those four walls praise her exemplary conduct; she alone knows under what threats, equal to or worse than smallpox, she is condemned to the sacrifice. “There is nothing that has not been done to increase the likelihood of her contracting smallpox,” Count de Tessé writes in a letter to France.
Count de Altamira, the lord chamberlain, decides to send for five physicians, who confer together for three hours before declaring themselves in favor of a supplementary bleeding. Not at the foot this time, but at the arm. The lancet slices into Luis’s meager flesh, his blood flows, his heartbeat slows down. His fingers are curled tightly around a crucifix; his tormented eyes search out those of Louise Élisabeth. To Father de Laubrussel, a man as sensible as he is kind, the bleeding seems dangerous: there’s a risk that the smallpox, which has reached the suppuration stage, will start its cycle anew. “We tremble for the King,” he writes in a letter to Tessé dated August 29, “but we have no say in this matter, and our only recourse is to pray to God to let the remedy succeed, contrary to all our fears.” The remedy does not succeed, and God refrains from intervening.
She’s at the dying boy’s bedside. A section of the bed curtains is open. The king, his head resting on sweat-drenched pillows, moans. His moan is soft and deep, a song of strangulation in the breathless dark. Louise Élisabeth bites her fingernails. All at once, it’s too much for her. She bounds to her feet, shoves aside clerics and guards, overturns console tables and statuettes, and then begins to run; the carpets become elastic under her feet, she runs and runs, she’s young and strong, her whole future lies ahead of her, she has nothing to do with that recumbent effigy, nothing in common with the ghostly husband who’s pulling her into the grave; she runs. Her goal is to reach the stables, jump on a horse, and ride to Paris, to the Palais-Royal, she’s almost at the entrance to the stables, she spots her own black horse, but two men block her passage, forcefully gather her up, and haul her into the antechamber of the royal apartments. “If you please, Madame, return to your place by His Majesty’s side,” the nearly dead boy’s lord chamberlain tells her in an amiable tone. “This … foray of yours is due to nothing other than your generous sensitivity. Far be it from me to reproach you for that.” Before she can utter a word in reply, her escorts give her several pairs of slaps, striking her with all their strength in front of the Count de Altamira, who distractedly arranges an orchid flower with the tips of his fingers. At a sign from him, the batterers desist and the Duchess de Altamira slips into the antechamber; then she brings the stunned, bruised Louise Élisabeth, who has one swollen eye and a bloody mouth, to the bed where Luis I lies, ready to depart for Paradise.
The King’s illness having grown considerably worse during the night between the 28th and 29th days of last month, His Majesty made his confession on the 29th, and toward evening of the same day received the Viaticum from Cardinal Borgia’s hands. Two hours later, he was given some potions as ordered by the Physicians who had been summoned for consultation, and prayers were ordered in all the churches: the Relics of St. James, those of St. Isidore, and the miraculous images of Our Lady of Atocha and Our Lady of Solitude were exposed to the veneration of the people, and extraordinary alms were distributed to the poor … The King died at half-past two in the morning of the 31st, in the eighth month of his reign, after having given all the signs of a perfect resignation to the will of God … On the first day of the present month, King Philip and his wife betook themselves from San Ildefonso to their Palace in this City, where the assembled Council of Castille implored His Majesty to put on the Crown again in order to console the Kingdom for the loss which it had just suffered. On the same day, the body of the late King was embalmed, after which it was exposed in his bedchamber until three o’clock in the afternoon, when it was borne with the customary ceremonies from the Buen Retiro to El Escorial, accompanied by the Grandees and the principal Officers and Lords of the Court. The Queen his widow, who hardly left his side during his illness, has repaired to an apartment separate from that of the late King her husband, where her grief is commensurate with the loss of the Prince who loved her so tenderly. (From the Gazette, Madrid, September 5)
Elisabeth Farnese will maintain that Louise Élisabeth shouted with joy when her virginal, tormented husband — the too-docile son, the seven-and-a-half-month king, the poor Luis — gave up his soul to God. The former queen, now once again the reigning queen, will further declare that her daughter-in-law had gone on to utter horrors that would not bear repeating. Could it be possible that scraps of abominable litanies rose to the young girl’s lips at that moment, that she spat them out in all their filth, without any shame, indifferent to the aghast faces of those around her? But perhaps it was Elisabeth Farnese herself who couldn’t refrain from such an explosion of outrageously inappropriate euphoria at the king/son’s death, for it brought unhoped-for change to her life: king/father would return to the throne, and so would his queen.
Louise Élisabeth catches the disease and begins to show symptoms. Elisabeth Farnese doesn’t hide her relief; should the girl survive as dowager queen of Spain, the new queen foresees new scandals. The depraved little baggage puts all manner of things into her mouth and will do the same with her sex. “It will be such joyful news both for France and for Spain,” writes Elisabeth Farnese, “when someone comes to us one fine day and tells us that the Queen is with child, or that she has given birth.” Despite the lack of care (maybe that’s what saves her) and the violent hostility shown her — her ladies treat her quite nastily — Louise Élisabeth gets better.
As far as Philip V and Elisabeth Farnese are concerned, she’s responsible for the death of Luis I. They long to be rid of her, to send her back to France, and not only because she’s a source of scandal; they want to drive her out of their sight like a criminal whom they lack the power to eradicate from the surface of the earth.
Louise Élisabeth, Mlle de Montpensier, the Princess of Asturias, Reina Luisa Isabel de Orléans is fifteen years old. She’s a widow, she’s loathed by her in-laws, she bears the title of second dowager queen of Spain (because the first, Maria Anna of Neuburg, is still living in Bayonne), and she can expect no help from her own country, where, in the words of a diplomat of the time, she is as much des
ired as “a bundle of dirty linen.”
FONTAINEBLEAU, NOVEMBER 3, 1724
The Feast of Saint Hubert, Patron of Hunters
Hunting fever is at its peak. Incense burns on Diana’s altars. The Feast of Saint Hubert occasions an incredible deployment of colors and music. The king’s hunt and those of M. le Duc, the Count de Toulouse, the Count de Conti, and other princes of the blood unite. This day’s hunting mobilizes about a hundred hunting-horn blowers, more than nine hundred dogs, a thousand horses. Le vin, la chasse et les belles, voilà le refrain de Bourbon (Wine, hunting, and beauties, that’s the Bourbon refrain): the words of the House of Condé’s fanfare “La Bourbon” fill the air.
The infanta becomes infatuated with a hedgehog.
MADRID, NOVEMBER 3, 1724
Through the Eyes of a Courtier
The Exchange of Princesses Page 23