Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette Read online

  ABUNDANCE

  A Novel of

  Marie Antoinette

  Sena Jeter Naslund

  For my beloved daughter

  Flora Kathryn Naslund

  Oh, you women of all countries, of all classes of society, listen to me with all the emotion I am feeling in telling you: the Fate of Marie Antoinette contains everything that is relevant to your own heart. If you are happy, so was she…. If you have known unhappiness, if you have needed pity, if the future for you raises in your thoughts any sort of fear, unite as human beings, all of you, to save her!

  —Germaine de Staël, from Réflexions sur le procès de la reine (“Reflections on the Trial of the Queen”), 1793

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  ACT ONE

  An Island in the Rhine River, May 1770

  Strasbourg

  Inside the Blue Coach

  What of the Light?

  The Map to Marriage

  The Nunnery

  In the Forest of Compiègne

  In the Depths

  A Mistake at the Château de La Muette

  Versailles: A Royal Wedding, Wednesday, 16 May 1770

  The Next Night

  The Cup of Chocolate

  Versailles: The Bedchamber

  Time Passes

  A Letter from the Empress

  Hunting at Compiègne

  After the Hunt

  A Vow

  ACT TWO

  The Princesse de Lamballe, Carnival 1771

  In the Garden: A Dragon

  A Tempest

  Madame, My Very Dear Mother

  The Empress’s Reply

  Count Mercy Offers Advice on the Last Day of the Year, 31 December 1771

  New Year’s Day, 1772

  Madame, My Dear Daughter

  Madame, My Very Dear Mother

  Entering Paris, 8 June 1773

  Madame, My Dear Mother

  The Land of Fantasy: A Snowy Night, 30 January 1774

  Winning and Sometimes Losing, Spring 1774

  The Land of Intrigue: An Adventure in the Château de Versailles

  The Chevalier Gluck

  The Hall of Mirrors

  Iphigénie en Aulide, 19 April 1774

  The Maid of Versailles

  Catastrophe

  ACT THREE

  The First Gift of the New King to His Wife

  Maria Theresa to Marie Antoinette

  The Château de Marly, June 1774

  The Dressmaker

  Hunger and Riots

  Entering Rheims

  Before the Throne of God

  Marie Antoinette to Her Mother, Empress of Austria

  An Heir to the Throne of France, August 1775

  Fontainebleau: A New Friend, Comtesse de Polignac

  Amusements

  The Queen’s Bed

  Indecent Verses

  Madame, My Most Dear Mother

  Madame, My Very Dear Daughter

  Dawn

  A Visit by the Queen’s Brother, Joseph II, Emperor of Austria

  Letter of Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, to His Brother Leopold Concerning the Conjugal Relations of the King and Queen of France

  The Aftermath of the Visit

  A Bath, 18 August 1777

  My Dear Mother

  To Honor the King, the Opening of the New Gardens at Trianon

  Madame, My Dear Daughter

  Madame, My Most Dear Mother

  My Dear Daughter

  My Very Dear Mother

  The Générale Is Tardy! April 1778

  Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun

  The Bavarian Question

  Madame, My Very Dear Mother

  The Return of Count Axel von Fersen, of Sweden

  Giving Birth, 19 December 1778

  Farewell to Count von Fersen

  ACT FOUR

  The Death of the Empress of Austria

  A Friend

  Letter from Axel von Fersen

  Letter to Axel von Fersen

  Red Stockings

  The Hope of France, 22 October 1781

  Joyful Noise

  Simplicity

  The Return of Fersen from America, 15 July 1783

  Montauciel

  A Bitter Birthday, 1783

  Balloonmania

  A Double Portrait, Spring 1784

  The Season of the Hameau

  Portrait of a Queen in Blue Satin, Holding a Pink Rose

  Theater, 1785

  The Birth of Louis Charles

  A Fall from a Great Height

  Midsummer

  A Hoax in Diamonds

  Sad Days

  The Verdict of the Trial of Cardinal de Rohan, etc.

  Portrait in Red

  Matters Grave and Financial

  Sophie

  On the Fate of Charles I, of England

  In the Town of Versailles, May 1789

  Grief

  The Revolution of 1789

  ACT FIVE

  The Tuileries, Paris; Fall and Winter 1789

  The New Year, the Tuileries, 1790

  Escape from Paris

  Fersen

  The Tower, 1792

  Terror, Fury, and Horror Seize the Earthly Powers

  End of the Monarchy

  To the Conciergerie

  The Death of Marie Antoinette

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  History, like fiction, is in many cases a matter of interpretation, especially when one tries to understand motivations or to link causes and effects. My readers may well wonder how accurate a historical portrait is presented in these fictive pages. Relying primarily on contemporary scholarship, I have tried to imagine the Marie Antoinette story accurately and to achieve a degree of understanding of this traditionally misunderstood and often maligned queen. Often, I have tried to employ phrases, translated into English, available in the historical record—initially recorded in memoirs by those who heard her remarks or surviving in real letters exchanged between Marie Antoinette and her mother, the Empress of Austria.

  Within this novel the reader will hear Marie Antoinette, when she first sets foot in France, spontaneously ask her hosts in Strasbourg, France, to speak to her only in French, not in German, implying how fully she wished to embrace her new identity as French; she actually did say the words given her in this novelistic rendering of the occasion. Likewise, at the end of this novel, when Marie Antoinette mounts the scaffold to the guillotine, the words she speaks were her actual words. Many readers will expect to meet in these pages the Marie Antoinette of tradition, a woman reputed to have said, when informed that the people of eighteenth-century France were starving, “If they have no bread, then let them eat cake.” But that notorious retort will not be found here. Why? She never said it, and contemporary biographers, such as Antonia Fraser, have taken care to vindicate Marie Antoinette in this matter. That heartless sentence was the speech of another queen, the wife of Louis XIV, not Louis XVI, a hundred years before a very young and innocent Marie Antoinette traveled by horse-drawn coaches from Austria to France to marry the Dauphin destined to inherit the throne of France.

  The fate of this charming, beautiful, extravagant princess is well known, but through imagination, based on research, the reader will experience her life as she lived it moment to moment. Full of human needs, fears, and talents, Marie Antoinette engaged life with an abundance of feeling and met death with heroic courage, du
ring the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. I have written this novel believing that her life, one often marked by compassion and gaiety, like all our lives, is a valuable one.

  Act One

  AN ISLAND IN THE RHINE RIVER, MAY 1770

  Like everyone, I am born naked.

  I do not refer to my actual birth, mercifully hidden in the silk folds of memory, but to my birth as a citizen of France—citoyenne, they would say. Having shed all my clothing, I stand in a room on an island in the middle of the Rhine River—naked. My bare feet occupy for this moment a spot considered to be neutral between beloved Austria and France. The sky blue silk of my discarded skirt wreathes my ankles, and I fancy I am standing barefooted in a puddle of pretty water.

  My chest is as flat as a shield, marked only by two pink rosebuds of nipples. I refuse to be afraid. In the months since I became fourteen, I’ve watched these pleasant rosebuds becoming a bit plump and pinker. Now the fingers and hands of my attendants are stretching toward my neck to remove a smooth circlet of Austrian pearls.

  I try to picture the French boy, whom I have never seen, extending large hands toward me, beckoning. What is he doing this very moment, deep in the heart of France? At fifteen, a year older than myself, he must be tall and strong. There must be other words than tall and strong to think of—to describe him, to help me imagine and embody his reality.

  My mother, Empress of Austria, has told me how to anticipate the meeting of our bodies and all the events of my life to come; I am always in her prayers. Every month I will write to her and she to me, and our private letters will travel by our own couriers between France and Austria. When I try to picture my future husband, Louis Auguste, standing in the forests of France with hands and arms outstretched to me, I can only envision my most dear mother, dressed in black, sitting behind me like a dark wedge at her desk; she awaits the courier bearing a white rectangular packet, the envelope that represents me.

  After I am married at Versailles, when Louis Auguste and I are alone in bed, certain events will follow. We will copulate through the door at the bottom of my body; next, I become pregnant. Nine months after my marriage I give birth to a baby. There will be many witnesses when my body, then age fifteen, opens to produce a future king. Years from then, after my husband has died, this baby will be the seventeenth Louis, King of France. This is what I know.

  While my ladies flutter like bright butterflies around me, I glance at my naked body, a slender worm. Louis Auguste and I must be much the same, as all humans are really much the same, except for the difference of sex. We all have two legs—mine are slender—supporting a torso; two arms sprout on either side of a bodily cabinet, which contains the guts and bladder in the lower compartment and the heaving lungs and heart in the upper section. In between, for women, is the chamber called the womb. From the trunk, a neck rises up like a small lookout tower whose finial is the head.

  Mine is a graceful body—made strong by dancing and riding—and of a milky porcelain color. Recently a few curly threads emerged from the triangle between my legs. Squeezing my thighs together, I try to shelter this delicate garden because my new hair seems frail and flimsy.

  The French word for him, the prince who will become my husband and king, is Dauphin, and the French word for me, who will be his bride, is the same, but with a small letter e, curled like a snail in its flinty house, at the end of the word: Dauphine. I have many French words to learn.

  My darling Austrian ladies sail around me in their bright silk dresses—cerise, and emerald, deep blue-with-yellow-stripes; their throats and sleeves bedecked with frothy, drooping lace. Like dancers, they bend and swoop to gather the garments I’ve shed; other ladies, standing patiently, hold my new French clothing folded across their forearms, cloth of gold and filmy lavender.

  A flock of goose bumps sweeps over my bare flesh.

  Antonia, the pretty mouths of my ladies breathe, Antonia. Their eyes glisten with unshed tears, for I am about to abandon my old name.

  The stern French require that I step forward, naked, with no ribbon, memento, ruby, or brooch of Austrian design. To my ladies, I display my open palms so they may witness and affirm that I leave empty-handed and am beholden in no way to my native Austria. Resplendent in rich colors, they draw near, in a solemn circle, to regard my vacant hands.

  My nakedness complete, now I die as Maria Antonia, Archduchess of Austria, daughter of Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria.

  To be her worthy daughter, I will that my chilled flesh unpucker itself and become all smooth and lovely. Clothed nobly in nothing but my own skin, described as pearly by some in its translucent sheen, I begin the donning of French clothes, no longer Maria Antonia but my French self, now named: Marie Antoinette.

  I GASP—my first damp breath of French air on this small island embraced by the arms of the rushing Rhine—and remember the admonition of my mother: Do so much good to the French people that they can say that I have sent them an angel.

  So said my mother, Empress of Austria, and I will love them, and they will love me, and I will love my husband, who is shy, they say, and the old King, Louis XV, who is not my future husband’s father (that Dauphin having died without his ever having become king) but his grandfather; and I will love the maiden aunts of my future husband, Louis Auguste, who will become Louis XVI, God willing (but not soon, not soon I hope and pray, for in fact I know that not only my unformed body but also my spirit is still that of a child), and I will love the Duc de Choiseul, the great foreign minister of France, who has made my happiness come about by mating me with Louis Auguste, whom I have never seen yet—and I will love the Count Mercy d’Argenteau, for he is Austrian—Austrian!—and my mother’s friend and our—no, not “our” but “the”—Austrian ambassador to France. I will love them all, especially Choiseul the foreign minister and Mercy the Austrian ambassador, even as I have been instructed always to love those who further our cause—the peace of Europe. And I will find new friends, my very own friends, to love as though they were sisters.

  But now they say Mops is not to accompany me. Mops! More precious than any ornament of silver or gold because Mops is a living being who scampers across my heart with all four of his fast little feet! My loyal companion, Mops is not a thing to be abandoned! Mops has tender feelings. But it is this very loyalty, and mine to him, that disqualifies him for passage.

  I place the heels of my hands, like broad stoppers, against my closed eyelids, behind which hot tears are collecting. Unfortunately, when I press inward, tears gush out and track my cheeks. Someone is pulling my hands away from my face. I must present a cheerful countenance to the French—no one needs to remind me. Making myself cheerful is my own chore, a task I must spare these kind souls around me. Because I hold no handkerchief or possess not so much as a sleeve with which to dry my tears, I hunch up the round of my bare shoulders, on each side, to wipe my eyes and cheeks.

  Then Mops, Mops! I cry again, while my imploring hands beseech the empty air. He lifts his darling black-button pug nose and howls and yaps. Tossing his forelock from his brown eyes, he struggles to leap from the vise-grip of strong female hands. He cannot prevail, so he wags his tail like a little plumy flag, the best flag, the flag of my own heart to try to cheer me. Au revoir, Mops.

  The bare ends of my toes yet touch the blue silk of Austria, puddled on the floor around my feet. Blue, blue as the Danube swirling through Vienna on a bright blue day. I believe silk and water do have something of the same fluid slipperiness.

  My ladies would have me to step forth. It is the littlest toenail of the most little toe on the left foot that lastly brushes the fabric of the House of Hapsburg. All my being rushes into this insignificant toenail, not so big as a shiny sequin or a flake of trout skin. My toenail is like the loop on the letter e at the end of a word: Dauphine.

  Auf Wiedersehen—my little toenail whispers to the silk. To think, that it is the tiniest toenail so honored, the last part of me tangent to home!

  “She’s lik
e Venus rising from the sea,” my Austrian attendant exclaims, to make me feel clothed in beauty. But I am rising from the Rhine and am the Daughter of the Danube.

  “Like Flora, goddess of flowers, and a goddess herself,” another murmurs, so that I lift my chin, to be worthy, and I suck the air through my nostrils as though, indeed, I were smelling flowers, as though I were among lilacs in some enchanted garden—yes, a theatrical garden, on a floral stage. Trained by the best dramatic coaches of Europe, I raise my eyes and inhabit my role.