Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race.
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours…
Was ever a woman so sad, ever a woman so hopeless?
Yes, Antoinette. Probably all of them, if truth be told. Brave women, stuffing rags in their shoes, foraging for bread in the streets of Paris. Brave murderous women, if truth be told, since what woman would hesitate for a second if she thought that by murdering someone she could save her own precious child's life? People in Paris were black with hunger, Axel said. Each night forty newborns were left on the doorstep of the Foundling Hospital. People were making straw effigies, Louis the Crack-Brained, Madame Deficit, and setting them on fire to warm their hands and feet. The Seine was frozen solid as a rock. Frozen water everywhere like a message from the future.
Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss
With an individual kiss;
And Joy shall overtake us as a flood.
He had quite a memory, my Louis.
The Diamond Necklace Affair was finally over, Rohan back in his palace, writing his memoir; Cagliostro duly idolized, writing a memoir. The little streetwalker Oliva's memoir had already been published and branded a great popular success. The only one of the key players left in prison was La Motte, and when she escaped everyone said it was through my influence. We'd been lovers, it was said; she was my cat's-paw. The whole thing had been her idea, so you'd expect her to have had a good imagination (or at least as good as every other French citizen busy picturing his Queen lavishing attention on one cock after another; so many cocks, said the author of "The Patriotic Bordello," that if they were laid end to end they'd stretch from Versailles to Paris), but she didn't. La Motte ended up all by herself in a filthy room in London, writing memoir after memoir. Eventually she threw herself from a window.
Maybe it's that whatever passes for imagination in a conniving mind has very little to do with hope. Hope is the ability to imagine other ways out, at least when you're young. Later it changes into something else.
The passageway from the South Quincunx, for instance, via the vanished Labyrinth. Imagine that passageway, like something a small animal might tunnel, twisting and turning around tree roots and past glittering fountains, through the Land of Dancing Water, the Land of the Singing Apple, the Land of the Little Bird Who Knows All, and to Eternity. The long Eternity that would greet our bliss.
Back then I was thirty-three going on a hundred. My hair was turning white.
Nor was I thinking of anything so fanciful as Eternity. No, what I was really thinking of were Axel's apartments, that labyrinth of rooms I'd had built for him just above my own, tucked into long forgotten hallways and within walls, between second-story ceilings and third-story floors, folded in so perfectly you needed to count footsteps or use a tape measure to know they were there, a maze of secret corridors and cubbyholes accessible through doors you could only barely make out, the faintest seam in a panel of silk wallpaper, in a gilt molding, the whole thing a little on the dark side but giving onto a small courtyard and with enough mirrors so that you could count on the occasional ray of morning sun to kiss your skin.
From the South Quincunx, through the Labyrinth, and into Axel's arms.
"Close your eyes," I told him. I led him into the room where the new Swedish stove stood ticking in the corner as its dark blue tiles heated up. Tall, from floor to ceiling — it had been next to impossible to sneak it in without anyone noticing, but I'd managed. Maybe the more obsessed the people around you are with rumors, the less observant they are of what's actually going on. Maybe the busier they are reading "A List of All the Persons with Whom the Queen Has Had Debauched Relations," or discussing how the Queen paved the floor of the Trianon with jewels, or pondering how the Queen got the King drunk on purpose in order to have sex with — of all people! — Cardinal Rohan, the less they see.
Axel said it was a beautiful stove, he couldn't have been happier with it, and I started to cry.
The logs were green and wet, the chateau reeking of smoke. All the windows were thick with frost; you couldn't see through them, let alone open them, even a crack.
He was so kind. It was more than I could bear. Not just the pamphlets, though they were bad enough. Not just my sweet sickly boy. My baby girl, born in July, dead the following June, her lungs the size of teaspoons. The Serious One, my own dear daughter. She heard I'd fallen from my horse and said she wished I'd died.
"Dear heart," Axel said. "Joséphine." He'd chosen that name because he said it made him think not only of the softness and paleness of my skin and hair, but also the firmness of my chin, which he loved. I couldn't stand having anyone around when I was miserable; he took my chin in his hand, he looked me in the eye. "She didn't mean it," he said. "She's very harsh; that's her way. It's how she protects herself. She'll live to be a hundred."
From the north, Axel — the frozen north. If you were to split the frozen surface of the Grand Canal with an axe, out would flow blood, warm red blood. He didn't mind if you saw that about him.
Wicked men, monsters! What had I done that they should hate me so?
A proper Queen would stay in her apartment doing needlework, everyone said. A proper Queen would never have gotten mixed up in the Diamond Necklace Affair in the first place.
No smoke without fire, everyone said, except Goethe, who said the affair filled him with as much terror as the head of Medusa; or Napoleon, who referred to it years later as the gateway to my tomb.
Generally speaking, men are more melodramatic than women.
Meanwhile the Dauphin was dying. He was getting thinner by the day, his poor little spine more and more twisted and his poor little face pinched with pain, every single breath costing him the greatest effort. Lying flat on his stomach on the green felt billiard table in the Chamber of the Pendulum Clock, reading history, philosophy. Reading Hume's History of England, like his father. Our expectation that the sun will rise tomorrow has no basis in reason, but is a matter of belief, which is why it should have come as no surprise to Charles I to wake up one fine day to find his head chopped off.
The two beautiful clocks tick tick ticking away.
Even the surviving Mesdames, Adélaïde and Victoire (Sophie died in 1782) couldn't remember a worse winter. Paris was in chaos; things weren't much better at Versailles. We handed out food to the poor; we built bonfires at the crossroads near the Grand Canal. Food and bonfires, just as Louis's cousin Philippe, the Due d'Orléans, was doing in Paris, though unlike him we didn't try suggesting that no one else was doing anything to help.
But Philippe was busy becoming ringleader of the opposition, turning the Palais Royal, his Paris residence, into its headquarters. The Due d'Orléans — a true Prince of the Blood but otherwise Colonel in Chief of the Emptyheads, a man best known for enjoying rabbit hunting in the nude. "I'm stunned by the pleasure of doing good!" he exclaimed, though that was merely that devil Laclos, who also happened to be his private secretary, speaking through him.
Did I say frozen solid? Did I say reeking of smoke? Did I say four walls do not a prison make?
With a polite nod of the head this footman or that would indicate that hidden door or this; we still thought things weren't so bad. We still thought we had choices. I'll tell you a secret. We ran out of wax candles and had to use tallow; the whole palace smelled like sheep.