Versailles

Pear Tree

Delicate, girlish, all in white. Like a girl dressed for her first Communion but with hints of the bride she'll one day be — among the five hundred pear trees in the King's Fruit and Kitchen Garden, Bon Chrétien d'Hiver's fruit is the sweetest, its habit the most graceful.

Jean de La Quintinie planted the first pear trees at Versailles in 1679, on a square plot of land just to the east of the Pool of the Swiss Guards. He divided the square into sixteen compartments of equal size, using the trees as walls, and added manure, peat, sawdust, and compost, since the soil was swampy and unwholesome.

"It is above all necessary that a kitchen garden please the eye," he wrote, "the most beautiful form being one in which the corners are carefully squared…"

He was a genius. La Quintinie; he could grow anything. He could give the Sun King asparagus in December, lettuce in January, cauliflower in March, strawberries in April.

He was also an artist, understanding as an artist must the difficulty posed by edges, transitions.

So Élisabeth Vigée- Lebrun handled the problem in her final portrait of Antoinette, the skin of her friend's face and neck and shoulders and arms an opaque smear of titanium white over dark translucent glazes, an almost mercifully obscure picture of where a body stops and a world begins, of how a Queen conceals her sadness.

So the roots of the pear trees extend beneath their shadows and deep into the dirt, while the white crowns dance indistinguishable from the cloudy sky.

That first summer, the summer of 1790, the first summer after the fishwives escorted the King and Queen to Paris, the pear trees set fruit and there was no one there to eat it. The fruit should have been picked before it was fully ripe, sometime in early September, and left to ripen in a cool room. It shouldn't have been left to ripen on the trees, falling to the ground where it got bruised and rotten, attracting wasps. The fruit should have been brought to the Queen on a Sèvres platter. She should have quartered it with a silver fruit knife, removing the core and delicately peeling away the skin.

"Bon Chrétien d'Hiver is of a yellow color," wrote La Quintinie, "and with a pink blush on the side which gets the sun, rejoicing the eyes of those who come to look at it as they might a jewel or a treasure. As for taste, it is in comparable, with brittle slightly scented flesh and sugary juice."

The trees bloomed in the spring of 1790, and again in the summer of 1791. No one pruned them or dressed them with manure. The white flowers opened, fivepetaled and in clusters of six or seven. The petals fell off and the pistils began to swell. Some of the trees were attacked by midges, others by borers. Wasps buzzed hungrily around their feet.

The asparagus kept coming back, also the strawberries, though the beds were getting choked with weeds. Vagrants traveling from Saint-Cloud along the southernmost toe of the goosefoot would stop at the Kitchen Garden and ñll their stomachs and their pockets.

There is no such thing as a bad-tempered pear, said Jean de La Quintinie.

When he died in 1688 the Sun King was inconsolable. Eventually the pears made their way to America, where they were called Bartletts.

Spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall. Pentecost, haymaking, Saint John's Eve, Michaelmas, deer hunting, winemaking, Advent. You think it will go on that way forever; the days get long, the days get shorter. The pigs have babies, the pigs get slaughtered. Acorns. Willow wands. Lard.

At Versailles there were so many mirrors! I had most of them put there myself, and when I caught a glimpse of the Queen walking by in all her majesty it would please me, even surprise me a little, to see those blue eyes I'd been looking at my whole life still looking back at me, like a friend. Mama's silver hand mirror in Schönbrunn Palace, the reflecting pool beside her summer house. Your eyes will stick like that, Antonia, if you're not careful.

Not so many mirrors at the Tuileries, though — grâce à Dieu, grâce à Dieu.

Not so many mirrors here and no one playing the harp in a far-off room, a long thread of music winding back through the hallways to tangle round your heart. It's raining little shepherdess. Ach du lieber Augustin. The music box Carlotta gave me when she was dying and Papa took away because he said it made me morbid. Alles ist weg, weg, weg…

Princess Snowflake, Princess Bright-Eyes. What do you do, take them out at night and polish them?

"Our family life is a kind of hell," I wrote Axel. Everyone had taken to calling Louis "King Log," most notably Provence and Artois, as well as the rest of our fair-weather friends who'd eventually decamped for Koblenz, and as if to prove them right he'd stopped talking or doing much of anything except for playing backgammon with the Serious One, who was looking more like him with every passing day.

Though did it matter, really? At her age I was already married, a Dauphine. At her age I thought my whole life lay before me.

Sometimes we were allowed to go to the Princesse de Lamballe's salon, once to the theater to see Psyche. The Furies shook their torches as they danced, lighting our faces.

Sometimes I barely recognized myself and had to pause to realize that this person was really me.

"Tranquillity hangs by a thread," I wrote Axel, trying to get his attention. I sent him a gold ring inscribed Lâche qui les abandonne, after wearing it myself for two days to take the chill off. Coward, to abandon me!

Ach du lieber Augustin, all is lost, all is lost…

And then, one day I looked up. Late winter, lambs being born, also kids and fuzzy yellow ducklings, but it made no difference, I scarcely went anywhere.

I was looking up more those days, holding my head up high, as they say — it gave me a certain perspective, ceilings, birds, clouds, rooftops. Chandeliers. Hot-air balloons. The indifferent sun and indifferent moon as opposed to the expressions on the faces of the people around me, my dejected family, my pitying servants, the occasional furious Jacobin holding a calf s head aloft on a pike at the window, sticking out its tongue at me while its eye sockets buzzed with flies.

Holding my head up high and more than usually aware of my throat, where I used to paint a thin blue vein on top of the thick white makeup we all had to wear in the good old days at Versailles. Full of arsenic, that makeup — though when has it ever been safe to be beautiful? When has it ever been safe to be Queen?

The Blade of Eternity was busy flashing away out there in the weak Parisian sunshine. Monsieur Guillotin's brand-new idea, designed to sever the heads from the bodies of rich and poor alike in less time than it took to blink, or so Madame Campan informed me, having made a point of watching the trial demonstration on a petty criminal, a man convicted of forgery, in the Place de Grève, Nor did the forger's headless body commence to dance, as scientists predicted it might, nor did his bodiless head jabber in the basket.

Though who knows what ghostly thoughts kept flying through the hallways of the forger's brain?

A particularly challenging signature? The extreme forward slant of the capitalA? The ornate flourish trailing from the final letter?

Or maybe his mistress's mouth preparing to smile, her upper lip lifting to reveal the white tips of her teeth and on her breath the smell of the season's first apricots?

Maybe So this is what becomes of Eros.

Maybe OH NO OH NO OH NO OH NO.

One evening in February, I looked up and saw a tall man with a large dog walking into my room.

He was wearing a disguise but I recognized him immediately, just as he did me. Even without mirrors I knew I was no longer slim and pretty, or not so slim though still pretty and vivacious, or verging on fat though radiant; even without mirrors I knew I was pale and haggard and white-haired.

But you can't have let your defenses so thoroughly down with someone and not forever after know them, no matter if they're disguised as a common messenger, like Axel that February day, flying on his winged feet past twelve hundred murderous guardsmen. I saw the melting snowflakes in his black eyelashes. I saw the set of the mouth, a dimple to either side of the faintly trembling lips, the brow no longer smooth yet still wide and intelligent, the nostrils flaring a little with each breath.

The dog was as long-legged as its master, a snow-white creature with pricked ears and a beautiful plumed tail that made me think of the ostrich feathers on my bedposts at Versailles. As I stood there rigid with longing, it leapt up and licked my cheek.

"Odin," Axel said. "Mindyour manners."

And then he embraced me and, really, I thought a person could lose her head forever and what difference would it make.

Only later — much much later, the next day in fact — when Louis finally joined us, did the talk turn to politics. We were flirting with danger. Axel said. Flirting, he repeated and threw me a look; we were playing both ends against the middle, wooing every crowned head in Europe on the one hand, every bloodthirsty revolutionary on the other. It was too late, Axel said; our only hope was escape. Just because the last attempt had failed was no reason not to try again. "We could head northeast this time, concealed within the dark tunnel of forests that stretched from Paris to the marches of Flanders. Why not? he pleaded, but of course we all knew perfectly well that even if escape had once been possible it no longer was. Not only was every avenue fiercely watched, but Louis had pledged his word to the National Assembly that he would stay in Paris, and Louis was an honorable man.

"If you stay you will die," Axel said.

"When the counterrevolutionaries finally get here," Louis replied, "the revolutionaries will need to keep me alive as a hostage to save themselves."

The human heart is many-chambered; I loved them both. I loved the touch of both men, the one seeking to calm my blood, the other to heat it up. The one froglike in his unfashionable wig, the red sash of the Order of Saint-Louis straining across the immense hill of his belly. The other tall and thin. On edge, watchful. Like a racehorse. A beacon.

Resté là, Axel would later write in his diary. This was his usual method for recording an amorous liaison, the equivalent of Louis's got one, but without the bloodshed.