At the end of the month, the Duke of Osuna, the Spanish ambassador, hosts a celebration of extraordinary magnificence. He has an artificial rock built in the middle of the Seine, and on that rock, directly facing the balcony of the queen-infanta’s apartment, a temple supported by many columns. The first of the temple’s four sides represents Hymen, and in his hands two myrtle crowns, which he holds out to the king and the queen-infanta. Ceres, Bacchus, and the Goddess of Peace are painted, respectively, on the other three sides. A ring of boats illuminated by small lamps surrounds the rock. When the king comes out on the balcony, the musicians placed on the boats strike up a triumphal concert, which is the signal for a water-joust between gondoliers. Once the combat is over, the temple is burned, which in turn sets off a fireworks display that lasts nearly an hour. When the grand finale comes, water and sky reflect a thousand flames back and forth. The Seine glitters and sparkles. The little girl, the reason for this blaze, cries out in joy at each rocket, and perhaps also in distress as the temple she had barely time to glimpse so abruptly goes up in flames. She pulls the king by the sleeve and points to the blossoming explosions. If he’d only say something! If he’d make a sign! She insists: “Oh! Ah! How beautiful it is! Oh! Monsieur, look!” She rubs herself against him, gets out of her seat, tries to stretch up to his ear.
At last he pronounces the word “Yes.”
Whereupon the radiant child turns to the courtiers and says, “The king spoke to me! The king spoke to me!”
On the scale of fetes, the infanta has reached the top.
Her fourth birthday is hardly distinguishable amid so many celebrations. She receives letters and gifts from her parents, messages from her brothers, more dolls with sumptuous outfits and furnishings, other toys. The king compliments her. She hears Mass at his side in the Tuileries chapel. When they leave the chapel, a flight of pigeons takes off, and the king smiles at her. The infanta gathers up that smile like the day’s treasure. It crowns her somewhat disparate collection of gifts.
It has rained a great part of the day, but at sunset she’s able to look out of a window in the Tuileries and contemplate an astonishing set piece of pink-and-gray clouds, shot through here and there with sunbeams. Even more than this, she admires the king’s silhouette as he passes in review the regiment of 160 young people, trained by himself, who perform their soldierly exercises every evening on the terrace of the palace. The regiment is called the Royal Terrace. They see the young king every day. The infanta fiercely envies them. But that’s trivial compared to how she feels about the Guards of the Sleeve, the detachment of gentlemen who never leave the king’s side during a ceremony and whose duty is to keep their eyes on him at all times. Duty? Can there be a greater pleasure?
Returned from his military obligations on the Tuileries terrace, the king shows the infanta one of his treasures, a singular birdcage: a hamper bound together by silver hoops and filled with all sorts of birds. He reveals nothing of his precocious political activities: his creation of administrative entities — the Department of Freshwater Ports and Harbors, of Terrace Trunks and Chests, of Chicken Coops, and of the Orders of the Salon, of the Medals, of the Mustache, and of the Flag, for each of which he has named grand masters, masters, and assistant masters, and dreamed up complex and varied protocols.
The infanta asks to go crayfishing with the king. The matter must be discussed.
In Paris, as on her journey there, she captivates everyone. Mme de Ventadour writes to the infanta’s mother the queen of Spain:
Even after traveling so long, the Infanta has endured all the fêtes perfectly well … She charms everyone, she attends all the celebrations that have been arranged in her honor as if she were twenty years old. She has had one or two little indispositions, but they have not prevented her from going to everything.
Yes, the infanta goes to everything. She goes with all her heart. In her innocence, in a transport of love.
The king also goes to everything, but he puts as little of himself into it as possible. He is not captivated by the infanta; she’s too little, too much of a chatterbox, too exasperatingly cheerful, and the way she’s acclaimed by everyone can only add to his antipathy. Not to mention the fact that she began by taking Mme de Ventadour away from him. But maybe all this is only a bad start, a first impression that will correct itself in time. Maybe, in the end, he’ll be won over like everyone else. Who knows?
The infanta is interested, the infanta is blithe. In the morning, she gets out of bed dancing and singing and hums while she’s being made ready, impatient to throw herself into the new day. She never cries except when she has a bad toothache, or when any attempt is made to curl her blond tresses. This she unequivocally refuses; there’s no way anyone’s going to touch her hair, or put a nightcap on her at bedtime, or decorate her head with flowers and ribbons and frills during the day. She feels even more strongly about the bourrelet, the padded, protective head roll, which she regards as a crime of lèse-majesté. She shakes her hair, bobbing and weaving in all directions like a doe. She was born to support nothing on her head but a crown.
Apart from toothaches and hairdressing sessions, everything’s blissful for the “future queen — infanta”: receiving letters and presents from her parents (“She’s always delighted when Your Majesties and Their Royal Highnesses her brothers are spoken of,” her governess writes), opening trunks, laying out her things, plunging headfirst into her toys (“Rest assured, her trunks are filled with everything she could want, we hadn’t opened them until we reached Paris, having carried with us whatever she needed for the journey”), playing with her dolls, dressing them, undressing them, having them served little meals, receiving deputies, rectors, ambassadors, standing out on her balcony, listening to the boatmen’s cries, watching the boats pass, the tree trunks floating on the Seine, going to Mass in the little chapel adjoining her room, in Notre-Dame Cathedral, in the royal chapel in the Tuileries, or in the churches of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, of Val-de-Grâce, of the Feuillants, of the Daughters of Calvary, of the Ave Maria, of Sainte-Élisabeth … (she visits the different quartiers of Paris by going to their churches), walking in her garden. But the infanta’s greatest happiness is to see the king, and to let others see that they’re a happy couple.
She baptizes the baby doll “Louis.” On the first evening, not having had time to come up with a better solution, she puts the baby doll in Carmen-Doll’s bed (the baby doll doesn’t have a good night). The next day, she requests a cradle for “the dauphin Louis.” She presents him as her son, their son. Although she makes no explicit demand, she expects the courtiers to salute their queen and pay homage to her offspring. And they do it. The courtier’s status requires great suppleness, the ability to submit, to bend low before power, to crack your back with bowing, to sweep the ground with the plumes of your hat. The council chamber where Anne of Austria used to hold her audiences is always full of people. They prostrate themselves before the queen of France, they converse seriously about doll-related matters, about mechanical birds, about cockchafers and ladybugs. To what level on the scale of tiny things will she reduce them? At what point will she succeed in turning the Old Louvre into the kingdom of Lilliput? She laughs, acts the clown, plays tag, participates in a masquerade of children disguised as dogs and barks instead of talking for several days thereafter. The embarrassment of the courtiers: Ought they to reply in kind?
The Princess Palatine’s Liberties
In May 1722, the Duchess de La Ferté writes: “I cannot let a day go by without paying court to her. When I have not the good fortune of seeing her, I feel I am missing everything. As I have the honor of being the King’s godmother, she honors me by calling me her own and does me a thousand kindnesses.” Everyone is under Mariana Victoria’s spell, or pretends to be, but one person alone truly loves her: Madame, the Princess Palatine. The first time she set eyes on the infanta, Madame recognized the specific genius of the little girl, at once so “lofty” and so funny, and felt immediate and
total affection for her. She doesn’t find it hard to prefer the child to her own grandchildren, with the exception of Mlle de Beaujolais.
The Princess Palatine is seventy years old this spring. She describes herself without mercy:
I have always been ugly, and the smallpox has left me even more so; moreover, my waist is monstrous, I have the shape of a large cube, my skin is of a reddish color mottled with yellow; I am beginning to go gray, with salt-and-pepper hair; my forehead and the skin around my eyes are wrinkled; my nose is as crooked as ever, but now festooned with smallpox scars, the same as my cheeks, which are sagging; I have heavy jowls and rotting teeth; my mouth too has changed somewhat, having become bigger, with wrinkles at the corners.
She knows she’s very ugly, and she feels very old. She’s too fat, she has trouble breathing, her feet are swollen. Lately, at any hour of the day, she has a tendency to fall asleep. In the past, that would happen only at Mass. She’d snore heartily, sitting at Louis XIV’s side, and he would elbow her awake. The Catholic liturgy and its Latin chants, with their long, drawn-out vowels, had on her the effect of a sleeping potion. So much so that she’d attend a religious service as a cure for insomnia! But even in her present state, ill and weak, Madame stands out as the woman with the strongest personality in the Regency period, and perhaps even (with her enemy Mme de Maintenon, whom she qualified variously as “old drab,” “old dunghill,” “the she-monkey,” “the hag”) in the reign of Louis XIV. She was certainly the most touching, because her life was a constant battle from the age of nineteen, when she was married to Monsieur, brother of Louis XIV, and delivered up to the Sun King’s meticulous tyranny, to his courtiers’ mean-spirited nastiness, and to the hostility of her husband’s several catamites, who dreamed of a thousand different ways to do her harm. At first she had to fear being poisoned, as Monsieur’s previous wife certainly had been; then, after that fear faded, she concentrated her energy on staying alive, not only physically, but also in the full spiritual and moral sense, determined above all else to be free. It was a hopeless battle. One day the Princess Palatine utters this harrowing observation, or cry: “They have clipped my wings!” Far from admitting defeat, she keeps on fighting. She resists until the end, with what remains of her spontaneity, her courage, her intelligence. And what remains is immense.
Despite the importunate crowds, the visits, the audiences, the introductions, the galas of every description, the infanta hasn’t failed to notice Madame. She’s intrigued by this comical personage. Maybe her initial reflex was to hide her eyes, but with Madame’s first visit to the Old Louvre, the infanta discovers in the princess the grandmother she’s never had and falls madly in love with her, while at the same time the princess declares herself wild for the infanta: “Our little Infanta is undoubtedly the prettiest child I have ever seen in all my days. She has more intelligence than a person of twenty, and yet she retains the childishness proper to her age: the result is a most pleasant mixture.” Furthermore:
I do not think it would be possible to find a nicer and more intelligent child in the world than our little Infanta. She makes observations worthy of a thirty-year-old person. Yesterday, for example, she said, “They say that when someone my age dies, they are saved and they go straight to heaven, and so I would be happy if God wanted to take me.” I am afraid she is too intelligent to live; whoever hears her speak is immediately enthralled. She has the nicest ways in the world. I have won her favor; she runs out into her antechamber with open arms to meet me and kisses me most lovingly.
Madame has to restrain herself from paying the infanta a daily visit: “She is prettier and nicer than ever, and were I to follow my inclination, I should amuse myself with her all day long. But because of my great age, people would think I was entering a second childhood. And so I must rein myself in.”
But at the hunt, or anywhere else, Madame’s tendency is rather to slacken the reins. She limits herself only moderately in her affection for the infanta. She’s filled with admiration for a creature at once so childish and so thoughtful. The little philosopher enchants her, and the infanta doesn’t hold herself back either. She loves to open her arms wide and run to the Princess Palatine, and to invent excuses for kissing her again and again. The old lady writes: “I am in Her Lovableness’s good graces; she makes me sit in a big armchair, takes a doll’s stool, sits down next to me, and says, ‘Listen! I have a little secret to tell you.’ When I bend down to her, she throws her arms around my neck and kisses me on both cheeks.”
Madame never goes anywhere without her dogs. Mariana Victoria skips along in their midst, hangs from their necks, races them.
The Princess Palatine wants to give the infanta some knowledge of the woods; she thinks it important that the child should feel nature’s superiority over even the most beautiful gardens of the world. She has the coach stop in a moss-covered place. Madame and the infanta walk along a path streaked with sunlight. They lean over a bed of wild violets. The little girl crouches down and picks them one by one, sticks her nose in their golden-yellow centers, explores the tiny tracery of the moss, strokes its velvety softness. She discovers another forest inside the forest, a forest made to the measure of butterflies and ants — a forest made to her own measure. Madame tells her,
I would rather look at land and trees than at the most magnificent palaces, and I prefer a single vegetable garden to a hundred parks adorned with marble statues and water spouts. What is more beautiful than a meadow, what is more moving than wildflowers? Natural things are exciting, they give you energy and ideas.
The two of them gather armfuls of daisies. The infanta lies down on the grass and brushes Madame’s wrinkled cheeks with golden blossoms.
This is her wildflower lesson, her lesson in truth. A short time later, on April 26, the infanta says something surprising, which the Princess Palatine recounts: “The dear child put down her doll and ran to meet me with open arms. She pointed to the doll and said, laughing, ‘I tell everyone that doll is my son, but I’ll tell you the truth, Madame: it’s only a baby made of wax.’ ”
Madame often betakes herself to the Louvre; the infanta, for her part, loves to visit the old lady at her residence in the Palais-Royal. Eight spaniels (of which Unknown Queen, the mother of the irreplaceable Titi, is the favorite) cohabit with her in her salon, along with a canary and a parrot. Every time someone enters and goes to pay his or her respects to the mistress of the house, the parrot cries, “Put out your paw!” The infanta laughs so hard she gives herself a stomachache.
One day the princess surprises the little girl by inviting her into her cabinet of curiosities. It’s filled with such treasures as butterflies mounted on boards, stones, snakes preserved in jars, microscopes, glasses for observing the stars and solar eclipses, coral shrubs, giant sponges, an elephant’s skull, a group of stuffed ostriches … The child goes from one odd thing to the next. Not long afterward, Madame asks her what she liked best.
“You, Madame.”
The Infanta’s Garden
The Princess Palatine lends her voice and her gaiety to celebrate everything that grows and flourishes freely. And she proves to be a vital resource for the little queen, who’s surrounded by grown-ups determined to put on an act, for one another as well as for her. After a visit from Saint-Simon, the child writes to her parents:
The duke de St. simon, My dear Maman, gave me the pretty things you and dear papa sent me. I kissed them a thousand times with affection and joy. I made a gift of the nicest things to the king, because he gives me something precious every day, and because we love each other very much. Cardinal de Rôhan came to dine recently with maman de ventadour. she told me it will be the cardinal who will marry me to the king. Mme de soubise plays me tricks sometimes: but she always has a hundred charming things to say to me, and she told me about the finery I shall wear on the Wedding day, and what will happen in the church, at the banquet and at bedtime, and the cardinal said he will also take charge of baptizing the dauphin. We laughed and lau
ghed. The entertainments do not rule out serious occupations. There are hours of catechism lessons and other lessons, too. I always remember what you recommended, and I love you, my dear maman, very tenderly, and infinitely more than I can say. (Paris, May 17, 1722)
“We laughed and laughed …” The conspiracy of compliment givers and flatterers, all of them more or less always lying, goes forward: “The king adores you, you will form an incomparable couple and have many children.” Any signs of reticence are denied.
Mme de Ventadour writes:
Our little queen is thriving, but the night before last, after being perfectly gay all day long, she coughed a great deal, and in the morning she seemed a little upset. Then came a fever, accompanied by so much drowsiness that she slept fourteen hours in a row, and by yesterday morning her fever was completely gone, leaving only an admirable appetite. Because of this, Madame, we shall not leave for Meudon until tomorrow, so that we can be sure enough days have passed and that we need not fear a return of the indisposition; there is certainly no sign of a relapse.
Her intelligence and good sense charm everyone. The King came to see her with a good deal of affection, but ere he came she was waiting for him so impatiently that I took the liberty of sending him a message urging him to come presto, for he had resolved not to come until after the formalities, but I saw how much pleasure his coming would give our little Queen, and he came straightway, and was most gracious in his manner, and our Queen responded in such a way that we were surprised at all she understood. I cannot stop myself from telling Your Majesty that the night she had the fever, seeing that she had awakened, I rose, desiring to give her some bouillon, and sat undressed beside her bed, and she immediately told one of her women fetch a quilt for maman so she won’t catch cold. There has never been a child like her.
The Exchange of Princesses Page 11
