The Exchange of Princesses (18 page)

She loves to accompany the servants when they close the shutters in her chamber and draw the curtains and bring night to the Palace of Grandeur.

She loves to bend over the fountains and pull algal blooms closer to her with the aid of a hook.

She loves to be tickled by the lace frills of Maman Ventadour’s “fontange coiffure,” and just before she falls asleep, she likes Marie Neige to sing her a Spanish song while caressing her cheeks with the heavy tresses of her hair.

She loves the Water Avenue.

She loves to stop in front of the fountain with the statue of the little girl and make faces at her.

She loves to crawl on all fours under the table in the council chamber, and in the park to slip out of sight, into the darkness of the many bits of forest that have been left standing and marked off by wooden fences. She prefers the bamboo forest for the music of its foliage.

She loves to be the center of the world. She loves to slip out of sight.

She loves rainbows and fireworks.

She loves to watch herons take flight and is fascinated by hedgehogs.

When, for the thousandth time, she’s pressed on the subject of Spain and asked if she misses her country, she loves to pick up Carmen-Doll, hide behind her, and reply in her shrillest doll voice, “Yes and no.”

She loves it when, at the turn of a path, in the morning light, at sunset, or anytime, anywhere, the king appears.

She loves the idea that the king loves her, she loves to be able to write to her mother, “My dear Maman, the King loves me loves me with all his heart.”

In Versailles, as previously in the Louvre, the infanta never goes to sleep without first being sure she’s left enough room beside her in the bed for her king. Tiny as she is, she sleeps close to the edge on her side.

The king’s schedule has become more studious. Under the direction of the regent and Cardinal Dubois, he receives lessons in the politics of the kingdom, in economics, and in diplomatic relations with foreign countries. The infanta, under the same teachers who taught the king as a young child, learns to read and write. She’s burning with impatience to be able to read and answer her parents’ letters. At the bottom of her governess’s letters, she adds samples of the present state of her writing skills. When she sits at her little desk and copies her lines — Com bi na tions of vow els and con so nants form syl la bles: KING DOM DO MI NO PA RIS BI DA SO A — she fully accepts the seriousness of her task. To be illiterate in a situation of exile is a terrible thing. The infanta is conscious of that.

One Tuesday, which is the day when the king receives ambassadors, he brings her his own writing notebook. With her fingertip, she follows the letters drawn by the beloved hand. She redoubles her efforts, doing her utmost to write exactly like him. An excess of tender feeling gives her a tendency to bear down too hard on her pen.

She also takes lessons in dancing, music, singing, deportment, and drawing, but in her eyes they count as mere amusements.

When she’s good, her reward is permission to pay a visit to the king, sometimes even during his morning study hours. In such cases, she sits quietly in a little armchair while he repeats his history lesson or does equitation exercises on a wooden horse. She’s constantly on the point of asking a question.

The king is handsome, elegant, attentive, clever; he promises to become an excellent horseman. To say nothing of his religion: he’s the Most Christian king, and she, the queen, accompanies him with fervor. “Her love for the King only continues to grow,” writes Mme de Ventadour.

As instructed, the royal pair have revived the ritual of traversing the Hall of Mirrors on their way to the royal chapel: “All those who saw her with the King, as he took her hand for the entire length of the gallery, were in ecstasy” (Mme de Ventadour). The courtiers on both sides make their bows. The “charming couple,” as Cardinal Dubois refers to them, delight the spectators. And those who remember Louis XIV’s remark about the severe geometry of Le Nôtre’s gardens — “They lack childhood” — can believe that Versailles, with a twelve-year-old king and a four-year-old queen, is going to be rejuvenated, that the stone walls will be replaced by an intangible softness: the down of childhood …

The king and queen of Spain are depicted in two portraits that hang by the entrance to the chapel. The infanta bows and crosses herself before each of them. She blows them kisses and makes “little loving gestures.” She does the same with the statues in the park, which look as bare to her as French religious statues. (Spanish religious statues, by contrast, are covered with precious fabrics and bedecked with jewels.)

If the promenade through the Hall of Mirrors is one of the infanta’s delights, religious services in the chapel, all white marble and gold and flowers, are pure elation. In the royal tribune, their prie-dieux touch; angelic voices soar; the dove hovers. Peeking between her white-gloved fingers, Mariana Victoria checks to make sure that the king hasn’t flown away with the Holy Spirit.

July is delicious. The exploration of the palace and its park takes up most of the infanta’s time. In certain rooms the floors need to be redone, and there are several broken windows. A number of lowly and destitute people have taken refuge in the attics, while others more insolent than they have settled into princely ground-floor apartments. These squatters are the first to be chased out by the army of floor polishers who flood the whole palace with wax. Other guests will perhaps never be spotted, like the family of white owls nesting in a study. Outside, the grass has grown randomly. The perimeters of the lawns have disappeared, absorbed into large meadows. With a resolute gesture, she tosses the wide-brimmed hat meant to protect her head onto the greenery and starts picking poppies. It’s as if the park has been transformed according to Madame’s wishes, as if her lesson on wildflowers created this new landscape. Alas, Madame’s health is in decline. She’s often obliged to cancel visits. Instead of the dear lady herself, Mariana Victoria receives a basket of cherries. She eats them sadly. When she doesn’t have the heart to eat them, she wears four of them as earrings.

One stormy afternoon, Madame reappears. She’s far from being as exuberant as her dogs, but she has enough
energy to carry off the infanta in the direction of the Trianon. The little girl congratulates her on the return of her health, whereupon Madame replies, “Thank God, I was able to neutralize my doctors’ initiatives, otherwise I would be dead. I told them a long time ago: ‘My health and my body are mine, so I intend to govern them as I please.’ ”

“They obeyed you?”

“They obeyed me. And you too, my dear child, you must never forget that: your health and your body are your own …”

“… so I intend to govern them as I please. I am queen of France, and of my body.”

The Princess Palatine stays for supper. No tutors, under-tutors, preceptors, masters of ceremonies, or experts in good manners are at the party. Madame eats — like King Louis XIV, she recalls — with her fingers and a knife. It’s much better to touch your food. She has no patience with affected people who show off by using forks. The infanta plunges both hands into her green pea puree.

Fetid Dampness

When they’re away from bad influences like the Princess Palatine, the boy-king and the queen-infanta handle their forks perfectly well. Sometimes they take their meals in public. They perform as successfully at table as they do in church or in the passage through the Hall of Mirrors. Louis XV and Mariana Victoria are little model persons, perfections in miniature.

The infanta charms all with her good humor and her rejoinders. For example, when the Portuguese ambassador, having inquired about her health, asks her if “she finds France and Versailles more beautiful than Madrid,” she replies, “It was very hard for me to part from my father and my mother, but I am delighted to be queen of France.” Her intelligence, it’s said, verges on the prodigious. People admire, they go into raptures. And what if it’s all too much, what if she’s too intelligent to survive? People laugh, they applaud her, but they whisper to one another a prediction by Nostradamus:

Under the pried-up floorboards, in the empty armoires, the shadowy corridors, the uninhabited children’s rooms, the cradles of agony, Death is lurking. The “new bride” sometimes cries in her sleep and has inexplicable bouts of fever. She wraps her dolls in shrouds and lines them up in the Salon de la Paix, the Peace Room.

Returning from a rabbit hunt, the king catches cold. His stockings are soaked, but he’s so accustomed to being dressed, undressed, and served on all occasions that he says nothing, despite his gelid feet.

On another day, he faints at the Mass.

The infanta turns pale, would like to take him in her arms.

The rumors about Versailles’s bad air come back, the talk about the miasmas, about the multifarious corruptions fostered in that former marsh.

The infanta is thought to be too intelligent to live long, the king too handsome to keep his virginity for any length of time. Louis XV is the object of seductive maneuverings by persons of both sexes, who plot to gain power over him through the enchantment of sensual pleasure. While still in the Tuileries, the young boy sometimes had the surprise of seeing extraordinarily beautiful young girls — peasants, princesses, sultanas — emerge from the half-light of an adjacent room and cross, as if by chance, his field of vision … Such
apparitions were sometimes staged to give them an air of verisimilitude, as when two shepherdesses, one blond and one brunette, exquisitely got up and partially naked, burst onto the royal pall-mall course in pursuit of a sheep. Play was stopped by the shiver of desire that ran through all the players except the king, who was vexed because a sheep had dared to disturb his game. The plots to make him succumb to feminine charms were all the more relentless in that the would-be seductresses were counterattacking a very solid offensive position held by a small group of nobles in the king’s inner circle, young men certain that their efforts to ensnare his royal and virginal body would succeed because of his implicit consent, his vague collusion in his own exploitation. According to hearsay, which for the moment had not spread beyond the court, Louis XV seemed uniquely susceptible to masculine charms, to the beauty, reflecting his own, of companions little older than he. According to the custom established for future kings of France, at the age of seven he had “passed to the men,” that is, he’d been snatched from Maman Ventadour’s hands and given over to an entourage of tutors and instructors, all of them men. The question was, had that passage been
definitive
? The doubts and suspicions were confined to a small group. It was essential that nothing be disclosed for however long it took to correct the king’s tendencies. But what remained unnoticed in the Tuileries is on display at Versailles and provokes public condemnation.

They bear great names and have quite naturally been designated as the king’s favorites. They are the Duke de Boufflers, the Duke d’Épernon, the Duke de Gesvres, the Marquis de Meuse, the Count de Ligny, the Marquis
de Rambure, and M. d’Alincourt, the Marshal de Villeroy’s grandson … Most of them are married, no older than twenty, fond of laughing, and inclined to find forbidden caresses and furtive bonks in convenient corners of the palace more exciting than conjugal embraces. They surround the king, gain access to his chamber, sneak into his closet, where they caress him, guide his hand, and set about teaching him to come without concern for women or pregnancies. Their words are surreptitious, semen-stained.

The king’s wearing nothing but a white satin dressing gown and long stockings. M. d’Alincourt takes Louis’s sex in his black-gloved hand, on which several rings are sparkling. He makes the boy moan and slide softly against him. The very pretty Charles Armand René, Duke de la Trémoille, sixteen years old, first gentleman of the king’s bedchamber, observes the scene from the stool he’s sitting on. He too is breathing heavily, his hands are likewise trembling. On his knees is his interrupted embroidery work. He’s not jealous; the king’s progress along the path to pederasty should turn to his advantage. At the moment of orgasm, he swallows one after another three round fruit pastes drenched in pear liqueur.

It’s hot. The fetid dampness their elders find so trying suits the favorites. It makes them feel like embracing, biting one another, frolicking naked in the copses. Night after night they gather in the darkness and fornicate under the statues of Diana the Huntress in her short chiton and Louis XIV in his armor. The park belongs to them. They have the audacity of the satyrs. The garden side of the palace isn’t enough;
they venture into the guarded areas near the big gates and even into the Marble Court, where they wind up under the Duke and Duchess of Boufflers’s windows. Awakened by the noise, the couple go to the nearest window and discover their own son with his ass in the air, trampling on all the laws of propriety and offering himself to the young Marquis de Rambure. Other windows are flung open, and the light of the full moon catches the joyful group in flagrante delicto of the vilest sort, on the very ground where Molière, during the previous reign, produced his comedies. The king, God be thanked, is sound asleep.