The Exchange of Princesses (25 page)

M. le Duc likewise takes over the apartments formerly occupied by Philip d’Orléans, on the ground floor, facing the Orangerie.

  IV  
Woe to the Vanquished!

Defenseless

The Princess of Asturias is again afflicted with erysipelas. Her whole face swollen, her head like a stone, she sinks into a lethargic life. Whether because of her illness or through indifference, she isn’t told of her father’s death until nearly a fortnight after the event. She has no notion of politics, but she instinctively knows that once the head of your clan is dead, unless he leaves behind an eldest son or widow of exceptional caliber, you lose and the enemy clan wins. Her despair is frightening. Elisabeth Farnese goes so far as to kneel down next to her daughter-in-law to talk sense to her. That the queen has made this gesture, that she has literally lowered herself to her knees beside Louise Élisabeth, whose face is swollen by sickness and chagrin — this is considered most remarkable.

Louise Élisabeth’s sister, the Duchess of Modena, is quite simply not informed. She discovers her father’s death only by obtaining a copy of the announcement sent to her father-in-law, a letter whose contents he had not the slightest intention of revealing to her.

The Real Coming of Age

Concerning the late Duke d’Orléans, the
Gazette
writes: “This Prince was particularly devoted to the maintenance of the peace he found established in Europe when he came to power; he solidified it even more by new treaties, and later by the formation of the happy bonds that unite France and Spain and are today the source of our dearest hopes.” The infanta, it seems, can continue to be joyful and sure of herself. “She asks only for joy,” as Mme de Ventadour noted upon the girl’s arrival in France. Any sort of music makes her feel like dancing, even a requiem. Nonetheless, there’s something irreparable in the air. The death of Philip d’Orléans means the end of his policies, the burial of his projects. It propels the young king into a new atmosphere. It definitively separates from power all those, men and women, whose presence or whose functions were dependent on Philip d’Orléans. They are now out of the running, Saint-Simon among the first of them. The little daughter
of Spain transformed into the queen of France and her French ambassador both belong to the same lot: those who are to be, or have already been, disposed of. Saint-Simon has hardly glanced at the queen-infanta since her arrival in France, but if he would, he could see in the tight parabola of her triumph and decline the mirror image of his own political destiny. Saint-Simon will go into exile from Versailles of his own accord. The infanta will maintain some of her momentum and continue as long as possible to contribute heartbreaking fragments of joy to Mme de Ventadour’s obstinate lies.

Louis XV’s thirteenth birthday liberated him in the abstract (and the most significant symbol of that pseudo-liberty may be seen in the king’s decision, once he came of age, not to sleep in the same room as his tutor anymore; except that the said tutor had in fact stopped watching over his sleep, only to be replaced by the undertutor!). Louis XV’s uncle’s death liberates him concretely, physically. In spite of his sadness, the young king feels the same new rapport with his body and its urges as he did on his tenth birthday, when M. de Villeroy gave him permission to abandon the corset of whalebone stays that trained him to hold himself erect.

Discreetly, but with implications that Louis XV grasps immediately, M. le Duc absolves him from any feelings of obligation toward the person whom the king’s new tutor refers to as the “pygmy” infanta. Mariana Victoria is still there, but the king can live as if she doesn’t exist. So much for the project — which has proved to be highly unrealistic — of getting the king to love her. The appearances of affection are
done away with. All that remain are the forms of courtesy and ceremony.

At his grand château in Chantilly, M. le Duc organizes fabulous hunts, diurnal and nocturnal spectaculars, for the king. The boy’s apprenticeship to the kingly profession is about to retreat into the background — unless one thinks, as M. le Duc does, that enjoying the pleasures of life and delegating professional matters to others constitute the proper occupation for a sovereign. At Versailles, nothing less than icy conditions can keep the king from his hunting. The courtiers curse his energy, which obliges them to spend all their time galloping in pursuit of some animal; and as the beast jerks and twitches in its death throes, those noblemen — drenched, freezing, suppressing nasty coughs — sometimes wonder whether, instead of delighting in their exploit, they shouldn’t see in it a version of their own approaching end. But as for the king, he’s growing, and his health is a marvel. And even in the coldest temperatures, when frost turns the locks that escape from his headgear crisp and white, there’s something Dionysian about his young beauty. It cheers the hearts of the gouty and the rheumatic and sweeps away in a carefree gallop the princes closer to his age.

Must Christmas at Versailles be preceded by a death every year? Does the celebration of the fabulous event, the birth of the infant Jesus, necessarily imply some sort of counterbalancing, macabre pact? Mariana Victoria doesn’t go so far as to think anything like that and, no doubt unconscious of the repetitive aspect of those December bereavements, doesn’t
even make the connection between one Christmas and the other. She scampers through the winter from day to day, cherished by Mme de Ventadour and advised by Carmen-Doll. She passionately follows the king’s every act and gesture, sends him kisses and prayers. But it seems as though the elusiveness of her beloved, the gray skies, and the tardy mail deliveries, hampered by bad weather, combine to act upon the little girl’s morale. She’s no longer recognizable; she’s grouchy, ready to snivel at the slightest pretext, given to complaining without being able to say about what.

On one particularly dismal morning, she wakes up aching all over; while she’s being dressed, she eschews her usual humming and her usual comments on the different articles of her clothing. She doesn’t admonish a foot that’s too slow to get into a stocking or a clumsy arm that won’t slip into a sleeve. All the same, she goes to morning Mass; afterward, however, she needs to be put to bed. Her nose and eyes are running, light hurts her. In her room with the curtains closed and her heart beating fast, she lies curled up under the eiderdown and awaits the intervention of the doctors. The sounds of footsteps outside her room, amplified by fever, give her a headache, through which she senses the physicians’ arrival. And suddenly they’re there. They move toward her bed. The flame of the candle placed at her bedside accentuates their dreaded silhouettes. With her burning eyes, the little girl perceives the visitors: gigantic noses, hunched backs, long arms ending in hands prepared to crush her. They’re carrying the lancet they’ll bleed her with. Mariana Victoria shrieks and howls. The bleeding must be postponed until later, but the doctors manage to examine the
child. On her face and behind her ears, red blotches have appeared. Smallpox! The scourge that strikes children first, infects their eyes and eyelids, transforms their soft skin into a mass of pustules; the hemorrhagic plague that causes them to die in streams of blood! As soon as the physicians formulate their diagnosis, they abandon the infanta and turn their attention to what’s most important.

M. le Duc flies into a rage; “Not only is this alliance bloody ridiculous, it’s also threatening to cost us the king.” The latter is covered with a fur cloak and thrust into a carriage that deposits him at the Trianon a few minutes later. The cold is glacial, and the teenager, standing before a fire that’s taking a while to catch, is at first disoriented by his exile. The protective cocoon of his habits has been ripped apart. Louis curses the way in which, one more time — the last, he swears to himself — he’s been summarily dealt with, the way his opinion has not been consulted. Is he the king or isn’t he? His Majesty is indeed the king. And it’s precisely because of that, because of the sacred character of his precious person, that it was necessary to act so quickly, to ensure that the disease infecting the queen-infanta doesn’t have a chance to reach him … The fire has caught. The king spreads out his cloak and lies down in the crackling warmth. The road between the palace and Trianon is noisy with the barking of dogs and the laughter of his friends. Louis lets himself give in to a surge of good humor. All of a sudden he likes this impromptu excursion. It allows him to forbid the place to people who bore him and to keep only his playmates near him.

Throughout the morning of January 1, a ritual of long standing is renewed; in a long procession, the courtiers file
past the king and offer him their good wishes for the New Year. The king has played his part in this annual scene since the age of five and has always been resigned to submitting to it as a matter of course. Generally, he simply doesn’t listen. When he was younger, the only effort he made was to remain still. As he grew older and became more compatible with the patient and imperturbable ceremonial mannequin he was supposed to incarnate, he might have lent an ear to at least some of the many auspicious felicitations. He has refrained from doing so. Because he didn’t believe them, and because he was afraid that if he stopped playing deaf, he could be induced to reply. But on this January 1, 1724, in the little Trianon palace he so much loves, at a time when he’s just starting to have a sense of real freedom, the courtiers’ good wishes become clear and audible utterances, words he can believe in, expressions of his own desire to live.

The young people leap from their mounts to the pink marble paving stones of the Trianon. At the supper that awaits them, outpourings of friendship will take the place of etiquette. And the champagne will provide the king with his first discoveries of the newborn year: the ease of drunkenness, the euphoria it engenders, the heat that rises to one’s cheeks and loosens one’s tongue.

Conjugal Hell

The king his father has carefully explained to him what one does; his professor of natural sciences has — with the approval of the church — commissioned illustrated plates that show the male and female reproductive organs. In addition, he has been able to see some anatomical wax sculptures sent from Italy, in particular one of a very beautiful brunette woman with a long braid. Her smooth belly could be dismantled to reveal an imbroglio of vital organs inside. Don Luis shuddered. But in spite of everything, he is resolute. The princess never plays the game of “
Mi marido, mi amor
” anymore. In bed, she doesn’t allow him near her and kicks at him when he gets too close. She threatens to break his skull with a candlestick. Don Luis persists. And one night, he gets his little wife in a tight embrace, his hard, taut sex just at the entrance of her vagina. He’s practically there. But all of a sudden she frees herself, bites his tongue
bloody, and escapes to the other end of the bed, ready to fight. The prince, propelled in equal measure by fear and despair, takes refuge in the chapel. He thinks, “I would rather be sent to the galleys.”

A Defeat for the Infanta

Mariana Victoria’s bedroom is the equivalent of what the city of Marseille used to be, a hotbed of pestilence. It should be walled up, except for a tiny opening her doctors could slip through, though they would still get none of the infanta’s blood. For the present, they have yet to obtain a drop. In spite of her fever, her fatigue, the spread of the red rash to her upper torso and then to her arms and legs, she holds out. With a fortitude that arouses respect, not at Versailles, for her star is fading there (what Mme de Ventadour admires as her “strong will” is more and more disparaged as the result of a bad upbringing), but beyond the narrow, twisting corridors where calumnies are born and nourished and virtues shrivel up. Outside the gates of the palace, the infanta’s courage demands sympathy.

The physicians have tried everything: gentle urging, the allure of rewards, appeals to reason; they undertake to explain to the child why she must be bled and what the
immediate benefits of bleeding are, she must get well, it’s obvious, Her Majesty wishes to get well, does she not? For herself, for her people, because the health of the queen of France is important to her subjects, to the twenty-three million French who adore her. Twenty-three million, repeats the little girl, still curled up and tense, twenty-three million, twenty-three million; she chants the number of her people, the population of France, like a litany. She possesses 347 dolls and twenty-three million French people. Three hundred and forty-seven dolls, not counting the dolls that are shut up in the trunk … For the first time since her arrival in Versailles, she remembers them. She thinks she’d like to have them with her. Those uncouth dolls would know how to stand firm against these bleeding doctors. The infanta — lying on her side, her arms wrapped around her knees and her knees against her chest — wishes she could change herself into a bundle of thorns. She feels a burst of fierce energy. She yanks her limbs out of the physicians’ steely hands and curls herself up even more tightly. Marie Neige rushes to assist her. The men in black withdraw. The infanta’s worn out, but she has won. She recalls Madame’s voice, very close to her, repeating, “Your body belongs to you, you are its mistress, you are not a pig whose blood can be drawn to make sausage.” They’ve gone; they’ll come back. The little girl would like to block up her room’s two doors and two windows. The rumor that she’s been badly brought up begins to be augmented by the insinuation that she’s mad.