The Sisters of Versailles

by Sally Christie

  “You look like crows!” he cried. “Bad luck! Always my bad luck!” And then he ordered us all out, yelling that only Marguerite should stay, for she was the only one who could comfort him.

  We traipsed slowly back up to the fourth floor, all of us still sobbing. The nursery seemed smaller and shabbier than I remembered, the tapestries more moth-eaten, the floors more uneven and the rooms colder.

  “Agathe doesn’t have any mourning clothes!” wailed Marie-Anne, flinging her doll on the floor. Sometimes I would forget that Marie-Anne was the youngest, for she was often very quick and sure of herself, and never afraid. But she was only twelve and still a baby at heart. I hugged her to me, her little body stiff in her black mourning gown, shaking with sobs.

  “We can make her some out of our veils,” said Diane helpfully, pulling hers off and jabbing it with a hearth poker to rip it.

  “Oh! Tante Mazarin will be very angry,” breathed Hortense, forgetting to sob.

  “That’s a good idea,” said Pauline, taking her veil off as well and ripping it with her teeth. “No one will say anything, because everyone is sad for us. We are orphans.”

  “Not orphans!” I declared. “Our father still lives.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  “Perhaps she will come back,” whispered Marie-Anne to me, Agathe now safely and properly wrapped in the black lace. Pauline snorted.

  “Pauline!” I admonished. “Don’t be so cruel.” I wouldn’t usually confront Pauline, but I was a married woman and felt a sudden responsibility for my little sisters. Whatever happened, I would take care of them. I gathered them all to me, even Pauline, who squawked in protest, and we embraced and cried again.

  After the funeral everything changed. Pauline and Diane entered the convent at Port-Royal on the outskirts of Paris, and Hortense and Marie-Anne were sent to live with Tante Mazarin.

  And I? Out of sorrow came my fortune, for my mother’s death meant her position at Court was secured upon me. I was finally to go to Versailles. It was not the way that I had wished or wanted, but that is how it happened.

  And now I am here in the center of the world, both hating it and loving it.

  From Louise de Mailly

  Château de Versailles

  June 2, 1730

  Dear Pauline and Diane,

  Greetings, sisters! I trust you are well and enjoying life at the convent. I am sure the nuns are taking good care of you. Pauline, I hope that you are finally getting the education you always so desired.

  I received a letter from Zélie; she is now in Picardy and writes that she misses us most terribly. It is so sad she is not able to be with us. Do you remember her exciting stories of China and Québec?

  Life here at Versailles is wonderful. Yesterday I met the Turkish ambassador and last night the queen hosted a concert in her rooms—Couperin! Everything is very glamorous and exciting. The queen is a wonderful mistress and the other ladies are very kind and caring. My husband, Louis-Alexandre, is so attentive; it is wonderful to be together with him all the time, though he does not sleep at the palace but prefers his house in town. He says the dust in the palace causes him to sneeze too much.

  Diane, I will try to send the ribbons that you asked for, but money is very tight here. My dear husband gives so much to charity that there is little left over for trifles! I must be very inventive with my clothes. Do you remember our everyday yellow muslin dresses we all wore in the nursery? I made mine into an underskirt and on my days off duty I wear it with my blue flowered chintz. All the other ladies admire it very much.

  Pauline, please write to me! I would love to hear your news. Diane, thank you for your letter, but unfortunately the ink was smeared and I could not understand much of it. You must write to Tante Mazarin and thank her for taking care of Hortense and Marie-Anne. Do not be sad about Mama and remember to pray for her soul.

  Your loving sister,

  Louise

  From Louise de Mailly

  Château de Versailles

  June 12, 1730

  Dear Marie-Anne and Hortense,

  My darling sisters! I trust you are well in Tante Mazarin’s care. I saw her yesterday and she told me you are happy in your new home and that Hortense, you have stopped having nightmares about the rats living beneath your bed. Don’t forget, bad dreams are caused by Satan, so if you fear nightmares, wear your crucifix to bed and He will protect you.

  I received a letter from darling Zélie, she is now living in Picardy and says she misses us most terribly. It is so sad she is not able to still be with us. I will miss her dreadfully. Do you remember how she used to sing to us at night, whenever there was a thunderstorm? How sweet she was.

  Life is wonderful here at Versailles. Everything is very glamorous and the people are very grand but very kind. My husband is very attentive and it is wonderful to be so close to him and not constantly separated as we were before. I hope when the time comes for you to be married, you will have as wonderful a husband as mine.

  I will give Tante Mazarin a pot of fig jam for her to bring to Paris when she next goes; it is a gift to me from my friend the Duchesse d’Antin. I thought to share it with you as I know how much you love figs. Please don’t write to Diane and tell her about it; she would be very jealous but I only have one pot left.

  Do not forget to pray for our mother’s soul.

  Love,

  Louise

  Marie-Anne

  HÔTEL DE MAZARIN, PARIS

  1731

  If I had a diamond ring I would scratch it on the windowpane of my room and write: Here Marie-Anne de Mailly-Nesle died of boredom, February 15, 1731. Marie of Scotland, imprisoned in an English castle, engraved a sad poem on a window glass to prove she once lived, though she knew she would die soon.

  Our governess, Zélie, told us that story, so it might not be true.

  But even if it’s untrue, I still feel some affinity for poor, doomed Marie. I have no diamond but one day I slipped a small sharp knife under my sleeve after dinner. I tried to scratch out my despair on the windowpane, but my sister Hortense heard the housekeeper yelling at the servant girls about the missing knife. She made me feel guilty enough to relinquish it to her superior person. She put it on a side table where a footman found it, then informed me she would pray away my wickedness.

  After our mother died, our Tante Mazarin embraced us and said we must make a home with her, and consider all she had to be ours. Tante is a pious old bat. She’s only just past forty and still quite beautiful, but she wears dark old-fashioned clothes that make her look like an ancient widow, and her lips are thin from a lifetime of disapproval.

  I don’t like our new home. I miss the fourth floor on the Quai des Théatins and all that was familiar. I wish our mother never had to die; she was too young and it all happened so suddenly. I wish our father was . . . well, not like our father is, and that we could have stayed in our house, instead of it being rented out to horrid strangers that Tante Mazarin doesn’t even know. She says the new tenants might be bourgeois, and when she says that word she lowers her voice as if talking of the contents of a close stool.

  I miss our old life. We were all together and it was fun and interesting. Lessons in the morning were useless—I often suspected Zélie, our governess, of invention—but in the afternoons we were free to play and do as we wished. I was very young, but by the time I was ten I had already decided that I wanted to be a scientist, if a woman was allowed such a thing. I carried out many interesting experiments: I gathered mice from the jaws of the cats and kept them in a box to see how long they would last before starving to death, and I liked to pull the legs off spiders to see how many they could lose before they lost the ability to walk. Five. And we had our toys—dolls, a perfect miniature crockery set to feed them, and a wonderful Noah’s Ark with thirty-two pairs of animals.

  Then my eldest sister, Louise, left the nursery to get married, and everything changed. I missed Louise, even though she was a bit soft and foolish. Z�
�lie used to say that Louise viewed the world through a bouquet of flowers, which meant she only saw the good in everything.

  Once Louise left, my older sister Pauline became insufferable. Pauline was always very nasty and she was jealous of Louise, because Louise got married while she was still stuck in the nursery. She often said that Louise didn’t deserve to be married first, because even though she was the eldest, she was a ninny and a fool. My sister Diane, who worshiped Pauline, agreed with her, but Hortense, who was always so good, opened her eyes wide—she has very big eyes and is very pretty—and said we must not talk about our sister like that, for it was not very sisterly.

  “Sororal,” elucidated Zélie. “Not very sororal.”

  Sororal—it’s a good word, but I think I am also guilty of not being sororal because I hate my sister too. Not Louise, but Pauline. She is tall and ugly, and once Louise left to get married she reigned over our nursery in complete tyranny, throwing spiders on us and forcing us to climb inside the chimneys.

  Pauline took to gathering our toys and keeping them locked in an oak cupboard. She wore the key tied securely around her waist like a jailer or a housekeeper, and told us she would not open the cupboard and release the toys unless we offered her gifts. Sometimes it was food and we had to save our buns from breakfast and give them to her! And she already so big and fat!

  I urged my sisters not to return their toys when Pauline demanded. In retaliation, Pauline announced that anyone who did not return their toy by the time appointed would not be able to play with it for two days.

  I protested, hanging on to my doll Agathe. “You are not in charge here! You cannot make up these stupid rules.”

  Pauline’s face darkened at my resistance. “Return the doll,” she commanded.

  Zélie said nothing against our tormentress—she said her duties were done when our lesson books closed at noon. There was no one in higher authority to stop the tyranny, so I plotted to use whatever means necessary to ensure Pauline’s downfall. Just like the Roundheads did when they executed King Charles I in England. (Zélie says the English never executed their king, but I found a book in the library that says they did just that.)

  I decided that instead of becoming a scientist, I would become a revolutionary. Or a rebel. What is the difference? Regardless, I decided to launch a revolution, or a rebellion, and burn down the prison-cupboard.

  I waited until the toys were safely out of their jail. It was a drizzly afternoon and we would not be going out for a walk. I asked permission from Zélie to go down to the library and left my sisters playing in the schoolroom: Pauline reading a book, Diane and Hortense carefully feeding all the animals before they had to go back into the ark.

  The sconces in the dark stairwell were lit and I took a candle and crept back into our bedroom. I held the candle to the oak closet but it just singed the wood and refused to catch. I considered calling one of the maids, for they had great experience in lighting fires, where I had none, but decided they might inform Zélie. Instead, I took a pillow from Diane’s bed, lit it, and threw it inside the cupboard. I closed the door, snuffed out the candle and returned to the schoolroom.

  “Where’s your book?” asked Pauline suspiciously.

  “I found nothing to interest me.”

  Soon there was a smell of smoke and Zélie leapt up in alarm as a maid came running to say there was a fire in the bedroom. In the bedroom? I only wanted to burn down the cupboard! There was great screaming and running and breathless servants as pails of water were hauled from the courtyard well four flights below.

  We were hustled down to the rainy courtyard and the scene was quite dramatic: smoke was billowing from the windows and the servants were alerting the neighbors behind with great cries of “Fire ho! Fire ho!”

  The fire was finally contained, at the loss of the cupboard, some linen from Diane’s bed, and two old tapestries that were used to smother the flames. There was a full investigation and the house steward even climbed up to our nursery. To our eyes, Monsieur Bertrand was grander and even more important than our father, for it was he who dispensed money for clothes and toys and additions to the menu.

  The final verdict: one of the maids neglected a live ember from the night fire. Little Claude, with pockmarked skin and a slight limp, was dismissed. It was unfortunate but in every war there must be some casualties.

  That night the air smelled charred and we all coughed dreadfully. There was no closet to put our toys into, so we kept them at the foot of our beds. Pauline demanded to know where I had been when the fire started. Instead of denying, I simply said: “Next time, it will not be the cupboard. It will be you.”

  After that she left me alone and did not reinstate her control of the toys. It was all very satisfying. I thought, when I am older, instead of marrying and having children perhaps I will run away and foment revolution in strange lands. I seem to have quite the talent for it. And besides, there is hardly any money left for our dowries—apparently it has all been spent in an “orgy of dissipation,” as I once overheard a footman saying. I’m not sure what an orgy is—it must be very expensive—but all I know is that it means we are now poor.

  Shortly after the fire my mother died, and we had to leave our house and come and live with Tante Mazarin. Hortense is happy here; she likes the rigid order more than the mess and neglect at the Quai des Théatins. But I do not. Tante’s house is dark and gloomy; crammed with misplaced statues and tables and mirrors. She has started renovating but it will be a long time before the changes reach our rooms on the third floor. The house is set back from the road by a large courtyard and behind lies a long, formal garden, hidden from the house by a solid wall of yews.

  I feel as though I am in a crypt.

  Entombed.

  We pass our days with Tante or her women, reading scriptures and memorizing births and deaths from the Genealogical History of the Royal Family and Peers, which I suppose is also a sacred text. Tante insists on a great deal of needlework and we are never permitted to sit in chairs with backs—imagine if we slouched! And what a scandal that we weren’t wearing stays before we came to live with her! In this house, girls are forbidden to run, skip, or even ask questions.

  One of her waiting women is responsible for our manners and instructs us on the twelve steps required to take snuff elegantly and how to eat an egg properly. I am not sure this is very important, but Tante proclaims that thanks to her and the education she is providing, we might make better marriages than our dowries would normally predict.

  I think our education is ridiculous—why should my future husband care if I crack my egg with a fork, or with a knife? And surely I’ll never meet all the people we have to learn about?

  “But it is important,” Hortense protests when I mock our lessons. “It is important to know who is who in our world. In the future we may go to Court and meet these people. And imagine how awful it would be if you did not know how to address them properly, or know who their parents were? You would bring shame upon Tante and she would be accused of neglecting our education.”

  Hortense is two years older than me. Still, I do not believe that gives her the right to treat me as though I am her child.

  “Oui, maman,” I say in my most exaggerated voice, then regret it as Hortense flinches; our mother is dead only just over a year.

  We are sitting in Tante’s library, practicing “families” from the Genealogical History. I think the sun is shining outside behind the thick trees, but we must stay inside. I throw my sister what I hope is a difficult one: “Conti.”

  “Prince of Conti, title created 1597 and revived 1629. Current head, Louis François de Bourbon, born in 1717. Like you, Marie-Anne! Succeeded his father in 1727.”

  “Wife?”

  “Marie . . . no, Louise Diane d’Orléans, Mademoiselle de Chartres.”

  “Children?”

  “None, he only married this year!”

  “Other titles?”

  “Comte d’Alais, Comte de Beaumont-sur-O
ise and of . . . Pézenas, also Duc de . . . Mérode?”

  “Wrong!” I cry triumphantly, consulting the appropriate page. “Duc de Mercoeur, not Mérode.”

  “You’re right, Duc de Mercoeur.” Hortense frowns. “Mercoeur: title raised to a ducal peerage in 1569.”

  “Correct.” I sigh.

  Hortense is too perfect.

  From Hortense de Mailly-Nesle

  Hôtel de Mazarin, Paris

  March 5, 1731

  Dearest Louise,

  Thank you for your letter and the pot of fig jam. One of the maids here was dreadfully sick with fever, so I gave her most of it for comfort. But then she died and Tante said we mustn’t eat what was left.

  Thank you for your news of your exciting life at Versailles! I am glad you and your husband are now able to be close again, and I pray that you will soon be blessed with a son.

  Tante Mazarin says that Versailles is a cauldron of sin, and that one must be very careful to guard against temptation. Every night I pray for your soul and ask God to guide you on the good path. At least you have Tante watching over: you must heed what she says, for she is very wise and very good.

  She is like a mother to us and takes great care of us. When she is in Paris she sees us every day and we even dine with her on occasion. Her women are very kind. We are learning a lot here, more than at the Quai des Théatins, though I do not want to insult dear Zélie.

  Marie-Anne sends her love and this handkerchief that we sewed for you. Tante insists on much needlework and that is a good thing: she was very disappointed with our sewing skills when we arrived. Now we spend many hours a day practicing. I hope you like the handkerchief; please excuse the drops of dried blood next to the pansy—that was where Marie-Anne pricked her finger. She is still learning, though I find it very easy—look at the petals of the flower, how fine they are. Tante always praises my delicate fingers.

  My love to you and your husband,