by Edward Carey
“Well, Marie Grosholtz,” he said.
“Your Majesty,” I said, bowing very low.
“Well, I must say the queen is much better now. Next time it shan’t be like that. Next time we’ll have nobody present who isn’t strictly necessary. Nobody at all, for example, on top of the furniture. Next time: private.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” I said, thinking all the while: those are the king’s lips, beyond them the king’s teeth and tongue all together in one royal cavern, and the king’s epiglottis, and the king’s salivary glands too, and a royal passageway called the king’s pharynx, deep down into the depths of the corpus majestic.
“Tell me,” he demanded, “did you have no idea who I was?”
“No, Your Majesty. I thought you were a locksmith.”
“I am proud of it. But on the roof, the footman wore my livery.”
“But your sister’s footmen wear blue also.”
“Elisabeth’s very fond of you, isn’t she? She’s coming out of herself at last. We should never have allowed Madame Mackau to look after her. Our parents’ death was a terrible thing for her, our brother’s too. We were quite thrown together for a while. She can be, you see, a little nervous. Tears and things. But she’s better, I like to think, of late—better certainly. Which is another way of saying, well done. And thank you. For Elisabeth, and for your recent attentions on behalf of the queen. Is there anything in turn I might do for you?”
Here was my opening, opened by the king himself.
“Before I came here, Your Majesty,” I said, “I was employed with a wax modeler, a very gifted one, in Paris. I know that it would be the prize of his collection if Your Majesty should grant him permission to cast your face from life.”
“Oh, I don’t like the sound of that at all.”
“You would be most impressed with his art.”
“Would I? I wonder. And you were his pupil?”
“Yes, in Berne, in Switzerland, where I come from, he taught me.”
“We have our guards from Switzerland, positioned around the palace inside and out, for personal protection. We should not do without them. I am not ignorant of Swiss, no indeed. Your master, was he a good teacher?”
“Oh yes, quite wonderful.”
“And were you a good student?”
“I studied very hard and learned much.”
“Well, then, you can model me yourself.”
“I, Your Majesty?”
“Yes, you.”
“You cannot mean it.”
“I absolutely do.”
“No, no, I could not.”
“You could not?”
“Well, that is, I could, but I must not.”
“Why must not?”
“No, it wouldn’t be right at all.”
“If I say it is right?”
“But please, sire, it is for my master . . .”
“I say it is for you.”
“It would hurt him so.”
“Then let him hurt.”
“He would never forgive me.”
“He will. You shall say it is the king’s word.”
“It is so far above myself!”
“Then grow, girl, do grow to it!”
“It would be a crime, sire.”
“It is now, Grosholtz, or it is never.”
And so, so help me, I did it, myself.
We were in one of the king’s private chambers, his little forge close by. At first we ate raspberry tartlets. The king took off his brocaded jacket and pulled on a simple frock coat. The room was bedecked with globes, and a great quantity of maps; there were scale models of strange-looking buildings, and a great many different ingenious devices: telescopes and microscopes and sextants and theodolites and orreries and all sorts of instruments I had never heard of. And around the room, between globes of the earth and of the planets, were hundreds of books, all in the correct order. Among these was the entirety of Diderot’s Encyclopédie and also—how I longed to tell him!—Paris in the Year 2440 by L.-S. Mercier.
I cleaned the king’s face. I oiled his eyebrows, I patted them down. I put straws up that large and royal snout, I did it. I laid plaster on the face, I covered the face of the king as if blanking it out, I did it. How quiet everything was, just myself and the king. Alone in the world after all. I took off the plaster, cleaned his face. I took certain necessary measurements of him. Thickness of head from ear to ear: eighteen inches. Girth of neck: twenty-two and one-third. Marie measured.
I had the king’s head, then, but not the queen’s. I feared to ask for more and yet I must.
“Your Majesty, may I ask something else?”
The king nodded.
“I would be most obliged to you, Your Majesty, if you might help me get an appointment so that my master might make a cast of the queen’s head.”
Of an instant, the king was overcome by a fury of protection. “The queen is not to be disturbed! The queen is not an object to be pushed and pinched, to be pried open at public will, to be gaped at. She’s not to be exposed. There’s no decency anymore. No, no, the queen is not to be disturbed.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“I won’t have it.”
“No, Your Majesty.”
“It upsets me.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. I thank Your Majesty.”
He looked around the room, agitated, as though losing his bearings amidst so many globes. “We shall not have our talks again,” he declared, shaking his head. “That would hardly be right. Not at all correct. I was confused. When we first met, in my forge, you see, I thought you were my sister. I should have known it then by the spectacles, but I see now you are not. Not at all, you are a caricature of her. Perhaps you are not to blame. Well, it shall not happen again. I am the king, and you are merely Grosholtz. Good morning. Good morning.”
I would not see the king up close again for several years.
Later, in the workroom, I told Elisabeth all.
“I, Anne Marie Grosholtz, have smelled the sweat of the king.”
“You are very crude, heart. I should not have to remind you that you are my body, my body alone, not anyone else’s.”
“I have cast the king, and must send the mold to my master in Paris.”
“You are my body, aren’t you?”
How easily she was made jealous.
“Yes, dear Madame Elisabeth,” I was quick to reassure her. “Of course I am.”
“You’re not going to leave me?”
“I am not, not until you wish it.”
“I shall never wish it.”
“Please say that again.”
“I shall never wish it, heart.”
“Then may I kiss you?”
“I think you may.”
I had the cast packed into a crate with straw. Inside I put a letter, one it had taken me many tries to write to my satisfaction:
Dear Sir,
I do hope all is very well with you in Paris. I think of you often, and of all the wax people. I trust the business is well. I am very busy here and work every day for the Princesse Elisabeth. I do not think I exaggerate when I say that I have become her favorite and, sir, I think she would very much like to keep me here with her always. I would be very happy for that. I am most grateful and sensible of the care you have put into my education and I most humbly thank you for it. I shall always think of you with great gratitude. May I also say, in a whisper, that I have served you, without pay, for a long time and that I do hope my work has given you some satisfaction. In short, sir, will you please release me and have my papers sent here?
I enclose in this box a cast, from life, of His Majesty LOUIS XVI. His Majesty insisted that I cast him and that there would not be another chance. I asked him to send for you but he would not allow it. And so I had to go
about the business myself. Please forgive me in this, but I do hope you will see that I have done the casting most correctly. And that it now requires your great brilliance to complete. Please may you accept this as payment of me, and may you write to the palace and give my service officially over to Princesse Elisabeth and so send my papers.
Thank you,
Yours most sincerely,
Little, formerly Marie Grosholtz, your old servant from Berne
It took two weeks for a reply to come, and when it came it was not from my master:
Little creature,
You have upset your master more than you shall ever know. The trouble I have had with him these last days. I thought he should die.
Understand your name is filth here, and your papers shall not be given over.
I acknowledge receipt of the cast. Years it has taken you to give us this little. It makes me sick to think of it.
What use is a king without a queen? Get the queen, and quickly too, or you shall be dragged back here and how we shall work you then.
Get to it!
In sincerity,
C. Picot (widow)
I carefully folded the letter, which seemed to contain a very powerful unhappiness, and with the help of a ladder borrowed from Pallier put it on the top shelf of my cupboard where I never visited. Still, even so high up, it came to me in my sleep three shelves down.
CHAPTER FORTY
Regarding toys and their owners.
Very soon there were new circumstances that, in our daily intimacy, I had forgotten to worry over.
“Oh, my dearest heart,” she said, opening my cupboard door, “something incredible has happened! I was sent for. I’m going away. It’s going to happen. I shall be married! I shall miss you, dearest heart, but I am to be married! I shall go away from here. I shall leave all this behind. All will be well. O Lord, I thank you, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
“No,” I said, for this was my region, “hardly from there.”
“It has been announced! My husband is to be the Duke of Aosta. The Duke of Aosta!”
To my mind Aosta sounded very like aorta. The aorta is situated above the heart. She showed me a portrait of her duke; he did not look much of anything to me. When Elisabeth was too busy to join me in the workroom, she said I must spend my time copying the portrait, that she should like to have another copy, one that she could fold up and keep with her always.
{The Duke of Aosta}
{A Human Aorta}
The drawing grew smudged and creased after constant attention.
Another day, Elisabeth knocked on my cupboard door. “I’m not supposed to spend so much time with you anymore.”
“Has Madame Guéméné proclaimed it?”
“Madame Guéméné has been appointed governess to the Dauphine. It is Madame Diane de Polignac who looks after my house now. Rage has been sent away, and even Démon is to be rationed to twice-monthly visits. I have new ladies-in-waiting. I am growing up, I feel it.”
“And me?” I asked. “What has Madame de Polignac said regarding me?”
“Oh my heart, my own heart, it is such a new beginning! My heart, we’re so cramped in here. Would you like me to find you a proper room? It would be a little farther away but perhaps it would be better.”
Pity the poor toys, for they are generally loved for such a short time; they get broken, or other things come along to replace them, and they are taken to distant rooms set aside for unloved objects. Generations of dolls are left to decay in outbuildings. Seeing new parts of the palace now, it seemed to me no longer the golden leviathan I had first encountered, but rather a vast skeleton, the remains of some beast that had been killed, and that we lived within its expired body. My new location was a whole room, cold and empty; you could not warm it. I tried to think up the ghost of Edmond in that sorrowful place, but he would not come. He had disappeared on me, never to visit again.
And yet it has been known that discarded toys are sometimes taken up again, and held with a rekindled passion; that familiarity is very helpful in despair.
Then, as suddenly as talk of the Duke of Aosta had begun, just a week after I was shown my room forty minutes’ walk away, it all ended, with two small words: he too was “not becoming.” Elisabeth must make do with that. And instantly I was remembered. The cupboard was open for business once more.
It was a quieter Elisabeth who emerged from the tears and the shivers on the evening I was returned to the cupboard. That evening Elisabeth gave up on herself; she declared that she was rededicating herself to the poor suffering people, that from now on she would expect nothing for herself. She instructed me to fetch the plaster Jesus from his cupboard, then held that object in her lap like the babies she would never be having. Thenceforth our days were to be religious days; from now on there would just be us: Elisabeth, myself, the plaster fellow. And if ever I tried to kiss her, I was gently pushed away.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Pain is to be found at the Church of Saint Cyr.
Afterward, time came to be measured in trips to the Church of Saint Cyr. In that church, in various side chapels, could be found a growing populace of body parts, nailed one on top of another, and ever less wall. Elisabeth’s Poor Suffering People advanced into its third volume and months went by and the year changed at last; and the next year began, which would be very much like its predecessor; and so would the ones that followed it, and all time was very much alike and bodies were grievously poor and endlessly suffered and showed us with their tears or clenched teeth where it was that they hurt. They really did hurt in those days and years, very greatly, and there seemed ever more of them. They were not always glad to see us, and sometimes took Elisabeth’s money with cold looks. One reason for this, we supposed, may have been the poor weather and the bad crops; another may have been one of the men, a former stable boy now lamed by a horse. One day, this poor man had come limping into the palace grounds to beg for alms. He was beaten and sent away by the guards, and he died from his wounds. Money was given, but no matter: when the man expired, their spirit declined. But Elisabeth never stopped her visits, and we took note of the people and rendered their difficulties in wax. And we grew older. And though we could still be considered young, and Madame Elisabeth was always the youngest, layer by layer the dust settled upon us and Elisabeth turned by degrees into a spinster and put away all thoughts of any other kind of future. Inside, her body was drying out.
We were moved also.
Princesse Elisabeth’s new household was to be found at the very end of a corridor in the southwest wing of the palace; this was said to be so that she would not be so disturbed, but in fact it was so that she might be forgotten. From the windows of her new rooms we could see the Grand Canal, but more important the road to Saint Cyr, the direction in which we always looked. We were situated on the first floor; beneath us were the great apartments of the queen, above us the rooms of the master of the horse, whom we could always hear pacing back and forth in his great boots. All around us we heard the life of the palace, but it was never with us. The new household consisted of seven rooms: the antechamber, the second antechamber, the bedroom, the grand cabinet, the billiard room, the library, and the boudoir. Outside the bedroom was my new wall cupboard; it had one shelf fewer than my old space, and was not clean when I arrived. Its previous tenant had not cared for it, had left boot marks and scratches on the interior walls. I cleaned it out and climbed inside. Ants lived there with me, and a mouse to begin with, on and off, on the bottom shelf.
These were the long seasons of Madame de Polignac. Diane de Polignac, sister-in-law of the queen’s newest favorite, was an ugly woman, hunchbacked and slovenly, with sallow skin and wet lips; she swallowed when she saw men. She did not care for Elisabeth, a fact she made perfectly plain once she had secured her position. She peopled Elisabeth’s corridor with her own harem; they l
aughed at Elisabeth loudly enough to be sure she would hear. Elisabeth’s only companions were myself and the cupboard Jesus.
Whatever difficulties had marked the successive reigns of Mackau and Guéméné, they had undertaken their work with good intentions; their methods, however wayward and defeating, were truly designed to benefit Elisabeth. By contrast, Polignac was concerned only with herself. It was Polignac who demanded the billiard room; Antoinette had taken to this entertainment, and everyone had to follow. Elisabeth retreated and retreated. Elsewhere, the palace bustled with society; there were great parties and fêtes and gambling, but I never saw any of it myself. Below we heard laughing and happiness; above we heard marching and slamming doors. Though she was only seventeen years of age, Elisabeth seemed thirty.
“Don’t ever leave me, my body. Don’t ever go.”
We lived our quiet lives and made friends of the side chapels of the Church of Saint Cyr. Each of these chapels was named after a saint. I came to learn my saints very well in those days. Mother would have been most pleased.
Saint Vincent de Paul was an ancient man who had devoted his life to the poor and had houses built for them. We filled his chapel with our wax pieces, until there was no room left for another hurting kidney or broken finger, not even space for a cloudy eye. Saint Martin de Tours was another ancient man who had cut his cloak in two to give half to a beggar; in his chapel soon were smashed legs, swollen arms, bruised trunks, dented heads, torn noses, blistered mouths—all in wax, until there was no longer space for even one more crumb of grief. Saint Denis was the first bishop of Paris, and in his chapel appeared, in wax, rent ribs, burst lungs, exhausted hearts, spent livers, stinging bladders, useless ovaries, twisted testes, yellow skins, tender stumps. All that pain, all that suffering, so much poverty.
The bishop was worried: his church was being taken over, his holy place remade as a wax butcher’s shop. But Madame Elisabeth and I could not be stopped. Just as Saint Cyr himself, who had never grown into adulthood, had had his head smashed against a wall for insisting he was a Christian, so Elisabeth was martyring herself upon the hurt of others. Elisabeth hungered after pain, other people’s pain to dull her own; the pain of those poor everyday people fed her life. She had become addicted to misery. We piled up organs. My cupboard door was knocked upon at different hours of the day, sometimes at night, before the sun was up, to summon me to work. Elisabeth believed in those little wax objects—they were evidence of her intention—even if to the poor and suffering they meant nothing at all.
