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.
Labyrinth
There were thirty-nine fountains tucked away within the Labyrinth, and the Labyrinth itself tucked into a shady corner of the palace grounds, west of the Orangerie, south of the Latona Gardens, and north of the aqueduct carrying water to the town of Versailles.
Each fountain was based on one of Aesop's fables, though interestingly never on those about lions. The Monkey King, the Parliament of Rats, the Rooster and the Diamond, the Hare and the Tortoise — there were almost two hundred animals in all, all of them exquisitely cast in lead and gilt-painted, their gold mouths wide open, spewing forth bright jets of water.
The Sun King had the Labyrinth built for his heir, the so-called Grand Dauphin, alone among his six legitimate children to survive the court doctor's passion for bloodletting. A sweet-natured person, and also quite handsome until he grew fat, the Grand Dauphin. In the end the court doctors got him as well, leaving him empty as a glove, after which the Grey Sisters prepared him for burial. Or maybe it was the chateau floor polishers, or the workmen who made the coffin. Accounts vary.
Though when you think about it, isn't this the lesson of a labyrinth? You walk in filled with eager anticipation of the marvels that await you, racing along the boxwoodlined paths as if actually guided by some intrinsic sense of destination, only to find yourself in a dark little cul-de-sac, face to face with a gilt-painted lead rat on the back of a gilt-painted lead frog.
Of course the Sun King's intentions for the Labyrinth seem to have been somewhat less metaphysical. Aesop's pragmatic, you might even say cold, view of human relations deeply appealed to him, and he hoped to impress them by whatever means possible on the Grand Dauphin's dreamy sensibility.
The Labyrinth could be entered by means of a special key, in the keeping of Bishop Bossuet, the sadistic tutor. Come, come, Bossuet would implore in a fed-up tone. For the love of God, lift your feet. As often happens, the boy's gentle spirit stimulated the tutor's desire to inflict pain; soon enough Bossuet had beaten any love of learning out of his charge, who grew into what we'd call a nonentity if it weren't for the fact that he was heir apparent to the French throne. The Grand Dauphin loved playing card games, hunting for wolves, ugly women, and collecting art, though not necessarily in that order. Frequently he could be seen drumming his fingers on the lid of his snuffbox. "Like a ball to be rolled hither and thither at the will of others," according to Saint-Simon, "drowning in fat and gloom."
Bossuet would unlock the gate at the main entrance, flanked on the left by a statue of the fabulist himself, on the right by a statue of Love. Bowing, ironic —After you, Monseigneur. The Labyrinth astir with bees, the almost ducklike voices of the actual (as opposed to lead) frogs living in the thirty-nine fountains, the shifting shadows of millions upon millions of leaves.
Straight ahead, then right, then right again, then left. The Duke and the Birds. The Eagle and the Fox. The Dragon, the Anvil, and the File.
A Dragon wanted to eat an anvil, wrote Aesop. And there the Dragon was, disgruntled and golden, coiled in his shadowy lair with water shooting from his mouth and nostrils. A File said to him. "You'll break off your teeth before you even begin to bite into that, whereas I can chew my way through anything."
Meanwhile Bossuet stood waiting in his long black robes at the intersection of two paths, arms crossed, tapping his elegantly shod toe. Sun glinting off the crucifix on his chest, off the mammoth dome of his forehead. That pious half smile!