The Sisters of Versailles

by Sally Christie

  “Oh, yes,” says Hortense dutifully. Diane twirls once more in satisfaction and her skirt clips a spindly-legged table. Hortense’s cup falls off and shatters on the floor. “Oops. Whoops. Madame Lesdig always says I am as clumsy as an ox.”

  When the mess has been cleared away and she has sat down again, I pursue the issue: “Do they ever . . . does Louise ever write about Pauline?”

  Diane considers. “Not really. She just said that the king adores her, but then again who wouldn’t adore Pauline? She is so funny and so nice”—sometimes I think we are talking of different people—“well, I know, Marie-Anne, you never got on well with her, but she is very nice. I think if you met as adults you would really like her. I really loved her, I mean I do love her, and so does Louise, so I am sure that she is happy that Pauline is much in the king’s favor.”

  “Is it true what they say, that the king won’t piss without Pauline’s permission?”

  Hortense tuts in disapproval.

  “Oh, that I wouldn’t know. But I am sure the king does listen to her, she is so very smart. If I were the king I would listen to her, you know . . .”

  Diane drones on. I half listen, thinking of the strange situation we five sisters find ourselves in. Three here in Paris, two at Versailles. And those two! It would have been interesting if they could have come to Paris for the wedding, but neither is making the journey. A real reunion . . . it is hard to picture, though it would certainly be amusing. I perk up when Diane says something interesting:

  “Pauline says she is going to find a duke for me to marry.”

  “Oh, sister, but that is wonderful news!” exclaims Hortense. “Then we will all be married! How proud our mother would be.”

  I smile as well, but inside vinegar curls my stomach and pickles my heart. Diane, a duchess? Here are Hortense and I, with our middling provincial marquis, and, on the other side of the chasm of luck and fortune, sit Louise and Pauline, intimate with the King of France and powerful (well, Pauline at least). And now Diane to marry a duke.

  This will not sound very sororal, but Zélie is a million miles away—dead in fact—and I believe it to be the truth: if faces are fortunes, as they usually are, then my elder sisters would not have been pinned for success. By all natural rights, Hortense and I should be the ones enjoying the glory, for we are the most beautiful, far more so than plain Louise, ugly Pauline, or fat Diane. Instead . . . well, it is as if the world is upside down.

  I’m not sure even Aesop could explain this strange situation.

  From Hortense de Fouilleuse, Marquise de Flavacourt

  Hôtel de Mazarin, Paris

  February 1, 1740

  Darling Marie-Anne,

  I write to you from Paris and a place of happiness. Isn’t married life wonderful? God could not have sent me a better husband than Flavacourt. My only sorrow is that after the wedding he was too soon recalled to his regiment, and I have only seen him for a scattering of days since.

  But oh! What days. What bliss. What . . . Oh, Marie-Anne, I wish you were here and we could talk, face-to-face. There is a limit to what I can write, and though I hold you no grudge for not informing me before of the joys of married life—I understand that such topics are not appropriate when one is a maiden—how I would like to talk about them with you now! About men and the joy of marriage duties. But alas, such talk must wait until we meet again.

  I trust Jean-Baptiste is well and that you will see more of him this year than last. What tribulations we women suffer when our men are not at home!

  I send you this fan from Madame de Germond’s shop—I remember you admiring mine at the wedding and I thought you might like one for yourself. See the rural landscape—perhaps Burgundy is like that, with cows and such? It is rather elegant, perhaps too elegant for Burgundy, but I know you will look lovely with it.

  With much love,

  Hortense

  From Marie-Anne de la Tournelle

  Château de la Tournelle, Burgundy

  February 26, 1740

  Dear Hortense,

  Greetings from Burgundy. I am very pleased that you are enjoying married life.

  Unfortunately I have no plans to travel to Paris again so soon, so we will not be able to enjoy the conversation you so desire. Please forgive me if I have interpreted your letter wrongly, but if you are curious, I am sending you a book you might enjoy. I found it in the library here—for some reason it was classed amongst the botany books, but it has nothing to do with plants. It is written in a strange text, from India I believe, but the pictures are really all that is important—they are quite instructive.

  I have bound it with a velvet cloth; please keep it covered unless you are alone. I think Tante would be highly shocked if such a book were found under her roof. Also, I suggest you do not share it with Flavacourt—even though he may enjoy the fruits of your reading, many men are prudish when it comes to their wives and he might not like to think of you learning such things.

  Take good care of the book. If you do not wish to read it, please put it in the chest under the bed in my old chamber and I will retrieve it when I am next in Paris.

  Life continues on here as usual; coming back from Paris was quite an adjustment! But spring is just around the corner and the hothouse did not suffer in my absence. My Garnier is a very talented man, in many ways. I enclose a box of vanilla beans—your cook will know what to do with them.

  Love,

  Marie-Anne

  Diane

  HOUSE OF THE DUCHESSE DE LESDIGUIÈRES, PARIS

  March 1740

  After Pauline left for Versailles, I received several invitations from relatives offering me their home and hospitality. It’s a pity that they couldn’t have invited us before: Pauline hated the convent so! I didn’t mind the convent, but without Pauline I was quite lonely and so I gladly accepted the Dowager Duchesse de Lesdiguières’ invitation to come and live with her.

  Madame Lesdig (as I call her) is frightfully old, almost sixty, an aunt of dear Mama’s, and a great friend of Tante’s. She has a large mole on her chin that looks like a beauty spot, except beauty spots don’t have hair.

  Madame Lesdig lives in the grand old-fashioned style and constantly compares her current house unfavorably to the palace she lived in when her husband was alive. He died thirty-seven years ago; I hope she hasn’t been complaining for thirty-seven years. There are always two footmen walking behind her now, but she told me that when her husband was alive he never left the house without at least sixty of them. Sixty footmen! Imagine that. How did they all fit on the carriage?

  The house she lives in now is old and dark, on a road not far from our childhood home on the Quai des Théatins. Madame Lesdig swears that ghosts haunt the stairs and she has two women who sit with her through the night, never sleeping, but keeping an eye out for apparitions. I don’t believe in ghosts, I don’t think, but to be safe I unpacked a crucifix from the convent and sleep with it in my bed at night. I try to make my woman, Touffe, whom Madame Lesdig has assigned to me, stay awake all night but she refuses. She says if she doesn’t sleep during the night then she won’t be able to work during the day.

  Because of the duchess’s grand past, the house is positively stuffed with furniture and vases and candelabras and chairs and statues—some of them naked—and many other strange objects, all of them far too big for the cramped rooms. I avoid the room with the fierce tiger-headed rug, but every time I turn around it seems I knock over a vase from China or a statue from Siam or a giant crystal candelabra balancing precariously on the hand of a bronze nymph. Madame Lesdig sighs and says I must aspire to move elegantly at all times, to be more like a swan than a bullock.

  “If I were younger,” she says, “I would mind terribly all this clumsy destruction of my pieces of art.” She calls them art but truly they are just vases and candlesticks. “But I am old enough to know that things that don’t live are usually replaceable.”

  Madame Lesdig no longer travels much, but there are many vi
sitors to the house and I am often invited to sit with her when she greets her guests. I may also come and go as I please, as long as I am with Touffe or a footman. The house is just over the river from the gardens at the Tuileries and some days I walk there. My childhood home is also very close, just by the river, and once I walked there. It looked the same; I don’t know who lives there now.

  Sometimes I visit the convent, and Madame de Dray and the other ladies keep me updated on the gossip while I share with them all I learn at Madame Lesdig’s. The drops—oh, I shouldn’t say that, that’s what Pauline always used to call them—greet me and shriek when they learn I did not leave to be married. And me already twenty-six!

  At first the food at Madame Lesdig’s was not very good; the duchess has lost most of her teeth and prefers soups and mashed chestnuts for her dinner. She says I should follow her diet, for I am, as she terms it, “grossly fat.” “Strive to be more like an eel and less like a whale,” she says. After I dine with the duchess I go down to the kitchens for my second dinner. The cook is very kind and makes a delicious pigeon pie with sorrel, and if I ask nicely he will even bake me a sugar tart sprinkled with ginger, my favorite, and just for me.

  The best thing about Madame Lesdig’s house is the cats; there are dozens of them and there are always adorable kittens of every size to be cuddled and played with. The cats roam the house with impunity and trip up the footmen in the darkly lit rooms. I am certain the footmen break more vases and mirrors than I do.

  “You see,” Madame Lesdig instructs me wearily, “how elegant and spry they are? You must strive to be more like a cat, Diane-Adelaide, and less like an ox.” She sighs. “That was from India.”

  “Yes, Aunt,” I say, and she motions to one of the footmen to pick up the pieces. It was once a delicate ostrich egg, carved to allow a candle to sit inside. Now it’s just a pile of shell.

  From Pauline de Vintimille

  Château de Versailles

  March 20, 1740

  D—

  I know it has been a long time, but I have been frightfully busy. Today the king is engaged with an enormous delegation of vintners and economists—this wicked, never-ending winter has killed all the vines and wine may be in short supply this summer—so I have some time free. I shall write you a lovely long letter.

  I am glad you like living at Madame de Lesdiguières, though I am sure you will miss Madame de Dray and some of the other ladies at the convent. Did Mother Superior say anything cruel to you on your last day, as she did to me? Probably not; she always liked you.

  I am sorry that Madame de Lesdig—as you call her—has hurt her . . . herself. I am not sure from your penmanship whether it was her foot or her tooth that was hurt. Either way, I hope it is better.

  Did you attend Hortense’s wedding? I heard Flavacourt is a blustering fool who has been saying treasonous things. He shouldn’t worry; the king is not interested in Hortense because he is only interested in me! Now that I am married, the king and I have become closer. Much closer. Ask Madame de Dray what I mean. It is wonderful and very exciting—men are such strange creatures. You will understand when you are married. I think he loves me, a thought that fills me with a strange elation I can’t well describe. I like him too, well enough. Goodness, I hope the spies don’t open these letters.

  My husband was quite annoying at first, I think he actually expected me to act as a wife to him. What a pimply-faced fool! But he cannot complain; now he is allowed to ride in the same carriage as the king when they depart on the hunt.

  So, I promised I would share with you the details of my presentation dress—I am sorry it has taken me so long to respond. The king and I have been busy at Choisy—he tells me he is renovating the palace just for me! Imagine that—a palace as a gift! It—and I—will be famous throughout Europe. I will insist that one of the bedrooms be decorated in yellow, your favorite color, and it will be where you will stay when you come to visit.

  So, my presentation. My dress was of silver satin with pale lemon lace everywhere, six layers at the sleeves! The panniers were dreadfully wide but necessary, the dressmaker told me, to make the right impression. It was very hard to get through the doors of the smaller rooms—I had to walk sideways like a crab. Very annoying. I insisted the hairdresser—Charolais lent me hers—dress my hair high. He refused, saying he was only able to work with modern styles, but I insisted and so he piled my hair a few inches high, and dressed it with ribbons of the same lemon lace. So then I was both tall and wide! And long—my train went on forever. I felt very triumphant and it was wonderful.

  The queen was not very happy to meet me, though she was not rude of course. She’s rather inconsequential, I think; my presentation was the first time she spoke to me and it may be the last, though I don’t care. Thank goodness I am not in her service, as Louise is! Hmm, I don’t think the spies read these letters. But I am not saying anything that everyone doesn’t already know.

  I had my dressmaker remove the yellow lace from my dress and I enclose it for you; I know you will like it. I am also thinking of saving my presentation dress for you—for your wedding. Now that mine is over, it’s time to start planning yours.

  I promise.

  Our sister Louise is well, as always, and is delighted with my marriage and my prospects. For a while she was thinking of retiring to the convent at Poissy but it now seems she has changed her mind and prefers to stay at Court.

  Love,

  P

  Louise

  VERSAILLES

  April 1740

  Zélie used to say the only thing more tiresome than a woman with a tongue is a woman with a tongue who repeats herself. Or something like that. Though it has been more than a year since Pauline came to Court and everything went wrong, the hurt and the despair do not subside. I try to be pleasant and accepting with Pauline. I keep my same smile and light conversation and the care of my toilette as I always did, but inside, my heart is simply breaking. And I do not think there is anything in this world that can piece it back together again.

  At the end of the New Year’s festivities, especially lavish this year to usher in the new decade, Louis gave a small dinner in his most private chambers and after much teasing presented Pauline with a beautiful gilded oil box. My own gift to him—a pair of candlesticks of the finest Saxony porcelain, decorated with his favorite scenes of the hunt—received only a perfunctory nod. He didn’t give the queen a New Year’s gift, nor any of his children. And certainly not me. I know Fleury has been urging economies on him recently—and with the continuing famine there is a need to cut expenses—but surely he didn’t mean to include New Year’s gifts?

  Pauline is the only one who received anything. I know I must begrudge him nothing, but the look of pride in his eyes as Pauline accepted her present . . . Something inside me died. I must give up my fantasies of his return to me and accept that as long as Pauline lives, there can be no true reconciliation.

  I can only seek what comfort I can in his presence: his occasional tendernesses; the time when he was ill with a fever and declared that only I should nurse him. For three blissful days I tended him and fixed a special broth of turnips recommended by the doctor. He drank it gratefully and declared it prepared by the hands of love. He wanted none but me by his bedside; he understood that Pauline would be useless.

  But what can I do—wish continued sickness upon my beloved so that I may be his nurse? No, I cannot do that.

  Recently Pauline has been less cold to me, less demanding. I believe she likes me at her side, as a confidante and foil. As I once wanted her to be mine! Oh, how very ironic, how very unfair. How I wish I had never invited her. What did I do to deserve a sister like Pauline?

  The king is often at his new palace of Choisy with her. There is much work to be done there—improving and redecorating—and he is enthusiastically overseeing all of it. They are enthusiastically overseeing it; Louis declares it will be his gift to Pauline and that when they are finished it will be the most beautiful pa
lace in Europe.

  He never gave me a palace.

  I have been to Choisy a few times and Louis is very energetic there, like a young boy with a newfound passion. He spends hours with the architects and works with the carpenters on their drawings, making changes here, suggesting other designs. The Court buzzes with the news that he has even taken up cooking. Apparently last week he made a delicious soup from the mushrooms he and the courtiers had spent an afternoon gathering from the forest. Gathering mushrooms! Like peasants! Tales of these scenes of easy domesticity burn my ears and deepen my despair—how was I to know that Louis wanted to be like a peasant?

  Oh, despair.

  I cannot endure this life, I simply cannot.

  From Louise de Mailly

  Château de Versailles

  A dark day, 1740

  Dearest Mother,

  How are you, dear Mama? Are you happy where you are? I miss you so much, Mama, I remember when we would come down from the nursery to your wonderful golden chamber, and you would lie with us on the bed and hold us and feed us candies. How I long to feel your arms around me again!

  I am so alone, I turned to Pauline when I needed guidance, I had hoped she would help me but she did not. She did not. She is . . . well, I cannot write what I think of her, for though she has done me a hateful service, she is still your daughter. And my sister.

  Oh, Mama, how I wish you were here to guide me. Do you remember how you hugged me the day of my wedding? You said you would always be there for me, but then you died.

  Though it is wicked to think such thoughts, and even more wicked to write them, sometimes I envy you, for you are in a far better place and all the grief and the sorrow of this cruel world are behind you. You are at peace, a state so rare here on earth.