Kathryn Davis - Versailles

Then the wolf says in a serious tone, "Undress and get in bed with me."

I admit, I was credulous. I admit I played too much roulette, cavagnole, lansquenet. The word most often used in describing me was "pleasure," as in "Antoinette lives for pleasure."

Will a lion roar in the forest, when he hath no prey? Will a young lion cry out of his den, if he hath taken nothing?

I think I was casting about among the millions of things I was surrounded with to find just one, JUST ONE LITTLE THING that would somehow stand for the whole. One thing to fix my eyes on, to still my racing heart. A silver snuffbox such as got stolen daily by the hot-fingered riffraff the place was full of? A diamond bracelet? An especially fine apricot?

God knows I was nice enough, kind enough. (I was, too.)

God knows it drove me mad to watch my cross-eyed sister-in-law's belly get bigger and bigger, in preparation for the day not so very far off when she'd spread her legs and out would pop the Due d'Angoulême.

And meanwhile in the Orangerie the potted trees put forth their sweet white blossoms. And meanwhile my husband kept shooting and hammering and forging; I kept piling more and more feathers on my head. Trying to redress some imbalance, I suppose, like the spurned lover who turns to opiates or chocolate or drink.

It was the fashion, then, to complain about everything. It was the fashion to say, "Oh, if only I were in Paris," unless that's where you happened to be, in which case you'd say, "Oh, if only I were at Versailles." Whereas meanwhile I lived for pleasure.

For example, my "lovers." Count Esterhazy, with his sly Magyar eyes, who shot bread pellets at me when I was laid low with measles. The Prince de Ligne, who told me my soul was as beautiful and white as my face. Women, too. I was to have had unnatural relations with women, wild orgies at night under the stars while my husband slept the deep sleep of the innocent. My wedding ring disappeared, and it was whispered that it had been stolen by a witch from the Massif Central. To keep me barren, it was whispered — as if supernatural forces were actually required for such a thing.

"Where shall I put my petticoat?" the girl asks the wolf. "Where shall I put my stockings?"

"Throw them on the fire, dear. You won't need them anymore."

Though who knows how these things happen? Maybe there was witchcraft at work, only not on my womb. Maybe witchcraft was behind the previous summer's crop failures, which led to the following winter's grain shortage, which led to the flour wars of May. The same year my cross-eyed sister-in-law prepared to give birth, and a fortune was being poured into Rheims Cathedral to refurbish it for my husband's coronation. Seamstresses busy stitching gold fleurs-de-lis on everything in sight. Cobblers busy making the violet boots with high red heels in which my husband would totter toward the altar. Bird catchers busy catching the hundreds of birds that would be let loose to beat their poor wings against the vaulted arches, as the Archbishop of Rheims tipped the Holy Ampulla full of coronation oil over my husband's head. "May the King possess the strength of a rhinoceros. May he drive the nations of our enemies before him like a rushing wind."

Because, really, who knows why it never rained during the summer of 1774? Why the soil turned to dust and when the rain finally came, the worm got into the bud? Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it? You might just as well say a witch put a spell on the sky.

I admit, I was oblivious. I liked to go to the races with my charming brother-in-law, playfully dispute the merits of Glowworm, King Pepin. Who knows why one horse triumphed, another came up lame? I liked to watch the little silver ball in the roulette wheel leap from number to number like a flea.

And on that May morning when a crowd of peasants poured through the gates at the Place d'Armes, filling the Forward Court with their furious voices and pale upturned faces, with their rumbling stomachs and loaves of moldy bread, who knows why I didn't see among them the invisible hand of the future, wielding a bloody knife?

It wasn't because I was too stupid. It wasn't even because I was unwilling to face facts. No, it was because I was completely uninterested in food — always had been, always would be — and off somewhere else, sequestered as usual, no doubt taking a walk. Alone for a change, alone and thinking things over. The happy days of my childhood and the gardens of Schönbrunn, the way the sweet woodruff grew thickly around the base of each shade tree in a collar of lace. May wine, Carlotta told me, this is what's used to flavor May wine, and she picked a flower and made me taste it, but it was so bitter I had to spit it out. There was still snow on the mountains; our mother galloped past us on her favorite stallion, seated astride like a man. Calling out in her wild imperious way, Guten Morgen, meine Schatzerl! the sound of hoofbeats continuing to thud behind her long after she was gone. How warm the air, yet with a smell like melted snow. Carlotta put her arms around me and laughed. Inside my body, my soul stirred. Changeless, changeless, as if that could compensate for all the rest.

"Oh, grandmother! What big teeth you have!"

"Oh, grandmother! What big—"

Presently the Queen takes a walk.

Around the Latona Fountain, where the stone frogs perch with their poor sad mouths eternally wide open, hoping against hope for a drink that never comes, and then across the bright springy turf of the Tapis Vert and toward the Grand Canal.

There was the smell of newly cut grass and boxwood, the sun at my back, pleasantly warm and the canal extending before me like a blue sparkling avenue all the way to a place where a person might fall off the edge of the world if she wasn't paying attention, which, I admit, I wasn't. Woodsmen were busy chopping the trees that hadn't made it through the previous winter, talking to each other in that easy way of the peasant class, making jokes, singing, until they saw me approach and clammed up, growing busier than ever. In those days I think I was still more admired than despised, though perhaps also (unbeknownst to me) pitied a little, pity being the prelude to contempt.

" Bonjour, " I said, and came to a halt near one particularly industrious pair of broad-shouldered youths. " Comment pa va? " I inquired, whereupon in keepingwith the protocol they threw themselves obediently, if not a trifle clownishly, at my feet. The smell of sap, of wood chips and sweat and the sweet May breeze, combined with some oddly exhilarating aroma the canal was giving off, a mix of algae and trout spawn, was going to my head. "Please get up," I said, knowing that as they did they couldn't fail to catch a glimpse of slim white ankle. Even the Queen of France should be allowed to forgo her stockings on a warm spring day.

I know what you're thinking. But NO NO NO! — I would never be untrue to Louis, though I'm also willing to admit I liked to flirt, especially if the man had a long humorous mouth and clear blue eyes like the taller of the two, and so I made a joke of my own at the expense of our current Finance Minister, Turgot, a sort of rude play on words involving impotence and the single property tax, or impôt unique, he'd recently instated.

"It's a bad idea," the shorter of the two young men said. His eyebrows ran together over the bridge of his nose, giving him a grave, unforgiving look. "God's will, not the farmer's lack of it, is behind a poor harvest. The rich merchant buys what little grain there is and makes the baker pay for it through the nose, and then the baker turns around and charges the hungry woodcutter an arm and a leg for a single lousy loaf crawling with bugs. "