Kathryn Davis: Versailles

SOPHIE: Uh-oh! Here comes Father.

She races from the window and takes a seat on the couch beside Antoinette, only moments before Louis, who is rakishly dressed for the hunt in a scarlet coat and leather breeches, and carrying a gilt coffeepot, enters, stage right. Immediately all three daughters begin displaying signs of agitation, fruit-lesslyfussing with their hair and tuning at their clothing.

VICTOIRE: I'm starving! Have we nothing good to eat? Breakfast was a million years ago. Surely there's something left on the tray? A rind? A pit? A crust of bread?

LOUIS: You eat too much. The lot of you eat too much, and it shows. Why can't you all be more like Antoinette? He turns to face her, staring pointedly at her chest. Some coffee, my dear?

Meanwhile Bread, an androgynous figure in white, part baker, part winged Victory, incomplete in many respects (right cheek and ear, right hand, right foot) yet also oddly triumphant, is gradually taking shape in the gilt-framed mirror on the wall.

BREAD: Rain falls on wheat, heavy the head, bending the stalk. Harvest and crush it, thresh it and winnow it, discard the husks. Round wheat, golden wheat, round golden beads. How many beautiful women have been heroines?

ANTOINETTE: Thome coffee, Royal? Mypleasure.

He was sick and getting sicker. His teeth were gone and so was his brain. He was dying and everyone knew it but no one would admit it — that was the way of the place.

The way of the place was to ignore the wages of the flesh, but still call as much attention to it as possible. Dress it up, rouge its cheeks. The flesh was interesting, especially if it was royal. So interesting the average courtier couldn't resist speculating on the size of the King's — well, everything. Too interesting, in other words.

They tucked Beloved into a camp bed in his room overlooking the Marble Court, where not so very long before he'd been accustomed to watching the world come to meet him on horseback and in carriages, sun sent flying from its stirrups and gilt wheels like arrows. But now he could no longer stand the sun. It made his eyes water. Even moonlight was too much for him. He had his windows draped in yards of dark cloth, and every visit was like a game of blindman's buff.

Six doctors, five surgeons, and three apothecaries were in attendance. Six times an hour they lined up and took turns taking Beloved's pulse, studying his tongue, poking his stomach. So solemn, in their understated attire, their modest gray periwigs, gravely vying for the best place in line — it would have been amusing if it weren't for the smell. In the dark of the King's Bedchamber I could feel my poor husband tremble beside me; once Beloved was gone there'd be nothing to stand between us and our unthinkable destiny.

"I feel as though the universe were tumbling down on top of me," he said. Trembling and breathing shallowly, the way he would when I'd remove my chemise and show him my breasts, undeniably the part of me he liked best, though chiefly to gape at. And then all at once a servant lit a torch and everyone in the room gasped. My elbow jumped, knocking some fragile thing off a table and onto the floor. "Antoinette?" said Beloved, though it came out more like nnnn, his speech slurred, his tongue, as it turned out, covered in pustules and decomposing like the rest of him.

In the torchlight I could see his face. Like those parts of a deer that hunters discard in the woods, peeking from under dock leaves, slick and pitch-black and buzzing with flies.

"Antoinette, is that you?" he said. Cupping his privates, or what was left of them, with what was left of his hands. Nnnnsthayoo? And then a long horrible gurgle the First Gentleman of the King's Bedchamber translated as: "Get her out of here before she breaks something truly valuable." Lewd to the end, Beloved.

That was the last time I saw him alive. I'd been inoculated against smallpox, but Louis had not, and after that we were denied entry. Not unlike the Du Barry, though in her case it was because following his third bleeding the King knew he was going to die and decided to become pious. He sent the Du Barry away in a carriage, no doubt hoping to lend a little credibility to the confession he intended to make, his first in four decades. Poor thing! For all the trouble the woman had caused me I admit I felt sony for her, her big empty head lolling in its usual way like a blown rose from side to side, as if her not especially slim neck wasn't up to the task of holding it aloft. Wiping her nose on her sleeve — you could tell she loved him, and if he bought her love with jewels, so what?

Whereas the daughters — no one seemed to care what became of them, least of all their father. They were ugly, anyway.

It was spring. The tenth of May. Large clouds sweeping like epic events across a clear blue sky, and the pear trees just starting to shake loose their petals, getting ready to make fruit. Bon Chrétien d'Hiver, huge and green-gold and luscious.

Everyone on tenterhooks, waiting for the slick black case to crack open and shake loose the petals of the soul.

But I'm dramatizing, as Mama would say.

Nor did Louis and I kneel together the minute the candle in Beloved's window was extinguished and pray to God for His protection. Nor did we hold hands and wail, "We are too young to reign." That is Madame Campan dramatizing, though the style of her memoir is admirable. She's the one responsible for describing how the sound of thunder filled the halls of Versailles as all the hundreds of feet of the waiting courtiers sprang into motion, racing from the Bull's Eye Chamber and down the Hall of Mirrors to pay us homage. They were the ones doing the kneeling, not us.

Of course we were very young: I was not yet nineteen, my husband not yet twenty. And of course we weren't especially well suited to the task ahead.

But we didn't weep — oh no. Always stolid, my Louis, always lacking in imagination. While I was all imagination, which is to say restless to the core.

The candle was extinguished, there was the sound of thunder. The black case split open and the corruption poured out; everyone leapt into his carriage and bolted for the chateau at Choisy. By four o'clock the place was empty.

Once the smallpox had run its course, fifty courtiers had caught the disease, and ten people, including the King, had died of it.

Beginning with Louis XIII, the royal bedchamber of every King who lived at Versailles looked out across the Marble Court, facing east toward Paris. Even before it was Versailles, when it was merely a glorified haymow for Louis XIII to romp in with his girlfriends, the King's Bedchamber was strategically positioned. Louis XV had a secret window installed through which he could see the world but the world couldn't see him; Louis XVI, in a rare farsighted moment, added a telescope.

The day's first sun falls across the black and white paving stones that give the court its name. Italian marble, luminous and fine-textured, ordered during the second building campaign by Louis Le Vau, who'd no sooner watched it set in place than he began to cough up blood and die. It was his idea to lay three new steps atop the existing two, preventing carriage access, to sink a pool in the center of the courtyard, and to position huge cast-iron birdcages in the corners, filled with disoriented birds from foreign lands who'd sing their exotic songs at all hours of the day and night. By the time Louis XV was lying dead in the royal bedchamber, the birdcages were gone and so was the pool, and it was once again possible to admire the perfection of Le Vau's black-and-white diaperwork pattern, especially if you shared the dead King's habit of wandering around on the roof after dark, conversing with your guests down the chimney flues.