Becoming Marie Antoinette: A Novel

by Juliet Grey

  It was my first lesson. But it would take hours of practice day after day until my feet no longer felt sore after only a few minutes, until I could traverse the vast halls, corridors, and chambers of the Hofburg while effortlessly sustaining the walk. I kept thinking about Maxl’s little wooden horses, pretending that I had a mile-long satin ribbon about my waist while some unseen hand was pulling me forward. How much easier it would have been if my slippers had wheels! Poor Liesl massaged my calloused feet every evening after I soaked them in a bucket of bath salts. Were the women of Versailles in as much discomfort? And would I ever become used to their absurd, doll-like shuffle, gliding through the French court in my vast grands paniers as though I had never moved any other way in my life? What was wrong with a good German stride?

  SEVEN

  “A Particularly Egregious Faux Pas”

  It would not be sufficient to perfect my skills in dance and movement; my tongue would have to become as agile as my toes. By the time I arrived in France—if I was ever to arrive at all—their language must come as willingly and mellifluously to my lips as my native German. With that in mind, Maman doubled her efforts, hiring two experts to train me. It was the only misstep she would make, but it was a grave one.

  Although Maman spoke French fluently, she had never lost her German accent. Acknowledging that this was perhaps the one situation where her own talents and experience could not guide me, she had become determined to engage a French elocution instructor to tutor me in the correct pronunciation of the language. Evidently, as it was taking Louis an inordinate length of time to enter his formal request for my hand on behalf of his grandson, my mother had grown increasingly anxious—particularly after the duc de Choiseul admitted to her that there were still many at Versailles who spoke against the match. I had much to prove. Or improve, as things stood.

  Would it really happen? I wondered. And who were these unnamed naysayers? But I had enough worries closer at hand. Deep inside my heart the fear grew stronger by the day that I would disappoint Maman, and, by extension, the Hapsburg dynasty and the entire Austrian empire.

  I would have to endure the dental tortures of “Fauchard’s Bandeaux” for another few weeks, but perhaps Maman had convinced herself that if I could speak French properly with all that metal in my mouth, I should shortly achieve linguistic perfection without it. Soon after Charlotte’s departure a pair of actors from the Comédie-Française in Paris arrived at the Hofburg. Monsieur Sainville and Monsieur Aufresne were living at the time in Vienna where they were performing in a romantic comedy by Marivaux at the Burgtheater.

  Chaperoned by the Countess von Lerchenfeld, I awaited their first visit in the Rosenzimmer. My new governess had suggested I practice my hostessing skills in front of the actors. After all, when I became dauphine I would be expected to hold court in my apartments every morning and to preside over card and gaming parties—oh, the dreaded cavagnole!—nearly every night. Consequently it was important to learn how to lead the conversation, to listen graciously—or at least appear to do so—and to make sure that my audience was always contented and entertained. I had ordered coffee with cream and cinnamon and was prepared to offer it in my very own service of ruby-colored Meissen ware embellished with a rose motif. A dish of marzipan rested on a rosewood half-table. It had taken more than one day of practice to be able to pour the coffee without the tips of my lacy engageantes dipping into the porcelain cups.

  At first I thought the players had arrived in costume because their wide-cuffed velvet coats and full, curly wigs—in the style worn by my grandpapa, Charles VI—were so long out of fashion. The buttons of Monsieur Aufresne’s waistcoat, an affair that grazed his knees, were straining to contain his girth. In contrast, Monsieur Sainville was as slender as his colleague was portly, his uncommon height echoed by his beribboned walking stick. Their faces were highly rouged, embellished with patches here and there (on Aufresne’s left cheek and above Sainville’s right lip) to cover telltale pockmarks. Unfortunately, their heavy makeup, calculated to produce the illusion of youth, had the opposite of its intended effect, for the white lead foundation had settled into the fine wrinkles of their faces.

  Monsieur Aufresne made a leg, such as courtiers did in the time of Louis XIV of France, thrusting out his well-turned calf. His hose—once white, I presumed—were a dingy dove-colored shade. Doffing his feathered hat with such a theatrical flourish that the plume swept along the parquet, he declaimed, “Bonjour, little madame,” producing the greeting from deep within his barrel-shaped chest.

  “Bonjour,” echoed Monsieur Sainville, as he greeted me with the same outmoded court bow. His voice was considerably higher than Monsieur Aufresne’s. His enormous hat—amber-colored velvet, accented with a vibrant yellow plume—had seen better days.

  I smiled at the pair of players, forgetting that I had a mouth full of gold. I must have looked quite fearsome. My hand flew to my cheek to hide a blush. “Bonjour, messieurs. Je suis enchantée de faire votre connaissance,” I said, and immediately noticed that the men exchanged glances. Was my accent dreadful? Passable? Did my dental bandeaux frighten them? Although they were merely actors, I wished to make a charming first impression.

  I gestured toward the armchairs and invited the gentlemen to partake of some coffee with cinnamon. I suppose we all had our parts to play, because they fell over themselves to praise my gown, my features, and even my carriage as I glided over to the table to offer them a nugget of marzipan. Monsieur Sainville made a point of mentioning that he had some familiarity with the manners of the nobility, as he had formerly been the Vicomte Clairval de Passy. I was at pains to imagine how a vicomte could tumble so precipitously down the social ladder, until his companion explained that the ci-devant nobleman, after falling in love with a celebrated actress, had adopted her profession so that they might never endure a separation. I had never heard such a remarkable—or romantic—story.

  Although they seemed to take themselves quite seriously, I found messieurs Sainville and Aufresne to be quite a comical pair. I studied their faces as they drank their coffee, noticing how tiny the porcelain cup looked in Monsieur Aufresne’s large, expressive hands. Suddenly I realized that the players reminded me of Cervantes’s knight errant Don Quixote, and his squire, Sancho Panza. The Countess von Brandeiss had suggested that I read the novel in its German translation, but it was far too long and ponderous to hold my attention.

  In order to discern the strengths and weaknesses of my speech, the actors asked me to converse with them. I glanced over at Madame von Lerchenfeld and she nodded her head, giving me her tacit permission to talk to the players as though they were my social equals. The countess surreptitiously stiffened her spine, a reminder to me to sit up straight. One of my shoulders is a bit higher than the other; when I become inattentive to my posture my siblings tease me for resembling the misshapen Frau Schwab. Maman had somehow become certain that the less forgiving corsets worn by the women of Versailles would disguise my physical flaw.

  In the lucky absence of such an instrument of torture, I endeavored to emulate the result, sitting as stiff as a poker as I politely inquired of the players whether they were enjoying the fine weather. Not a cloud in the sky, I added, in my cautious French. Had they ever seen it so blue? After a few moments, I realized that I had been posing numerous innocuous questions and neither of these painted gentlemen had said a word. Was my accent so unintelligible that they could not make head or tail of my words? “I don’t understand—why do you not reply?” I asked them. “Je ne comprends pas. Of what use is a conversation when one party is doing all the talking?”

  “We are listening to you, madame archduchess,” said the portly one, Monsieur Aufresne.

  “Oh.” Suddenly I was too embarrassed to continue. “Another morsel of marzipan?” I exclaimed, reaching for the dish. The men declined the almond paste, but I couldn’t resist. I nibbled the peach-shaped candy as I thought of something else to say. I feared I was not being a good hostess or a parti
cularly exemplary pupil. It was difficult to conduct a dialogue in a foreign tongue with complete strangers who were there to assess me, and who would no doubt report their impressions to Maman.

  “How do you find Vienna?” I finally asked, fairly confident that I had constructed the French sentence correctly. Aha! I had found a topic on which one could expound indefinitely.

  “Vienna is a very beautiful city, madame,” Monsieur Aufresne replied. “My wife and children are quite happy here as well.” Patting his prodigious belly he added, “And the food is excellent. I have become quite partial to your schnitzel.” He brought his fingers to his lips and kissed them with a loud smack.

  “With potato dumplings?” I asked excitedly. “You have good taste indeed, Monsieur Aufresne, for that is my favorite meal in the world.” He was the first rotund Frenchman I had seen. I imagined his family all shaped the same way—pink cheeked and round, like the nesting dolls the Empress of all the Russias had sent to Maman, or a fat Viennese burgomeister and his brood.

  Another painful silence descended.

  “Perhaps you would like to recite something for us,” Monsieur Sainville suggested. From the deep pocket of his embroidered coat he drew a small book bound in red calfskin, its pages yellowed. “This is a copy of the play we are performing at the Burgtheater. La Femme Fidèle,” he said. “The Faithful Wife.”

  “Parfait!” exclaimed Monsieur Aufresne. He snatched the little volume from his colleague’s hands and placed it in mine, exclaiming in his rumbling voice, “You will kindly turn to the passage on page twenty-three, and read Céline’s speech—she is the faithful wife.”

  This would be a treat; I loved the theatre. I was a natural mimic, and if I had not been born an archduchess, perhaps I might have dabbled in it. I was intrigued by the idea of playing at being a shepherdess without the fuss of farm animals, or pretending to be a carefree maidservant without having to empty a chamber pot. Every day a new play and a different costume. What fun!

  I quickly glanced at some of the other scenes before returning to the speech that Monsieur Aufresne had assigned me. I dared not say so, but had I been asked to select a passage on my own, I would have preferred to read the role of Céline’s saucy maid, Florette, who was so much cleverer and more interesting.

  Evidently Monsieur Sainville thought so, too, because he read Florette’s part in the scene with Céline, and it was all I could do not to laugh at his fluted tones and the way he fluttered and flounced about the Rosenzimmer.

  He judged my interpretation of the faithful wife to be “absolument charmante—utterly charming.” But they had not come to the Hofburg to teach me to become an actress. My accent was, “malheureusement, madame,” regrettably deplorable. And that would never do for the future dauphine of France.

  For the next two hours I sat opposite the pair of players and did nothing but mimic funny French vowel sounds—eu, ou, eau, oou—until my lips were tired. We then tackled consonants until the top of my mouth and the back of my throat felt raw from voicing so many R’s—though they were really nothing to producing the German ch sound, as in ach. Despite my native partiality to my mother tongue, I was discovering that French was a profoundly beautiful language when properly pronounced.

  The actors were pleased with my swift progress and assigned me a number of sentences to practice; a second lesson was arranged. Some days later, I stood in the center of the Rosenzimmer repeating the phrases they had given me to perfect.

  The players’ suits, rather threadbare velvet affairs, were just as outmoded as the ones they had worn at our first encounter, but I noticed that the men had moved their mouches; the black patches were stuck to different parts of their faces than they had been on the day we met. I tried not to stare.

  I had been practicing my French on Mops and Liesl, and even on Liesl’s little son (although neither pug nor maid nor moppet could understand a word of the language), so I was delighted by the players’ assessment that my pronunciation was already improving. “But you must properly produce the sound as well,” said Monsieur Aufresne. “After all, you will be speaking to people all day, from your morning levers to your evening couchers.”

  “And it will not do for the dauphine to suffer mal à la gorge—a sore throat,” chirped Monsieur Sainville. “So we will teach you the actors’ method to avoid fatiguing the vocal cords.”

  Apparently, learning this technique entailed lying on the floor and placing one’s hands on the belly. Would madame l’archiduchesse be permitted to do so? The players applied to the dour-faced Madame von Lerchenfeld, who succinctly informed the pair that a daughter of the House of Hapsburg does not supinate her limbs. In that case, would madame the chaperone herself submit to the demonstration? “Absolument pas!” came her emphatic refusal.

  After a brief and whispered conversation between them, the players concurred that the only way to demonstrate the technique would be if they performed it themselves. Monsieur Aufresne doffed his tricorn and lowered his bulk to the floor, while Monsieur Sainville, with all delicacy, knelt beside him and placed his palm over his colleague’s enormous gut. The slender actor explained how to breathe from the belly rather than from the lungs, instructing me to watch his hand rise and fall while Monsieur Aufresne inhaled and exhaled deeply, as he spoke several sentences in order to demonstrate how one sustains the sound without risk of injury.

  Try as I might, I just couldn’t see it. “Excusez-moi, messieurs,” I said, begging their pardon. I scuttled over to Madame von Lerchenfeld’s chair, interrupting her reading. I had assumed she was enjoying one of her devotional works, but curiously, she snapped the book shut as I approached her. “I can’t understand how to breathe properly because Monsieur Aufresne is so”—I puffed out my cheeks and surreptitiously pantomimed a rounded gut—“dickbäuchig! How can I tell whether his belly has expanded?” I whispered.

  The countess placed the book in her lap and clapped her hands in three sharp raps that echoed off the paneled walls of the Rosenzimmer. “S’il vous plaît, messieurs!” She asked them to switch places so that I could better discern the breathing technique as it was demonstrated on Monsieur Sainville’s considerably slimmer frame.

  After watching the men for several moments I was determined to experience it for myself. The actors could never touch the royal person, but who was to prevent me—except my pinch-faced governess, whose attention I now imagined was immersed in some lurid novel—from lying down on the floor and feeling my own belly? So there I lay, swallowed up by my skirts, on a hard wooden floor, while above me an artificial garden was forever in bloom. However, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t discern whether I was breathing correctly because my corset and stomacher restricted the movement of my torso—the very raison d’être of these accoutrements, but of no use to me now.

  Too distracted by the roses overhead, I closed my eyes and practiced my phonetics. The actors had given me a few sample sentences to repeat. “Le petit chien est bleu”—the little dog is blue—I intoned with tremendous deliberation as I puffed out my lower belly, pushing it against my stays, then gradually deflated it as I spoke.

  “Antonia, what is the meaning of this!”

  My eyes flew open and I was treated to a view of somber black brocade festooned with lilac furbelows, my mother’s skirts. I sat up with a start. Maman was shadowed by the duc de Choiseul, his customary benign smile replaced with a grimace of consternation. I will long remember their mutual expression of horror at the sight of Monsieur Sainville in a recumbent position on the polished floor, while his stout colleague bent over him in what must have appeared to be a somewhat compromising pose with his ample derrière, clad in dun-colored breeches, poking skyward like the rump of the rhino in the royal menagerie.

  In a tone that could freeze fire, Maman announced that the lesson was over. Immediately.

  Countess von Lerchenfeld had jumped up from her chair as though her skirts were ablaze. She colored furiously and endeavored to hide her book inside a pocket. Luckily for
her, Maman’s gaze was fixed on the pair of actors, who scrambled to their feet with as much dignity as they could muster and quickly donned their hats. With a “By your leave, Your Imperial Majesty” and a considerable amount of bowing and awkwardly ingratiating smiles, they departed the room in great haste.

  “Actors,” said the duc with icy disdain. There was a hardness in his eyes I had never before seen. “I had not believed it when it was first reported to me. The news defied everything I have come to recognize as Your Imperial Majesty’s piety and correctness—particularly as it applies to your daughter’s preparation to become the dauphine.”

  I rose to my feet and smoothed my skirts. Never before had I seen Maman speechless. Her fleshy chins trembled with apprehension.

  “I-I was against it from the start,” the countess stammered. Maman’s glare could have penetrated iron.

  The French diplomat wrung his hands. “Your Imperial Majesty, the court of Versailles, and most specifically His Most Christian Majesty, are extremely distressed to learn that you have engaged a pair of strolling players to educate the future queen of France. I have staked—”

  “Yes, I know,” Maman snapped. “You have staked your lengthy career on Antonia’s union with the dauphin. There is no need to remind me, monsieur le duc.” After several moments of hideously tense silence, my mother summoned her redoubtable equanimity. “It was my studied estimation that a pair of native-born speakers would be more appropriately suited to improving my daughter’s French. True, they are actors—”

  “Undesirables,” the duc interrupted. He shook his head. “Versailles regards this decision, madame, as a particularly egregious faux pas. In fact,” he added, measuring his words in a way that sent shivers along my spine, “when it is coupled with the archduchess’s continued deficiency in intellectual pursuits and her poor acquaintance with basic academics, Louis has begun to question your judgment—as well as Madame Antonia’s suitability to become dauphine. It will take a good deal of delicacy—and persuasion—to convince him otherwise.”