The Sisters of Versailles

by Sally Christie

  Mother Superior comes out into the courtyard to bid me farewell. She holds me at arm’s length and studies me intently. I avoid her eyes. I don’t think she was ever pleased with me. Not once.

  “Such an extraordinary young woman,” she says, and my ears prick: Mother is usually a woman of few words. “Normally I would be apprehensive of such a journey, and of such a destination, and with such an immoral hostess.”

  Diane and I exchange a quick look.

  “I am sorry if I sound harsh, Diane-Adelaide and Pauline-Félicité, but it is the truth. Your sister Louise-Julie has sadly strayed from the path God would wish for her. Yet oddly, I am not afraid for you, not at all. I believe you can take care of yourself. You have such confidence. Not our doing, not at all; you were fully formed when you arrived. How old were you?”

  “Seventeen.” It seems so long ago—nine years in fact.

  “Seventeen.” She shakes her head. “Even at that age, such assurance and confidence. Though I can’t imagine where it comes from, for you are not blessed either financially or physically.”

  “She is morally good.” Diane chips in to champion me. I don’t say anything; I think having confidence is a good thing, but the abbess speaks of it as if it’s something found in a chamber pot.

  “Oh, you are a fine Christian woman,” continues Mother Superior in a dry voice. “And long may that last in that wicked cesspool you go to. If only your strength of character were to be employed to remain virtuous and true. But that, I am afraid, is rather improbable.”

  “Pauline is a force of nature,” Diane says proudly. “Unstoppable, like a blizzard or a flood.”

  The Mother Superior raises her eyebrows. Her face is poached white from decades inside the cloister walls. “Yes, that does quite describe our Pauline,” she says drily.

  The carriage arrives and my sister and I hug one last time. Now Diane is truly wailing, but my eyes are dry. I get in the carriage, my heart singing. It begins.

  “Sister!”

  We embrace and I am shocked. It has been so many years since we last saw each other and Louise is far prettier than I remember. She is positively radiant; the slightly scared, slightly ovine expression on her face has been replaced by a serene, poised mask. Her dress is most elegant: luxurious green with flounced yellow lace at the neck and elbows. She looks sophisticated. For the second time in my life, my confidence feels burned; apparently it takes a sister to do this.

  “You look lovely,” I say, and I mean it. I wish I didn’t.

  “Thank you, dearest!”

  She smiles and I notice she has two symmetrical orbs of rouge on her pale cheeks, a beauty spot centered in one.

  “And you too my dear, you look . . . well. So well! And what a nice hat! Pretty feathers. The journey was not too tiresome?”

  I look around her apartment, keeping my mouth shut so it doesn’t gape like shutters in the wind. The room is not large but it is beautifully decorated, the panels painted with sprays of flowers in every color. Gilded cherubs keep watch over the doors and windows. The plain white walls of the convent suddenly seem very far away.

  “But this is beautiful!” I exclaim despite myself. In one corner there is a pink sofa with a curved scalloped back, flanked by three pink chairs; on another wall a bronze statue stands guard between two narrow windows.

  “Come and see my bedroom.”

  Louise walks me up a few stairs to a smaller chamber where an enormous blue-canopied bed takes up almost the entire room. Two women sit sewing on a bench and they stand to bob when we enter. And this, I think, looking at the vast bed that rises like a ship from the parquet, is where Louise and the king make love. We return to the main room and some of my old confidence returns. Only two rooms! For the royal favorite!

  “Two rooms. He must love you very much.”

  Sudden fear floods her face. She is like a damaged vase; from afar everything appears smooth, but up close you can see the hairline cracks.

  “These were Mother’s rooms. Versailles is so terribly overcrowded, you wouldn’t believe where some people live. Even the Duc de Villeroy! He has only two rooms, and by the east privies, and even my friend Gilette’s apartment has a chimney that constantly smokes. Here at least I have a nice view.”

  “At least,” I murmur, looking out onto a narrow sunless courtyard. Strange to think this was where my mother slept. Perhaps with her lover, the Duc de Bourbon. And perhaps even with my father.

  “I have a surprise for you.” Louise comes close and squeezes my hand. Her brown eyes lighten and I smell jasmine and something deeper and more expensive.

  “Tonight . . .”

  “Yes?” I am holding my breath, and the bees have returned and are buzzing quite madly.

  She claps her hands together. “The king will dine with us here tonight and has graciously allowed you to be present.”

  I too clap my hands, and the bees are silenced.

  I wear my pale blue dress with Diane’s peach bows and Louise lends me a fan and some of her scent. As we are having our hair done we sip champagne and Louise fusses over my dress. She declares it impossibly plain and only reluctantly concedes it will do. Why do women think clothes are so important? Only women care how they are dressed; my friends in the convent told me that all men want to see is some bosom and a pretty face. My breasts are rather nice, and my wit will be my pretty face. I am like a pineapple, I decide, hiding my luscious interior beneath a rather scaly exterior.

  I could get used to this, I think, sipping champagne and luxuriating in the softness of the sofa. Lamb’s wool! From Turkey! I take mental notes from Louise on the king’s best points—his charm and his manners. She lists his likes—pretty women and fashion—and tells me of his dislikes—being pestered; smelly cheeses; thunderstorms. And masculine women.

  Everything in Louise’s apartment is tenfold more luxurious than the convent, but as we sit I spy the little economies and signs of hardship: paint is peeling on the wall by a window, and one of Louise’s petticoats is ragged with age. A single dying daisy in a glass vase graces the side table. Her woman, Jacobs, is running around borrowing candles from her neighbors, coming and going with bundles, followed one time by two footmen bringing in a pair of enormous candelabras. They are placed carefully to flank the table where we will dine.

  “Isn’t the room well lit enough already?” I ask. I’ve counted six sconces as well as a twenty-candle chandelier.

  “Oh, no! Everything, everything must be brilliant for the king. He rarely dines here, and I want everything to be perfect,” says Louise. She chews her lip. “It can be hard, keeping up with the king’s demands. Candles are expensive. Especially the musk-scented white wax ones that he prefers.”

  Why is she mewling about expensive candles when she is the mistress of the most important man in the world? Well, most important after the pope, but the pope can’t have a mistress. At least not these days. Louise, I realize, deludes herself into thinking that the king will love her more for her reticence and lack of greed.

  Finally our hair is done, the champagne bottle is empty, and the servants bring in heaping dishes to lay on the table, among them a stuffed goose, an elegant porcelain stove piled with eggs for an omelet, and an enormous raspberry jelly that quivers with anticipation. Diane would love it here, I think, and then there is a commotion outside and the door opens without even a scratch. He is here, in all his glory. King Louis XV of France.

  “I call him ‘Twinkles,’ ” Louise whispers in my ear, sharing her pet name for him with all the solemnity of a state secret. “Only in private, of course. Because his eyes twinkle so.”

  Louise introduces us and I fall in a quick curtsy, then pull myself up to my full height. I lean in close and make my eyes forceful and brilliant. The king smiles but takes a step back and I can see I have unsettled him. Just a little bit. That is good. He should know from the beginning that I am not my sister.

  Other guests arrive and introductions are made and people generally ignore m
e. They do not think I am important, even though I am Louise’s sister. Or perhaps because I am Louise’s sister? If so, then that is the opposite of the way things should be.

  The meal begins. The men talk of the stag they failed to catch at the hunt. The king describes the rack of antlers on the beast. The prolonged efforts to corner the elusive animal caused him to miss a visit with his children. Everyone listens, rapt, their attention as overdone as the goose.

  The talk turns to politics and I perk up, but I can’t follow the details as everyone debates the Austrians and the upcoming Treaty of Vienna. I don’t know much about politics, but I suppose I will have to learn. I notice Louise doesn’t participate either, but just nods and follows every movement of the king.

  Then the woman next to me, Mademoiselle de Charolais, fearfully pretty and fearfully important, entertains the table with a description of a troop of traveling monkeys she saw in Paris.

  “The monkeys were trained to do tricks, and one even played the harpsichord. But it only knew Prussian music!”

  The guests lap it up. Louise is the very picture of perfect attention, giggling and cooing and sighing at all the right moments and never taking her eyes off the king. At one point he tells her to move her chair away, saying the room is too hot and she is suffocating him. At this she doesn’t even blush but just shifts over, her eyes still smiling.

  I study what the women are wearing—Charolais has eight layers of lavender ruffles on her sleeves—and memorize the food so I can describe it all to Diane. I feel a pang; I miss her and part of me wishes I could sleep tonight in our bed at the convent and not with Louise in this strange and magnificent place. What weak thoughts!

  I mentally push myself back to the table and compliment Mademoiselle de Charolais on her sleeves. Her list of conquests would put my own mother’s to shame, and her face is as creamy and beautiful as her grandmother Madame de Montespan, King Louis XIV’s most famous mistress. It is a delicious thrill to be sitting next to the woman known at the convent as Worse Than the Whore of Babylon.

  “You should see my silver satin.” She twirls her wrists and little silver bells, hidden in the lacy folds, chime softly. “Sixteen layers of lace at the sleeves.” She looks me over to see how she may return the compliment but comes up short. Instead she motions down the table to Louise. “We call her Poor Goose,” she whispers to me, then elegantly spears a mouthful of the roasted one. Charolais knows full well I am Louise’s sister, yet she bothers not to hide her disdain. She then turns her daggers on me: “What an interesting perfume you are wearing. I smelled something like it in Paris last week . . . by the dancing monkey’s cage.”

  Near the end of the meal, the Marquis de Meuse absentmindedly plays with his spoon in a dish of pears with cream. The king shakes his head in annoyance and remarks that the marquis must have had neither manners nor music lessons when he was young, for the sound of the spoon on the porcelain is neither polite nor melodious. Meuse blushes beneath his powder and looks cravenly down at his pears, laying his spoon on the table as quietly as he can.

  Quickly I tap my champagne glass with a fork and sing a little scale to accompany the beat. “Come,” I say, “his music was not so bad. With the right accompaniment, we could have an orchestra and it could be quite melodic. We could call it Pear Poetry.”

  There is a dark silence. I feel Charolais shrink away from me and Meuse looks as though he wishes oubliettes were still in use that I might fall into one and disappear.

  The room holds its collective breath.

  Then the king laughs. Quickly, everyone laughs as well.

  “Mademoiselle.” He addresses me, and I see a flash of understanding in his eyes. “You have a fine ear for music. What would you call this?” The king taps the rim of the omelet plate lightly in a three-beat with his knife.

  “An Omelet Opera, of course,” I say quickly.

  We all laugh again and then there is instant cacophony as the others fall over themselves, clamoring like monkeys in a cage, to make “Soup Sonatas” and “Raspberry Rhapsodies.”

  The king’s eyes are still on me and he is still smiling.

  Triumph.

  After the guests leave Louise fusses around with her servants, supervising the dismantling of the table and food. I sink into her luxurious pink sofa and nibble on the remains of a goose wing. Louise has a fuzzy little frown on her face and I know she wants to say something.

  She sighs, starts to speak, stops. She turns away, a perfect picture of indecision, and orders Jacobs to wrap the rest of the goose and save it for tomorrow. “But you can take away the jelly . . . how I hate things that quiver.”

  I suppose I should make this easier for her. “There is something you wish to say to me?”

  Louise looks at me cautiously. She was never good at confrontation—in the nursery the little ninny couldn’t say no to a kitten; even the maids would boss her around.

  She takes a deep breath:

  “You do not know—you could not know—everything on your first night here. But to do as you did . . . it was very . . .” She searches for the perfect word, so as not to offend. “Very . . . naive? You did not know. How could you? You have been cloistered in the convent for so many years, and our manners here at Court must seem very strange to you.”

  “What did I do wrong?” I ask, trying to hide my amusement. I think of the king’s eyes on me, the little sparks of connection. I finish the goose wing and hop up to the table to see if there is anything else worth eating. I pour myself another glass of champagne and spoon the last of the cream and pears before Jacobs can spirit them away. Mmm, this is the life. I think back to the Mother Superior’s horrid words to me: Not blessed either financially or physically. Well, I am blessed in other ways.

  “You should not have spoken to the king without being addressed first. And you contradicted him! You almost insulted him! He does not like to be treated in a familiar manner by those he is not familiar with. He is very shy, you know.”

  “Oh, he didn’t mind.”

  “Oh, but he did mind! He minded terribly. He would not show it because his manners are perfect. He will forgive—he is a very forgiving man, and I know he will be indulgent with you, to please me—but he was insulted. Believe me. I know him well, better than you.”

  For now. I finish my champagne and change the subject.

  “That dreadful woman—Mademoiselle de Charolais?”

  “Oh, yes!” says Louise, sitting down in relief, the difficult part over. “She’s ghastly, simply ghastly. But she’s ever so influential and Twink—the king, I mean—is ever so fond of her. But that lilac powder in her hair!”

  “And oh, how she reeked of violets! And nastiness. And what is wrong with her voice—she sounds like she is six!”

  “It’s true! Some say she sounds like her eldest sister, who is shut up in an abbey and rumored to be ill in the head. And another sister, Mademoiselle de Clermont, the surintendante of the queen’s household, is as false as a—oh, I know I shouldn’t spread gossip, but that is just the way it is here at Versailles.”

  Louise hugs me, happy now that she thinks she has an ally. We get undressed and I can’t help but stare at myself in the mirror, the candles flickering, my face enriched by the gilded surroundings, glowing from champagne and the memory of the dinner. I see myself as the king must have seen me, and shiver inside. I climb into bed with Louise and she hugs me.

  “Oh, Pauline, I am so glad you are here. This is just like old times! Do you remember when there was a fire in the nursery, and Diane’s bedcovers were ruined, so she slept in Hortense’s bed, and then we all piled in, coughing dreadfully?”

  “No, I stayed in my own bed.” Away from Marie-Anne.

  “Oh. I don’t remember that. I thought we were all in bed together.”

  Eventually Louise falls asleep. I lie awake, listening to the strange sounds of the Versailles night, so different from the convent—dogs barking and whimpering, the sound of marching guards in the courtyard outsid
e, carriages coming and going, giggles and whispers floating in from the rooms around us as people flit and fly through the night, the magnificent palace giving up its secrets and its whores.

  This is going to be fun.

  From Hortense de Mailly-Nesle

  Hôtel de Mazarin, Paris

  November 10, 1738

  Diane!

  Tante is at Versailles for two weeks, so if you want to come and visit, please do. You must be lonely at the convent without Pauline. Tante has not expressly forbidden you to step foot in her house (as she did with Pauline), so please come if you can on Thursday or Friday.

  I trust Pauline is having a good visit with Louise at Court. Tante has not seen her and she says that that is just as well. She heard that Pauline has dreadful manners and that she insulted the king! Well, not to worry, it’s only a short visit.

  If you come next week you can see Victoire’s new puppies. One is very, very small and has the strangest red fur. I also received a letter from Marie-Anne; I will share her news with you.

  Please, when you reply, just write yes or no so I can understand if you are coming or not.

  Hortense

  Pauline

  VERSAILLES

  Early Winter 1739

  Versailles is an enormous place but everything that is important is small. Hidden amongst the peacocking of the courtiers, beneath the winking lights of a thousand candles reflected in a hundred mirrors, the devil, as they say, is in the details.

  Little scratches at the door, smaller for some, louder for others. A greeting that is a second too long, or a second too short—what does it imply? A look given or withheld. A coat worn one too many times; lace used inventively but too often on the same bodice; the crackle of a fresh satin gown, where before there was only wool. Where one sits at Mass, where one sits to dine, in which carriage you ride—second behind the king, or third? The room assigned to you when the Court is at Compiègne or Fontainebleau: larger than last year, or smaller? Minuscule details yet so infinitely, infinitesimally important.