Kathryn Davis - Versailles

Say goodbye to the eyelash in your eye and you say goodbye to your eye, as well. Eyebrow, eyelid. Antoinette, goodbye, you say.

Nor would you necessarily end up old and ugly and a woman. You could be King of Sweden, for instance, a handsome young count tucked firmly under your wing. You could be a butcher, a cow. Even the handsome young count himself, tucked there firmly yet, I have no doubt whatsoever, platonically, despite the King's famous appetite for handsome young men.

In the beginning the bodies stand empty, like milk pails waiting to be filled. Then the spirit is apportioned, completely at random, and once it's been poured in, that's that. There's no room for leaks or spillage. You can catch the measles from your brother-in-law. You can eat roast beef. You can take a lover, give birth. But no matter how close the proximity, it's only your flesh that's changed, only your flesh that sprouts a rash or puts on weight or bursts into sweat. No matter how close the proximity, you'll never end up with a trace of cow-spirit.

No matter how old you live to be, that is what you are, through and through. Like a tree, when it's sawed in half, or a body that's been torn to pieces by a mob.

It was the summer of 1784. Everyone said I was at my most radiant. I had my two dear children and was once again pregnant, in the early stage that leaves you flushed and bright-eyed and nauseated. My husband was busy making preparations for a French expedition to the Pacific. We'd won the war in America. My mother was dead.

I was in love.

The gardens around the Petit Trianon had been lit with log fires and fairy lights. Anyone who wanted could walk there after supper, provided they could still walk after dining on forty-eight entremets and sixteen roasts, and provided they were wearing white.

The white was my rule. I wanted everything to be perfect. Perfectly beautiful, the sky as dark and endlessly translucent as the Hall of Mirrors at midnight, the moon a dazzling milk white globe, and the courtiers drifting along the pathways in their white clothing like moths.

Everything perfect except, no surprise, my husband, who'd come out wearing shoes that didn't match.

I was in agony, I admit. As if the shoes were a moral failing.

Louis was keyed up, and not just because he'd spent the whole afternoon studying maps of the Sandwich Islands, but also because he wanted to make a good impression on the aforementioned Swedish King, who was considered at the time to be our best bulwark against Russia, as well as Europe's leading enlightened despot. A great theater lover, Gustavus enjoyed traveling incognito. Though unlike my brother he was quite the fashion plate, having made his entrance at Versailles disguised as Turkish royalty.

Louis said I was to spare no expense in planning a party. My favorite directive, even though I knew I'd come in for the same dreary criticism soon enough. Of course I had my own reasons for wanting the event to be a success, an occasion that would not only reflect the grandeur of the French court, but would also provide a brilliant setting for me, Antoinette, the brightest jewel of all.

Poor girl, so full of expectations! She had no idea, no idea at all…

We were to have a new opera, performed on the stage of the Trianon theater. Called The Sleeper Awakened, it was based on a story from th e Arabian Nights about an ordinary citizen named Hassan who becomes a caliph and then falls in love with a slave girl. I'd chosen it myself, as it required the endless costume changes Gustavus was said to adore.

Poor poor Antoinette, turning this way and that in her chair to survey the audience. Where is he? Poor sad Hassan, renouncing his throne for love.

You can generally count on a sodomite to appreciate the company of witty and fashionable women; Gustavus clearly found me irresistible, or at least until it was time for bed. "The Queen spoke to all the Swedish gentlemen and looked after them with the utmost attention," he later reported, though whether he was slyly hinting at my attention to one Swedish gentleman in particular, who's to say?

Gustavus was a tall man with an extremely high forehead and the stubbornly impassive look of a sheep, though whatever his face lacked in expression he made up for with his hands, which were, as he was well aware, his finest feature. He wrung them to indicate anguish, fluttered them to show amusement, waved them around in time to the music. When he clapped, he held his hands absolutely upright as if getting ready to pray, so you couldn't fail to notice how long and graceful his fingers were, how exquisitely manicured his nails.

I thought the opera would never end, likewise the supper after it. Endless supper! Two hundred mouths, all of them endlessly opening, closing, chewing, chattering; two hundred bodies digesting, sweating, expelling gas. From time to time I'd catch sight of Axel, but since we hadn't been seated in the same pavilion it was always at a distance, my view partly blocked by some count's fat flushed face, some marchioness's towering hairdo. Pure and remote, Axel, like the north itself; he looked thinner than when I'd last seen him, darker, more melancholic — but that had been three years ago before he left to fight in America. Of course I had no appetite, not for food.

At last the musicians assembled on the terrace and began playing dances, their gigantic shadows sawing away madly on the wall behind them. Demented black shadows, smooth golden stone. Lilies and jasmine, boxwood and candle wax. When released into the sweet night air, the pent-up stink of two hundred bodies added its own crucial note, one that was welcome, seductive, even. Gustavus took off in hot pursuit of a coquettish little equerry; I could hear the sound of oars dipping in and out of the water, an oddly dry sound, like silk stirred by wind.

Antoinette! Antoinette! There was a game of hide-and-seek in progress somewhere near the Temple of Love, Artois hoodwinked and spinning, arms outstretched. Antoinette, come play with us! The grass was sopping, moondrops adrift on the water. No sign of Count Fersen anywhere.

The first time I saw him he was only eighteen, exactly the same age as I. At one of my Monday-evening masked balls, back in the days when Beloved was still alive, Louis impotent, and I was still a foreigner, my true identity pitifully obvious to everyone in the French court, despite the mask. A foreign body, Antoinette, like a piece of shot in a wound, something that has to be removed before it kills you.

We danced, we talked. Axel told me he'd been to visit Voltaire — all the young men did when they made their tour, as if the philosopher were a monument similar to Chartres or Notre-Dame. Voltaire's dressing gown was faded and his wig shabby, but he had beautiful soulful eyes. Axel said, almost as beautiful and soulful as my own. Of course they were all he could see of me-, he had no idea who I really was until I lifted the mask. Just for a second and then I was gone, leaving nothing behind except, I guess, an impression. Gold hair, white skin. "The prettiest and most amiable princess I know," as he told his sister.

Nor did I forget him, oh no, oh no. And sometimes found myself daydreaming about him, recalling his brooding look and agile body, his fine dark eyebrows and air of underlying sadness, as meanwhile I sat glued to that gold brocade loveseat in Adélaïde's apartments, embroidering my lumpish husband one pathetic vest after another and thinking, This is where I'll be stuck all my life without company or friends. Sifting through the ashes, weeping floods of tears.

Sorrow kills men, they say, gives life to women. A woman's heart is more alive than a man's, if less bold, and so with that heart of hers a woman can endure whatever comes her way.