The Enemies of Versailles

by Sally Christie

  “Them.”

  “Who, dearest?”

  “The nightingales.”

  “I can—they sound so beautiful,” I whisper back, stroking his cheek but avoiding the oozing pustules. Perhaps he talks of the nightingales at Louveciennes, that used to sing in the summer nights when we held our suppers and parties.

  Smallpox is not always fatal; perhaps one of four or three might die, a roulette that gives some hope. Then I think of his old, raddled body, and I am again terrified. I sit with him every night while around us intrigue swirls. Richelieu insists the king would die of fright at the suggestion of last rites, while Choiseul’s party is working, from afar, to have me banished regardless of the outcome.

  Enough of this intrigue! Just let me be with him.

  The doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries that surround him, alongside the puppet ministers, are all walking a delicate tightrope: to predict the death of a king who survives is dangerous, but to allow a king to die without confession? Infinitely more so.

  But then his pustules start to close in. All is lost, say his doctors, and even those in our camp cannot fight science. The end is coming—will come—and his confession must happen. And when the last rites come, out the door I must go. We hear the dreadful news and Richelieu tries to bolster me with stories of the Duchesse de Châteauroux at Metz.

  “She was banished, but recalled before the year was out. The king couldn’t live without her, and he can’t live without you.”

  But now he is so much older, and already teetering on the brink of piety. If I am banished, I doubt I will be recalled.

  The doctors tell him the truth of his situation.

  “Angel, we must say good-bye. You must leave.” He is lucid now; the Archbishop of Paris is summoned, and in the morning he will hear Louis’ confession.

  “I know, I know.” I am crying, great rivers of tears that flow off me and over his raddled face and chemise. I want to encircle him with my arms, wrap him up and fly away with him, far from this sickroom and the grim reality of what is happening.

  My Louis is dying.

  “My Angel,” he whispers again, and a wasted arm stretches out for a last fumble of my breasts.

  “My love!” I cannot bear this. It is the greatest grief I have ever known and I don’t know what to do with it or where to put it. Give us more, I demand of God. Give us more time, more life, more love! Behind me, the men are massing at the doors, half of them gleeful, the other half knowing that when I go, so go their fortunes.

  “Dearest, leave.” I know the words cost him greatly, this man who has nothing left. “You must not be here. I am in my last state and now I must give myself to God and my people.”

  I fly out of the room, as fast as I can run, my face blinded with tears. It was not supposed to happen like this. I hate to leave him to the vultures; the certainty of his impending death has stripped the last vestige of artifice from their faces, and now his courtiers regard him with the contempt they believe he deserves. Wise heads turn to greet the rising sun, Chon remarked sadly.

  The clocks chime four and I stumble alone through the great staterooms, through the grim corridors of darkness, as deserted and as sad as I am now. The same rooms I gleefully ran through with Barry chasing after me, that very first night. Five years ago. I don’t want to leave this charmed life and my adoring lover. I want more, more of everything. I want more time! Why did we go to the Trianon? Where did he catch it? Why did we not even consider the new vaccinations? Mirie’s two nephews took them, and suffered no ill. Why can’t we turn back time and do it all over?

  I am crying so hard I don’t even see who it is who helps me to my feet and carries me up to my apartment. Only enough time for one last run through my beloved rooms, the scene of all my happiness. They are empty now; all the good things he gave me, all the beautiful things of this life that can mean so much, and do mean so much, are waiting for me at Louveciennes. They are the symbols of our love and the lasting memories of it. But I don’t want them there, I want them back here!

  “Come now,” says Chon patiently, following me as I whirl through the rooms in a maelstrom of grief. The moon is too bright tonight, shining though there is no hope of mercy or redemption. Below, in the courtyard, my carriage is waiting, to take me to Rueil—Aiguillon’s house, closer to Versailles than Louveciennes.

  “Do you have no heart?” I scream at her, suddenly sick of her capable, cold little face. “I can’t leave him! No one cares about him! He can’t die alone!”

  “It’s over,” she says firmly, and her voice is sad; there will be no more intrigues and plots to keep her animated. She will mourn this life as surely as I will. “All of it, over. Even if he recovers, he won’t recall you. Come, we’re not going far, and only God knows the future.”

  I stumble down into the waiting carriage, the courtyard in darkness, feeling like a criminal. And that is what I will become if the king dies: a criminal.

  Over the next few days, we receive visitors at Rueil; each handsome carriage that clatters into the courtyard brings me hope, for some courtiers are still hedging their bets, placing one chip on each side. Two messengers an hour also make the ride, their horses burning the road, but the news continues sober and terrifying.

  After I left, his addled brain asked for me, forgetting he had told me to go. My heart cleaves that he might think I abandoned him. Only his daughters remain with him, and only that gives me some comfort; he will not be alone at the end.

  But no! This is not how it ends. I will return to Versailles and I will see him again. There is so much more to my life that needs to be written.

  It cannot be over. It cannot.

  Louis XV of France

  February 28, 1710–May 10, 1774

  Fulfilling his shameful destiny,

  Louis has finished his career.

  Cry, scoundrels; cry, strumpets,

  You have lost your father.

  —Parisian street song, May 1774

  Part III

  Departure

  1774–1800

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  In which Madame du Barry is yet again confined to a convent

  I miss . . . so many things. Chocolate in bed with the early sun streaming through the window; mornings with merchants and piles of favorite things; my dogs and my sweet singing birds; my green morning robe trimmed with rabbit fur. Warm baths; my maid Henriette rubbing amber cream all over me, and hundreds of redolent myrtles and roses, gathered in great bouquets around my salon.

  And most of all I miss him, and his look of idle, slack appreciation that never lessened in the five years we were together.

  The letter came to me at Rueil two days after his death, signed by that pudding himself, now Louis XVI: banishment, by his pleasure, to the Abbey of Pont-aux-Dames, a charnel house four hours from Paris. The night I arrived, I wept, for everything was so cold and my cell reminded me of a crypt. The first months were hell: I was allowed no correspondence, nor even allowed outside of the dripping cell that made my chest suffer—they think to let me die in here, I thought in despair on my darkest days. The only silver lining, yet so faint and gray, was that this bleakness was a fitting place to mourn the man, and the life, I once loved.

  I grieved for him, as many did not.

  His death was so needless, I often thought, thinking bitterly of all those ancient men we used to remind him of. He should have lived another ten years, twenty, even thirty years—why not? Cardinal Fleury lived to ninety, and Richelieu is almost eighty, still tottering around, though probably not at Court: the new king will give him short shrift.

  At first, the nuns showed me no kindness and were afraid to talk to the woman they thought worse than Jezebel. They were either terrified or disdainful, but soon they warmed to me. Even the Mother Superior, at first frosty and curt, became a fast friend. Gradually small luxuries were permitted and winter passed, as it always does.

  I was allowed outside and felt the sun on my face for the first time in month
s. I decided the country was quite charming, and soon I came to think of the abbey not as a charnel house but as a delightful crumbling ruin, romantic in its decay. I enjoyed my daily walks through the countryside, accompanied by two lay sisters who also asked shyly about life at Court. I was happy to entertain them, my stories purified for their benefit, and when I described the life I once had, each telling made it slip further away and into a land as magical as it was improbable.

  My grief gave way as sunshine returned, and now I find the slow, indolent life becomes me; routine breeds its own kind of harmony. My cell is furnished with carpets and soft chairs, and I may receive guests and letters, and my chef has been allowed to come from Louveciennes. The nuns are kind and refined, and so pretty in their white habits, and once a week I give bread and soup to the poor alongside them. The abbey has beautiful orchards with apricots larger and even plumper than even those at Louveciennes—the best in seven towns, says Sister Perpetua, the nun in charge of the stillroom.

  Through the thick walls of the abbey, news of the outside world trickles in. After Louis’ death, they said the “barrel” was leaking, and indeed it was: Barry fled to Switzerland, Adolphe was exiled, Chon and Hélène as well. Terray and Maupeou were curtly dismissed and Aiguillon is no longer welcome at Court. All my friends and supporters sidelined or banished: they called it a purity campaign.

  The Comte de Maurepas was recalled by the new king to be his chief minister. If the king had chosen Choiseul, I would have been here in this abbey for eternity. But Maurepas—banished in 1749, more than twenty-five years ago, by the Marquise de Pompadour—was the chosen one, and so he returned to Versailles, all seventy-nine creaking years of him.

  A feeble fool in the hands of feeble fools, writes Richelieu, but Maurepas is a relative by marriage of Aiguillon, and thus a friend. The future holds hope. It must.

  “You’re a plant, a hardy one, you bloom wherever you are planted,” observes Chon, one of my first visitors. She smiles at me and I know she misses me, as I do her. “You look well.”

  She lives at Louveciennes now, guarding the palace for my return. They haven’t taken that, and it appears that all my possessions shall remain mine. All those beautiful things given freely to me by Louis: my jewels, paintings, furniture, and little treasures. Chon oversaw the sale of my Versailles house to the king’s brother Artois, and paid off my creditors and now she keeps my servants and staff on hand. Waiting—for the day I will be released.

  “Really, it’s not so bad here. Very relaxing. Versailles was quite busy,” I say, thinking it was so much more than that. It’s rather nice to be free of obligation and intrigue. “I am very comfortable here, and the country air is wonderful, and the nuns ever so kind. Mother Superior—she insists I call her Gabrielle—doesn’t admonish me at all.”

  “I’m sure everyone loves you, Jeanne,” says Chon, and there is no malice in her voice. She smiles at me again. She is wearing a smart red jacket and looks a little plumper. No intrigue to keep her busy, but perhaps indolence becomes her as much as it does me.

  “They danced in the streets,” she tells me sadly. “It made me see what a—what is the right word?—a fairyland?—Versailles is. Was. I knew he was not the most admired of kings, but the venom after his death was something else. Sad, really. And disturbing—that people should feel so comfortable showing such a lack of respect for their sovereign, dead or not.”

  I can’t bear to think of Louis lying alone and despised, abandoned; they say even his close servants and gentlemen refused to attend his putrid body. “And the new king?” I ask, turning the conversation to a slightly more palatable subject.

  “Wildly popular. And the queen. All feel . . .” She pauses, and shakes her head. “All feel a new era is upon us. A rebirth for France. Fifty-nine years is a long time for anyone to rule.”

  “Almost sixty,” I say sadly. And it should have been more.

  “I suppose you could say he outlived his time. The people want a king who will listen to them. All this talk of democracy and revolution from the Americas—it’s coming over here too. Everyone hopes the new king will have a new attitude, more in keeping with our times.”

  “He’s still a Bourbon,” I say.

  Chon embraces me before she leaves. “Soon, soon. Maurepas has your case before the king, and if he can think for himself, without interference from the queen—that is in doubt—we should be fine. He knows you were kind to his grandfather.”

  Without interference from the queen.

  I can only hope.

  “Just one more,” I say, taking an apricot. I am in the stillroom with two of the nuns, surrounded by an orgy of apricots—the harvest has started and the room is thick with the sweet smell of their juice. I can’t resist and take another, though my stomach is beginning to hurt.

  I have been at the abbey now a year and I am starting to feel as though my life is suspended. Like those pickled cherries, preserved in vinegar and time, I think sadly, looking at a shelf lined with Sister Perpetua’s favorite preserves. The months pass, but still no word of freedom. Though life is pleasant, I know it can be sweeter still, and I feel my youth slipping away, seeping through the cold gray stones of the abbey walls.

  I am starting to itch for silk on my skin, for the company of men and their admiration and looks of longing, and for someone to hold me. I’m only thirty-one! Out of respect to the nuns, I cover my hair, but secretly I hate my coif.

  “What is she like?” asks Sister Catherine, speaking of the queen. She is shy and genteel; the nuns here are of good birth, and Catherine is related to the Marquise de Rambures.

  “Well . . . not exactly pretty, but she has a certain elegance and style. I’ve heard she is starting to dress even more extravagantly, now that she is queen.”

  “What was her prettiest gown?” chips in Annie, one of the lay sisters, pausing from depitting her pile of apricots, then bobbing a curtsy to excuse her interruption.

  “Mmm, it is hard to say.” I look at my fruit and remember the pale, luscious colors of life at Versailles. “I think my favorite dress of hers was a green-and-yellow one she wore for Easter two years ago. The bodice was green trimmed with yellow bows, and the skirt yellow trimmed with green bows. It was all rather perfect.”

  “I hear she wears her hair very high, with ornaments and ducks on it, and everything,” says Sister Louise, wistfully running a finger under her wimple. She is one of the newest nuns, only eighteen, and I once asked her why she took the veil. She told me her older sister had been destined for the convent, but then she died, and the dowry had already been paid.

  “Yes, she has a very talented hairdresser—he did my hair too.”

  “How did you wear your hair?”

  “Ah, the fashions were very fine,” I say, thinking back to the last supper I gave at the Trianon, just before Louis fell sick. “I wore it very high—some ladies were using poufs—fake hair—but I didn’t have to, and my hairdresser wrapped a long orange ribbon, lace, all through my curls . . . there must have been six yards of it at least. He tied the ends in bows and pinned a diamond brooch at the center of each one.” I look down at the half-eaten apricot in my hand—the ribbon was almost that color, and the diamond clusters the size of their pits. Will that ribbon and those diamonds be waiting for me at Louveciennes, if—when—I get out of here?

  “Oooh, how fine,” breathes Sister Louise, her eyes big with dreams.

  “Mmm,” I say in agreement, finishing the fruit. Dare I risk another?

  A clatter in the courtyard—a coach. Sister Louise rushes to the window and peers out.

  “A grand carriage,” she calls, and steps aside that I may see. Six matching horses, ducal red velvet, a striped yellow-and-black shield emblazoned on the side.

  Oh—I sink down on the window seat.

  “It must be for you, Jeanne,” says Sister Catherine sadly, hugging me.

  “It can only be good news,” whispers Sister Louise.

  A servant comes to bring me to
the Mother Superior’s study, and I follow her as though in a dream. No time to change, or do my hair, but I know I look beautiful: lots of sleep and country air have done me well. And I always looked my best slightly en déshabillé.

  Gabrielle rises to meet me, and hugs me.

  “Dearest, we’ll miss you,” she says, and I follow her out to the courtyard and into the brilliance of the summer sun. A man steps out of the white brightness toward me. His eyes show that he has not forgotten me, and the letter he brings shows that others have not either.

  It is the Duc de Brissac.

  Hercule, my Hercule, has come to carry me home.

  Life can begin again.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  In which Madame Adélaïde considers dancing

  The Duc de Duras announces the opening of the ball and the dancers take their places. The symphony strikes up and with dignity Madame Clothilde steps forward on the arm of the Sardinian envoy, an odd man with curious black spectacles and no teeth. We watch them as they lurch past us. Both so terribly fat, I think, remembering my brother’s deathbed, the wobbling fat, the many chins. But at least Clothilde appears healthy, if rather too rotund. This magnificent ball, held outside in the Court of Honor on this steaming August evening, celebrates her departure for Sardinia, where she is to marry its prince.

  “Little Clothilde,” says Victoire wistfully, seated beside me under one of the velvet tents. “Going so far away. And how pretty she looks!”

  “She’s hardly little,” I scoff. Clothilde is fifteen, and though there have been copious tears and pretty scenes of regret, she seems resigned to her fate. I think with satisfaction of my triumph over the curse of matrimony, and how I kept my sisters safe. My greatest accomplishment, perhaps, apart from my deep knowledge of Greek.

  “Well, I’m going with Civrac to get another plate of cherry tartines,” says Victoire, downing the last of her wine. Sophie shuffles over to fill her place, and murmurs something about tarts. I watch Victoire depart, and fan myself against the heat, the dancers continuing their parade before us, the torches and the moon lighting the night.