Conjugal Hell
The king his father has carefully explained to him what one does; his professor of natural sciences has — with the approval of the church — commissioned illustrated plates that show the male and female reproductive organs. In addition, he has been able to see some anatomical wax sculptures sent from Italy, in particular one of a very beautiful brunette woman with a long braid. Her smooth belly could be dismantled to reveal an imbroglio of vital organs inside. Don Luis shuddered. But in spite of everything, he is resolute. The princess never plays the game of “Mi marido, mi amor” anymore. In bed, she doesn’t allow him near her and kicks at him when he gets too close. She threatens to break his skull with a candlestick. Don Luis persists. And one night, he gets his little wife in a tight embrace, his hard, taut sex just at the entrance of her vagina. He’s practically there. But all of a sudden she frees herself, bites his tongue bloody, and escapes to the other end of the bed, ready to fight. The prince, propelled in equal measure by fear and despair, takes refuge in the chapel. He thinks, “I would rather be sent to the galleys.”
VERSAILLES, JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1724
A Defeat for the Infanta
Mariana Victoria’s bedroom is the equivalent of what the city of Marseille used to be, a hotbed of pestilence. It should be walled up, except for a tiny opening her doctors could slip through, though they would still get none of the infanta’s blood. For the present, they have yet to obtain a drop. In spite of her fever, her fatigue, the spread of the red rash to her upper torso and then to her arms and legs, she holds out. With a fortitude that arouses respect, not at Versailles, for her star is fading there (what Mme de Ventadour admires as her “strong will” is more and more disparaged as the result of a bad upbringing), but beyond the narrow, twisting corridors where calumnies are born and nourished and virtues shrivel up. Outside the gates of the palace, the infanta’s courage demands sympathy.
The physicians have tried everything: gentle urging, the allure of rewards, appeals to reason; they undertake to explain to the child why she must be bled and what the immediate benefits of bleeding are, she must get well, it’s obvious, Her Majesty wishes to get well, does she not? For herself, for her people, because the health of the queen of France is important to her subjects, to the twenty-three million French who adore her. Twenty-three million, repeats the little girl, still curled up and tense, twenty-three million, twenty-three million; she chants the number of her people, the population of France, like a litany. She possesses 347 dolls and twenty-three million French people. Three hundred and forty-seven dolls, not counting the dolls that are shut up in the trunk … For the first time since her arrival in Versailles, she remembers them. She thinks she’d like to have them with her. Those uncouth dolls would know how to stand firm against these bleeding doctors. The infanta — lying on her side, her arms wrapped around her knees and her knees against her chest — wishes she could change herself into a bundle of thorns. She feels a burst of fierce energy. She yanks her limbs out of the physicians’ steely hands and curls herself up even more tightly. Marie Neige rushes to assist her. The men in black withdraw. The infanta’s worn out, but she has won. She recalls Madame’s voice, very close to her, repeating, “Your body belongs to you, you are its mistress, you are not a pig whose blood can be drawn to make sausage.” They’ve gone; they’ll come back. The little girl would like to block up her room’s two doors and two windows. The rumor that she’s been badly brought up begins to be augmented by the insinuation that she’s mad.
The infanta is prepared to defend herself against the physicians’ return, but she’s stunned to be awakened by a deafening uproar in the Salon de la Paix. Some travelers who proclaim that they’ve been sent by the king of Spain intrude into her bedchamber. They’re roguish-looking fellows, wearing boots and traveling cloaks and enormous mustaches that partly hide their faces. The first of them declares in Spanish that His Majesty Philip V has been informed of his daughter’s illness and desires most affectionately that she recover and live; and for this reason, therefore, he orders her to let herself be bled. Mariana Victoria is about to capitulate. However, she’s not completely convinced. “Show me the letter from His Majesty my father and I will obey.” When they cannot produce the substantiating document, she dismisses them with uncontestable authority.
The doctors have not spoken their last word. They return to the attack. Their monstrous silhouettes writhe above her and conspire in Latin. She feels alone, desperately alone. While two of them force her to relax her arms and extend her legs, the third brings down on her, like a club, the final argument: “And the king your husband, have you thought of him? You have smallpox, one of the deadliest of diseases, a disease most readily transmissible; for the person of Louis XV and consequently for the throne of France, you represent a mortal danger.” The infanta is astounded. The bleeding doctors have gone too far. Reeling from the blow of such an accusation — that she’s putting her dear husband’s life in danger — she sobs, crushed by a sense of guilt, unable to react otherwise. A physician takes advantage of her state to draw a pint of blood from her. When the operation is over, she says to them in a very small voice, “Since the king need only touch someone to heal them, let him come, let him touch me, and I shall be healed.”
The smallpox turns out to be nothing but a case of measles. The red blotches fade. The newspapers announce: “Ever since the 5th day of January, the Queen-Infanta has continued to recover from her illness, and she is at present in perfect health.”
The king returns to Versailles. He is spared the chore of paying a homecoming visit to the infanta; a question of elementary prudence, according to M. le Duc, who sent constantly for news of her when her sickness was at its most serious. Had it carried her off, as it did thousands of other children, that would have sorted out everything.
To have fallen ill from a disease, whether measles or smallpox, which threatened to infect the king has humiliated the infanta. In her ensuing weariness, the humidity, the drafts, the gigantic rooms, the exhausting corridors make her suffer more keenly than ever before. As she lies in bed and stares up at the somber canopy, she grows afraid of the dark and listens motionless to the night birds’ cries. She weeps in silence at first, then a little more loudly, so that Mme de Ventadour (who has just fallen asleep) will get up and take her in her loving arms. Like a baby? Yes. Like her baby? Like the way she used to hold Dauphin-Doll in her arms. But that was before she got sick, before the insolence of the doctors, when it was fun to pretend and to see the greatest dignitaries accept the game. Today Dauphin-Doll is still marked with the red spots she daubed on him, but on one part of his face — the part she tried to wash with soap and water — the irruption has become a bloody stream, which has stained all his clothes. He disgusts her, gory thing that he is, like an incurable sickness. He has fallen off the bed. She doesn’t touch him, doesn’t ask for anyone to come and help her. In the state he’s in, who would dare return him to her? She waits for a chambermaid to sweep him away and throw him on the fire. “I tell everyone that doll is my son, but I’ll tell you the truth, Madame: it’s only a baby made of wax.”
The men in black lift up her chemise, maul her lumbar region, pinch her spinal column with their violent fingers. They track down, they invent her infirmities. They shake their headgear and dismiss her, wipe her out, her and her descendants. The infanta is malformed, no doubt “obstructed.” Her pelvis is afflicted with a crippling narrowness, and as for the organs of procreation, those of Her Majesty, unfortunately, are definitively atrophied. There’s nothing to be done. Except to bleed her, of course, to bleed her and thus to liberate her malignant humors.
For her convalescence, M. le Duc gives her a fool. At first, she asks to have the Duke de Chartres, son of the late Philip d’Orléans, as her fool, because of his unstable voice. The Duke de Chartres as the infanta’s fool? The request is met with guffaws. She is given Bébé IV, a dwarf from the Polish court. He wears a red wig, has big, round, bulging blue eyes,
and will pull as many faces and perform as many antics as you please. When he doffs his wig, he reveals a nearly bald pate with very sparse tufts of pale blond hair. That pate and those scattered tufts intrigue the infanta, who has only ever seen heads covered by wigs. She’d like to touch the dwarf’s hair.
“May I?” she asks Bébé IV.
“My pate belongs to you, queen of my heart!”
“Why do you have all those holes in your hair?”
“It’s age, age without wisdom, queen of innocence.”
“They gave me an old fool,” the infanta concludes peevishly.
“It’s a simple matter, Almighty Queen, you need only exchange me for a young, hairy fool.”
“Well, I was exchanged.”
“For what, peerless wonder?”
“For Mlle de Montpensier, a French princess. She married Don Luis and I married King Louis. She’s becoming a Spanish girl and I’m becoming a French girl.”
The infanta’s resting, sitting up against her pillows. Her face is tense. It looks contracted somehow. Not only is she not growing, hiss the vipers’ tongues, she’s actually getting smaller. She observes Bébé IV’s monkeyshines gravely. Under the pretext of supervising her convalescence, her doctors torment her. They listen to her chest, remove her clothes, palpate her. They bruise her and humiliate her. Her ability to reproduce is not only declared to be many years off, too many years off, but she is suspected of being incapable of ever giving birth because of a malformation that will, they say, condemn her to sterility. A badly brought-up child, slightly crazy, too little, deformed. In her governess’s loving eyes, the infanta is radiant with grace and beauty. Likewise in the eyes of the artists who paint her portrait. But insidiously, venomously, within the restricted space of Versailles, a different creature born of hatred and rejection is being substituted for her. A puny, disagreeable, wan, wildly chirping little girl, an unbearable child about whom only one question can be asked: How do we get rid of her? The king’s antipathy is supplemented by the political bias of the Duke de Bourbon, head of the House of Condé, which has not yet finished settling scores with the House of Orléans.
The infanta, however, regains her strength. She is authorized, between two rain showers, to take a turn in the park. Her ladies enthuse together over this lovely break in the bad weather. Bébé IV accompanies the infanta’s first outing with a comical dance, possibly Russian, requiring much vigorous leg-thrusting. The child is hardly visible at all, protected as she is by scarves and coats — except for her lively eyes.
Today, February 1, those eyes are wide with surprise and shiny with welling tears. “That is not true,” she says. “It isn’t possible. My father is the king of Spain and always will be. A king can’t stop being king.”
The Spanish ambassador has the thankless duty of announcing to the infanta the news of Philip V’s abdication. “You must believe me, Your Majesty,” he says. “His Highness Philip V has decided to renounce his throne.”
“You forget my mother. She’s too cunning, she’s as clever as a hundred devils, she would never let Papa abdicate. You are lying to me, it’s a plot to make my head spin.”
“The ambassador is speaking the truth,” Mme de Ventadour assures her. “His Majesty the king of Spain has handed over his crown to your brother, the Prince of Asturias.”
“My mother is the wife of the king of Spain as I am his daughter, and that cannot be changed … La Savoyana’s son …,” the infanta sobs.
Louis XV, extraordinarily enough, corrects her: “The son of Maria Luisa of Savoy, sister of Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, my mother. Maria Luisa of Savoy was, like her, an exceptional woman.”
Trying to overcome the affront inflicted on her by Louis XV, the infanta has the situation explained to her: Don Luis is the son of Louis XV’s mother’s sister, and therefore these two Louises are first cousins, Louis XV and Luis I … but that’s not the problem. Can she, the infanta of Spain, today be nothing more than the daughter of a dethroned king?
“Since you have your doubts, listen to this,” says Mme de Ventadour, and she reads the end of the letter from the infanta’s mother: “Moreover, you will perhaps be surprised to learn that we have abdicated, and that we are withdrawing from this corrupt world.”
Mme de Ventadour, writing in the infanta’s name, addresses the new king of Spain:
My Royal Brother, although I and all this Court admire the generous resolve of the King my father, I cannot but be pained by it, and my only consolation is that you will be raised to the throne. Your Majesty brings to the government all the virtues that one could desire for the welfare of your realm. I congratulate you with all my heart; rest assured that your friendship is extremely dear to me, and that I shall always answer it with all the sentiments of the most loving and devoted sister who ever was. I am, my Royal Brother, Your Majesty’s
Very affectionate sister
Mariana Victoria
On the sly, the infanta slips into the envelope a few lines of her last writing assignment and some peony petals for the palace ladies.
LA GRANJA DE SAN ILDEFONSO, MADRID, FEBRUARY 1724
“It having pleased God in his infinite mercy, my well beloved son, to make me sensible for some years past of the nothingness of this world and the vanity of its grandeurs …” (Philip V)
To those close to Philip V, his decision came as no surprise. Elisabeth Farnese, like the Prince of Asturias, knew that the king would abdicate as soon as San Ildefonso became habitable. On the day when he signs his act of abdication, Philip V experiences true sovereignty, the kind that places one above all he surveys. It’s the dead of winter. The mountain passes are closed. The lines of communication between him and Madrid have been cut. He walks through his park, roams around his palace, and yields without restraint to the joy of having freed himself from the cares of the world. He contemplates a portrait of Louis XIV, well placed on the wall of the vastest room in San Ildefonso, and finally feels bold enough to meet his eye and say to him, “The crown you charged me with, Majesty — I renounce it. And see, you for whom no enjoyment equaled the business of being king, see what I dare to do: I abdicate. I abdicate a kingdom that cost thirteen years of war and more than two million dead. And to keep nothing hidden from you, I will confess that it took me but a short time after the end of that same war to resolve, in secret, to step down. You always thought me incapable. I surpass your worst judgments. You despise me as you, a man whose hauteur is legendary, have never despised anyone. I am, in your opinion, a pathetic king, a coward, a religious zealot, and the gardens of La Granja reflect my miserable destiny. That I compare them with your gardens at Versailles, what buffoonery! It’s like trying to compare the ‘Great Century’ of your reign with prehistory! The dimensions, the harmony, the infinite horizon … Nothing about your gardens is comparable to mine. The paths in La Granja mimic those in Versailles, but they end in walls of snow. Life here is naked and savage; one bumps up against it, no doubt about that, but prick up your ears, listen to that music, that perpetual streaming. Here water flows in abundance, it meanders, seeps, gushes, cascades … water is everywhere, it fills my pools, my ponds, my canals, it makes the glory of my fountains. At La Granja, Majesty, I have water with me. Mountain water, running forever, inexhaustible. To receive it, I need only dig out a shallow basin. My Great Water Spectacle, my Very Great Water Spectacle, suffers no interruption. You smile, but God tells me I would be wrong to bow before that smile, and that this alone is the right way to build, not by declaring war on nature, His Creation, but by humbly thanking him for It, the source of every Good.”
From now on, it’s undeniable that the king and queen do everything together, they don’t leave each other for a minute, but also that they don’t think together. The queen hides her pique: she loves the corrupt world she’s withdrawing from; the retirement to San Ildefonso horrifies her. Her childhood and youth were filled with mortifications, and now they’re going to start again. In the silence of La Granja, a stillness broken on
ly by the muffled thuds of masses of snow falling from the trees, she reflects bitterly on her vitality, on her intelligence, on all those talents of hers that are going to be interred … She speaks and writes several languages, she dances and sings admirably, she draws, paints — for whom? For what? In her letters, she offers no glimpse into the storms raging inside her; at most, she permits herself an ironic point or two, such as, “Forgive me if I use a rustic term, but as I have become a rustic, I employ the terms of my fellow rustics.”
Nowadays the royal palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso is a tourist site, and several works by Philip V’s wife are on display there: portraits of saints, in full-face, profile, and three-quarter views. Her line is sure, her color sense subtle, she was obviously gifted. Her pictures are flawless, yet they leave the viewer indifferent. The thing is, they have no soul. It doubtless exists, but like that of Elisabeth herself, it’s too deeply hidden to show through. These are facade saints, perfect, decorative, and insipid. Nuanced watercolors put up as screens to conceal the devastating rage inside her.
The people of Madrid are jubilant. Their hearts go out to Don Luis, La Savoyana’s son, a child nourished on chocolate, a real Spaniard! “Viva, viva, viva! Viva Luis I, el Buen Amado!” (Long live Luis I, the Well Beloved!). The people’s joy spreads from street to street until it reaches El Escorial. “What is that noise?” asks the Princess of Asturias. Her ladies have no idea. A message signed “Luis I” and delivered by the Duchess de Altamira informs the princess that she’s the queen. She gets dead drunk that night. She swallows everything La Quadra pours into her glass. She offers some dreadful toasts. Her twenty-seven ladies-in-waiting, all disheveled, cry out, “Viva la reina! Viva la reina!” Faced with their gibes, the Duchess de Altamira scuttles away.
Louise Élisabeth staggers to the royal bedchamber. The Kalmikov sisters, each bearing a torch, open the door wide and announce, “Her Majesty the queen!” Louise Élisabeth, with a woolen blanket draped across her shoulders, a sort of coronation cape for a shepherdess, mumbles, “Estoy borracha como una cuba” (I’m as drunk as a skunk). The king parts the bed curtains and holds out to her a white, fragile, exceedingly delicate hand, a hand limp and impotent.
The Exchange of Princesses Page 20
