Becoming Marie Antoinette: A Novel by Juliet Grey

Author:Juliet Grey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345523877
Publisher: Ballantine Books Trade Paperbacks
Published: 2011-08-08T21:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

Rien

The dreaded banquet finally ended; but for the thousands of voyeurs whose noble lineage entitled them to witness the events of the royal wedding, the real spectacle had just begun. A grand processional led by the king and the Archbishop of Rheims conducted my husband and me from the Salle de Spectacle to the dauphin’s apartments where a table had been set up in the music room. There, like the monkeys in my father’s zoo at the palace of Laxenburg, whose antics were displayed for the delight of the Austrian elite, Louis Auguste and I were expected to amuse the crush of ducs and duchesses, marquis and marquises, and comtes and comtesses whose rank accorded them the privilege of watching the heirs to the throne of France play a few rounds of cavagnole with members of the Orléans branch of the Bourbons. I was too anxious to acknowledge the exhaustion in my body. I knew I must play, and play deftly. And of course, because the courtiers loved the game so much, I tamped down all feelings of tedium, as one ticket after another was drawn from the banker’s bag, and the players held their breath to see if anyone had backed the winning number and whether the wager had been prodigious. Why they enjoyed such a dreary pastime remained a mystery to me.

Eventually, Louis Auguste stifled a yawn behind his hand. The archbishop, his fingers reflexively clasped, as if in a permanent state of prayer, glanced expectantly at the king, who regarded the pendulum clock on the mantel. Midnight had come and gone.

“Et maintenant—and now—it is time for the coucher,” said Papa Roi. The glimmer in his eye unnerved me. He took my arm and nestled it in the crook of his elbow as he escorted me to the dauphin’s bedchamber. My husband lagged behind us like a sullen puppy.

During one of her many interminable lectures on the etiquette of the French court, the comtesse de Noailles had explained that certain members of the nobility (only the highest, of course) were entitled to spend their mornings attending the rising and formal dressing, or lever, of the king and of the dauphin and dauphine; and at the end of the evening, to attend the ritual of our undressing and getting into bed, or the coucher. But the explanation of it and my experiencing it were worlds apart. It was our wedding night! Were the dauphin and I to have no privacy?

A pair of intricately painted folding screens shielded our view from each other, but I suspected that my husband was enduring a similar agony. Every jewel in my hair and on my body and each article of my clothing—shoes, gown, panniers, pockets, petticoats, and stays—was removed with painstaking exactitude and humiliating longueur and passed hand to hand by a chain of women, including my ladies in waiting, Mesdames tantes, and Madame de Noailles. But some of these aristocratic handmaidens were unknown to me; as strange fingers touched my skin, it pebbled with modesty and cold.

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