The regent rejoices in the success of his plans. He participates in the ball triumphantly, a conquering hero, at least during the first few hours. At a certain point, however, a bout of nausea compels him to leave the room, and he spends the night retching and vomiting.
That evening, after the signing of the marriage contracts, after the ball, and after dutifully accompanying his cousin, the future queen of Spain — who turns out to be as little delighted with her destiny as he is with his own — the king attends a performance of Lully’s Phaëton at the Palais-Royal. It’s his first opera. Confronted with the magnificent sets, the vivid costumes, the bright, sumptuous lighting, the shock of the voices, he’s seized with a kind of exhilaration that by the last act has dwindled into total dejection. The revelation that strikes him is the opposite of rapture. He discovers the limitless boredom music brings him. Through Phaëton, he glimpses the innumerable operas, like so many trials, that he’ll be obliged to endure. He crosses his arms and falls asleep with his cheek against the gold thread of his formal coat.
No Goodbye
Two days later, amid general indifference, Louise Elisabeth sets off for Spain. Her mother hardly looks at her. Her grandmother, the Princess Palatine, comments on her departure: “One cannot say that Mlle. de Montpensier is ugly, but she is surely the most unpleasant child alive, in her way of eating, of drinking, of speaking. She makes a person lose all patience, and so I shed no tears, and neither did she, when we bade each other farewell.” The king wishes her a good journey to Madrid and returns to the Tuileries. The regent, following the laws of etiquette, accompanies his daughter as far as Bourg-la-Reine, about six miles to the south. Mlle de Montpensier shares her coach with her father and her brother, who will soon leave her; with her governess, the horrible Mme de Cheverny, all covered with red blotches and disfigured by scurvy, who will leave her at the border; and with the Duchess de Ventadour, the infanta’s future governess, who won’t be crossing into Spain either.
Mme de Ventadour is, without doubt, the best disposed person in this business, but given her devotion to her king, her present assignment both flatters and troubles her. He kissed her coldly this morning and thus spoiled her leave-taking a little, but at bottom she’s calm. She knows she’s in no danger of experiencing with the infanta the transports of maternal love she experienced with the little king. And besides, isn’t he an orphan? Whereas the infanta is no such thing. She has a mother indeed, a mother who won’t let herself be overlooked; moreover, the duchess thinks with tears in her eyes, could there be a handsomer boy in the world than her king? There’s no chance that the infanta will put him in the shade. The still beautiful “Maman Ventadour,” feeling stronger and younger, settles into the coach and abandons herself to the vanities of appearance. She’s been named maîtresse du voyage, mistress of the journey. She’s traveling in grand style, escorted by eighty splendidly dressed bodyguards. But they look drab next to the 150 guards, led by the Prince de Rohan-Soubise, who bring up the rear of the march.
Mlle de Montpensier is frowning. She mutters that her corset’s too tight, that it’s beastly cold in the coach. Her father remains calm, but underneath the kind facade his impatience is perceptible. He wants to have done with this farewell farce. And yet Mlle de Montpensier’s behavior seems quite acceptable if he thinks about the crises and suicide threats of her sister, Mlle de Valois, married one year earlier. More than threats; she was prepared to do anything to avoid joining her husband, the Duke of Modena. She purposely visited the convent at Chelles, on the pretext of seeing her sister the abbess, but in reality because she knew the place was afflicted by an epidemic. “Don’t go there,” she was told, “or you run the risk of catching smallpox.” “That’s what I’m looking for,” she replied. But all she caught there was the measles, which at least gained her a little time. She stopped eating and wept incessantly. On the day of her proxy marriage, people noticed her swollen face, her dejection. She cried so much she couldn’t articulate a single word.
Fortunately, Mlle de Valois is now in Modena; otherwise, she would be capable of communicating her rebellious spirit to her sister. Not that Mlle de Montpensier is docile, but she’s still ignorant of desire, and she doesn’t know that its imperatives have nothing to do with politics. Of this fact Mlle de Valois is well aware. The Duke de Richelieu was her first master in debauchery. The Duke de Richelieu, that popinjay, that pervert, that relentless destroyer of the peace of families and states, that plague, that brilliant shit-stirrer … the word “brilliant” is an exaggeration, the regent thinks, correcting himself, but “plague” is thoroughly accurate. His daughter Charlotte Aglaé — Mlle de Valois — is in Modena, but she’s trying to return to France. She writes one letter after another, complaining about her in-laws and, most recently, demanding the annulment of her marriage on the grounds of impotence. Her father-in-law has had a wall built between her apartments and those of his other daughters-in-law. But she doesn’t give in … She’s not especially beautiful, the Duchess of Modena, with her ugly teeth and her big nose, already ruined by tobacco, but she has character and a taste for combat … More than mere threats of suicide? The regent remembers her “accident,” which took place shortly before her departure. Mlle de Valois launched her horse at a gallop through a small doorway. She didn’t duck and struck her head with such force that she was thrown backward onto the animal’s croup.
Mlle de Montpensier says she’s too hot, opens her window, sticks her head out. The rain destroys her coiffure and trickles down her neck.
The regent feels great relief when they reach Bourg-la-Reine. He kisses his daughter, pinches her cheek amiably, and jumps out of the coach.
SPAIN, WINTER 1721
The Duke de Saint-Simon’s Three Bows
The Spanish capital breathes an air of expectation and excitement. For the past three months, rumors about a marriage between the infanta Mariana Victoria and the king of France, and also about other royal unions, have been spreading. On the streets, in the marketplaces, in the taverns and the churches, people discuss, hope, assume. To know the truth, it would be necessary to penetrate the Royal Alcázar, an immense white-stone building with narrow windows and a jumble of rooms, to reach the interior of the palace, and to gain access to the royal chamber. It’s there that the king, in spite of his antipathy for this dwelling place, spends most of his life, at the queen’s side, glued to her. The people detest the Italian woman and continue to love Philip V’s first wife, the adorable and courageous Maria Luisa of Savoy, la Savoyarde, la Savoyana. Still today, when the king and queen move about Madrid, at the passage of their coach the crowd cries out, “Viva la Savoyana!” Elisabeth Farnese is wounded by such outbursts, but not gravely. She has lived through a childhood and an adolescence in which affection had no place. Her father died when she was very young. Her mother, a haughty, vindictive woman determined to break her daughter’s character, succeeded in making it hardly different from her own. Her contact with Elisabeth was rare, and she relegated the girl — practically a prisoner, unknown at court — to attic rooms high up in the enormous ducal palace in Parma. Elisabeth’s only visitors were teachers, priests, and, when needed, physicians. This system, far from making the young girl more yielding, hardened her. She chose to dedicate herself to her studies, and should a marriage possibility present itself, she resolved to realize it come what may. Love didn’t enter into her daydreams. Besides, she wasn’t a dreamer. In her relationship with the king of Spain, she soon understood that she must employ all the resources of her personality and her body, not to try to eliminate the ghost of Maria Luisa of Savoy, but to set a screen around it, to block its apparitions. She doesn’t deviate from her plan. The king’s attached to her. Excessively so, and she could wish for some intervals of independence, but since that’s impossible, she does all she can to augment the king’s need of her, to ensure that their union becomes still closer, clammy, unbreathable — a knot of embraces. The king and queen form a single, indivisible entity.
The brocade curtains, adorned with mother-of-pearl, silver, and gold, are drawn, both those on the windows and those around the canopy bed. Philip V and Elisabeth Farnese seem to be agitated by contrary feelings. Sometimes they smile and savor in anticipation the happy event of their daughter’s marriage; sometimes they interpret the delay in the ambassador extraordinary’s arrival as a bad omen. The king tends toward pessimism, but his wife reassures him. They say their prayers. The monarch is brought his morning beverage, which serves as his breakfast: a white, hot liquid, a mixture of bouillon, milk, wine, egg yolks, cloves, and cinnamon. The queen takes up her tapestry, which she keeps within reach on a little table. On the days when the king works with his minister of state, the Marquis de Grimaldo, she follows the conversation closely. Without laying aside her needle and thread, she participates and makes decisions. In fact, she takes a more active interest than the king, who’s silent and morose most of the time and manifestly tormented when there are political matters to be dealt with. There’s no difference between the way he talks to his minister of state and the way he grinds out his prayers.
When the queen’s in bed, she’s never busy with her tapestry for long. The generally gloomy and dull king undergoes a change when the desire to make love comes over him. At those times, he displays great ardor and vehemence. He flings himself upon her. His amorous temperament is gossip material for servants and courtiers. When the queen refuses him, it’s said that the result is bedlam and tumult in the royal bedchamber. The king shouts and threatens. The queen shouts and complains. She calls for help, weeps. It seems unlikely that anyone would come running … When she finally yields, the king’s pleasure is even more intense, and he gives her whatever she desires.
But today, under the winter sun of this limpid morning, as she considers the miracle of the new rapprochement with the kingdom of France, she has no reason to refuse the king. She puts down her tapestry and caresses him. “How handsome you are,” she murmurs to the ugly face leaning over her. Whereupon, without interrupting his thrusting, the king grunts, “But why hasn’t the Duke de Saint-Simon arrived yet? Didn’t he leave a month ago, or am I wrong?”
Philip V’s calculations are correct. His lust hasn’t clouded his judgment. The ambassador extraordinary has fallen well behind schedule. To begin with, the diabolical Cardinal Dubois, by assiduously multiplying the obstacles that Saint-Simon had to overcome before his departure, caused the duke to make his travel arrangements on short notice, which obviously cost a great deal more. The same Dubois imposed on him a ruinously expensive retinue and military accompaniment. Then, during the French portion of his journey, a combination of bad weather and an abundance of receptions considerably slows Saint-Simon’s progress. And after that, when they finally reach the border, the French company is most thoroughly searched. Since the plague is still raging in Marseille, they have to open each parcel. Every person coming into Spain from France represents a risk of contagion. The Duke de Saint-Simon, suspected of bringing the plague in his baggage! It’s too much! He gets indignant, he rants and raves, but he’s forced to comply. And to round out the sum of his cares, in Burgos the elder of his two sons falls ill, a victim of smallpox, the scourge that kills people by the thousands, especially children. Saint-Simon has to leave the young man behind. He also leaves his other traveling companions: his younger son; his brother the Abbé de Saint-Simon; various friends, including the Count de Lorges and the Count de Céreste; and several servants, who are going to follow in coaches while he, Saint-Simon, aware of the royal couple’s impatience, continues on horseback. Worried about his sick son, stressed by the great number of messages with which the king and queen of Spain steadily bombard him, he urges on his horse.
At the end of the month of November, in the middle of the night, Saint-Simon enters Madrid. He’s gone practically without sleep since leaving Burgos. His Excellency the ambassador’s body is in bad shape, and likewise his morale.
He has but a poor understanding of Spanish. It’s a tongue he dislikes, a brutal, loud tongue whose sounds remind him of sneezes. A language that suits the lice-infested people who speak it. And as if their spoken language weren’t enough, the Spaniards sing, too, and their bizarre, indefinable songs get directly on his nerves. Wherever he stopped, in the most remote hamlet, out in the countryside — and the windswept expanses of Castille have nothing in common with the pleasant copses of la douce France — in places one would believe uninhabited, a song, often accompanied by a guitar, would arise, a piercing, maddening song. Most of the time, he couldn’t see the singer, but at some point the awful lament would always start up, usually out of nowhere. It sounded like something halfway between the mewing of a cat and the cries of a hysteric. And to top everything, the singers would express their torments amid exhalations of olive oil! It was enough to make you puke! Were Saint-Simon to classify, in ascending order of repulsiveness, all the annoying things he’s encountered on this trip, he would have to put olive oil at the top: an emetic that makes an already crude cuisine impossible to swallow. On the night when he first sets foot in the capital of Spain, which is even more dimly lit than Paris, the Duke de Saint-Simon is feeling queasy. And as he follows his guides, who are happy to have arrived and therefore cry out more vociferously than usual in their ignoble lingo, his morale bottoms out.
Above everything else, the Duke de Saint-Simon believes in hierarchy, in the sacred rituals of etiquette. He’s fastidious about questions of honor and courtesy. His journey to Spain, with its dirt roads, its arid plains swept by icy winds, its sporadic groups of dirty, sunburned peasants and ragged beggars, seems to him like a trip to another planet. The discrepant combination of poverty, superstition, and the desire to sing is beyond his understanding. He’d certainly like the title of grandee of Spain for himself and his sons, but if the older one has to die of smallpox in Burgos and the younger one, like himself, is afflicted with a liver disease brought on by too much rancid olive oil and nervous disorders caused by musical intolerance, then wouldn’t that title — so sweet to murmur to himself, so awesome to imagine amplified into echoes from hall to hall and palace to palace — wouldn’t that title be too dearly bought?
Nay, says Saint-Simon when he’s finally in the apartment prepared for him, sitting before a blazing fire at a table on which he spreads out the precious documents entrusted to his charge: a portrait of King Louis XV and a copy of the marriage contract, written in Spanish. The French version, which he has incessantly requested from the infernal Dubois, has yet to come into his hands. He tenses up at the thought of it. To relax, he steps over to the window and verifies the presence of the royal coach that has been placed at his disposition at any hour of the day or night. There at least is something that corresponds to his idea of respectability, and it leads him, now that he’s starting to feel better, to ponder a thorny question: At what time will he be able to present himself to the king and queen? As soon as possible, they’ve stressed in their innumerable messages. But what does “as soon as possible” mean to a king and queen of Spain? If he were in Versailles, he’d present himself without hesitation at the petit lever, but what to do here, where Their Majesties shut themselves up in private, where they sometimes, according to rumor, even go back to bed in the course of the day?
What Saint-Simon has learned about the way Philip V and his wife lead their lives alarms him. Their schedule, he’s been told, is as follows. They are awakened at eight; they remain in bed together, say their prayers together, get up, get dressed, and go to Mass together. After the Mass, they play billiards for a while and then read some devotional work together. Then they dine, and after dinner they play piquet or some other card game or chess, take a walk, or go hunting (an only moderately risky activity, given that the sovereigns sit in a coppice shaped like a theater box and from there, without budging an inch, fire on the animals peasant beaters drive in their direction). They return to the palace to read together, deal with political matters together, do good works together. Then they have s
upper together, pray together, and return to their bed. When they walk, they walk exactly side by side. If by chance they are disunited, because there are other people present and the queen, caught up in a conversation, drops off the pace, the king stops and waits for her. Only at the moment when she gets out of bed and puts on her shoes — and when she goes to confession — is the queen separated from the king; but in the latter case, if she stays too long whispering with her confessor, the king comes looking for her. It goes without saying that their chaises percées, their commodes, touch each other, and that in no case, not even when one of them is ill or during the queen’s lyings-in, does the king sleep in a separate bed. Saint-Simon finds all this disquieting. The only reassuring element, the fact that the royal couple, a sort of two-headed monster, both speak French, doesn’t suffice to dispel his apprehension.
The Exchange of Princesses Page 4
