But where did all of my actual information come from? The Valley of the Danube to the castle of Nymphenburg. 150 chickens, 270 pounds of beef. Pilchards and apricots and kugelhopf. The decayed molar, the coughing sister. Did I make it all up, fiction writer that I am? The truth is, I made none of it up. I am proud to say that every single fact in my book is a true fact, or as close to a true fact as a fact can be, given the vagaries of historic documentation.
Of course, the animating spirit of a thing is impossible to apprehend without first understanding the container.
When I set out to write Versailles, all I knew about Marie Antoinette was pretty much what everyone knows — probably less. I remembered descriptions of the lever from eleventh grade history, so horrified had I been by the idea of being watched by an audience upon awakening in the morning. The rolling in of the royal bathtub. Worse yet, the royal chamber pot. I remembered the insanely elaborate outfits. The Tennis Court Oath, though only the name of it, which I'd mixed up in my head with the Jeu de Peaumes museum. My sixth-grade teacher's name had been Robespierre Ichabod Fine, and he'd had pretty much nothing good to say about his namesake, whom he called a bloodthirsty tyrant, though I knew from my daughter that the story was more complex than that. I'd also read the Literary Heritage edition of Dangerous Liaisons when I was much too young to understand a single thing that was going on in it, but had been drawn to it (my parents had loads of these fancy-pants Literary Heritage books in their living room bookshelves) by the pictures and reread it many times as light progressively dawned. My same sixth-grade teacher — one of the best teachers I ever had in an academic career unusually blessed with good teachers — used to take three of us out for Cokes after school, and I remember one afternoon how he told each of us in turn which period in history he thought we belonged to. Wicki, twentieth-century America. Liz, Renaissance Italy. Me, eighteenth-century France. I remember I was insulted — eighteenth-century France! How stuffy and boring!
But Mr. Fine was right. I am an eighteenth-century girl, through and through. The secretly soft hopeful heart, the coolly ironic exterior. Lover of good food, lively conversation, romantic intrigue. Ruled by curiosity.
Still, I knew that before I could write my book there was a lot I had to learn about Marie Antoinette, about the period in which she'd lived, about the Palace of Versailles. I also knew I didn't want to write a book that sounded "research driven." I decided to read two biographies straight through, taking no notes: To the Scaffold and Marie Antoinette, the Life of an Ordinary Woman. Immediately I was struck by the fact that the story of Marie Antoinette's life was one of the most fascinating stories I'd ever read, and that every single detail in it was shimmering with narrative possibility. The way the names of the fashionable colors for ladies' gowns changed from season to season: baby flea to lover's guts. The way Mirabeau wore his unruly curls in a large velvet bag. The way tulips could or could not be planted depending upon whether or not France was at war with Holland. The way Louis XV walked around on the rooftop after dark, talking to his guests down the chimney flues. The way Antoinette unraveled a chemise and pried two nails from the wall so she could amuse herself by making lace while she was incarcerated in the Conciergerie.
Every single fact I encountered seemed seductive, though obviously I couldn't use them all.
And as I read my first two biographies, I began to surround myself with other books: more biographies, architectural treatises, history and philosophy books, prayer books, books of fairy tales, cookbooks. Piles and piles of books. You fall in love with your subject; you transfer your love to the books. It's almost as if they generate heat, standing there in their tall piles around your desk. I would write, and I would dip in and out of my books. I wasn't allowed to take notes. This was one of my most important rules, but also hardest to enforce. I was allowed to write smallish notes to myself on little scraps of paper and put them in a file box meant for index cards. I figured that way I'd only include information that had truly lodged itself in my imagination and would thus avoid the "overresearched" problem, though of course it would often happen that I'd be writing a chapter — about Louis's problems with his penis, for example — and I'd realize that I'd forgotten the name of Antoinette and Louis's doctor, and have to go rummaging through my books till I found it. A real historian, watching me at work would have gone out of his or her mind.
I also realized that I'd have to come to my own conclusions about some of the more "iffy" historic information, the king's penis being a case in point. Did Louis suffer from phimosis, a condition in which (forgive me) the foreskin gets stuck during ejaculation, thus making the act of intercourse so painful as to be avoided at all costs? Did he finally, seven years into his marriage to Antoinette, consent to the operation that at last made the production of an heir possible? Certainly it's true that during this seven-year period the French people tended increasingly to blame the absence of an heir on Antoinette, who turned in their affections from a blond, blue-eyed sweetheart to "the Austrian bitch."
The eighteenth century had a great fondness for all forms of drama; amateur theatrics were popular at Versailles, with the queen often taking a leading role. I decided to make use in my book from time to time of playlets, particularly when I was dealing with some of the more ambiguous historical situations.
Are the playlets true to fact? Yes, if you ignore the issue of what the people are actually saying to one another. But Antoinette did have a pug. She did tear around on horseback — rode astride, to be perfectly accurate, as she'd been instructed by her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, to the horror of the French court. Her eyes were trained on the flies of all the handsome young men, or at least according to the pamphleteers (Laclos, the dangerous author of Dangerous Liaisons being chief among them). Louis did make Antoinette a spinning wheel. He did on occasion eat entire roast piglets. And yes, Antoinette — that very same Marie Antoinette we've been encouraged to think of as devoted to a life of pleasure — never touched wine, or any alcoholic beverage for that matter.
Unfortunately, unless you want to litter your story with footnotes, it's impossible to reassure your reader about the historical accuracy of your material. That's one of the big drawbacks of historical fiction, I think. Once the reader begins to question the historical accuracy of a piece of information — whether Carlotta actually gave up liver pudding for Lent, for instance — the floodgates open. Everything gets thrown into doubt.
To get around this difficulty I chose to try to make the world of the book feel exceptionally real. The more I dwelt in it, the realer that world became for me, and I hoped this would rub off on the prose. I also wanted the movement of the book, the reader's sense of the passage of time, to be almost mimetic. I figured that in creating a real sense of time's passage, I could generate a kind of suspense, a version of the suspense otherwise denied me by my infamous subject matter.
Almost from the beginning I knew that I wanted the book to be full of numbers. An odd desire, given my own antipathy to mathematics, but utterly compelling. This was due, in part I think, to my wish to convey, simultaneously, a sense of almost unimaginable limitlessness and almost unendurable limit: to show how Versailles was a world with so many windows and doors you could barely keep count of them, and yet, ultimately, you could keep count. I wanted to make it clear that the container, no matter how huge, how apparently infinite, always has limits; that's what makes it a container.