Kathryn Davis - Versailles

But, for now, he had come back. Axel had come back and the night was sweet, the grass wet. Everything was joy, dancing and feasting. Hide-and-seek near the Temple of Love, blindman's buff on the terrace. Little roast pigs roamed crispy through the park, an orange in each mouth, a sprig of parsley in each ear, a knife and fork stuck upright in each back — my husband lay on the Temple steps, insensate from overeating. Antoinette! Antoinette! A chorus of voices, every one of them begging me to come play, every one of them not Axel's.

I couldn't rest until I found him. Or, better yet, till he found me, a white moth adrift on the night breezes.

I was headed more or less in the direction of the chateau, though why, I can't say, except possibly to trick fate into giving me what I wanted by appearing not to want it very much after all. I passed couples in rapt embrace, both vertical and horizontal. I passed men and women relieving themselves, some behind trees, others in the middle of the path. It was well after midnight, Cassiopeia descending, Antoinette ascending. The night was dazzlingly bright, the canal clear as air, weeds and stones gleaming at the bottom, a clump of waving cress, a sparkling pebble.

Drifting moth, drifting, drifting, almost as if my feet never touched the ground. Almost as if I had no feet, only wings, a quickly beating heart.

Who knows where I'd have come to light if it weren't for the lash in my eye? It was driving me mad; I thought I'd die if I couldn't get it out. I turned my back on Apollo's snorting golden horses, the moon casting my shadow before me on the Tapis Vert. I blinked. I pulled down my eyelid the way Papa had taught me. To either side, dense plantings of trees, their heads not yet thick with foliage, and up ahead the lit windows of the chateau, out of which everyone who wasn't at the Trianon, chiefly old people and sick people and servants, grudgingly monitored the night's festivities. Of course I was too far away for them to see me.

Too far away for them to see me blinking, tugging at my eyelid. Too far away to see the man dressed in white detach himself from the trees and approach, a finger to his lips.

I felt very alive. My eye was watering.

"Your Royal Highness," he said. His French was perfect, without a trace of a Swedish accent.

I asked him why he'd been avoiding me all evening, and he put on an expression of amazement. " I avoiding you? " he asked, then took me by the hand and led me into the trees to the left. His skin was smooth and dry and warm enough to suggest great stores of banked fire deep inside.

"Joséphine," he said, and I heard a catch in his voice, almost as if he were a young man again and his voice just starting to change. "I've said something to upset you."

"But I'm not crying," I told him, laughing. "There's something in my eye."

He drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket, licked one corner into a tip, cupped my head in his hand, and leaned in close. "Shhh. Don't move," he ordered. His breath always — always! — sweet like a child's, since he drank very little and never smoked a pipe and had adamantine teeth. My husband's opposite in every way but one, assuming, that is, I wasn't blind to the signs of true love.

"Better?" he asked.

"Now I get to make a wish," I said.

First the trees clustered thick around us, their trunks still giving off the day's heat, while the air that stirred between them grew cooler, darker. There was no pattern to their arrangement, and wildflowers clustered between their roots, anemone and violets. Little wild animals as well, rabbits, squirrels.

Axel guided our way through the trees, moving lightly but purposefully, his arm around my waist. I had no idea where he was taking me, and it was such a relief for once not to know — not to anticipate, you might say, the wheeling in of the toilet table after the wheeling off of the bathtub — that I didn't ask.

"I've told my sister about you," he said, looking down at me, his eyes black and avid. World of wild things, foxes, human glances. "She says she hopes the two of you will be good friends, and bade me warn you not to take my moods too seriously."

"You must give her two kisses — here and here — sister to sister, and reassure her that aside from matters of state, I take nothing seriously."

"Antoinette—"

"Shhh!" I admonished. "I refuse to listen. It's Midsummer's Eve. If you so much as think a serious thought, I will vanish into thin air. I promise. "

"But it's only because I care about you, you must believe me. Antoinette, dearest. The world is changing. Hear me out. The people of France hate you."

"Thank you very much."

"No, look at me! Joséphine! They want a Queen without flaw, but they also want no Queen at all. When you sit among them in a Paris theater, dressed as they are, they call you common, and when you leave them for Versailles, and put on your diamonds, they call you traitor."

Of course these may not have been our exact words, though they're close enough, at least in spirit.

Just as the planting of trees which Axel guided us through may not have been to the left of the Tapis Vert, but to the right, meaning that when I finally turned to him and said that all I really wanted was for him to help me find a way out, it may not have been in the North Quincunx, but the South, where we suddenly found ourselves.

Of course I'd been there many times before, only never from that direction, through the thick, patternless woods. Never on Midsummer's Eve, never with Count Axel Fersen.

It was as if, in the midst of life's bountiful yet confusing array of details — bark and leaves and rabbits and eyes; moon and stars, even, warnings, kisses — we had suddenly been vouchsafed a view of death.

I say death, though I ought not.

Ought instead to explain that where once there had been no plan or pattern, where once the space around us had been filled with trees like the Bull's Eye Chamber with aimlessly swarming courtiers, with trunks and limbs and twigs and leaves and nature, we now found ourselves in a place where the trees had arranged themselves according to the principle of the five-spot in a deck of cards, with a tree occupying each of the four corners of a square, a fifth the center, and the whole motif extending indefinitely outward.

The same earth beneath our feet, the same sky overhead, and yet we might have been in another world entirely.

Not one tree too many, not one out of place.

What is more beautiful than the well-known Quincunx, which, in whatever direction you view it, presents straight lines?

So said Quintilian, who also said that the perfection of art is to conceal art.

Nor does it matter, really, if Axel was my lover, in the physical sense at least. That isn't what matters, I know that now. It matters to historians, most of them men. It matters to gossips, most of them women. The pleasure is in the speculation.

My sister Carlotta made me eat sweet woodruff; it was early summer. My mother rode past us on her horse and for the first time I noticed they both had the same enormous buttocks. The air was fresh and blue, the grass new and green. Hope means if there once was a lash in your eye it will never be anything but that, no matter how old you live to be. Carlotta and I pricked our thumbs on a pricker bush; we mixed our blood and swore our undying love. You can always come back to a place, even if it isn't there anymore. The Labyrinth became the Quincunx, the Quincunx became nothing. It's always just you, even when your lover calls you Joséphine.

Inside the Quincunx, Axel and I were more alone than two stones at the bottom of a pool. It was the summer solstice; the nights were getting shorter, the dreadful winter of 1784 fast approaching.