But then, these men face in, not out. They interrogate every visitor who crosses the threshold, inspect every package—even the most mundane grocery delivery. They wear the uniform of the revolution: long breeches and the tricolor cockade, and they look at us all not with fear or respect, but disdain. None would sacrifice his life to save any of the erstwhile palace’s royal guests. Their loyalty lies beyond the paint-chipped walls of this dwelling, silently echoing the jeers of the rebels.
Though certainly a royal residence, Tuileries is nothing like Versailles, and even I—a peasant shepherdess—can ascertain the difference. There are ghosts of the tile factory it once was hidden in the architecture, especially in the hall where the household servants are kept. Entire wings are blocked from use, deemed dangerous because of their leaking roofs and aggressive mold. The king holds court—to the extent he is allowed—and has his private apartments on the first floor, Her Majesty on the second. And those who reside with them have taken apartments throughout. I think back to Madame Gisela, and wonder what she would think of the turn of events. Vindicated? Remorseful? Would she consider it still an honor to be part of the inner circle of the queen’s companions if being such put her life and freedom at risk? Or is she like the others, willing to trade her jewels and gold and weapons for emigration documents—scraps of paper giving her permission to get in a carriage like the one that brought me here and drive it to the coast, board a ship, and join the English bourgeoisie?
I’m told that this place was once a favorite of Her Majesty’s. From the days before, when Paris welcomed their young, fashionable queen, ushering her from one festivity to the next while the stodgy Louis drank his warm chocolate at home. Those were the days that the rumors worked in her favor—stories of illicit lovers in any one of the dozens of the palace’s apartments. But since the turning of that tide, when her husband and children begged royal dedication and the grandeur of Versailles, Tuileries has fallen into the disrepair of disuse.
Again, all of this is whispered to me by the staff transplanted from Versailles, serving at the leisure of the Assembly. I am not numbered among them. They can pass in and out, going to the market and to coffee shops and to the celebrations in the street whenever there’s word of another member of the Second Estate pulled out of his carriage and dragged into prison. They flaunt their freedom, singing the songs of the revolution as they perform the household tasks. I, on the other hand, am a prisoner. A rare common girl living under the punishment of power. And, though she offered me no welcome upon my arrival, displayed no acknowledgment of my presence for the first month of my residence, and has yet to show any gratitude for the actions that most certainly saved her life the night the women of Paris stormed her chamber, I place myself as often as possible in the queen’s presence. It is enough that Marie-Thérèse flew into my arms at the first moment away from her mother’s watchful gaze, and Louis-Charles entrusted me with his favorite wooden toy soldier to protect me like Monsieur Bertrand. By and by, I am allowed more time with the children, as the queen cannot find a nanny who does not look at them with sidelong, treasonous eyes.
For her part, the queen—or now simply Madame, since referring to her by a royal title is grounds for accusations of treason—refuses to act like a prisoner. She and Louis make daily excursions—he to the countryside, under guard, to hunt; she to pay social calls on those unwilling to visit her in the dank, crumbling parlor of her cramped apartment. As they are not allowed to have a chapel at Tuileries, the family goes to Mass every Sunday, and when I am once again enfolded to her favor, Madame allows me to accompany them. These are some of my very few opportunities to walk out on the streets.
And what frightening times! We are flanked by a contingent of the former king’s guard, those yet to desert in search of the blood-glory of the rebels, and they alone stand between us and the violence of the crowd. Their bodies bear the brunt of stones and bricks, their blue coats stained with spit. They are not permitted to carry weapons, or the route to Tuileries might be scattered with the heads of the poor. But they retaliate with their shoulders, their elbows, their feet.
I can imagine Bertrand here, a full head and shoulders above everything. My mountain, Marcel called him. A fortress. A bulwark. Yet, in the end, as vulnerable as the walls of the mighty Bastille, which had been torn down by the hands of peasants. These days, remnants of its stone walls are rounded and smoothed and worn as baubles in place of pearls.
On Tuesday afternoons, a routine since the first bitter-cold days in December, Madame assembles a guard and takes an afternoon to visit one of the neighborhoods struck by poverty. She brings baskets of food from our own kitchen and stacks of warm clothing and blankets. It is because of this, I think, that I have been admitted into her good graces, for I am capable of knitting five pairs of stockings a day, now that I have no other royal duties to attend to. I also have the trust of Mademoiselle, and have made her my apprentice. She is getting quite good—precise and detailed, though not nearly as fast. We make caps, too, and warm wool sleeping sacks for the smallest of children. All in black or brown, never the colors of the revolution. If we are given skeins of red or blue wool, I am charged to dye them black, and I live with the telltale sign of the deception beneath the nail beds of my fingers.
I am not permitted to accompany Madame on these excursions, but Mademoiselle is, and we spend long, cold afternoons next to the small fire in the parlor knitting in preparation for the next one.
“They are so nice to her, you’d never know,” she says, brow furrowed in concentration. In moments like this it is painfully clear that she will never be the beauty that her mother was in youth. Mademoiselle looks too much like her father from the nose up, and like her mother’s worst features from the lips down. Her skin is perpetually blotchy in the cold, her teeth crowded, her eyes small and close and pale. Her lips are pink, but not in an inviting way, and even when chapped with cold, manage to make moist popping syllables when she speaks. “These women, who sit around her and ooh and ahh over her dress, and say ‘Merci, our angel of mercy.’ And the next time they are there with more children, more mouths to feed. And Mother, how she loves them. Takes them into her arms, settles them on her lap, and says, ‘If you were mine, you’d never know a hungry day.’”
She pauses, lobs a mild curse at a dropped stitch, rips out a row, and begins again. “I’m always wondering, Are these the same women that ran through our house that night? And I think, if they knew truly the kindness and generosity of her heart . . .”
“I’ve often thought the same,” I say. I’m using the shuttle Madame gave me to create tiny yellow flowers from thread pulled from draperies I found stored in the attic. I attach one to each of our stockings, a hidden signature of the former queen. “Perhaps if she’d had more opportunities, before . . .”
Mademoiselle wrinkles her nose. “It wouldn’t matter. These are selfish, stupid people. They take her gifts and then curse her on the street.”
“Do you ever—does she ever worry for her safety?”
She shrugs. “I don’t think she cares anymore, one way or another. If they don’t want her as queen, she’s happy enough not to be queen.”
“And you?” It is a bold question, far above my station, but present circumstances have erased a multitude of formalities.
“You know I can never be. Our laws won’t let a girl—”
“But it seems those laws are changing. Or, perhaps, you’ll be married to a prince? Like your mother.”
She knits for what seems like ages, her nailbitten fingers snagging at the wool, before responding, and when she does, her voice is a whisper so low the sounds of the needles overpower it. “I don’t want any of this. Not to be married, not to rule. I don’t want to be what they hate.”
Summer arrives without any of its usual welcome respite from the cold of winter. The garden space at Tuileries is overgrown and untended, without even a hint of the majesty of that at Versailles. I know Madame longs for an escape to the Petit Trianon an
d complains more loudly of her confinement with each passing day.
“They trust me enough to allow me into the streets to feed their poor,” she complains. “But a single step beyond the city gate makes me a fugitive.”
She’s grown fatter during our time here, and every dress that she was able to summon after her arrest strains at the seams in a manner no corset can relieve. I’ve taken to sneaking them away at night and altering them as I can—adding panels of material cut from the skirt to the bodice, cutting more generous sleeves in the name of la mode. It is becoming the style to wear plain white dresses fashioned from cotton or muslin, with indistinguishable waistlines and an absence of any kind of structure. When I mention once, quietly, that she consider such a gown to make her appear more approachable to those she has alienated, she lets forth with a laugh so bitter I taste the black gall behind it.
“I was reviled for wearing such a thing years ago,” she said. “Didn’t look regal enough. Said I looked like some poor shepherd girl. And now—”
“The people, Madame. They are impossible to please.”
“Do you know, when I first came here—” her face goes dreamy with nostalgia—“when I was just a girl—fourteen years old, imagine, to marry Louis. I rode out from my home, and a carriage met me midway. A point, they said, in the direct center between my old home and my new. I stepped out of my carriage and there, in the middle of the road, they made me strip naked. A girl, fourteen. Bare to all. I had to leave everything. Down to my stockings and pants. And they dressed me in their clothes. Their colors, their fashion. And I’ve been a slave to them ever since.”
The two extremes of her reign interplay as she speaks. Her voice is that of the petulant girl, wronged and embarrassed and angry, the sharp whine incongruous with the soft folds of her face. Her eyes spark with memory, then cool to steel as they take in the cold shabbiness of the room. I have no words to soothe or encourage; even if I did, she is too far away to hear them. She is back at that same crossroads between her beloved homeland and this dreadful one, stripped of both the girl she was and the woman they forced her to become.
“It is time for me to go home.”
In early June, when she summons me and asks me to bring my measuring tape especially, my mind spins with possibility. Madame Bertin has vanished along with anybody who might be sympathetic to the royal plight, and wouldn’t be allowed to design a new gown if she were discovered living comfortably down the street. It’s been so long since I’ve crafted anything new—nothing, really, since the mourning gown after Louis-Joseph’s death. I raid the children’s room for some drawing paper and charcoal, and stand outside her open parlor door at our appointed time. There’s no one here to announce me or to keep me from barging in. I clear my throat once, recalling the importance of never addressing our queen until being first addressed. It seems to me by the subtle shift in her posture, an infinitesimal rigidity, that she is aware of my presence but is choosing to ignore me. A remnant of the status from her former life. Part of me senses that, were I to say, “You called for me, Your Majesty?” I would face chastisement for forgetting my place. And so I wait, and wait, until finally Marie-Thérèse and Louis-Charles come careening around the corner.
These two, she cannot ignore, and they run to her with a joy-filled familiarity, eager to show off the day’s treasure: for Marie-Thérèse, a new volume of poetry; for Louis-Charles, a new set of dominoes. Madame fawns over each and then happens to look over their shoulders to see me patiently waiting.
“Maintenant, mes enfants,” she says with a final kiss to each face, “off with you while I have a chat with la couturière. You can show me more after supper.”
They immediately depart, and for the first time I notice the absence of a once-familiar sound—that of shoes clattering and echoing in the halls. Not because the halls of Tuileries don’t echo—the floors and walls are largely stone and bare—but because the children’s feet, too, are bare. As bare as mine ever were in summer. Suddenly my soft leather slippers feel uncomfortable and confining, and I envy that measure of freedom.
We exchange no pleasantries once we are alone. In fact, she treated me with more warmth and familiarity on the day we first met than she does in this moment. She does, however, summon me close until I am standing right next to the small sofa on which she sits. Then, to my utter amazement, she pats the cushion next to her.
I am sitting beside the queen. She may be merely Madame to the bloodied rebels of Paris, but in my heart she has suffered no change of station.
“I need you to do something for me,” she says. As she speaks, her eyes dart between my face and her open door, and her voice is far softer than necessary.
“Of course, Madame. I am always at your service.”
She responds with a thin, strained smile. “You know, so much of my wardrobe has fallen into such disrepair, I need some new things. More appropriate, I think, for my current activities.”
“Activities, Madame?”
“Something that would make me less . . . reconnaissable. Now, people see me on the street and they say, ‘There she is! The queen!’ They can spot me from a mile away. They recognize my gowns. I need something . . .”
“Plain?”
“Bourgeois.”
I let the word sink. “Of course, Madame.” Already I am thinking of the endless sea of fabric in the garment room at Versailles. Here, I will have to crawl through unused wings looking for something suitable, for I doubt I will be able to visit any of the shops in the city.
I voice this concern, but she waves me off. “You’re a resourceful little thing. Always have been. If the people—those people—learn that I am indulging in a new gown, no matter how modeste . . .”
“I understand.” I put the bit of charcoal to the page and begin a sketch, thinking of the garments worn by the ladies who still come to call. I almost suggest borrowing something from one of them, simply altering it to fit Madame’s distinctive figure, but something tells me she would have none of that.
“And for Marie-Thérèse as well.”
I don’t look up. “In the same vein?”
“Oui.”
I feel a smile tugging. “If I may be so bold as to say so, Madame, I think it is a good thing when Marie-Thérèse accompanies you on your visits. It’s important for children—for poor children—to see such kindness. And I think it’s good for her to see such poverty.”
Madame doesn’t respond, and it’s like a thin window of ice has grown between us.
I continue to sketch until her hand stills mine. “This—this won’t be like the others. Remember when all of the court would be waiting to see what beautiful creation I would wear into the ballroom? All the silk. The candlelight, the music. The gold.” I glance up to see her gazing at the ceiling, where a water stain is creeping from the corner. “And the wigs! Oh, such towering, ridiculous things.” Her laugh is a private affair I am not invited to join. “And now I ask for nothing but a plain brown dress. Something that will make me look like the wife of a prosperous shopkeeper.”
This last word is delivered with a laugh too. Yet another from which I am excluded.
“I could never please them,” she says. “Any of them. Louis, such a boy when we married, had no idea what to do with a woman.” She leans forward. “Never learned, either. But always, I looked too Austrian, my French was inadequate, I looked too much like a little girl, then too much like a whore, then too much like a peasant. If I wore a new gown I was wasteful; if I wore one a third time I was disgraceful. If I danced too much, I was no more than a country trollop, but if I didn’t dance, I was a stodgy, humorless Hapsburg. I wish I’d never come.”
“Madame!” Impulsively I touch her sleeve. “You cannot mean that.”
Rather than pull away, she covers my hand with hers. It is warm and dry and heavy, and as she leans close, I permit myself to stare into her features with a forthrightness I’ve never been allowed. There is no beauty in her at this moment. Not a trace. She might as wel
l be the ghost of a tile cutter from the first generation of this crumbling palace.
“I would rather be dead,” she says, chopping her words with the accent of her native tongue. “A spinster at my mother’s side, my children nothing more than dreams that never lived, than to give myself over to the bloody hands of those animals outside.”
And that’s when I know, without any lingering doubt, that she has no intention to wear the comfortable, sturdy dress I’ve concocted on this sheet of paper on her next excursion to feed the bloody poor’s children. For that, she adores the recognition, knowing the bile they must swallow in order to accept her gifts. No, this is not a dress to wear into the streets of Paris. This—and the one I will make for her daughter—is the dress she will wear to escape them.
The pace at which I create Madame’s costume puts me to shame, or it would if anyone knew. Without bolts of fabric to stroll through, or even access to a dressmaker’s shop, I’m reduced to spending afternoons opening closed doors, sometimes using the skeleton key Madame slipped into my hand days after our conversation. Many of the rooms are empty, save for minimal furnishings covered with yards of dust-protective gray cloth. I rifle through closets and wardrobes, finding moth-eaten remnants even the poorest of the street would recognize as decades out of fashion.
Finally, I work my way to the upper floors, the servants’ rooms, and chastise myself for not thinking to start there. There is a wardrobe filled with dresses made from a serviceable light-brown wool. No bolts of material, but generous skirts, plenty to work with. I have several yards of a pleasant calico and ample linen that still smells faintly of drying in the sun. With Madame’s permission, I take one of the empty upper rooms as my work space. It is high enough that the open window spares me from the sounds and smells of the life teeming below, and when my shoulders ache from painstakingly stitching the panels, I lean out and marvel at the idea that I’m not allowed to join the outside world.
The Seamstress Page 32
