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.
Duettino
(after Mozart)
MERCY (entering the Bull's Eye Chamber through a door, stage right)
All is not lost yet;
We can still hope.
(Antoinette enters stage left, humming to herself, the red velvet bag containing her missal over one arm.)
But here is the Queen; a golden opportunity.
I'll pretend not to see her.
(Aside, loudly)
If only she would come, that pearl of virtue,
Whose charms the King cannot resist.
ANTOINETTE (aside, holding back)
He's talking about me.
MERCY (aside, to himself)
After all, in this strange land
She's the best one can hope for.
Style means everything.
ANTOINETTE (aside)
A spiteful tongue! Lucky for him
He has my mother's blessing.
MERCY
Bravo! Such discretion!
And those modest eyes,
That demure expression,
Those…
ANTOINETTE (aside)
Enough is enough.
(Both spring into motion, meeting at the door to the King's Bedchamber)
MERCY (executing a deep, satiric bow)
After you,
Your Royal Highness.
ANTOINETTE (executing a low, satiric curtsy)
No, I insist,
Most worthy sir.
MERCY
No, you go first, pray.
ANTOINETTE
No, no, after you.
MERCY AND ANTOINETTE (together)
Your words can sway the King;
Mine are like millet seed.
MERCY
Expectant mother, first.
ANTOINETTE
First, brilliant statesman.
MERCY
Austria's pride and joy.
ANTOINETTE
The toast of France.
MERCY
Your comeliness.
ANTOINETTE
Your wine cellars.
MERCY
Your dramatic gifts.
ANTOINETTE
Your lies.
MERCY (aside)
I'll die of apoplexy
If I stay here one minute longer.
ANTOINETTE
Duplicitous old sodomite.
If only my mother knew…
(Exit Mercy in a fury.)
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.