The Exchange of Princesses (8 page)

The Uprooting

Of all this — the fires, the thieves, the promised young bride’s illnesses — no one in the Spanish prince’s entourage is remotely aware. The only kind of news that’s propagated (with difficulty, considering the times) is positive. What Don Luis knows, essentially, is that Mlle de Montpensier is getting closer to him, as is the blessed day of their marriage. The prince is moved. He contemplates the portrait once again. If he looks closely, he can see that the young girl’s lips are smiling slightly … Don Luis is mad for hunting, and he has no doubt that his future wife shares his passion. He has secretly ordered the best gunsmith in Spain to make two hunting guns as gifts for Louise Élisabeth.

The great event, however, is the departure of the queen of France for “her” country. The Masses, the concerts, the balls, the Duke of Lerma’s extravagant hospitality all delight Mariana Victoria when she’s in the moment, but after she goes to bed, she can’t sleep. She weeps and cries out. She
hears footsteps in the darkness. By way of preparing her for her new life, her mother speaks to her only in French — in a charming, bookish French made musical by her Italian accent. Excited and anxious as the child is, she has to make an effort to understand. She answers in Spanish, the language that’s the most foreign of all to her mother’s ears.

When it comes time to say goodbye, the little girl is brought to her parents. Her mother wipes away a few tears, her father fingers his rosary. They each impart counsel that the child must not on any account forget. This is no simple matter in the case of Elisabeth Farnese’s recommendations, whose subject is none other than forgetting, but forgetting of a partial kind. The queen says to the girl, “Become entirely French, my daughter, forget your Spanish years. All the same, never forget your parents, or your brothers, or what your grand establishment in the most beautiful of kingdoms owes to our generosity.” She holds her daughter’s hands. Mariana Victoria would like to withdraw those hands from her mother’s viselike grip. She’d also like her mother’s eyes to look upon her more gently. They force her to lower her own, even though she feels it would be best if she could manage to look her mother in the face. But she doesn’t dare. She’s trembling too hard, she’s too disconcerted. “Don’t forget to forget.” The queen repeats her recommendation in French and Italian. Mariana Victoria, seated sideways on the Duchess de Montellano’s lap, feels herself slipping off. She very much wants this conversation — this seriousness, this emotion — to end. Under her extensive array of protective medals, her little heart is wildly pounding. Now it’s her father’s turn. Unlike the queen, he speaks with lowered
eyes, but that fact in no way authorizes the child to raise her own and look at him. “Your marriage with the House of France is a great joy to me,” he whispers with an air of dismay. At this point the infanta would really like to slide to the floor and be comforted. The king explains to her, or to an invisible confessor, that this marital union will atone for the great crime of the thirteen-year-long War of Succession, a crime for which he, Philip V, born Duke d’Anjou, is responsible before the Lord. The king falls to his knees and prays to be forgiven for his sins. The queen, the Duchess de Montellano (holding the infanta, who has gone completely limp), the grand inquisitor, a group of courtiers, a bevy of priests and nuns, and a few dwarfs immersed in the shadows imitate the royal gesture. Mariana Victoria has an urge to take refuge among the dwarfs in the dark corner, but she doesn’t have time to act. She is set on her feet and directed without further delay toward the Unknown. The king and queen give their daughter a ceremonious escort, not taking leave of her until they reach the foot of the stairs. There the royal parents are overcome by sadness and, as they will later declare, near fainting. Together.

What’s the urgency that compels these parents, in the dead of winter, to dispatch a little girl they claim to cherish on a journey that could well kill her? Isn’t her marriage nothing but a mirage, toward which they must rush headlong before it vanishes away? Mariana Victoria herself has already vanished from her parents’ field of vision. And whether she dies or arrives at her destination, they won’t see her again. They’ve said goodbye to a child who from now on, in their
eyes, will be dead, except as she may be viewed in some more or less faithful portraits.

When Will We Get There?

Along the way, amid the cold and the jolting, the infanta constructs a wall between herself and the landscape, a wall of dolls placed vertically one on top of another and firmly intertwined. In the two parental recommendations she’s received — to become
entirely
French and to atone for her father’s sins — there’s nothing specific about the duration of her journey. She’s going away, that’s for sure, but for how long, and where?

At Christmas Mass in the little village where the cortege makes a halt, the Infanta’s chair is placed so close to the Nativity scene that the pressure of the crowd filling the modest church causes her to end up on the straw. Had the ass not blocked her progress, she would have gone farther. Back in the coach the following day, she opens the gifts the peasants brought her. Those that are appropriate — dolls and marionettes of various kinds — she inserts into the wall. She calls for handkerchiefs and shawls to fill the holes.

She doesn’t cry too much and doesn’t complain. All the same, for no apparent reason, she occasionally lets out a piercing scream.

Every morning she wakes up in a different room. She who, in the Alcázar or the Buen Retiro Palace, used to take so much pleasure in nestling in her bed and jingling the little bells suspended beside her (to protect herself from the threat
of scary thunderstorms) and playing with the moon and stars that hung from a little arch above her head, she who would never fall asleep without putting Carmen-Doll to bed first, with her long brown hair spread out on a pink lace pillow identical to her own but smaller — she doesn’t recognize a thing. She clutches Carmen-Doll to her chest and speaks to her until they doze off.

The infanta is terrified of black pigs. She thinks they carry the evil eye. The villages she passes through are filled with such pigs, enormous, stinking, blocking the road. The farther her journey takes her, the more black pigs there are. Pigs and priests and old women. And young ones too, whom she glimpses inside houses as dark as the pigs. The infanta travels hidden behind her wall of dolls. If she’s unfortunate enough to catch sight of the outside world, she immediately covers her eyes with her hands. The outside world is too ugly.

When she grows weary of hiding her eyes, she asks to be blindfolded. And it amuses her to keep her blindfold on during the halts. Maria Nieves guides her. In the end, playing at being blind distracts her for a good part of her journey.

The infanta has a toothache. She forbids herself to cry. She’s the person through whom the crime of a long, murderous war is going to be expiated. She offers up all her sufferings to God. He will take them into account and pour out their beneficial effects upon the soul of the guilty king. She doesn’t cry; she lays her toothache as an offering upon the altar of her father’s remorse.

She listens to the sound of the rain beating down on the roof of the coach. You’re going far, far away, the sound of
the rain tells her. Far from the ladies of the palace and the good smells and the kisses. She asks questions. About her parents, her brothers, her dogs. By way of a reply, she’s given a bonbon. The infanta deafens her entourage with her cries. She has fits of rage. And then there’s the water that filters in through the coach doors, there’s the jolting, the mud, the cold, the fear of catching a disease. Being part of the infanta’s retinue is a privilege; it’s not a pleasure. Only Maria Nieves finds the jaunt delightful. She takes the child in her arms and has answers to all her questions.

“When will we get there?”

“One fine day.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’re going to France, your kingdom. But first we’re going to Pheasant Island.”

“Oh! An island where pheasants live? Do they know I’m coming? Are they waiting for me?”

“Of course. They’ve got a surprise ready for you.”

Maria Nieves and Mme de Montellano, seeing in the pheasants the way to serenity, tell the child all manner of outlandish stories about them. The result goes contrary to their hopes. When it comes to the pheasants, the infanta is insatiable.

The roads don’t get any better. In the long line of vehicles, there are carriages that get stuck in mud, tumble into ditches, break an axle. Whenever such an accident occurs, the whole cortege comes to a standstill, a golden opportunity for the black pigs.

The roads disappear, the horizon shows no way out, but over the course of one night — miraculously — the rain
changes to snow. The morning sun dazzles. The trees are weighed down with whiteness. Everything black has fled. The infanta opens her eyes wide. She digs out an opening in the wall of dolls. In a hamlet somewhere at the foot of the mountains, the peasants, to mark the extraordinary honor of her coming, present her with ice sculptures made especially for the occasion: they depict the village chapel with its crown of birds, the cluster of pathetic hovels, the flocks of sheep, the poultry, the baker’s oven. The infanta leans over the chapel, warms a bird in her hand. She begins to laugh again.

The snow comes down more and more thickly. The roads ascend, very steeply. One morning she’s brought out, all wrapped up in an eiderdown embroidered with flowers. She amuses herself by picking and offering them, one by one, to her cradle-rocker and lullaby singer, the gentle Maria. Maria Nieves: Mary Snows. “Maria Nieves, you bring the snows,” whispers the infanta.

On another day, she’s placed not in her coach but in a sedan chair. There are no more roads. Only steep paths cut into sheer rock.

The empty coaches are brought along, sometimes on mules, sometimes by men on foot. Mme de Montellano is on a litter. She panics. Sweat soaks through her gloves and wets her rosary. Maria Nieves, who has become the goatherds’ friend, charts the course.

The infanta’s bearers are overjoyed with so light a burden. They could run up the mountainside. She feels their youth and the pleasure she’s giving them, and, all pink in her eiderdown, she applauds the precipices.

Charlotte and Pasca

The little king is interested in geography. He loves to look at the large, multicolored map of the infanta’s journey. He learns the names of Spanish towns and rivers and mountains. Although he retains them without difficulty, he fails to recognize them when the Spanish ambassador, the Duke of Osuna, reads him an article from the
Gazette
; the ambassador pronounces all the u’s in the Spanish way, not the French, and makes all the
r
’s sound like stones rolling along the bottom of a swift-moving stream. Besides, the king soon stops listening. He combs his two Angora cats, Charlotte and Pasca, while the ambassador addresses empty space:

Louis XV puts tiny lace bonnets on Charlotte’s and Pasca’s pretty heads. His little cats are perfect company for him. Why this huge fuss about transporting an infanta?

Engagement Guns

Mlle de Montpensier is received by the dowager queen of Spain, Maria Anna of Neuburg, second wife of Charles II, the country’s last Habsburg ruler, known as
El Hechizado
, “the Bewitched.” Louise Élisabeth is quite pale, her eyes watery, her hair unwashed. A cold sore on one corner of her lips deforms her mouth. The dowager queen has the girl sit across from her
in a large chair like her own
. An amazing honor, and a supreme mark of courtesy. The onlookers cannot stop commenting upon it. Louise Élisabeth should be flattered. But she merely wonders how she’ll be able to swallow a few mouthfuls of hot chocolate without fainting.

The girl’s eyes shift from the exiled old lady, a mass of resentment, to the enormous cup that has been filled with the thick concoction and placed before her. She finds chocolate disgusting. She doesn’t like the old lady. She sees in her a woman of another kind. The old kind. Dowager queen. A creature, she believes, without the slightest relationship to
herself or to her destiny. She endures the woman’s dismal company.

Afterward, she returns to her apartments. The two hunting guns are brought to her, gifts from the Prince of Asturias. Magnificent, finely worked objects, works of art, and of course excellent firearms as well.

“They’re for me? Really?” The princess loathes hunting and hasn’t the smallest interest in firearms. She spends part of the night making crepes with her ladies.