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.