Versailles

The Queen's Bedchamber

Almost a perfect cube, four toises wide, four long, four and a fraction high. A jewel box, the ideal receptacle in which to put a Queen, beginning with stumpy little Marie-Thérèse of Spain, the Sun King's long-suffering bride, who enjoyed the company of puppies and dwarfs, and whose teeth were black from eating chocolate. Queen-in-a-box. Open the lid and out she pops!

The Queen's apartments are to the left of the Marble Court, the King's to the right, both occupying more or less the same amount of floor space. A novel arrangement, at least as far as seventeenth-century royal dwellings were concerned, and one designed to suggest the equal political — if not marital — status of husband and wife. Both apartments contained an unprecedented number of bedrooms and a confusing array of beds, making it difficult to know who was sleeping where, and with whom, until after the construction of the Porcelain Trianon, the Sun King's glittering blue and white tile pleasure palace.

The Queen's Bedchamber was completed during Louis XIV's second building campaign, a so-called "peacetime effort." The mood of the day was brightly nationalistic, favoring the use of indigenous materials — marble from Languedoc and the Pyrenees, tapestries from the Gobelins workshops — despite the fact that the interiors themselves were Italianate in design. The Bedchamber ceiling, for example, was divided into multiple compartments, and everything in the room was banded in marble, contributing to an oppressive and oddly trussed feeling in all the Queens who slept there. So what if two immense pairs of floor-to-ceiling glass doors provided a fine view of the Orangerie, where, in clement weather, the potted palm trees stood row upon row like feather dusters, and, just beyond them, one could see the glittering rectangle of the Pool of the Swiss Guards, and Satory's wooded hills? Hadn't the Pool of the Swiss Guards originally been called Stinking Lake?

Marie-Thérèse died in the Bedchamber, as did Marie Leczinska, Beloved's equally long suffering wife. He replaced some of the marble with wood, most notably on the floor, added bronze doors, and hired Boucher to paint the ceiling compartments with grisaille celebrations of the Queen's virtues, all of which — lucky for him — had their roots in a dull and basically tractable nature.

Marie Antoinette hated the Bedchamber. She did what she could to make it a more congenial place, putting up giant mirrors festooned with gilded bronze lilies, getting rid of all the tapestries commemorating the Sun King's military victories, and covering the walls instead in a lustrous white gros de Tours embroidered with bouquets of flowers and ribbons and peacock feathers. Wherever possible she added fringes, tassels, plumes, and braids, as well as cramming in chiming clocks and footstools, wing chairs and dainty cabinets, which were in turn filled with lacquerware, crystals, jasper, sard, and petrified wood.

But nothing helped. A box is a box, after all, no matter how many pretty things you put inside it.

Meanwhile, in her thing-filled Bedchamber, Antoinette dreamed.

She dreamed that while she slept her keys were taken from her pockets, permitting anyone to unlock her desk and read her letters, while at the same time making it impossible for her to lock them back up.

She dreamed that while she slept she was being watched.

Sometimes it was her mother's face bending over her, scowling, checking for signs of disobedience. Sometimes it was Mercy's face, masking disgust. Sometimes a complete stranger's.

The dirt-smeared face of a Savoyard, for instance, who seemed to have climbed onto the chimneypiece. Grinning and shouting words of encouragement as, meanwhile, a very hot fire burned near at hand, nearer than it should be unless it had somehow escaped the fireplace. Go away! Go away! The glass doors were caulked shut and pasted over with paper, and on all sides thick tapestry screens were held in place with rope, just barely protecting her from a great press of people, watching and whispering on the other side. The smell of vinegar, lavender, hyssop. A hand inside her, a hand on her stomach, and, shamefully, her naked body exposed from the waist down.

Such pain. Open the doors! Please!

But this was no dream, and the next thing she knew there was the Princesse de Lamballe's hand right in front of her face, her awkward overlarge fingers with their embarrassingly chewed nails making the private signal they'd settled on for girl.

All those chairs and clocks and mirrors and crystals and chimes and hands and mouths and noses sucking up what little air there was — first came a muffled thump as the Princesse fainted, followed by a low moan as the Queen followed suit.

"Warm water!" shouted the terrified accoucheur, who thought she was dying. "She must be bled in the foot!" But the room was so packed with princes and counts and countesses and foreign dignitaries as well as everyone who'd wandered in from the courtyard, not to mention all the furniture and knickknacks, that there was no way to get a basin of water through to him, and so he was forced to lance her foot without it. One quick jab and a jet of blood came spurting forth; naturally this cured her at once.

It was December 20, eleven o'clock in the morning; Antoinette had been in labor for eight hours. Louis smashed through the caulk and paper and glass, letting in gusts of cold winter air and a few flakes of snow. "Poor little thing," Antoinette is reported to have said to her daughter, "though you were not wanted, you will be my very own the more for that. A son would have belonged to the state, but you will be my happiness, and soothe my sorrows." Meanwhile the accoucheur, who would have received a pension of forty thousand livres for delivering a boy, did his best to hide his disappointment, wrapping the infant in blankets and handing her over to the Princesse de Guéménée. Through the broken panes the Orangerie terrace was barely visible, empty of palms, its two little reflecting pools glazed over with ice, staring blindly up at the lightless gray sky. A salute of one and twenty guns was fired, the meager number echoing the accoucheur's disappointment.

Two years later it would be a salute of one and a hundred guns, and the festivities celebrating the long-awaited birth of an actual heir to the throne would go on for weeks. In Paris the tocsin would ring without cease for three days. Fireworks would explode over the Seine, the fountains pump wine, and enormous heaps of meat and mountains of bread appear for the taking. Little Louis Joseph, decked out in gold raiment, would prepare to receive adoration as if he were the Baby Jesus.

Two years later delegations of tradespeople would come, bearing gifts: the chimney sweeps a miniature chimney with a regally clad boy crawling out the top, the locksmiths an elaborate and mysterious lock designed to release, when the King finally figured out how to spring it, a tiny Dauphin of steel. The whole world would come to pay its respects, and the whole world would be welcome, with the possible exception of the gravediggers, who'd be sent packing after showing up with a Dauphin-sized coffin.

Granted, it wasn't as though the birth of Marie-Thérèse Charlotte went completely unmarked. Prayers of thanks were offered for the opening of the Queen's womb, and it seemed possible, if only for a moment, that the French people might be willing to let bygones be bygones.

But only for a moment. Once it sunk in that Antoinette wasn't going to die, once word got out that her belly had been restored to its former supple state and that she was eating cream of rice with biscuit and a little poached chicken, everybody suddenly remembered how much they didn't like her. The Austrian Bitch — a big dis — appointment. Couldn't even be counted on to get the baby's sex right…

Marie-Thérèse Charlotte. Popularly known as Madame Royale, and nicknamed Mousseline la Sérieuse by her doting parents. A pretty child, with her mother's clear fair skin and large blue eyes, the older she grew and the more male siblings she acquired, the more her habitual gravity turned to sullenness, the sort of dusty limp look a sun-loving plant, a daisy for instance, develops when stuck in a shady part of the garden.

She would outlive them all, La Sérieuse, ending her days deep in the woods in a dark stone house, with only mice and squirrels and owls and the occasional fox for company. A persistent sighing of wind in the trees, a constant rain of leaves and acorns. A leaky roof, a smoking fireplace. Once upon a time she was a princess and she was crying because she was teething, and she was holding onto her father's finger as she sat on his lap in a wing chair covered in white gros de Tours. She loved to hold onto that finger, so long and plump and warm, with a consoling knob of knuckle in the middle and a smooth gold ring at the base. Big white clouds sailing past the window, and her father giving off his usual smell of sweat and horse manure and wine. Her mother playing the harp. Pling pling pling. I had a little nut tree and nothing would it bear.

La Sérieuse died in 1851 at the age of seventy-two, the same year Louis Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor. The house fell into ruins and was sold as scrap. Eventually the road to Quimper was built over the place where it had stood.