Versailles

Voices from Beyond

The English-style garden of Montreuil, the Prince and Princesse de Guéménéee's small yet graciously appointed chateau. It is a brilliant afternoon in early autumn, 1782; the Princesse is seated on a stone banquette, surrounded by her dogs. She is wearing a simple white lawn dress in the Creole style currently favored by the Queen, and a wide-brimmed straw hat, its blue ribbons loose and dancing in the breeze. Her eyes are closed.

PRINCESSE: HOW out of sorts I feel today, my darlings! Not unlike a soup tureen in the hands of a clumsy servant, if you know what I mean. Come closer. Speak to me. Set my mind at ease.

COOKIE: Hark, hark, the dogs do bark…

POUNCE: The beggars are coming to town…

PRINCESSE: Please. You're just making things worse. She rubs her temples and sighs. I want good news. Tell me some good news. The war in America? My dear friend Antoinette? Her adorable children?

WINNIE: Your dear friend Antoinette has an income of between three and four million livres a year.

PEARL: She also has one hundred seventy new dresses since January. White spots on a lavender ground. Gosling green with white spots. Mottled lilac.

LULU: Spots are all the rage.

WINNIE: Not to mention she's more beautiful than ever. Everythingthat astonishes the soul leads to the sublime — Diderot said that.

PEARL: Infernal depths, darkened skies, deep seas, somber forests. The war in America is over, by the way.

PRINCESSE: Hush, hush. You've made your point.

POUNCE: A clear idea is another name for a little idea. He bares his teeth and, growls.

COOKIE: Pounce is a very clever boy, but dangerous.

LULU: He's a very bad boy.

A shower of yellow leaves blows in from stage left; Pearl paws at the Princesse's shoe, whining.

PRINCESSE: This wind! If it doesn't let up soon I'm going to have to go inside.

PEARL: But I thought you wanted to hear about the adorable children. Don't you want to hear about them?

PRINCESSE: Yes. That's right. I do.

COOKIE: The little girl is solid as a rock, but the Dauphin's a mess. His vertebrae are put together wrong.

PRINCESSE: I'm their governess. All I have to do is look at them to know that.

CLIO, angry: Then what more do you expect? You of all people should know that the future is off-limits, even to the dead.

COOKIE: You of all people.

More leaves blow in; the dogs become suddenly watchful, tense, their muzzles raised, their ears pricked. The wind lifts the Princesses hat from her head and carries it, ribbons atwirl, toward the chateau.

PRINCESSE: Stop please!

COOKIE: But we can't. We can't.

FLOSS: You of all people should know that we can't stop anything.

PEARL: Where the sheep is tied, it must graze.

COOKIE: Famine and pestilence.

WINNIE: Fire and flood.

Suddenly everything is in motion, the agitated dogs, the blowing leaves, the Princesses gauzy white skirts. A combined sound of barking and snarling and howling can be heard, as well as the leaves' dry rattle and the flapping of fab — ric. And then, just as suddenly, the wind dies down; everything becomes perfectly still. By the time the Prince enters, stage right, the Princesse is paging through her breviary, and the dogs are lying in various postures of repose throughout the leaf-strewn garden. The Prince de Guéménée is a heavyset middle-aged man with a wild look in his eye. He is wearing a dove gray frock coat and tan riding breeches; his thinning white hair is braided into a pigtail and tied with a black ribbon.

PRINCE: Where on earth have you been, my darling? I've been looking everywhere, calling and calling.

PRINCESSE, setting her breviary aside: Nowhere but here, my darling.

POUNCE: Nowhere but nowhere, don't you mean?

The Prince sinks heavily onto the banquette beside the Princesse and heaves a loud sigh.

PRINCE: Then you haven't heard.

PRINCESSE: Heard what?

PRINCE: That we are ruined.

PRINCESSE: Indeed. She laughs nervously. And shall we have nothing to eat but pig swill from now on?

PRINCE: Please, my darling. Try to be serious. Our debt is somewhere in excess of thirty-three million livres.

PRINCESSE: Ours and everyone else's.

PRINCE: You don't understand. Debt is like building a castle in the air, stone by stone by nonexistent stone. To be free of a tangle you must borrow, to borrow you must be at ease, to be at ease you must spend. And then one day a real crack appears, and the whole thing falls in a heap at your feet. He puts his head in his hands.

LULU: Like faith.

OPHELIA: A castle built to the glory of God will never fall.

PRINCESSE: But you can't live in it, can you? Can you?

PRINCE: My darling, please try to concentrate. I've had to declare bankruptcy.

OPHELIA: With faith, two fish can feed thousands.

POUNCE: Not if there's a cat around.

PRINCESSE: YOU aren't answering me.

LULU: Death to the cats!

And if I had it to do over? Would I choose to live my life differently?

What a question!

Change even the smallest detail, the eyelash that got in your eye that summer night when Count Axel Fersen — beloved Axel! — spirited you off with him to the North Quincunx, and the next thing you know you're an old woman raising pigs in the Perigord. An ugly old woman with multiple chins and liver spots and a head where a head's supposed to be, attached to a neck, that is, which is in turn attached to a body.

Joséphine, he called me. A pet name, though of course I remained Antoinette, just as the Quincunx used to be called the Great Labyrinth.

They amount to the same thing, choice and fate. No one made me be Queen, and yet. "You took the trouble to be born, nothing more," wrote Beaumarchais.

Say goodbye to the eyelash in your eye and you say goodbye to your eye, as well. Eyebrow, eyelid. Antoinette, goodbye, you say.

Nor would you necessarily end up old and ugly and a woman. You could be King of Sweden, for instance, a handsome young count tucked firmly under your wing. You could be a butcher, a cow. Even the handsome young count himself, tucked there firmly yet, I have no doubt whatsoever, platonically, despite the King's famous appetite for handsome young men.

In the beginning the bodies stand empty, like milk pails waiting to be filled. Then the spirit is apportioned, completely at random, and once it's been poured in, that's that. There's no room for leaks or spillage. You can catch the measles from your brother-in-law. You can eat roast beef. You can take a lover, give birth. But no matter how close the proximity, it's only your flesh that's changed, only your flesh that sprouts a rash or puts on weight or bursts into sweat. No matter how close the proximity, you'll never end up with a trace of cow-spirit.

No matter how old you live to be, that is what you are, through and through. Like a tree, when it's sawed in half, or a body that's been torn to pieces by a mob.

It was the summer of 1784. Everyone said I was at my most radiant. I had my two dear children and was once again pregnant, in the early stage that leaves you flushed and bright-eyed and nauseated. My husband was busy making preparations for a French expedition to the Pacific. We'd won the war in America. My mother was dead.

I was in love.

The gardens around the Petit Trianon had been lit with log fires and fairy lights. Anyone who wanted could walk there after supper, provided they could still walk after dining on forty-eight entremets and sixteen roasts, and provided they were wearing white.

The white was my rule. I wanted everything to be perfect. Perfectly beautiful, the sky as dark and endlessly translucent as the Hall of Mirrors at midnight, the moon a dazzling milk white globe, and the courtiers drifting along the pathways in their white clothing like moths.

Everything perfect except, no surprise, my husband, who'd come out wearing shoes that didn't match.

I was in agony, I admit. As if the shoes were a moral failing.

Louis was keyed up, and not just because he'd spent the whole afternoon studying maps of the Sandwich Islands, but also because he wanted to make a good impression on the aforementioned Swedish King, who was considered at the time to be our best bulwark against Russia, as well as Europe's leading enlightened despot. A great theater lover, Gustavus enjoyed traveling incognito. Though unlike my brother he was quite the fashion plate, having made his entrance at Versailles disguised as Turkish royalty.

Louis said I was to spare no expense in planning a party. My favorite directive, even though I knew I'd come in for the same dreary criticism soon enough. Of course I had my own reasons for wanting the event to be a success, an occasion that would not only reflect the grandeur of the French court, but would also provide a brilliant setting for me, Antoinette, the brightest jewel of all.

Poor girl, so full of expectations! She had no idea, no idea at all…

We were to have a new opera, performed on the stage of the Trianon theater. Called The Sleeper Awakened, it was based on a story from the Arabian Nights about an ordinary citizen named Hassan who becomes a caliph and then falls in love with a slave girl. I'd chosen it myself, as it required the endless costume changes Gustavus was said to adore.

Poor poor Antoinette, turning this way and that in her chair to survey the audience. Where is he? Poor sad Hassan, renouncing his throne for love.

You can generally count on a sodomite to appreciate the company of witty and fashionable women; Gustavus clearly found me irresistible, or at least until it was time for bed. "The Queen spoke to all the Swedish gentlemen and looked after them with the utmost attention," he later reported, though whether he was slyly hinting at my attention to one Swedish gentleman in particular, who's to say?

Gustavus was a tall man with an extremely high forehead and the stubbornly impassive look of a sheep, though whatever his face lacked in expression he made up for with his hands, which were, as he was well aware, his finest feature. He wrung them to indicate anguish, fluttered them to show amusement, waved them around in time to the music. When he clapped, he held his hands absolutely upright as if getting ready to pray, so you couldn't fail to notice how long and graceful his fingers were, how exquisitely manicured his nails.

I thought the opera would never end, likewise the supper after it. Endless supper! Two hundred mouths, all of them endlessly opening, closing, chewing, chattering; two hundred bodies digesting, sweating, expelling gas. From time to time I'd catch sight of Axel, but since we hadn't been seated in the same pavilion it was always at a distance, my view partly blocked by some count's fat flushed face, some marchioness's towering hairdo. Pure and remote, Axel, like the north itself; he looked thinner than when I'd last seen him, darker, more melancholic — but that had been three years ago before he left to fight in America. Of course I had no appetite, not for food.

At last the musicians assembled on the terrace and began playing dances, their gigantic shadows sawing away madly on the wall behind them. Demented black shadows, smooth golden stone. Lilies and jasmine, boxwood and candle wax. When released into the sweet night air, the pent-up stink of two hundred bodies added its own crucial note, one that was welcome, seductive, even. Gustavus took off in hot pursuit of a coquettish little equerry; I could hear the sound of oars dipping in and out of the water, an oddly dry sound, like silk stirred by wind.

Antoinette! Antoinette! There was a game of hide-and-seek in progress somewhere near the Temple of Love, Artois hoodwinked and spinning, arms outstretched. Antoinette, come play with us! The grass was sopping, moondrops adrift on the water. No sign of Count Fersen anywhere.

The first time I saw him he was only eighteen, exactly the same age as I. At one of my Monday-evening masked balls, back in the days when Beloved was still alive, Louis impotent, and I was still a foreigner, my true identity pitifully obvious to everyone in the French court, despite the mask. A foreign body, Antoinette, like a piece of shot in a wound, something that has to be removed before it kills you.

We danced, we talked. Axel told me he'd been to visit Voltaire — all the young men did when they made their tour, as if the philosopher were a monument similar to Chartres or Notre-Dame. Voltaire's dressing gown was faded and his wig shabby, but he had beautiful soulful eyes. Axel said, almost as beautiful and soulful as my own. Of course they were all he could see of me-, he had no idea who I really was until I lifted the mask. Just for a second and then I was gone, leaving nothing behind except, I guess, an impression. Gold hair, white skin. "The prettiest and most amiable princess I know," as he told his sister.

Nor did I forget him, oh no, oh no. And sometimes found myself daydreaming about him, recalling his brooding look and agile body, his fine dark eyebrows and air of underlying sadness, as meanwhile I sat glued to that gold brocade loveseat in Adélaïde's apartments, embroidering my lumpish husband one pathetic vest after another and thinking, This is where I'll be stuck all my life without company or friends. Sifting through the ashes, weeping floods of tears.

Sorrow kills men, they say, gives life to women. A woman's heart is more alive than a man's, if less bold, and so with that heart of hers a woman can endure whatever comes her way.

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.