Kathryn Davis - Versailles

But only for a moment. Once it sunk in that Antoinette wasn't going to die, once word got out that her belly had been restored to its former supple state and that she was eating cream of rice with biscuit and a little poached chicken, everybody suddenly remembered how much they didn't like her. The Austrian Bitch — a big dis — appointment. Couldn't even be counted on to get the baby's sex right…

Marie-Thérèse Charlotte. Popularly known as Madame Royale, and nicknamed Mousseline la Sérieuse by her doting parents. A pretty child, with her mother's clear fair skin and large blue eyes, the older she grew and the more male siblings she acquired, the more her habitual gravity turned to sullenness, the sort of dusty limp look a sun-loving plant, a daisy for instance, develops when stuck in a shady part of the garden.

She would outlive them all, La Sérieuse, ending her days deep in the woods in a dark stone house, with only mice and squirrels and owls and the occasional fox for company. A persistent sighing of wind in the trees, a constant rain of leaves and acorns. A leaky roof, a smoking fireplace. Once upon a time she was a princess and she was crying because she was teething, and she was holding onto her father's finger as she sat on his lap in a wing chair covered in white gros de Tours. She loved to hold onto that finger, so long and plump and warm, with a consoling knob of knuckle in the middle and a smooth gold ring at the base. Big white clouds sailing past the window, and her father giving off his usual smell of sweat and horse manure and wine. Her mother playing the harp. Pling pling pling. I had a little nut tree and nothing would it bear.

La Sérieuse died in 1851 at the age of seventy-two, the same year Louis Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor. The house fell into ruins and was sold as scrap. Eventually the road to Quimper was built over the place where it had stood.

The English-style garden of Montreuil, the Prince and Princesse de Guéménéee's small yet graciously appointed chateau. It is a brilliant afternoon in early autumn, 1782; the Princesse is seated on a stone banquette, surrounded by her dogs. She is wearing a simple white lawn dress in the Creole style currently favored by the Queen, and a wide-brimmed straw hat, its blue ribbons loose and dancing in the breeze. Her eyes are closed.

PRINCESSE: HOW out of sorts I feel today, my darlings! Not unlike a soup tureen in the hands of a clumsy servant, if you know what I mean. Come closer. Speak to me. Set my mind at ease.

COOKIE: Hark, hark, the dogs do bark…

POUNCE: The beggars are coming to town…

PRINCESSE: Please. You're just making things worse. She rubs her temples and sighs. I want good news. Tell me some good news. The war in America? My dear friend Antoinette? Her adorable children?

WINNIE: Your dear friend Antoinette has an income of between three and four million livres a year.

PEARL: She also has one hundred seventy new dresses since January. White spots on a lavender ground. Gosling green with white spots. Mottled lilac.

LULU: Spots are all the rage.

WINNIE: Not to mention she's more beautiful than ever. Everythingthat astonishes the soul leads to the sublime — Diderot said that.

PEARL: Infernal depths, darkened skies, deep seas, somber forests. The war in America is over, by the way.

PRINCESSE: Hush, hush. You've made your point.

POUNCE: A clear idea is another name for a little idea. He bares his teeth and, growls.

COOKIE: Pounce is a very clever boy, but dangerous.

LULU: He's a very bad boy.

A shower of yellow leaves blows in from stage left; Pearl paws at the Princesse's shoe, whining.

PRINCESSE: This wind! If it doesn't let up soon I'm going to have to go inside.

PEARL: But I thought you wanted to hear about the adorable children. Don't you want to hear about them?

PRINCESSE: Yes. That's right. I do.

COOKIE: The little girl is solid as a rock, but the Dauphin's a mess. His vertebrae are put together wrong.

PRINCESSE: I'm their governess. All I have to do is look at them to know that.

CLIO, angry: Then what more do you expect? You of all people should know that the future is off-limits, even to the dead.

COOKIE: You of all people.

More leaves blow in; the dogs become suddenly watchful, tense, their muzzles raised, their ears pricked. The wind lifts the Princesses hat from her head and carries it, ribbons atwirl, toward the chateau.

PRINCESSE: Stop please!

COOKIE: But we can't. We can't.

FLOSS: You of all people should know that we can't stop anything.

PEARL: Where the sheep is tied, it must graze.

COOKIE: Famine and pestilence.

WINNIE: Fire and flood.

Suddenly everything is in motion, the agitated dogs, the blowing leaves, the Princesses gauzy white skirts. A combined sound of barking and snarling and howling can be heard, as well as the leaves' dry rattle and the flapping of fab — ric. And then, just as suddenly, the wind dies down; everything becomes perfectly still. By the time the Prince enters, stage right, the Princesse is paging through her breviary, and the dogs are lying in various postures of repose throughout the leaf-strewn garden. The Prince de Guéménée is a heavyset middle-aged man with a wild look in his eye. He is wearing a dove gray frock coat and tan riding breeches; his thinning white hair is braided into a pigtail and tied with a black ribbon.

PRINCE: Where on earth have you been, my darling? I've been looking everywhere, calling and calling.

PRINCESSE, setting her breviary aside: Nowhere but here, my darling.

POUNCE: Nowhere but nowhere, don't you mean?

The Prince sinks heavily onto the banquette beside the Princesse and heaves a loud sigh.

PRINCE: Then you haven't heard.

PRINCESSE: Heard what?

PRINCE: That we are ruined.

PRINCESSE: Indeed. She laughs nervously. And shall we have nothing to eat but pig swill from now on?

PRINCE: Please, my darling. Try to be serious. Our debt is somewhere in excess of thirty-three million livres.

PRINCESSE: Ours and everyone else's.

PRINCE: You don't understand. Debt is like building a castle in the air, stone by stone by nonexistent stone. To be free of a tangle you must borrow, to borrow you must be at ease, to be at ease you must spend. And then one day a real crack appears, and the whole thing falls in a heap at your feet. He puts his head in his hands.

LULU: Like faith.

OPHELIA: A castle built to the glory of God will never fall.

PRINCESSE: But you can't live in it, can you? Can you?

PRINCE: My darling, please try to concentrate. I've had to declare bankruptcy.

OPHELIA: With faith, two fish can feed thousands.

POUNCE: Not if there's a cat around.

PRINCESSE: YOU aren't answering me.

LULU: Death to the cats!

And if I had it to do over? Would I choose to live my life differently?

What a question!

Change even the smallest detail, the eyelash that got in your eye that summer night when Count Axel Fersen — beloved Axel! — spirited you off with him to the North Quincunx, and the next thing you know you're an old woman raising pigs in the Perigord. An ugly old woman with multiple chins and liver spots and a head where a head's supposed to be, attached to a neck, that is, which is in turn attached to a body.

Joséphine, he called me. A pet name, though of course I remained Antoinette, just as the Quincunx used to be called the Great Labyrinth.

They amount to the same thing, choice and fate. No one made me be Queen, and yet. "You took the trouble to be born, nothing more," wrote Beaumarchais.