The Sisters of Versailles

by Sally Christie

  “You must come away. The drafts will kill you.” I am seated by the fire, my arms outstretched in supplication to the flames. Even the ring of braziers can’t fight the cold that comes in from the icy night. The clocks chime nine into cavernous silence. We are in the Gold Room, where my mother used to sleep, and her ghost hovers around us now. Perhaps Pauline is here too.

  Then we hear the sound of the gates being drawn, sweeter than anything that Couperin ever composed. A carriage rolls into the courtyard, fighting through feet of snow, the horses neighing and trumpeting in the thin air. Marie-Anne puts her two hands straight onto the cold glass. “Diane, come here!”

  In lantern light against the pale snow we see a man descend, wearing a vast old-fashioned wig under a tricorn hat. “It’s him,” she whispers. “He came. Only days in Paris and he comes. I knew he would. I knew he would not forsake me.”

  Marie-Anne’s confidence is infectious. I hug her and laugh happily. “He comes! You were right, you are always right. This is not the end. He loves you too much. He loves you so much. Come, we must get you ready. You can’t receive the king looking like this. Some rouge, the pink and silver gown. I will entertain him while Leone—”

  “No,” says Marie-Anne, pushing a strand of hair back into her cap. “I will greet him like this. I want him to see what they have done to me. What he has done to me.”

  A footman opens the door and announces that the doctor has arrived.

  We are cured. Life can begin again.

  Marie-Anne

  EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

  December 1744

  All of them, the hated, the pernicious, the fence-sitters, the black vultures, they are all to go: the Duc de Bouillon, the Duc de Rochefoucauld, Balleroy, the hated Bishop of Soissons. Even the priest Perusseau, though a part of me regrets that one. Five lettres de cachet will heal my bruises quite a bit. Only one man will remain, and on this the king stands firm: Maurepas. He claims that with Fleury gone, only puerile Maurepas will do.

  We reach a compromise: Maurepas will stay but it is he who will personally ask me to return to Court. Perhaps humiliation, rather than destruction, will prove the best revenge?

  I allow the king to kiss me, and when he puts his arms around me my body responds like a flute to breath and I shiver in pleasure. I pull away even though I want nothing more than to melt into his arms and lie with him and erase all of this ugliness in passion and love.

  “Go,” I say to him. “I’ll come to you at Versailles. Soon the butterflies will open their wings again.”

  The next day Maurepas arrives and I receive him in my bedroom. The last few months have been a nightmare but I have come through, and though I am once again in the sun, I am so very tired. Maurepas is brisk and his manner is confident, but in his eyes I see an interesting mixture of fear and defiance. Around us gifts lie strewn on the floor: pots of jams and oils, a goose pâté, a new chair, a box of coconuts from Saint-Domingue, a fine silk shawl. The news is that I am victorious, and suddenly the whole world is my friend again. Diane sits on the new chair and spoons herself a pot of raspberry jam, her eyes on Maurepas. Aglaë sits beside her, nervous and worried.

  “I propose a truce, madame,” says Maurepas in his oily voice. “It appears the king needs both of us.”

  “No.” I am without hesitation, for I have thought long and hard of what I will say: “The king needs me, but the king only thinks he needs you.”

  Underneath his powder the man blanches slightly.

  “You have something for me?” I ask imperiously.

  He hands me a note and my hand brushes his bare fingers. I shudder.

  It is the king’s wish for you and Madame the Duchess your sister to return to Court and retake your places on Saturday next. He would be pleased if you did not refuse him this request.

  I do not enjoy the moment as much as I had hoped. When Maurepas leaves I lie in bed and cry, though I am not sure why. I am so tired, so very tired. All I want to do is rest. I believe my soul is exhausted, more so than my body. It’s freezing in the room—in the whole house. I find it intolerably cold. Diane and Aglaë fuss around me. I can’t hear them properly but I don’t really care, I’m so exhausted and speaking is more than I can manage. I must rest. When I took the letter from Maurepas’s bare hand I felt as though evil entered me . . . Does the Devil work through men like Maurepas? I feel Diane’s hand on my cheek but I pull away from her, and then there is a hard kicking in my stomach even though I am not pregnant.

  But I will have a son, not a son like Maurepas, but a good son. My son will be a prince, a son of the king. I must go to the king, on Saturday I will go. I will wear my pink and silver dress, his favorite, and I will find a hothouse rose for my hair, even if it costs me a hundred livres. A hothouse, yet this house is so cold. Now there are more people around the bed, talking, talking. My head is starting to throb and their words are like little lances piercing my brain. I call to them that they must help me, but they don’t help me and then I am wet with blood, and the blood reminds me of the jam that Diane was eating, and then suddenly, though I am not sure how this is possible—perhaps Richelieu will know, or a priest—I am in the garden at Tournelle, lush with roses and buzzing bees, and there is JB, which is strange because he is dead now and just a name carved in stone.

  But look, Louis the king is here. My love is here. I think the bees are dead. They have drowned in honey, or red jam, but my insides are on fire and there are too many people in the room. I drink from a copper cup but the liquid burns my throat, and where is Louis? Why am I not at Versailles? Is it Saturday yet? I hear voices that I have not heard for a long time and I feel great waves of love coming from the crowd gathered round my bed. I hear Louise’s voice and I want to tell her that I know, I know . . . but what is it that I know?

  Now I am floating down a dark stream. Perhaps it is a canal—at last I am in Venice. Are the canals in Venice filled with black velvet? Hortense is holding my hand and I want to say to her, Hortense, you are a hen but you are my sweet hen and I will love you forever. I can’t get the words out because the black velvet waters come rushing over me, and oh, how wonderful it is to drown in black velvet. Everything disappears in the dark and the last thing I see is Sybille, the witch from the rue Perdue, and she looks at me with all the sadness in the world and suddenly I understand why she could not tell me more of my future.

  Louise

  HÔTEL DE MAILLY-NESLE, PARIS

  January 1745

  The house is shuttered against life and the cold, the gifts lie forlorn in the bedroom, and the servants creep around. The death of Marie-Anne, and of dreams and hopes. Hortense is as white as pain—will she ever be the same? Will any of us? We are all here in the house on the Quai des Théatins, our childhood home; we were estranged, but Marie-Anne’s tragic death has brought us back together. I visit daily and we huddle in the comfort of the familiar.

  Diane gave birth to her child just days after Marie-Anne died, and now she alternates between laughing and crying, as we all do. The child is small and crumpled; she was going to be named Pauline but now she is Marie-Anne.

  “But Paris is not safe for children,” says Hortense. We are silent, remembering our first memories, the vast bosom, the milky smell of the sheets, the manure and the peat fire of the house in Picardy.

  Diane dips her finger in a honey jar and gives it to the baby. The child sucks blindly.

  “Is honey good for a baby?” The two mothers ignore me.

  “But the country—Madame d’Houdancourt’s children did not thrive well there,” protests Diane.

  “Yes, but that was Brittany. So cold! Picardy is not the same, my little Freddie and his sister are doing just fine.”

  “No, I want her close by me. I want her here with me,” says Diane stubbornly, wiping her finger on the child’s cheek.

  Diane’s odious husband visits, but he is surprisingly tender with her and coos over his little baby daughter. He comes with his two children from his previous w
ife, a quiet little boy and a girl with pale, corn-colored hair and no eyelashes. At first they peer with solemn shyness at the little swaddled bundle, but soon they are treating the baby as their doll, playing with her in their innocence, unaware or uncaring of the great death that has just happened. Their smiles and giggles and the cries of the new little Marie-Anne are all reminders to us that life goes on, even in the midst of such sorrow. Madame Lesdig is here too, fussing and calling both Diane and the baby her little chicks, and all the visitors and the commotion help to dampen and bury the pain.

  There is talk of poison, of Maurepas, but the words are hollow and it comes to nothing. The doctors found she died of an infected stomach, worn out, they said, by the rigors of the last few months.

  The king does not visit. Will he come? The unasked question, unanswered as well, hangs in the nursery and covers the house with wishes and longing.

  I hope he doesn’t come. I’m not an old woman but I feel like one: though I should be beyond such cares, I still don’t want him to see me like this. But the question, though unanswered, is clear, for I know he won’t come. He always ran from anything unpleasant, like a mouse from the jaws of a cat.

  “He won’t come. I know him—he won’t come.” I remember him at Saint-Léger after the death of Pauline. He was torn asunder by her death, but too soon he was able to bury the pain deep inside him and then it was as though she had never even lived.

  “He loved Marie-Anne so much,” says Hortense. She is going back to Versailles today, back to her duties with the queen, back to her life that will continue on without Marie-Anne. The new dauphine arrives this month; Diane’s husband will travel to escort her to France. Life, the great life of that palace, of that world, will continue in Marie-Anne’s absence.

  Hortense embraces me and promises to seek me out more often when she is in Paris. “We must—must—stay closer. We can’t let anything keep us apart. Not again.” Hortense cries as she speaks and I know her words are sincere. She is right. Petty struggles, silly feuds, all of it, in the end, what does it matter? We were sisters; we should have loved each other.

  Little Marie-Anne starts to cry and whimper at the world. I pick her up and carry her around the room, show her the snow outside in the winter streets, whisper to her of all the things that she will do and see in her life. I gaze into her wide, unseeing eyes. Her little fingers wrap around mine and I feel a pang for the unborn children that could have, should have, been mine. Only God knows why.

  I hand her back to the nurse; Diane snores gently on the bed. I take my leave of the house—I’ll visit often, and care for this child and nurture her as she grows. The carriage wheels heavily through the snowed streets. Tomorrow I will go to Saint-Sulpice and pray for Marie-Anne’s soul, with none of the spite and hate of my previous prayers. I will pray for Marie-Anne, for my sister, for the woman who caused me the most pain of my life.

  There are things in this world we cannot forgive, nor should we.

  But I can forgive her.

  I can.

  Hortense

  PARIS

  An VII (May 1799)

  The two young women come in, tutting as they always do and ready to scold.

  “But, Grandmama, why are you sitting alone in this darkness? Every time I tell that Sophie to pull back the curtains and yet every time we find you like this!” Elisabeth is the oldest and the bossiest of the two sisters, all twenty summers of her.

  “It’s so stuffy in here,” echoes Claire, settling herself onto the sofa opposite my chair. “Really, Grandmama, I don’t know how you stand it. Why must you insist on living in this darkness?” Claire has a dreadfully affected voice, speaking half with a common accent and half with a lilting lisp that reminds me a little of that woman . . . but I can’t even remember her name now. She wore lavender. Now apparently this affected voice, with its connotations of the street and the common citizen, is all that is fashionable.

  I say nothing; I rarely do these days. We have this conversation every time, and every time I cede to them, but only for as long as their visit lasts. In truth, I prefer darkness. I have seen all that I want to see in this life and now I prefer the shadows. I am not afraid; the only ghosts in this room are small wisps that my memory conjures, that dart and hide behind the sofas, harmless to an old woman such as myself.

  Elisabeth pulls back the heavy curtains and recoils from the window, coughing and smoothing the dust off her rosy cotton shift. A broad shaft of light cuts through the middle of the room in a dusty tempest and illuminates a portrait of Diane that hangs above the mantel. She keeps me company in my solitude, one eyebrow raised, and even in darkness I know she is with me. It is hard to be too melancholy around Diane.

  They come every week, these two young great-granddaughters of mine, thinking with the arrogance of youth that their presence pleases me, thinking to fill their virtue books with the charity of their visits. In truth, I do care not much for them; they are rude and thoughtless, with none of the grace that I remember from the women of my own youth. But I suppose I should be grateful, for they are all I have left of family.

  My two children are long dead; my son, Frederick, died when he was only twenty-two, a grief that is still raw and tender within me. My daughter also died young, in childbirth like my sister Pauline, and then the baby girl that killed her—my only granddaughter—lived but to the age of twenty-four. Now her two daughters are all that are left me, but they have their father’s name and so little of my own blood running in their veins.

  They are dutiful, I will give them that, and perhaps eager to maintain the bonds of family, for they are orphans—their mother long dead and their father executed in the Terror.

  “So, Grandmama,” Elisabeth says, settling back on the sofa, the room now awash in light, “what news do you have for us?” Her wedding is planned for this summer, and I know she will only become more insufferable once she is a married woman.

  I look to them sometimes for traces of my sisters, but I never catch enough to satisfy. The way the younger one, Claire, laughs and shakes her head sometimes reminds me of Diane, and when Elisabeth winds her curls around her finger, as she does when she is bored or distracted, I catch fleeting glimpses of Marie-Anne.

  How long ago it all was, and how fast the time went.

  I force a weak smile, all that my face will now allow. “I am well, thank you, my dears.” In truth I am not; I am eighty-four years old and my whole body aches. I have outlived all I knew from my youth, and even those from my old age. People admire me for my great age, or pretend they do, but no one thinks of the pain: Why must I be the one to see everyone I love die, when that grief is spared so many others? Why do some pass through this world so quickly, while others tarry too long?

  “And you, my dears, what news do you have?”

  I listen with half-closed eyes as Elisabeth chatters on about her upcoming marriage and threatens to bring her young beau for a visit. Claire tells me about the dresses she has planned for summer, in the new slim style. They look like Romans, these young people, in their silly chemises pretending to be dresses. Suddenly I am far from this room, far from these prattling girls, back in the Marble Court at Versailles, shivering with cold and excitement, wearing a Roman dress. That magical night, the night that Marie-Anne first met the king, the night when everything went wrong.

  “I was a Roman once,” I think, then realize I have said it out loud.

  Elisabeth leans over and pats my hand condescendingly, for she knows she will never grow old and foolish like me. She looks down at me with amused indulgence.

  “There, there, Grandmama, don’t be silly. You’re not a Roman and I’m sure you never were. Are you feeling quite well? Have you been eating your fruit?”

  My maid, Sophie, brings in coffee and a plate of tarts. The girls talk and eat as they do, drinking their coffee and clattering the cups as they place them back in their saucers. Dreadful. These days the world is impolite; sometimes it seems as though the laxness of dress and th
e laxness of the manners combine for all that is odious in this modernity.

  I think of them so much these days. My sisters. My memories are more sweet than bitter, though frustrating in their evanescence. But it was all so long ago: I am thinking of a life so far gone I can’t believe it was ever mine, and all I have left are the letters to remind me it all was real. Diane and I were closest, in our later years; we were together, longest living, after all the others had died. First Pauline, then Marie-Anne, both taken so young and so cruelly.

  Louise . . . well, she died on her day of exile. Her actual death came not too much later, in 1751, after nine cruel years of solitude and prayer. I pray she died happy. When she passed they found a hair shirt under her simple gown, and we knew then that her piety was not a ruse but a deep conviction. She never saw the king again. He knew of her death, of course, but if he grieved it was in private. It was a cruel end for a woman who sincerely loved him, perhaps more than anyone ever loved him.

  After Marie-Anne’s death, the extraordinary story of Louis XV and the Mailly-Nesle sisters ended. Her memory—our memory—was quickly quashed beneath the torrent that was the lovely Madame d’Étioles, the bourgeois fish from the forest who became the Marquise de Pompadour, and whose place is well assured in the history books. She reigned for many years and Louis loved her to obsession. He wasn’t faithful—no, not Louis, not the man he would become—and she had her share of fighting off rivals, including, curiously enough, another Marie-Anne de Mailly, a cousin of ours. But that one was just a pale imitation of the original, and she lasted no longer than a cheap-wicked tallow candle.