Versailles

Staircase of the Ambassadors

Fifty-eight steps from the centermost of the three gilt-grilled front doors, across the vestibule's rose-colored marble pavement and around a phalanx of dark squat piers supporting a dark low ceiling, to the foot of the staircase. Purposely oppressive, the vestibule — echoey, claustrophobic. "On thy belly shalt thou crawl," the overriding message.

And then suddenly at the foot of the staircase the whole thing opens wide, like breath expelled after passing a graveyard. The infinite pours in through a massive skylight three stories up.

No one standing there can resist looking into the face of God, which is to say into the sun. The Doge of Genoa, bringing the Sun King a coffer of precious jewels. The Due de Nevers, imprisoned by the Sun King for baptizing a pig. Jean Racine, suspected by the Sun King of being a poisoner. The Earl of Portland, hoping to convince the Sun King to drive James II as far from England as possible. Bonne, Ponne, and Nonne, the Sun King's hyperactive water spaniels. Dr. Guy-Crescent Fagon with his frightening tools, to let the Sun King's blood.

Ghosts, all of them. The Staircase of the Ambassadors is no longer there — hasn't been since 1752, when Louis XV ordered it destroyed to make apartments for Adélaïde. It was falling apart, anyway, he claimed: the cast-bronze structure supporting the skylight was beginning to wobble, and rain was beginning to leak through. An ill-advised decision for posterity, though certainly not surprising from the same man who remarked, "Après moi, le déluge."

In any case, ghosts are often associated with stairways, liking to hover at their head, or to drag noisy things such as chains up and down them. And don't stairways provide an avenue of connection between two levels or, really, worlds?

For instance, there by the fountain on the landing, where the two flights of stairs branch out, one to the right, one to the left. Isn't that La Voisin, in her trim white cap, with her bag of arsenic and nail cuttings, powdered crayfish and Spanish fly? La Voisin the Sorceress, who helps the women of the Sun King's court — many of them the Sun King's past, present, or future mistresses — obtain bigger whiter breasts, or smaller whiter hands.

It's difficult to tell for sure, since the Staircase is teeming with people who turn out on closer inspection to be unreal. The conquistador, fur trapper, and two red Indians in nothing but loincloths, gathered together on a loggia above the left-branching flight of stairs? The work of Charles Le Brun, master illusionist. Probably the only place at Versailles where you'd find a live red Indian would be out past the Grand Canal, in the zoo.

Nor would you be likely to run into the Bedouin prince and African tribal chief who stand in rapt discourse on a facing loggia.

Even the loggias themselves aren't real, nor are the oriental rugs draped over their parapets, no matter how temptingly soft to the touch they appear to be. The rugs are there to support the idea that this is a festival day, the Sun King having returned triumphant from the Dutch War, meaning—grâce à Dieu! — he will once again be able to line the walkways with tulips, his favorite flower.

A festival day, and not only have people from the four corners of the earth joined to receive the King, but also, in a mixed metaphor of hyperbolic proportion, all the divinities of Parnassus. Clio and Polyhymnia, Hercules and Minerva. Calliope, Thalia, Apollo. Fame and Mercury, Magnificence and Pegasus. Authority, Strength, and Vigilance. Also the twelve months of the year, back in the good old days when they were still named for gods and goddesses. Also a great variety of exotic birds — peacocks, ibises, and so on.

Not to mention actual people, many of them the Sun King's mistresses, since, let's face it, the King of France is expected to be excessively virile, a lion among men.

Up the stairs and down the stairs, delicately lifting their skirts to avoid an unsightly tumble. Beautiful but stupid Mademoiselle de Fontanges in her turquoise — blue riding habit. Mademoiselle de la Valliere and her cunning daughter, Marie, the two of them in matching black velvet gowns. Madame de Maintenon, otherwise known as Your Solidity. Madame de Montespan in all of her many incarnations, young and slender, old and fat, but always with that infuriating parrot jabbering away on her shoulder.

Up and down, up and down.

Let us walk among the tulips! Dance until dawn! Spin the roulette wheel! Slip the King a love philter when he isn't paying attention! Look at me! No, me!

Watch out, though. Sometimes La Voisin's clients get more than they bargain for. Sometimes out pops the Devil, with his sharp little hooves and his appetite for discord.

Nor do you want to get so involved in the spectacle that you fail to notice the python on the ceiling, lying dead at Apollo's feet. "His Majesty," as the Mercure Galant explains, "putting a stop to the secret rebellions His enemies have tried starting, as depicted by the serpent Python who originates from the gross impurities of the earth…"

Presently, the girl takes a walk. So many doors to choose among, so many people. Stupid, witty, amorous, bored, dark-eyed, washed-out, plucked-lipped, hairy. Scratch scratch scratch, with the little fingernail.

"Come in, my dear."

"Hello, grandmother."

Dancing, billiards, reversi, roulette. The path of the pins or the path of the needles. Sorbet, asparagus, cock kidneys, bonbons. Sausage, pigeon eggs, truffles, lemonade.

So the girl eats what's put before her, and all of a sudden there's a dear little tabby cat sitting at her feet, going meow meow how could you do it? Meaning how could she ever have managed to swallow a single bite, the wolf having gotten there first and carved her granny up into dinner.

But did I say girl? What I meant was woman. Queen, actually. When I said girl I meant Queen of France.

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. "

"No worse than that icebreaker," replied Blue Eyes, referring to Minister Turgot's machine, an ill-starred contraption that not only failed to break up the floes at the head of the Seine the previous February, but also was said to have capsized in a tantrum of whirling impedimenta, taking several of its operators down with it.

"The machine was only responsible for three deaths," said Eyebrows. "The tax will starve thousands."

"Turgot won't last," I said. "I am sure of it. Even now, wakened by the spring sun, the wheat anticipates the thresher's blade."

I could see the new leaves on the beech trees, pricked and moving this way and that like the ears of animals. Listening, listening… What is the Queen saying? What impropriety is she committing? The sun had gone behind a large dark cloud; the wind was picking up.

"And then?" said Eyebrows, lifting his axe, clearly impatient with the conversation and ready to get back to work.

"And then we shall have someone even worse," said Blue Eyes, grinning sardonically.

Suddenly a gentle rain began to fall, dotting the canal with millions of tiny bright eruptions, like flung pearls. On my cheeks and eyelashes, my ungloved hands, my uncoiffed head — for a moment I stood there, face uptilted and open-mouthed like one of Latona's frogs, and then all at once the sky filled with millions of tiny bright birds, beating their wings like mad to outrace the approaching storm, and for some reason I felt extremely happy.

"Your Majesty should find shelter," Eyebrows said, his gaze fixed on his axe blade, which he was in the process of sharpening with a whetstone. "Your Majesty might take a chill."

Blue Eyes bent to retrieve his own axe, and it occurred to me that he was trying to hide his amusement. The three of us were, after all, more or less the same age, and I was clearly in excellent health — had circumstances been different we'd no doubt have linked arms and run laughing into the beech grove. Though maybe he, too, had grown bored with the conversation. Maybe he wanted me to leave so that he could relinquish all pretense of continuing to work in what had by now become a fairly steady downpour.

"In any case," I said, "I had better get back to the chateau. The King will be looking for me."

Except of course he wasn't; he was off hunting in the densely wooded area somewhere near the Pond of the Iron Nail, and returned, as I did, drenched to the skin. "Got one," he told me, simultaneously making a note of the fact in his diary, but one what, I never had a clue.

Meanwhile the Prince de Poix, supported by the royal guards, had managed to disperse the angry mob, promising them good quality bread at two sous a loaf. Shortly thereafter the rain stopped, as quickly as it had started. I changed into Masked Desire, my latest Rose Bertin creation, and traded gossip with the Princesse de Lamballe (always an uneven exchange, given her fundamental aversion to speak ill of anyone, living or dead), and, more gratifyingly, with Artois, who told me the so-called inedible loaves wielded by the mob had in fact been cut open earlier and painted green and black, to make them look moldy. I played the harp; I did some needlework. I dined indifferently on the first asparagus of the season, likewise the first fraises des bois, cunningly baked into tarts shaped like hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs, each berry no bigger than my baby fingernail. I made eyes at this man, that man. I triumphed at roulette. Eventually I went to bed.

Can a bird fall in a snare upon the earth, where no gin is for him? Shall one take up a snare from the earth and shall have nothing in it?

Shh! Shh! Blow out the candles, offer a prayer. The body of the Queen of France is tossing and turning on her bed of needles and pins.

The body of the Queen of France, tossing and turning, and there deep inside her, what?

Lights and liver? Bones and blood?

No. The body of the Queen of France and there deep inside her the soul: the girl, taking a walk. From the gardens of Schönbrunn to the Grand Canal of Versailles; from the taste of sweet woodruff to the smell of rain and fish. A straight line connecting the two prime coordinates that, if only she'd paid better attention to her studies, she could have used to locate the third, without which her life would always lack dimension.

Every life has a shape. Even the lives of dogs, though they're born embodying theirs, unlike humans. Even Eggplant, his big round eyeballs rolling from side to side under his silky eyelids, snoring and twitching and dreaming at the foot of the bed. Even a sparrow, a trout, a flea.

Of course death is never a coordinate, not for humans at least.

Which is why it's wrong to say that a life gets cut short.