The Enemies of Versailles
Page 38
October 1789, I decide. That is when I should have died. Before I saw my beloved Versailles, and all that it stood for, desecrated. Before my nephew and his wife were executed, before I saw the truth of man and what he was capable of. Seventeen eighty-nine: I would have been almost sixty, and would have outlived both my parents and all my sisters save for Victoire.
But I could never have left her alone.
“Who are you writing to, Françoise?” I ask Narbonne, using her Christian name. She calls me Adélaïde sometimes, and when she does it is like music to my ears. I never knew a word could be so sweet. Perhaps it was the title I wanted all my life—just Adélaïde. I take another sip, the sherry making me sleepy and peaceful. I should not have been so harsh with Victoire when she found comfort from her empty life in her cherished cordial.
Narbonne smiles at me, the wrinkles on her skin hiding some of her pockmarks. No rouge, not these days, though I heard that even people in right society eschew it as well.
“I’m writing to Addie,” she says, referring to her son’s wife. Louis de Narbonne is in Germany now, seeking to return to France. We hear émigrés are trickling back, but I will never return to that country that turned on us so viciously.
“Please pass her my love,” I say. “And inquire after Louise and little Charlotte.”
Narbonne still has a family, but mine is sadly depleted. Little Madame Royale survives, Antoinette’s eldest daughter; she married Artois’ son last year. If only they had all succeeded in escaping in 1791—perhaps they would never have regained France, but they would still be alive. They could have made a modest Court somewhere, perhaps someplace like Bellevue was for us, and they would all still be alive.
They even killed that harlot du Barry, and apparently she shrieked like a fiend at the end of her life. When I heard the news, all I could think was that she knew how precious life was. We all want to stay longer, somehow, and even those with the purest of faith resist their Maker. I sometimes think with sadness of all the energy I wasted on her, on all the petty trivialities of life. But such is the way of youth, or of the world.
“Thank you,” I say to Narbonne, watching her in the fading light of the afternoon. She hasn’t lit the solitary candle on her desk yet. We count candles these days, as we count everything—abundance is gone forever.
“Madame?” she says.
“Just thank you.” I look away, suddenly embarrassed. “For everything.”
“Of course.”
“It is my father’s birthday today. He would have been ninety.” Above the mantel in our small, mean room hangs a portrait of him, a cheap copy that has become my most treasured possession. Bernis acquired it for us. The cardinal is dead, some six years now, but what a comfort he was in our early days in Rome.
Narbonne shakes her head and pauses at her desk. “He was a great king,” she says, even though we both know he wasn’t. “And a good man.”
“He was.”
Sometimes I wonder if Papa had aught to do with the state of the world. If he had lived? If he had stayed with God? If she had never come—both the Austrian and the harlot? Could it have been different, could this bloodbath have been avoided?
Perhaps; perhaps not.
Why could it not have been like the American Revolution—some battles, yes, but overall restrained? What is it about the French, about our tortured history, or perhaps—here I face the truth head-on—about our family that made the violence so inescapable?
But the time for questions, and answers, is over. I am so very, very tired.
I smile at the cracked portrait over the fire and raise my glass in a toast to a man long dead.
“To Papa,” I say, and close my eyes. My memory takes me back to a day in my youth when I was young and pretty and Papa loved me. We had been out riding, galloping through the crisp autumn of a beech forest, the orange leaves carpeting the ground. We stopped by a stream and I remember his face, flushed and hearty, happy with the hunt and with his life. It was a perfect day when all our sorrows lay ahead of us, as did the knowledge that the best was past.
“To King Louis,” echoes Narbonne.
To him.
Author’s Afterword
Adélaïde died on the twenty-seventh of February 1800, ninety years and six days after her father was born. She was almost sixtyeight and was buried in Trieste alongside her sister Victoire. After the revolution, their nephew Louis XVIII (the Comte de Provence in this book) brought their bodies back to France. At the Basilica of St. Denis you can still see, through the dim light in the crypts, their two coffins, side by side.
The bones of the rest of the Bourbon family, including Louis XV and Adélaïde and Victoire’s sisters, are held in a communal crypt where they were gathered after being exhumed and desecrated during the revolution. On one placard (there are two) that lists the bones held within, Sophie is erroneously identified as Sophie de Bourbon, sixième fille de Louis XVI—Sophie de Bourbon, sixth daughter of Louis XVI, not Louis XV. A sadly appropriate epithet for a princess as overlooked in death as she was in life.
Jeanne du Barry was guillotined in December 1793 at the age of fifty. She kept her spirit to the end, and they say her death traumatized those who saw it: the stiff dignity of the aristocrats as they faced death only increased the people’s disdain, but Jeanne’s wild pleas for mercy touched everyone who bore witness. As the people wearied of bloodshed, the worst of the guillotining stopped the following year. Let’s give Jeanne the legacy that in her own small way, dying as she did, she helped to save others.
After her death, her body was taken to the cemetery of La Madeleine and thrown into a mass grave. Today her bones are among the thousands that line the Paris Catacombs.
The Mistresses of Versailles trilogy examines the personal life of a controversial monarch through the lives of his many mistresses, with a focus on those intimate and personal moments that make history, just as surely as wars and great men do.
The history books have not been kind to Louis XV and certainly this trilogy has not been either. But from our vantage point of history and our current understanding of psychology, we must remember that he had a strange and lonely upbringing, orphaned at an early age and surrounded by sycophants his entire life. He sought out, as all humans do, the pleasures that comforted him.
More than any other French king, Louis XV was defined by the women who loved him and led him, and each book in the trilogy represents a discrete chapter in his life: his beginnings with the Mailly Nesle sisters in The Sisters of Versailles, showing his transformation from timid, faithful husband to unfaithful lover; the middle part of his reign in The Rivals of Versailles with his most influential mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour, in which he went further down the path of debauchery, aided and abetted by her; and finally his last years in The Enemies of Versailles with the Comtesse du Barry, and then forward to the revolution.
Louis XV was also “on trend” with his preferences in women that coincided neatly with the emerging egalitarianism of the Enlightenment: after the Nesle sisters (from the high nobility) he was the first king to have a bourgeois mistress (Madame de Pompadour) and then followed up that scandal by becoming the first king to install at Versailles an official mistress from the lower classes (the Comtesse du Barry).
The world in 1730—when the first novel in the trilogy opens—was a very different place from the world in 1800, when this book closes. While it is impossible to wind all the skeins that led to the French Revolution around the foot of one man, there is unanimous agreement that Louis XV certainly contributed to what came later.
Thank you for reading! For more information on the main characters in this trilogy, as well as secondary characters and places, and for more of my research and writing process, please visit my website at www.sallychristieauthor.com.
Acknowledgments
Bringing a book from draft to publication is definitely a team effort. Lots of thanks and gratitude must go to my editors Sarah Branham at Sarah Branham Editorial a
nd Sarah Cantin at Atria, and to my agent Dan Lazar at Writers House. Thanks to my readers Sylvia, John, and Vivienne for their early feedback.
Thanks again to Odile Caffin-Carcy in France for answering my questions, no matter how small or silly, and to Deborah Anthony at French Travel Boutique for arranging a backstage tour of Versailles that was invaluable in giving me much of the sensory detail that informs these pages. Thanks to the marketing and publicity team at Simon & Schuster US and Simon & Schuster Canada, and to the many helping hands behind the scenes that I never get to meet or talk with, responsible for all the editing and great design work, both on the cover and inside the book.
And finally, thanks to all the eighteenth-century witnesses who left behind their impressions and their stories that brought to life their amazing, tawdry, foreign, and fantastical world, and which informed so much of the fun I had in writing this trilogy as I immersed myself in their world.
For more salacious drama, check out the other seductive installments of the Mistresses of Versailles trilogy . . .
Goodness, but sisters are a thing to fear. The Nesle sisters compete for love, power, and the attention of King Louis XV in this scandalous and sumptuous beginning to the Mistresses of Versailles trilogy.
The Sisters of Versailles
* * *
Enigmatic beauty, social climber, actress, trendsetter, patron of the arts, whoremonger, friend, lover, foe. Madame de Pompadour, the first bourgeois mistress in the history of France is nothing if not influential, but no one ever captured the King's heart without facing some fierce rivals. . .
The Rivals of Versailles
* * *
ORDER YOUR COPIES TODAY!
JOHN CARVALHO, EXPOSURES PHOTOGRAPHY
SALLY CHRISTIE is the author of The Sisters of Versailles and The Rivals of Versailles. She was born in England and grew up around the world, attending eight schools in three different languages. She has spent most of her career working in international development and currently lives in Toronto. To find out more about the Mistresses of Versailles trilogy, visit sallychristieauthor.com.
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ALSO BY SALLY CHRISTIE
The Sisters of Versailles
The Rivals of Versailles
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Sally Christie
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cover design by Min Choi
Cover art by Heritage Images/Contributor
Names: Christie, Sally, date.
Title: The enemies of Versailles : a novel / Sally Christie.
Description: First Atria Paperback edition. | New York : Atria Paperback, 2017. | Series: The mistresses of versailles trilogy ; [3].
Identifiers: LCCN 2016032052 (print) | LCCN 2016038629 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501103025 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501103049 (ebook).
Subjects: LCSH: France—History—Louis XV, 1715–1774—Fiction. | France—Kings and rulers—Paramours—Fiction. | France—Court and courtiers—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Literary. |FICTION / General. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PR9199.4.C4883 E54 2017 (print) | LCC PR9199.4.C4883 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032052.
ISBN 978-1-5011-0302-5
ISBN 978-1-5011-0304-9 (ebook)