Becoming Marie Antoinette: A Novel

by Juliet Grey

  I heard that Madame du Barry was weeping when she departed Versailles. I wondered if she looked back as the duc d’Aiguillon’s carriage rumbled through Mansart’s majestic gateway for the last time, or if she embodied her motto, Boutez en avant, and continued to push forward.

  On May the seventh the king discovered that he was nearly bereft of speech. And yet he had to make his final—and as court etiquette required, public—confession. He had not done so in nearly forty years; yet now he literally could not utter words he would not speak for so many decades.

  Monseigneur de la Roche-Aymon, the Grand Almoner of France, made his way from the chapel to the king’s bedchamber amid a candlelit procession of clerics and courtiers, past a phalanx of Swiss Guards and Household Cavalry that lined the grand staircase, through the parade apartment and the Hall of Mirrors. Until now, the dauphin and I had not been permitted to approach the king’s apartments. My husband’s brothers, along with their wives, had joined the solemn procession as well, although we were stopped at the threshold of the King’s Chamber, forbidden entry for fear of contagion.

  The doors of the king’s chamber were open. Morbidly curious onlookers jostled their neighbors and craned their necks in the expectation of a final glimpse of what was left of Louis Quinze. I was sickened by their callous incivility. The king had been taken from the bed of state and placed on a camp cot. On either side, holding his communicant’s napkin, knelt two of the princes of the blood, Conti and Condé.

  The king’s head had swollen to twice its normal size. The black scabs that stippled his decaying flesh offended the flock of priests who were waiting to witness his confession. Even the physicians seemed surprised by the extent of the mortification. But I had seen it before. Two Josephas had departed this world for a better one, their souls, pure and white in Heaven, even if their blackened bodies rotted further in the Kaisergruft.

  His Majesty was nearly mute now; certainly inarticulate. So the Grand Almoner spoke the words of his confession for him. “Gentlemen: The king instructs me to say that he begs God’s pardon for his transgression and for the scandalous example he set for his people. Should the Almighty see fit to restore him to health, he vows that for the remainder of his days on earth he will devote himself to repenting his offenses and to the welfare of his subjects.”

  My husband feared that his tears would be thought unmanly. We stood outside the King’s Chamber, each with a lighted candle, keeping vigil while Papa Roi’s last confession was pronounced by the cardinal. I stole a glance at the dauphin’s brothers. Their eyes and cheeks were dry, not because they were stronger, but because I knew they didn’t love the king the way my husband did. Our grand-père had not always been kind to the dauphin; I knew he did not think much of my husband; and sometimes I imagined that he would have preferred to see either of Louis Auguste’s brothers assume the throne instead. I had once overheard him say that if the dauphin ever ascended the throne, his brothers would starve. But Papa Roi was—I dared to think it at this moment when he might breathe his last in any instant—wrong. He would make a better king than either Provence or Artois, for Louis Auguste had two endearing qualities that they both lacked: honesty and compassion. Would either of the comtes have sent two hundred thousand francs from their privy purses to distribute to the impoverished people of Paris, as the dauphin did when we returned to his apartments after the king’s confession?

  I, too, had made a contribution to the poor by electing to forgo a silly outmoded custom that had been in place since the Middle Ages: the Droit de Ceinture, or right of the belt, a tax that was levied on the people at the start of a new reign. It harkened back to an era long since gone, when queens wore golden girdles about their waists. “Belts are no longer fashionable,” I jested. But the truth was that I already had much, while many of our future subjects had so little. There would be no tax for the Queen’s Belt once I became the consort.

  At the onset of the king’s illness, a candle had been placed in each of the windows of the royal bedchamber. For thirteen days, overwhelmed by the increasing stench of their father’s decay, Mesdames had maintained their unpleasant vigil, joined on occasion, as if it burdened them to do so, by the princes of the blood. The morning of May the tenth broke like any other perfect spring day in France. Larks sang above the trees that lined the pebbled alleés beyond the château of Versailles and big-bellied white clouds, pregnant with abundance, floated serenely across a cerulean sky.

  At ten minutes after three that afternoon, the king’s bedchamber was thrown into shadow, as if the Almighty Himself intended to capture the attention of the devoted onlookers. His Majesty’s breath had been labored and ragged since dawn; his eyes, which had remained closed since the day before, still fluttered almost imperceptibly beneath his lids. And then, King Louis heaved a tremendous sigh, a single exhalation as if to expel the last bit of life remaining to him; and in a fraction of an instant, he was gone. With great solemnity the duc d’Orléans strode over to one of the windows and pinched the candle flame between his thumb and forefinger, quickly snuffing it out.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The End of the Beginning

  MAY 10, 1774

  The dauphin and I had been sitting in one of my rooms for hours holding hands, scarcely daring to breathe. Two days earlier, I had donned black mourning and refused to rouge my cheeks. It seemed disrespectful to be concerned with one’s appearance in such a time of sorrow. No one had brought us news of Papa Roi since sunrise. The clock struck once to indicate the quarter hour. I glanced at its face. Three-fifteen. We heard a sudden commotion, and from a distance, growing louder and nearer with each step, it sounded like a hundred people were fleeing for their lives and headed straight for our apartments.

  As they drew closer their shouts and cries grew more distinct, their words discernable.

  “The king is dead! Long live the king!”

  I gasped hysterically, and sank into a deep curtsy, gulping out the words between inevitable sobs. Louis le Bien-Aimé—the Well-Loved—was no more. “Your Majesty. You are king of France now!”

  My husband cried out and fell to his knees in prayer, clasping my hand to pull me down beside him. “I am the most unhappy man in the world,” he murmured. He looked utterly shattered, a young man broken on the wheel of fortune even as it rose to its zenith.

  The door burst open. The comtesse de Noailles, breathless, was at the apex of the stampede; she approached us and sank into a deep curtsy. “God save Your Majesties.”

  Our hands were still clasped in prayer. “God save us indeed,” I whispered.

  Louis Auguste’s sisters, the princesses Clothilde and Élisabeth, were among the first to offer their reverences, but my husband raised them to their feet and I embraced each of them with all the love of a sister. “What will happen to us?” Élisabeth murmured, clinging to her older brother.

  “We will not part,” he assured them with tears in his eyes. “I will be all things to you.”

  His youngest sister kissed his hands. “Then I will never leave you, brother.”

  Madame Etiquette—did she sense that her days of service were numbered now that I was queen?—ushered us into the Long Gallery. There, introduced by the ta-ra ta-ra of snare drums, we passed under the crossed swords of the Household Cavalry and for the next forty-five minutes received felicitations from a stream of ministers and courtiers. As eager as they were to ingratiate themselves with us as their new sovereigns, we could tell that they would rather be elsewhere—in haste to depart the contagion of Versailles for their own estates. For that reason, none of them was permitted to kiss our hands. Mesdames tantes, themselves infected with the pox, remained away. Within the hour they were bundled into one of the sixteen state coaches that had been standing at the ready since morning, embarking on the five-mile journey to the Château de Choisy along the banks of the meandering Seine. The palace of Versailles would have to be thoroughly cleansed of disease before the royal family and our vast households could safely return.
>
  My husband and I would join his aunts at Choisy, along with his sisters, his brothers, and their wives, although Mesdames would remain in a secluded wing until they had fully convalesced. Nonetheless, Madame Adélaïde, already exerting her influence over her nephew, sent word that my husband should recall the comte de Maurepas, a former chief minister of the late king’s, who had been in exile for twenty-five years for purportedly disseminating defamatory epigrams about Madame de Pompadour.

  I heard shouts outside for “The queen’s horses!” Trunks had been packed for days, ours among them, in anticipation of this hour, although no one dared to leave in advance of the old king’s demise. There had been other casualties, too, we learned. Seventeen brave men and women who had attended Papa Roi in his extremity had perished as well, and the king and I now prayed for their immortal souls.

  “What will happen to our grand-père?” I asked the comtesse de Noailles.

  “Contagion remains a concern,” she said quietly, feeding the words between her teeth. “The coffin was constructed with a double layer of lead and was filled with spirits.” I shivered as the memories returned regarding the death of my beloved sister Josepha just days before she was to depart for her royal wedding in Naples.

  “Those who attended the late king’s bedside have already received the last rites,” the comtesse continued. “To avoid risking more lives to infection, His Majesty’s corpse will be conveyed with all due speed to the royal crypt in the cathedral of Saint-Denis where it will be immediately interred.”

  Louis Quinze had been king of France for nearly sixty years. Endowed by the divine right of kings he was worshipped and adored for decades. How sad that he would arrive at his final resting place with so little fanfare, quickly put out of mind, better shunned than mourned. And then I had another thought: The king’s apartments, all those rooms of state already draped in black and purple mourning, would be ours upon our eventual return. Yet everyone, including the servants, was departing in droves, like hundreds of rats fleeing a sinking ship. Who would scrub them free of contamination?

  By four o’clock, scarcely three-quarters of an hour after Papa Roi had breathed his last, the royal coaches were prepared to depart. Mesdames Clothilde and Élisabeth, accompanied by their governess, the odious Madame de Marsan, who had been a Barryiste, clambered into one of them. The outriders dug their spurs into the flanks of their mounts as their team of eight horses was given the command to walk on.

  I turned to my husband and placed my hands in his. Nerves fluttered in my belly. “Well, King Louis Auguste, I suppose it is time for us to start out as well.”

  “Louis,” he corrected. “Louis Seize. Merely Louis the Sixteenth. There is nothing ‘Auguste’ about me,” he added with a rueful chuckle.

  “Then long live Louis the Sixteenth!” I said, bringing his knuckles to my lips.

  We stepped outside into the sunlight, the amber glow casting late-afternoon shadows on the cobbled yard of the Cour Royale. Mops was tucked under my arm; the other dogs traveled with our relations. The comtes de Provence and d’Artois and their wives waited for Louis and me, as their new sovereigns, to ascend first, taking our places in the capacious royal coach. Persons of higher rank faced forward. My husband sat to my right; on his other side was the comtesse de Provence, nervously fidgeting with her fan. Opposite us, her younger sister, squeezed in between her slender husband and the portly Provence, tried to wriggle closer to the comte d’Artois and rested her dark head upon his shoulder. Before we had passed the gilded gates of Versailles, the comtesse d’Artois had fallen asleep, lulled by the gentle rocking of the carriage.

  The glass coach bearing the coffin of Louis Quinze, draped with a silver pall that was embroidered with golden fleurs-de-lis, had left the courtyard just moments before us. It clattered northward along the King’s Road that led toward Paris and Saint-Denis with what appeared to me unseemly speed, as if the burden resting within it was an embarrassment; it was all the outriders could do to keep pace. More shocking still was the reception it received along the route. The roadside was crowded with people eager to bid the old king farewell in the most disrespectful manner. They shouted “Taillaut!” just as Papa Roi used to do when he spurred his horse beneath him as they raced to hounds. The excited waving of their hands and handkerchiefs were gestures of farewell and good riddance. “Adieu, le ‘Bien-Aimé’!” they hollered derisively. I shuddered to wonder what they might cry as our carriage passed.

  But my worries were for naught. With joy we beheld their happy, hopeful faces. “Louis le Désiré,” they called to us. Peasants hoisted young children above their heads, so their shining eyes might glimpse their new king and queen as the horses pranced by. Louis and I waved to them through the glass, and I repaid their giddy grins with broad smiles of my own.

  “ ‘Louis the Desired’!” I exclaimed, squeezing my husband’s right hand, as with my left I acknowledged our subjects standing by the road. “Imagine! See how much they look forward to your reign?” But my husband’s complexion was green. “Tell me, mon cher, is it the motion of the carriage?” I asked solicitously.

  “No,” he murmured. “It is the responsibility.”

  I glanced at Artois and Provence, the forced cheer in their faces an effort to mask their envy. They had shed no tears for the late king, unlike my husband, who cupped his large hand over his eyes in an attempt to conceal another onslaught of sobs. “They mock him now, where once they loved him,” he said quietly, pointing toward the carriage ahead of us. “I loved him, too.”

  “Oh, come, he hated you,” Provence said peevishly.

  I glared at him and stroked Louis’s hand with my thumb. “Shh. Pay him no mind. I am sure he is grieving for Papa Roi too—in his own way.” Maman would have been proud of my diplomacy.

  “No, I’m not,” the comte insisted.

  “He didn’t hate me,” my husband mumbled, looking at his feet so that his brothers would not see his cheeks quivering with strangled emotion. “He just didn’t understand me.”

  The comtesse de Provence reached across the coach and rapped her husband’s knees with her fan. “Stanislas—now is not the time to be a bully.” She gestured toward the road, the golden light falling on the fields, the sky above still bright and blue.

  “Marie Joséphine is right. Let us talk of something else,” I suggested.

  “Absolutely,” said the comtesse de Provence. “Does anyone else detect that foul smell?” She sniffed the air and the rest of us followed suit.

  “Ugh, what is that?” inquired the comte d’Artois. He held his nose with one hand and searched for a handkerchief with the other. I offered him mine.

  “They are too long in the hot sun,” said the comtesse d’Artois, waking up with a start. Her command of French was still on shaky ground, just as her older sister’s had been at first, although the pair of them shared the tendency to mispronounce things, utterly mangling their meaning.

  “Do you smell something?” her sister asked, ignoring Marie Thérèse’s apparent non sequitur.

  “What is too long in the hot sun?” said Louis.

  “Vos cheveux, Votre Majesté. Faugh, what a dreadful odor!”

  Everyone grew completely silent. None of us could believe that she had just insulted the person of the king.

  “What? What did I say?” asked the comtesse d’Artois naively. Her face was a picture of confusion as her dark eyes darted nervously from one of us to the other.

  “You—you’ve just told the king that his hair smells bad!” I said.

  Marie Thérèse’s tiny hand flew to her breast. Her cheeks grew as red as the silk upholstery she sat upon. “Non, non, that is not what I meant to say at all.” She tried to adjust her position, swiveling herself about to face forward, but her husband and brother-in-law were seated on her skirts, making the situation even more comical. In any event, she would only have smashed her long nose against the front wall of the carriage, had she succeeded. “The horses. Ah, it is the team of horses
that stinks so!”

  I began to laugh. “Oh, mon Dieu. You meant to say ‘vos chevaux’—your horses! ‘Chevaux’ is the word for ‘horses.’ ‘Cheveux’ means ‘hair.’ ”

  Riding on the crest of my laughter, the comte d’Artois pointed at his older brother and joined in the mirth. “How your hair—I mean your horses—smell, Your Majesty.” He held his nose ostentatiously.

  His wife pursed her lips into a little moue and elbowed him in the ribs. “Don’t make fun of me! It is not polite.”

  “But you are funny!” the comte d’Artois insisted.

  It took him a bit longer than the rest of us, but my husband finally smiled. Then he chuckled. And finally he laughed. “That is the last time I will permit myself to be insulted!” Louis proclaimed. “And by my own family!”

  “Better your own family than them,” I teased, indicating the joyful throng gathered alongside the road. All of us erupted into gales of laughter, glad, if only for a few moments, to be shaking off the yokes of mourning and etiquette. From now on the world was going to be ours—filled with dancing and music, with young people enjoying life to the fullest. The days of doddering old men and fussy old women were past. Ahead lay the fragrant gardens of Choisy; and beyond that, for years and years, a kingdom that was ours, Louis’s and mine, to fashion in our own mold.