Versailles

The Chamber of the Pendulum Clock

Tick tick tick tick. Twenty-two kilometers from Paris to Versailles. The season changing, the summer ending. August of Wheat, August of Oats. Deepening shadows, violet, indigo. The mill wheels turn, the mice move indoors.

Six hundred steps from the court to the entrance, fifty-eight steps from the door to the stairs. Tap tap tap tap. Shoes of soft leather, hard diamond heels. Where is the time gone? Who is the thief?

Where is the farmer who marks its passage, in hours long as the harvest allows? Mown fields unspool like bolts of dark velvet, snipped short at nightfall, rolled up and stored. The cat goes out hunting, the soul shuts its doors.

Transfiguration, the Feast of the Virgin. From Whitsun to All Saints', two hundred days. Down the longhall way, then left at the windows. Dice flung, a curse, in the chamber of clocks.

The Queen has grown restless. The Queen wants distraction. She's tired of sitting alone in her room, embroidering purses. Silk purse from a sow's ear, meaning the King. My dear, says Artois, what a pleasant surprise. Licking his lips as he scoops up the dice.

Tick tick tick tick. Shadows like water, flickering candles. The Clockmaker fixes the stars in their courses, planets and moons, a ruby, a pearl. From Easter to Whitsun, from All Saints' to Advent. From Advent to Christmas to darkest despair. The Baby's grown up, the Baby is dying, the Baby can't wait to be born once again.

Far far away in her garden retreat, the Queen's mother sits like a sack of sand. Snow on the mountaintops, eternal snow, her son in Bavaria, waging war. How old she's grown, old and ugly. France fighting England, no heir yet in sight. Madame my dear daughter, be prudent, take care. You might as well caution the sun not to rise. The King of Prussia rattles his saber, one eye on Austria, one eye on France.

In the chamber of clocks the gamblers play on. Clock of Creation, Clock of the Sphere. The Queen flings the dice across the green felt. A minute cracks open, a second comes out. Tiny, a bubble, its walls thin as hope.

And what is pleasure, really? If I lived for pleasure, what does that mean?

A lesser god than Eros, certainly. Not even a god, when you come to think about it. A kobold. An imp.

Louis finally consented to the operation, following my brother's visit. Early September, the time of the grape harvest, just before the Blessed Virgin's birthday. One little snip of Lassone's knife, that was all it took, and the next thing I knew the marriage was consummated. In the meantime Louis had a secret passage built between our two bedrooms, so he could tunnel his way through to me like an ardent mole, without attracting the attention of the well-wishers and curiosity-seekers hanging out in the Bull's Eye Chamber at all hours of the day and night.

"I am experiencing the most important happiness of my entire life," I wrote to tell my mother.

But pleasure?

In the absence of any impediment, I am sorry to say that my husband's caresses grew a trifle distant, rushed, even. Before, he'd worked so hard to drum up enthusiasm for the task at hand; now he pumped away with the same sort of frenzied single-mindedness I'd seen him use operating the bellows. An abstracted expression on his face, his mind elsewhere, imagining the final product perhaps, a lock so magnificent it could defeat the Evil One himself. Not a great lover, Louis.

Of course, he had no practice. Just as, pamphleteers to the contrary, I had no basis of comparison. Antoinette and Louis, as inept in bed as on the throne, though goodness knows we tried. That mattress, those hands. The sound of his breathing, the weight of his torso. Just the two of us, two human bodies reduced to the place where the one had come into the other, nudging, nudging…

But did I feel stirred? Yes, I admit, I did, a little. It was like the way I'd sometimes feel while I was sitting for my portrait, an almost unendurable sense of my self, of the surfaces of Antoinette, her eyes trying not to blink, her lips growing more and more pursed and dry, her tongue dying to lick them. And then just when I'd think I couldn't bear to sit there like that one minute longer, I'd suddenly find myself on the outside looking in, a traveler in a carriage passing an apparently deserted house at nightfall. The windows dark, no hint of movement, yet somewhere deep inside, in the deepest darkest corner of the cellar, there would be a little sleeping animal who would prick up its ears.

Michaelmas came and went, then All Saints' Day, closely followed by All Souls'. I turned twenty-four; the peasants went into the woods with their baskets to harvest the acorns to fatten the pigs. The sweet damp smell of decaying oak leaves, brushfires burning, the first flakes of snow. My mother could no longer walk and had to be hauled up and down stairs on a green morocco sofa, operated by winches. "I hope the weather will be abominable," she wrote, "so the King won't get tired from hunting so much, and the Queen won't gamble every night into the small hours…" Christmastide, the Feast of the Innocents. For the New Year my husband gave me a pair of brilliant diamond earrings and a statue of cupid carving his bow from Hercules' club; the little moats around the Trianon, called fox jumps, froze. "I very much enjoy this pleasure," Louis confided to his aunts, meaning our newfound intimacy. "I am sorry to have been deprived of it for so long." In the hallways of Versailles everyone was sneezing and coughing and blowing his nose; in Paris Benjamin Franklin was a great hero, and all the women were wearing a coonskin hat called "The Insurgent" in his honor. "I have a bad toothache and a swollen face," my mother wrote, "even to the eyes, but no fever at all." We replaced Minister of Finance Turgot with Jacques Necker, a physiocrat with a prude, Carnival with Lent. Thin soup, boiled eggs, steamed fish, pottage. No dancing, no gambling; I had diarrhea.

Then it was spring; then I was pregnant.

Antoinette pregnant, imagine it! Just like the sows and the mares and the ewes and the nanny goats. The trees were budding, so girlish and fresh in their pale green shifts. I went to bed early and arose early; I went for long walks in the cool of the morning, amazed to see how precisely the world mirrored my condition. All the bulbs swelled and put forth pale green shoots. Hyacinth and narcissus — such names! As if some long dead botanist had been determined to keep us mindful of the wages of beauty. My waist grew four and a half pouces by Pentecost.

Nor was this pleasure, being devoid of any trace of the pain that makes pleasure possible. I had what I wanted and, for a moment at least, I was content. I ignored the rumors about the baby's patrimony; I knew they were false, which seemed sufficient reason to discount them. A great weakness in a Queen, you might say, such indifference to political nuance — no matter that it was based on a clear sense of my own moral rectitude. But evidently everyone was less interested in having a truly good Queen than in having a Queen who appeared good. So long as I feigned deference to even the silliest details of court etiquette, remembering for instance to send my dentist six dozen handkerchiefs a year, so long as I made a great show of enjoying the company of even the most tedious old bundles, stuck to a few boring hands of cavagnole, and turned in before midnight, I think I could have slept with every man in France.

I was content. Somnolent, dreamy. I imagined my baby, cradled in my arms. A beautiful baby, flawless, with blue eyes and that newborn smell of powder and milk. Sometimes a girl, but more usually a boy, because that was what was expected of me.

"Once you feel the child, you shouldn't sit or lie on chaises longues too much," wrote my mother, "except for an accident, Gott behüte!" So she must have taken pains to protect herself when she was carrying Joseph; by the time I came along she'd already given birth fourteen times and, aside from her need to dispense endless advice, was never exactly what you'd call maternal. Often eight or ten days would go by before I'd catch even the most fleeting glimpse of her, a giantess in chamois riding breeches and high-topped boots, closeted in her room with the Lord High Chamberlain and a mountain of paper. If I had a fever, it would be the court physician who'd lay a cold compress on my forehead; if I had a problem with my needlework, it would be one of the court tutors who'd unsnarl the yarn. As for the routine miseries of childhood, I wasn't allowed to have them. Hurt feelings? A bad dream? Stuff and nonsense. The only monster we had to fear was the King of Prussia.

Whereas I was resolved to be a perfect mother. A sound mind in a sound body, that would be me. I would go to bed early; I would finally read all those books Mercy had been pressing on me for years. I would breastfeed my baby, as Rousseau advised, rather than send him out to a wet nurse, and instead of swaddling him like a mummy, I would let him kick his little legs and shake his little arms as much as he wanted. On nice days I'd take him out in a wicker crib and show him the trees, the clouds, the sky. If he got frightened by the sound of hunting horns winding through the woods, I'd pick him up and kiss him. The King of Prussia might still be a monster, threatening war with Austria in retaliation for my brother Joseph's invasion of Lower Bavaria. Mercy might be warning me that if France refused to come to Austria's aid, it would kill my mother. And my husband might be reminding me that if it weren't for my brother's ambition, there wouldn't be a problem in the first place. Affairs of state, in other words, might require most of my attention, but the truth is, my heart was elsewhere.

Which maybe is what it means to be content: the heart safely secluded, a world unto itself.

Unlike being in the grip of Eros, who takes you over, transporting you so thoroughly it's as if you have no heart, no head, no flesh even, every part of you burning in a single bright flame.

Unlike pleasure, which must be sought after.

The first time I felt the baby move I was walking through the Low Gallery with the strapping Princesse de Guéménée, her omnipresent pack of dogs, and the dainty flowerlike Madame Dillon. We were in those days still the best of friends, despite the fact that the Princesse's husband was madly in love with Madame Dillon, who was, herself, loyally devoted to him. It was late afternoon, the end of July; the sun was preparing to fall into the Atlantic Ocean hundreds of kilometers away to the west, bathing everything as far as the eye could see, trees and lawns and fountains and pools, in a molten red-gold light, as if the whole world were composed of a single red-gold substance.

"You'll want to establish a room for the baby here on the ground floor, adjacent to the terrace," announced the Princesse, speaking from her position as Governess to the Children of France. "That way, as soon as he is able, he'll take his first steps outdoors in the fresh air." She was a tall, rather badly made woman who, though pretty, maintained an unwavering look of deep concern, chiefly for the stupidity of others, and who claimed to communicate with the spirit world through her dogs.

"You seem so sure it will be a boy," said Madame Dillon. "I would predict a girl."

"Oh?" said the Princesse. "Why is that?"

"The way she carries."

"Antoinette is wide and flat through the hips. She has no alternative. Besides" — and here the Princesse indicated her dogs with a sweeping gesture—"I have it on the best authority. By next Christmas France will have the heir we've all been waiting for. A strong healthy baby boy, the reincarnation of Louis Quatorze himself."

We had come to a halt by one of the tall windows lining the Gallery; the light was no longer red-gold but red, and thin, almost watery, the way it gets when it prepares to fill with darkness. Lanterns hanging from the prows of the gondolas on the Grand Canal, lanterns circling Latona and her frogs, moving back and forth across the terraces, ferried by dark figures, men and women dressed for dancing and intrigue, mounting the steps between the Vases of the Sun.

Meanwhile the Princesse de Guéménée continued droning on and on. Clio, yap yap yap, animal magnetism, blah blah blah…"I still say it will be a girl," chimed in Madame Dillon. "You will be a girl, won't you?" she said, sweetly addressing my stomach, at which moment I felt the baby swim toward the surface like a fish about to leap from the water into the thin red air, as simultaneously a group of masked men and women burst through the doors from the Southern Terrace, bringing with them the combined smells of attar of roses, brandy, and perspiration. Racing together, laughing and chattering, their voices echoing off the smooth stone walls and the vaulted ceiling.

Pleasure-seekers, all of them.

The City of Sows, who can't be satisfied with noble loaves of barley and wheat but must have relishes and desserts. That's what Plato said.

Painting, embroidery, gold, ivory. Perfume, jew-elry, courtesans, wine. Poets, rhapsodes, actors, choral dancers, beauticians, barbers, relish-makers, cooks.

Swineherds, too, to fatten the pigs so they'd be good to eat.

The City of Sows, the Feverish City. See them turning and turning on their golden spits, their fine skin cracking, releasing fat.

Whereas I was content. I was content for that one little moment as I stood by the tall window in the Low Gallery in the growing darkness, feeling my baby move inside me.

Speeches have a double form, the one true, the other false.

Plato also said that.