Praise for
THE EXCHANGE OF PRINCESSES
“The strength of this novel, sprinkled with authentic quotes, rests on a story that history itself furnished.”
— Le Monde des livres
“To take history seriously only to grasp its ironic tragedy, this is great art … With delicious detail Chantal Thomas explores the hidden indignities of a century that exploited childhood even as it was inventing it, a delight of the form that is now wholly her own.”
— Le Figaro
“The exchange of these princesses is straight out of a Cold War spy novel, taking place on an island in the middle of a river that serves as the border between the two kingdoms. But none of these young protagonists will play the adults’ game and the princesses will end up going home. Chantal Thomas excels at humanizing history and exposing what is at stake (or ‘revealing its relevance’). How do these children, sold in such a way by their parents, feel? Will they love or hate each other? These are the universal, timeless questions that this ‘historical’ novel plays with, and which render it strikingly contemporary.”
— Vogue (France)
“We love [The Exchange of Princesses] because, as always with Chantal Thomas, winner of the 2002 Prix Femina for Farewell, My Queen, her stories dance on volcanoes. In her, the mighty of our world finish by bumping their noses against the whims of fate … A must-read if you still shy away from historical novels. That will change.”
— Le Parisien
“Delicious like childhood and cruel like life.”
— Télérama
“Chantal Thomas made history a pungent, political, and intimate epic, told by a narrator whose empathy does not detract from the satirical irony.”
— Le Magazine littéraire
“[With this] little-known episode in history, Chantal Thomas writes a superb novel about violence against women and children, [showcasing] marriages as absurd as they are forced.”
— Phosphore
“Impressive.”
— La Vie
“A fascinating novel.”
— L’Express (France)
“Through her voice — sensitive, alive, contemporary, sometimes raw — [Thomas] manages to recreate how these sacrificed children lived, felt, feared, hoped, and suffered.”
— Point de Vue (France)
“[Thomas] mixes fact and fiction to create her own novelistic space of a time that is at once free and cruel … What Thomas details here, in this story of lives in gilded cages, is the birth — or rejection of — desire in children who do not have the words to articulate it because they, too, are locked up in the absurdity of etiquette and formal rituals that have been imposed on them.”
— La Croix
“Chantal Thomas, a scholar brought up on Sade and Casanova, has clearly chosen, in her past few books, to hone in on dying aristocracies — not out of snobbery, but because what she has to say about our ‘beautiful present’ is reflected through, in her mind, the traditions of the past.”
— Le Point
“With the verve and delicacy for which she is known, Chantal Thomas reaffirms in these intense, feverish, and sensual pages her eye for detail and the painting of a scene, and her ability to turn a phrase that snaps like a riding crop.”
— Lire
“Chantal Thomas [is a] philosopher who brings historical erudition, pediatric science, bright tales of the heart, and breathtaking stories to the art of the novel and to theater.”
— Le Nouvel observateur
“To these sacrificed childhoods, these bruised fates, this history disdained by historians, Chantal Thomas’s beautiful novel grants a late and dazzling revenge.”
— Sud Ouest
“A beautiful saga.”
— Madame Figaro
“Thanks to Chantal Thomas for having crafted such a joyful book out of such sad fates.”
— Libération, Supplément livres
“As with Farewell, My Queen (winner of the 2002 Prix Femina) and Le Testament d’Olympe (2010), [Thomas] avoids the pitfalls of the historical novel by combining historical documents — letters, excerpts from Saint-Simon’s Memoirs — with fiction.”
— Le Temps, Samedi culturel
“With elegance and subtlety, Chantal Thomas pursues sensitive evocations of eighteenth-century France.”
— Le Journal du dimanche
“While very classic, her writing still surprises, distilling irony in each sentence like a poison … Like Saint-Simon revised and edited by Sade.”
— Les Inrockuptibles
ALSO BY CHANTAL THOMAS
Nonfiction
The Wicked Queen:
The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette
Coping with Freedom:
Reflections on Ephemeral Happiness
Fiction
Farewell, My Queen
Copyright © Éditions du Seuil, 2013
First published in French as L’échange des princesses by Éditions du Seuil, Paris, in 2013.
Epigraph copyright © Éditions Stock, 2010
Translation copyright © John Cullen, 2014
This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and FACE Foundation (French American Cultural Exchange).
Foreword copyright © Martha Saxton, 2015
Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016.
Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Thomas, Chantal, 1945 —
[Echange des princesses. English]
The exchange of princesses / by Chantal Thomas; translated from the French by John Cullen; foreword by Martha Saxton.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-59051-702-4 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-59051-703-1 (ebook)
1. Orléans, Philippe, duc d’, 1674 — 1723 — Fiction. 2. Arranged marriage — Fiction. 3. France — History — Regency, 1715 — 1723 — Fiction. I. Cullen, John, 1942- translator. II. Title.
PQ2680.H493E2413 2015
843′.914 — dc23
2014043505
Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of historical fiction based on factual events. Characters and incidents in this story are in part the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
v3.1
For Alfredo Arias
in memory of his show Les Noces de l’Enfant Roi
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
I: An Excellent Idea Paris, Summer 1721
Madrid, September 1721
Paris, Autumn 1721
Spain, Winter 1721
Bazas, December 22, 1721
Behind the Wall of Dolls, December 1721
Paris, January 1722
Bayonne, January 1722
Pheasant Island, January 9, 1722
II: First Steps on Foreign Soil Lerma-Madrid, January–February 1722
A Euphoric Passage through France, January–February 1722
> Madrid, February 1722
Paris, March 1722
Madrid, March 1722
Paris, Spring 1722
Madrid, June 1722
III: Fortresses of Deceit Versailles, June–July 1722
Spain, Summer 1722
Versailles, August–December 1722
Madrid, January 1723
Versailles, January 1723
Madrid, February 1723
Versailles, February 15, 1723
Spain, Spring–Summer 1723
Meudon, July 1723
Madrid, August 25, 1723
Versailles, August 25, 1723
El Escorial, Autumn 1723
Versailles, December 2, 1723
IV: Woe to the Vanquished! El Escorial, December 20, 1723
Versailles, January 1724
Madrid, January–February 1724
Versailles, January–February 1724
La Granja De San Ildefonso, Madrid, February 1724
Versailles, February 1724
Madrid, Carnival 1724
Versailles, Spring 1724
Madrid, Spring–Summer 1724
Versailles, July 1724
Madrid, July–August 1724
Fontainebleau, August–November 1724
Madrid, August 15–31, 1724
Fontainebleau, November 3, 1724
Madrid, November 3, 1724
Fontainebleau, End of November 1724
Madrid, End of November 1724
Versailles, Winter 1724
Madrid, December 11, 1724
Versailles, December 17, 1724
Madrid, December 1724
Versailles, February 20–23, 1725
At the Border, Mid-May 1725
Author’s Note
Principal Characters
About the Authors
And something told me, and tells me still, that disregarded stories, one day or another, will have their revenge.
— ERIK ORSENNA, L’Entreprise des Indes
FOREWORD
In 1721 Philip D’Orléans, regent of France, devised and set in motion a masterstroke of Kinderpolitik: two marriages of four royal children ranging in age from three to fourteen. Philip was hoping to ensure peace between Spain and France and lengthen his control over his eleven-year-old nephew, Louis XV, king of France. To this end, he promised his neglected, bleak, and turbulent daughter, Louise, aged twelve, to the unprepossessing Luis of Asturias, aged fourteen and heir to the throne of Spain. At the same time, he engaged his mournful nephew to Mariana Victoria — infanta of Spain, half-sister of Luis — a plucky three year old who would make her betrothal journey to France accompanied by a trunk of beloved dolls. Chantal Thomas’s ability to inhabit these children’s hearts reveals the emotional chaos their guardians’ routine betrayals and manipulations inflicted on them. All the young royals probably would have been well advised to choose dolls as the primary recipients of their affections.
At the time that Philip was orchestrating these nuptials, a movement was underway that would revolutionize ideas about child raising. Beginning in the eighteenth century and gathering momentum in the next, childhood increasingly came to represent to parents a time in which they should protect and cherish the innocence of their children before the cares and duties of maturity set in. They were to encourage their childish sympathies and intelligence. Affectionate child rearing led to parents beginning to permit their offspring to choose their spouses based on mutual attraction and respect rather than on matters of property and fortune.
The Spanish monarchs and the regent’s faction at court were oblivious to this developing trend and joyfully anticipated the prospect of the double marriage. The adult puppeteers wrote congratulatory letters to one another in their various charges’ names, expressing pious sentiments of devotion and hope in glorious marital and national futures. The ventriloquized children, meanwhile, complied and either tried to silence their feelings of confusion, dread, and sadness, or acted them out.
The ruthless utilization of royal children over the centuries is hardly news, but Thomas splices together the assaults on these children’s feelings and desires with surreal depictions of the extravagant clothing and luxurious entertainments that accompanied them, bringing the velvet-clad abuse to life and rendering the emotional wreckage that ensued powerfully touching. It was decreed, for example, that the boy king, who has lost his mother, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, would have to sacrifice his Maman Ventadour, who had taken care of him since infancy. She was to travel to Spain to accompany the tiny infanta to Paris. When they arrived, the infanta, now coddled by Madame de Ventadour, fell worshipfully at the feet of her graceful intended spouse and would pass her years of engagement trotting around after him hoping in vain to elicit a flicker of affection. For his part, Louis was seized the moment he met his betrothed by furious, inexpressible jealousy over her possession of la Ventadour. Meanwhile, the Spanish ambassador in Paris celebrated the future union of the thumb-sucking girl and her shut-down fiancé by building an artificial rock in the center of the Seine (in front of Mariana’s windows) and placing on it a columned temple, decorated with paintings of Roman gods and goddesses. Lighted boats circled the island, bearing musicians playing their instruments. The event culminated in a joust between gondoliers and a conflagration that took the temple down and ignited a lengthy display of fireworks.
In Spain, Louise, whose only education has consisted of going to the theater now and then with her father, Philip, has begun to digest the facts that her future husband’s sole interest is hunting and that her in-laws are grimly devout. Her arrival is marked by an auto-da-fé, in which the grand inquisitor presides over the torture and burning at the stake of numerous yellow-clad heretics, including, Prince Luis informs his bride-to-be, eleven women.
The rhetoric surrounding the French and the American revolutions accelerated the change toward protecting children and nurturing their abilities and — at least for boys — autonomy. Thomas’s novel provides a frightening portrait of what preceded “the invention of childhood.” She shows us children as actors in a game they often barely understood, costumed in silk, satin, and jewels, in an international play about naked power. It is little wonder that Louise — of whose hapless body so much was expected — expressed her misery and contempt for her abusers by rejecting the fine clothing designed to adorn and appease her and, eventually, by tearing off every piece of her clothing altogether to escape from the tableau vivant that imprisoned her. Thomas documents with wit and skill the others’ fates, less dramatic, but arguably more painful.
Martha Saxton, Professor
History and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies
Amherst College
I
An Excellent Idea
PARIS, SUMMER 1721
In the Regent’s Bath
“No hangover can stand in the way of a good idea,” says Philip d’Orléans to himself, inhaling the strong fragrances of his bath and closing his eyes. Were he to open them, his field of vision would be obstructed by his large, pale paunch, afloat in the hot water; and although the sight of that beached animal’s belly of his, that soft demijohn distended by nights of debauch and gluttony, wouldn’t completely spoil his delight in his good idea, it would certainly diminish it. “My children are big and fat,” declares the Princess Palatine, his mother, who herself is not thin. As the thought of his mother is always agreeable, his corpulence becomes a matter of complete indifference to him. But should he recall the words she’s always happy to add — “Big fat people don’t live any longer than anyone else” — he’d feel a frightful pang of sadness. Two years ago, his adored eldest daughter, the Duchess de Berry, died in a horrifying physical state, her obesity augmented by — or so it was said — the early stages of a pregnancy. The speed at which she’d burned out her young existence, her thirst for pleasure and extinction, the delirium of theatricality and self-destruction in which he had so loved to join her — all that had left her incapable of e
ngendering anything but her own death.
He knows he shouldn’t dwell on the Duchess de Berry. He mustn’t think about her in these evil hours, these leaden, alcoholic hours. Stick to the present, and to whatever fosters belief in a future … Yes, it’s a good idea, he repeats to himself, plunging his head underwater. He’s found the solution to two vexing problems: one centers on the political need to neutralize Spain and prevent a new war, and the second results from his secret, crafty desire to put off as long as possible the time when little King Louis XV might beget a dauphin of France. It won’t be tomorrow, since the boy’s only eleven years old and won’t come of age until his thirteenth birthday, and even then … But the best course is to address the matter now. If the king has a son when he dies, then that son will naturally inherit the crown; but if the king dies without a male heir, then … then … perforce … the crown would belong to him, to Philip d’Orléans, regent of France, nephew of the late King Louis XIV, who throughout his reign took pains to keep his brother’s son well away from the government, to treat him like a good-for-nothing, and all the more rigorously because the Sun King was aware of the young man’s capabilities. Except in Louis XIV’s service, intelligence was no asset at the court of Versailles.
By a smooth transition, this reflection leads the regent back to his admirable idea. The bathwater’s cooling down, but he doesn’t care, he’s happy with his plans for the future. He’s a man who’s scrupulous and careful in accomplishing his mission, though things aren’t easy, what with the suspicions of poisoning that weigh on him, suspicions incessantly revived by the old court party; but should the occasion authorize him to ascend to the throne in all legality, he can very well see himself as king. Philip I? That title’s already taken; there was a Capetian Philip I. He fought doggedly against William the Conqueror and got himself excommunicated for repudiating his wife, Bertha of Holland, who had been chosen for political reasons … as if there were any others, the regent thinks, as if there were any such thing as marrying for love, at least as far as he was concerned … and this point, though not so painful as the death of his daughter, still rankles him. Philip II, then? Why not? Philip II, called “the Debauched.” A naive but irresistible vision; power, once tasted, is difficult to give up. It’s no use to be clear-sighted, to know that the more power you acquire the less you count personally, since you’re nothing but a pawn on the chessboard of the ambitious who are working away feverishly below you. No, you hold on, you postpone as long as possible the moment when you must step outside the circle of light and away from the hum of praise and compliments — the moment when you’re going to find yourself alone in the dark, hunted out of the world, stricken from the ranks of the living. Philip II — wouldn’t that complicate relations with the current king of Spain, Philip V? Yes, quite a bit, and not only because the king of Spain’s named Philip too; he would also be in the running for the French throne if Louis XV were to disappear. Of course, Philip II is a title that has been taken before: there was Philip II of Spain, called Philip the Prudent, the gloomy builder of El Escorial, an arch-pious, slow-moving bureaucrat. From the Prudent to the Debauched, a long story …
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