Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow by Juliet Grey

Author:Juliet Grey [Grey, Juliet]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-345-52389-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

Motherhood

DECEMBER 1778

Early in the evening on the eighteenth of December I awoke from a nap thinking I had been dreaming of swimming in a lake with my sister Charlotte. My nightgown was soaked through and my thighs were covered in fluid. I shouted for help, thinking something was terribly wrong, afraid I was losing my baby.

The maid who slept in a cot near the foot of my bed rang for the doctors and Monsieur Vermond. Poor thing, she was barely older than a child herself and didn’t know what to do either, terrified of touching me, or any of the linens, and making a mortal error.

Several minutes later, the bespectacled accoucheur arrived with his box of instruments, his supper interrupted. After briefly examining me by placing his cold fingers on my thighs and blotting the liquid away with a clean, moist cloth, he informed me that it was perfectly normal for my bag of waters to break shortly before the pains of labor commenced.

A few days earlier, estafettes, mounted couriers, had been dispatched to the Parisian town homes and country estates of any nobles who were not currently residing at Versailles to inform them of the impending arrival of a child of France, for more than a century of court etiquette granted the highest-ranking members of the aristocracy the right to be present in the queen’s bedchamber during the birth.

As an army of maids and footmen bustled about, arranging the rose and cream upholstered tabourets for the duchesses in front of the gilded railing about my bed and setting up rows of chairs for the other nobles as though a play was about to begin, the physician took my pulse and felt my brow to ascertain whether I had a fever. Monsieur Vermond requested me to mind the golden clock on the mantel and mark the amount of time elapsing between the contractions.

This was a simple enough request to comply with, and soon the pains began, mild seizures at first, perhaps a half hour or so apart. But the contractions continued throughout the night as they came closer and closer together and the chamber grew more crowded. There they were—Mesdames Adélaïde, Victoire, and Sophie, Louis’s maiden aunts; Monsieur and Madame, and the comte and comtesse d’Artois; the duc and duchesse de Chartres and the duc d’Orléans; the other Princes of the Blood, Louis XV’s cousins the prince de Condé and the prince de Conti; Marie Thérèse de Lamballe (one of the only faces I would have desired to see) along with Gabrielle de Polignac. The highest nobles made themselves comfortable on armchairs close to my bed. But where was Louis? My bed curtains remained parted, so they could see me, rivulets of perspiration and tears coursing down my face, as I stifled every urge to cry out, despite the terrifying, and sometimes horrifically intense, waves of pain. I could just imagine the admonishment I might have received from my former dame d’honneur, the comtesse de Noailles: “It is not comme il faut for the queen to scream like an animal during childbirth.

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