Becoming Marie Antoinette: A Novel

by Juliet Grey

  Louis truly grieved for the old king, his late grand-père. As for the others, the straitlaced prudes—collets montés, as I dubbed them—who so tediously offered their respects that afternoon in the black-and-white-tiled hall at the hunting lodge of La Muette, I found their sympathy, as well as their expressions of felicitations on our accession to the throne, as false as the blush on their cheeks. They had not loved their former sovereign for many decades, if at all. Moreover, they had little confidence in my husband’s ability to rule, and even less respect for him.

  “Permettez-moi de vous offrir mes condoléances. J’en suis désolée,” I giggled behind my fan to my devoted friend and attendant the princesse de Lamballe, mimicking the warble of the interminable parade of ancient crones. “Honestly, when one has passed thirty, I cannot understand how one dares appear at court.”

  I found these old women ridiculous, but there was another cause for my laughter—one that I lacked the courage to admit to anyone, even to my husband. In sober truth, not until today, when we received the customary condolences of the nobility, had the reality of Papa Roi’s death settled upon my breast. The magnitude of what lay before us, Louis and me, was overwhelming. I was overcome with nerves, and raillery was my release.

  The duchesse d’Archambault approached. Sixty years of rouge had settled into her hollowed cheekbones, and I could not help myself. I bit my lip, but a smile matured into a grin, and before I knew it a chuckle had burbled its way out of my mouth. When she descended into her reverence I heard her knees creak and felt certain she would not be able to rise without assistance.

  “Allow me, Your Majesty, to condole you on the death of the king-that-was.” The duchesse lapsed into a reverie. “Il était si noble, si gentil.…”

  “Vous l’avez détesté!” I muttered, then whispered to the princesse, “I know for a fact she despised the king because he refused her idiot son a military promotion.” When the duchesse was just out of earshot, I trilled, “So noble, so kind.”

  “Your Majesty, it does not become you to mock your elders, especially when they are your inferiors.”

  I did not need to peer over my fan to know the voice: the comtesse de Noailles, my dame d’honneur, the superintendent of my household while I was dauphine, and my de facto guardian. As the youngest daughter of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, I had come to Versailles at fourteen to wed the dauphin, and had been not merely educated but physically transformed in order to merit such an august union. Yet there had still been much to learn and little time in which to master it. The comtesse had been appointed my mentor, to school me in the rigid rituals of the French court. For this I had immediately nicknamed her Madame Etiquette, and in the past four years not a day had gone by that I had not received from her some rebuke over a transgression of protocol. Just behind my right shoulder the princesse de Lamballe stood amid my other ladies. Our wide skirts discreetly concealed another of my attendants, the marquise de Clermont-Tonnerre, who had sunk to her knees from exhaustion. I heard a giggle. The marquise was known to pull faces from time to time and kept all of us in stitches with her ability to turn her eyelids inside out and then flutter them flirtatiously.

  “Who are you hiding?” quizzed Madame de Noailles. My ladies’ eyes darted from one to another, none daring to reply.

  “La marquise de Clermont-Tonnerre est tellement fatiguée,” I replied succinctly.

  “That is of no consequence. It is not comme il faut. Everyone must stand during the reception.”

  I stepped aside. “Madame la marquise, would you kindly rise,” I commanded gently. With the aid of a woman at either elbow she stood, and the vast swell of her belly, straining against her stays, was as evident as the sheen on her brow. “I believe you know the comtesse de Noailles,” I said, making certain Madame Etiquette could see that the marquise was enceinte. “I am not yet a mother, mesdames, although I very much pray for that day. I can only hope that when it comes, common sense will take precedence over protocol. And as queen, I will take measures to ensure it.” I offered the marquise my lace-edged handkerchief to blot her forehead. “As there is nowhere to sit, you may resume your former position, madame, and my ladies will continue to provide you with a screen from disapproving eyes.”

  I glanced down the hall to see the line of courtiers stopped in front of Louis, a few feet away. I returned my attention to the comtesse de Noailles. We were nose to nose now, and I was no longer an unruly child in her custody. One mother who scolded me at the slightest provocation was sufficient; I had no need of a surrogate. “You and your husband have served France long and faithfully,” I began coolly, “and you have devoted yourselves tirelessly without respite. The time has come, therefore, for you to take your congé. My husband and I will expect you to retire to your estate of Mouchy before the week is out.”

  Her pinched face turned as pale as a peeled almond. But there was nothing she could say in reply. One did not remonstrate with the queen of France.

  “The princesse de Lamballe will be my new dame d’honneur,” I added, noting the expression of surprise in my attendant’s eyes and the modest blush that suffused her cheeks. I had caught her completely unaware, but what better time to reward her loyalty?

  The comtesse lowered her gaze and dropped into a deep reverence. “It has been an honor to have served Your Majesty.” The only fissure in her customary hauteur was betrayed by the tremolo in her voice. For an instant I regretted my decision. Yet I had long dreamed of this moment. From now on, I would be the one to choose, at least within my own household, what was comme il faut. As the comtesse rose and made her way along the hall to offer her condolences to the king, I felt as though a storm cloud that had followed me about from palace to palace—Versailles, Compiègne, Fontainebleau—had finally lifted, leaving a vibrant blue sky.

  At the hour of our ascension to the throne, after the requisite obsequies from the courtiers, we had fled the scene of Louis Quinze’s death nearly as fast as our coach could bear us, spending the first nine days of our reign at the Château de Choisy on the banks of the Seine while the innumerable rooms of Versailles were scrubbed free of the smallpox contagion. Yet I was bursting to return, to begin making my mark. No one alive could recall when a queen of France had been much more than a dynastic cipher. Maria Theresa of Spain, the infanta who wed the Sun King, was almost insignificant at court. She spent much of her time closeted in her rooms drinking chocolate and playing cards with her ladies and her dwarves and had so little rapport with her subjects that when they were starving for bread she suggested they eat cake instead—this much I had learned from my dear abbé Vermond, who had instructed me in the history of the queens of France when I was preparing to marry the dauphin. The abbé had journeyed to Versailles as my reader, to offer me spiritual guidance, and he remained one of my few confidants.

  In any case, Maria Theresa of Spain had died nearly a hundred years ago. And her absence from public life had afforded Louis Quatorze plenty of opportunities to seek companionship in the arms of others. They, not his dull queen, became the arbiters of taste at court.

  My immediate predecessor, Marie Leszczyńska, the pious consort of Louis Quinze who died two years before I arrived at Versailles, had been the daughter of a disgraced Polish king forced to live in exile. She bore Louis many useless daughters but only one dauphin to inherit the throne—the father of my husband—and he died while his papa still wore the crown. Like the queen before her, she endured a shadowy existence, maintaining her spotless propriety while my husband’s grand-père flaunted his latest maîtresse en titre. No one noticed what Marie wore or how she dressed her hair. Instead, it was Madame la marquise de Pompadour who had defined the fashion in all things for a generation. And then Madame du Barry, Louis XV’s last mistress, set the tone, but there was no queen to rival her—only me. And I had failed miserably, never sure of myself, always endeavoring to find my footing, desperate to fascinate a timid husband who could not bring himself to consummate our marriage. I had wasted precious
time by allowing the comtesse du Barry to exert her influence not only over the court but over Papa Roi, much to the consternation of my mother.

  But I was determined to no longer be a disappointment. Not to Maman. Not to France. In the aftermath of Louis Quinze’s demise, the du Barry was now consigned to a convent. Her faithful followers at court, the “Barryistes,” would simply have to accustom themselves to the absence of her bawdy wit and gaudy gowns. I was queen; morality and good taste would prevail from now on—though not at the expense of gaiety, glamour, and fun.

  The condolences of the nobility at La Muette marked the end of the period of mourning. When the last of the courtiers had risen, the king and I made our way outside to the courtyard, where the royal coach awaited us. I dared not voice my thoughts to Louis but I felt as though we had spent the past ten days in Purgatory and now, as the gilded carriage clattered over the gravel and out onto the open road toward Versailles, where we would formally begin our reign, we were finally on our way to Heaven.

  I had first entered the seat of France’s court through the back route in every way—as a young bride traveling in a special berline commissioned by Louis Quinze to transport me from my homeland. How eager he had been to show me Versailles, from the Grand Trianon with its pink marble porticoes, to the pebbled allées that led past the canals and fountains, all the way to the grand staircases and the imposing château that his great-grand-père the Sun King had transformed from a modest hunting boîte into an edifice that would rival all other palaces in Europe. And oh, how disappointed I had been on that dreary afternoon: The fountains were dry, the canals cluttered with debris, and the hallways and chambers of the fairyland château reeked of stale urine.

  How different now the aspect before me as we approached the palace from the front via the Ministers’ Courtyard. The imposing gateway designed by Mansart loomed before us, its gilded spikes glinting in the soft afternoon sunlight. At such an hour less than two weeks earlier we had fled the contagion. I rolled open the window of the carriage and peered out. Then turning back to my husband, giddy with anticipation, I exclaimed, “Tell me the air smells sweeter, mon cher!”

  “Sweeter than what?” He looked as if he had a bellyache, or a stitch in his side from a surfeit of brisk exertion. As neither could have been the case, “What pains you, sire?” I asked. I rested my gloved hand in his. He made no reply but the pallor on his face was the same greenish hue that I recalled from our wedding day some four years earlier. He was terrified of what awaited him, fearful of the awful responsibility that now rested entirely upon his broad shoulders. And as much as I desired to be a helpmeet in the governance of the realm, I was no more than his consort. Queens of France were made for one thing only. And that responsibility, I was painfully aware, I had thus far failed to fulfill.

  I pressed Louis’s hand in a gesture of reassurance. Just at that moment, the doors of the carriage were sprung open and the traveling steps unfolded by a team of efficient footmen. “Sois courageux,” I murmured. “And remember—there is no one to scold you anymore. The crown is yours.”

  I was astonished to see that the Ministers’ Courtyard and the Cour Royale just inside the great gates were once again pulsing with people. The vendors had returned to their customary locations and were already doing a brisk business renting hats and swords to the men who wished to visit Versailles but were unaware of the etiquette required. The various merchants of ribbons and fans and parfums had set up their stalls as well. I wondered briefly where they had been during the past two weeks. How had they put bread on their tables while the court was away?

  My husband adjusted the glittering Order of the Holy Spirit that he wore pinned to a sash across his chest. But for the enormous diamond star, his attire was so unprepossessing—his black mourning suit of ottoman striped silk was devoid of gilt embroidery, and his silver shoe buckles were unadorned—that he could have easily been mistaken for a wealthy merchant. As we were handed out of the carriage into the bright afternoon, at the sight of my husband a great cheer went up. “Vive le roi Louis Seize!” How the French had hated their old king—and how they loved their new sovereign. Louis le Désiré they called my husband.

  Louis reddened. I would have to remind him that kings did not blush, even if they were only nineteen. “Et mon peuple—my good people—vive la reine Marie Antoinette!” he exclaimed, leading me forth as if we were stepping out onto a parquet dance floor instead of the vast gravel courtyard.

  They did not shout quite as loudly for me. I suppose I had expected they would, and managed to mask my disappointment behind a gracious smile. When I departed Vienna in the spring of 1770 my mother had not so much exhorted as instructed me to make the people of France love me. I dared not tell her that they weren’t fond of foreigners, and that even at court there were those who employed a spiteful little nickname for me—l’Autrichienne—a play on words, crossing my nationality with the word for a female dog. Did Maman realize that the French had been Austria’s enemy for nine hundred years before they signed a peace treaty with the Hapsburgs in 1756? Make the French love me? It was my fondest hope, but I had so many centuries of hatred to reverse.

  The courtyards teemed with the excitement of a festival day. Citizens, noisy, curious, and jubilant, swarmed about us as we made our way toward the palace. A flower seller offered me a bouquet of pink roses, but I insisted on choosing only a single perfect stem and paying for it out of my own pocket. Sinking to her knees in gratitude, she told me I was “three times beautiful.” I thanked her for the unusual compliment and tried to press on through the crowd. After several minutes of jostling and much waving and smiling and doffing of hats, we finally reached the flat pavement of the Marble Courtyard and the entrance to the State Apartments. For days I had imagined how it would feel to enter Versailles for the first time as queen of France. I rushed up the grand marble staircase clutching my inky-hued skirts, anxious to see my home, as I thought of it—my palace. Would I view it through new eyes, now that I was no longer someone waiting—now that I had become?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JULIET GREY has extensively researched European royal history and is a particular devotee of Marie Antoinette. She is also a classically trained professional actress with numerous portrayals of virgins, vixens, and villainesses to her credit. She and her husband divide their time between New York City and southern Vermont.