The Sisters of Versailles (54 page)

An VII (May 1799)

T
he two
young women come in, tutting as they always do and ready to scold.

“But, Grandmama, why are you sitting alone in this darkness? Every time I tell that Sophie to pull back the curtains and yet every time we find you like this!” Elisabeth is the oldest and the bossiest of the two sisters, all twenty summers of her.

“It’s so stuffy in here,” echoes Claire, settling herself onto the sofa opposite my chair. “Really, Grandmama, I don’t know how you stand it. Why must you insist on living in this darkness?” Claire has a dreadfully affected voice, speaking half with a common accent and half with a lilting lisp that reminds me a little of that woman . . . but I can’t even remember her name now. She wore lavender. Now apparently this affected voice, with its connotations of the street and the common citizen, is all that is fashionable.

I say nothing; I rarely do these days. We have this conversation every time, and every time I cede to them, but only for as long as their visit lasts. In truth, I prefer darkness. I have seen all that I want to see in this life and now I prefer the shadows. I am not afraid; the only ghosts in this room are small wisps that my memory conjures, that dart and hide behind the sofas, harmless to an old woman such as myself.

Elisabeth pulls back the heavy curtains and recoils from the window, coughing and smoothing the dust off her rosy cotton
shift. A broad shaft of light cuts through the middle of the room in a dusty tempest and illuminates a portrait of Diane that hangs above the mantel. She keeps me company in my solitude, one eyebrow raised, and even in darkness I know she is with me. It is hard to be too melancholy around Diane.

They come every week, these two young great-granddaughters of mine, thinking with the arrogance of youth that their presence pleases me, thinking to fill their virtue books with the charity of their visits. In truth, I do care not much for them; they are rude and thoughtless, with none of the grace that I remember from the women of my own youth. But I suppose I should be grateful, for they are all I have left of family.

My two children are long dead; my son, Frederick, died when he was only twenty-two, a grief that is still raw and tender within me. My daughter also died young, in childbirth like my sister Pauline, and then the baby girl that killed her—my only granddaughter—lived but to the age of twenty-four. Now her two daughters are all that are left me, but they have their father’s name and so little of my own blood running in their veins.

They are dutiful, I will give them that, and perhaps eager to maintain the bonds of family, for they are orphans—their mother long dead and their father executed in the Terror.

“So, Grandmama,” Elisabeth says, settling back on the sofa, the room now awash in light, “what news do you have for us?” Her wedding is planned for this summer, and I know she will only become more insufferable once she is a married woman.

I look to them sometimes for traces of my sisters, but I never catch enough to satisfy. The way the younger one, Claire, laughs and shakes her head sometimes reminds me of Diane, and when Elisabeth winds her curls around her finger, as she does when she is bored or distracted, I catch fleeting glimpses of Marie-Anne.

How long ago it all was, and how fast the time went.

I force a weak smile, all that my face will now allow. “I am well, thank you, my dears.” In truth I am not; I am eighty-four years old and my whole body aches. I have outlived all I knew
from my youth, and even those from my old age. People admire me for my great age, or pretend they do, but no one thinks of the pain: Why must I be the one to see everyone I love die, when that grief is spared so many others? Why do some pass through this world so quickly, while others tarry too long?

“And you, my dears, what news do you have?”

I listen with half-closed eyes as Elisabeth chatters on about her upcoming marriage and threatens to bring her young beau for a visit. Claire tells me about the dresses she has planned for summer, in the new slim style. They look like Romans, these young people, in their silly chemises pretending to be dresses. Suddenly I am far from this room, far from these prattling girls, back in the Marble Court at Versailles, shivering with cold and excitement, wearing a Roman dress. That magical night, the night that Marie-Anne first met the king, the night when everything went wrong.

“I was a Roman once,” I think, then realize I have said it out loud.

Elisabeth leans over and pats my hand condescendingly, for she knows she will never grow old and foolish like me. She looks down at me with amused indulgence.

“There, there, Grandmama, don’t be silly. You’re not a Roman and I’m sure you never were. Are you feeling quite well? Have you been eating your fruit?”

My maid, Sophie, brings in coffee and a plate of tarts. The girls talk and eat as they do, drinking their coffee and clattering the cups as they place them back in their saucers. Dreadful. These days the world is impolite; sometimes it seems as though the laxness of dress and the laxness of the manners combine for all that is odious in this modernity.

I think of them so much these days. My sisters. My memories are more sweet than bitter, though frustrating in their evanescence. But it was all so long ago: I am thinking of a life so far gone I can’t believe it was ever mine, and all I have left are the letters to remind me it all was real. Diane and I were closest, in our
later years; we were together, longest living, after all the others had died. First Pauline, then Marie-Anne, both taken so young and so cruelly.

Louise . . . well, she died on her day of exile. Her actual death came not too much later, in 1751, after nine cruel years of solitude and prayer. I pray she died happy. When she passed they found a hair shirt under her simple gown, and we knew then that her piety was not a ruse but a deep conviction. She never saw the king again. He knew of her death, of course, but if he grieved it was in private. It was a cruel end for a woman who sincerely loved him, perhaps more than anyone ever loved him.

After Marie-Anne’s death, the extraordinary story of Louis XV and the Mailly-Nesle sisters ended. Her memory—our memory—was quickly quashed beneath the torrent that was the lovely Madame d’Étioles, the bourgeois fish from the forest who became the Marquise de Pompadour, and whose place is well assured in the history books. She reigned for many years and Louis loved her to obsession. He wasn’t faithful—no, not Louis, not the man he would become—and she had her share of fighting off rivals, including, curiously enough, another Marie-Anne de Mailly, a cousin of ours. But that one was just a pale imitation of the original, and she lasted no longer than a cheap-wicked tallow candle.

After Louise died, only Diane and I remained, both of us still at Court through all the changes that came and went. Diane’s little girl—our new little Marie-Anne—died before she reached the age of five. Of all the tragedies and the heartaches that our family has suffered, this I feel was the cruelest. The death hit Diane hard and I grieved for her; she was one of the good ones, never a bone of artifice in her body, and she deserved her small share of happiness, which in the end was denied her.

And Versailles is no place to mourn.

Diane finally retired from Court and died in 1769, thirty years ago now but a time that passed in a blink of an eye. She died at the height of the
ancien régime
—even now we call it thus, though it was less than a generation ago. Our Louis was still on the throne
then, and it was before the changes, before the Revolution, before the world stopped then started again. I am glad she did not live to see the world she loved with sincere abandon explode in such a horrid way. She died at the right time, and though only our Maker knows the hour of our death, sometimes I regret having lived so long.

I survived the Revolution that struck this country, that awful broom that swept the land and rid it of the dust and dirt accumulated over centuries. They say that change is the great constant, and even those like myself that lived in gilded cages knew it was coming, but why did it have to be so cruel and so bloodthirsty?

I was imprisoned during the Terror, and many that I knew and loved perished. When they arrested me I was seventy-eight years old—can you imagine? An aging widow, wearing black and passing her days listening to her maid read aloud from old letters, her eyes riddled with cataracts. What threat was I to anyone? What was my crime—had I bored the revolutionaries with long-winded stories of my youth?

But I was not killed like so many I knew; instead they released me, and so I live on.

“Grandmama! We have a surprise for you! We went to Versailles last week.” I pretend I haven’t heard Elisabeth; I don’t want her to even say that word.

“Can you hear me, Grandmama? I said we went to
Versailles
last week. Béranger came with us—I can’t wait for you to meet him. The gardens are in a dreadful state but it was of passable interest. We had the most divine blackberry ices, and for five centimes you could boat on the canals.”

“We bought you this,” says Claire shyly—only she has the feeling and the grace to be uncomfortable. She places a small piece of gilded iron in my hands, cold and heavy. “We bought it from one of the peddlers. He said it was from the gate to the Court of Honor.”

My hand won’t cooperate and I drop the piece of iron into my lap. Versailles as I knew it in my youth, in all its pestilence and its
glory, will never be again. Now the great palace sits empty, desecrated and ravaged by the Revolution. I can’t bear to think of it like that.

I myself left in 1776, along with so many others. A virtual exodus it was, all of us disgusted with the new queen and her peasant ways. Funny to think the worst among us used to compare the late Queen Marie to a peasant; no, her Polish manners were sometimes rough, but she was at heart a queen and her blood never betrayed her. But that Austrian girl—you would have thought she had been brought up by the gypsies, the way she was determined to flout all that everyone held dear and true.

Once I left, I never went back. And now . . . its great halls destroyed, but not my memories. With my good hand I thumb the piece of golden iron like a talisman, willing it to bring me back to that place and time, that will never, ever, come again. Gone, like a faith that has disappeared and never been reclaimed.

“Thank you, my dears,” I say softly, and to my horror I realize I am crying.

“Oh, Grandmama, don’t cry!” The girls are horrified and uncomfortable; they have not the manners to deal with the spectacle before them. The tears continue to roll down my cheeks as they take an awkward leave, promising to visit again next week when I am better. I am surprised at how my tears fall, for I didn’t think there was this much left in my dried-up old body.

After they are gone my maid, Sophie, comes in and closes the curtains again. She doesn’t chide or scold me, or treat me like a child, just presses a handkerchief on me then leaves me alone again in the dark. It is in darkness that my memories come, floating like feathers down through the years to settle at the bottom of my soul. I long for them, I live for them, for what else do I have left? In recent years my mind has played tricks on me and the memories and images of my childhood rise up brilliant and clear, as though they had happened yesterday; meanwhile what did happen yesterday is lost in shadows.

When I was younger I saw the world in black and white and
thought the Bible was best read as a guide for judging others. Now I know that the world is but a storm sky filled with infinite shades of gray, nuanced and deep, everyone striving through whatever sorry hand they have been dealt by God and fate.

My sisters are all gone and soon I will be too. What then is left of their story—our story—the story of the famous Nesle sisters? Lingering memories in the old-timers, a flicker of recognition in some when they hear our names. A tomb in Saint-Sulpice, a place in the gossipy
mémoires
of Court life “in the old times,” in vogue in recent years as if people need to be reminded of all that they had worked so hard to erase.

They circulate Richelieu’s memoirs, but I don’t think he wrote them: he was everything scandalous but at base he was a discreet man. He died in 1788, his timing impeccable as always. He enjoyed the life that our world gave him immensely, and died before he had to pay the price.

I close my eyes and wait to see my sisters again. Soon, out of the darkness, a memory comes, blazing through the black, its colors vivid and bright, and there they are. I am back with my sisters in our nursery on the fourth floor of the Quai des Théatins, the one time we were ever truly together, before fate and circumstances and malice and greed separated us all. I see Louise, always so quiet and content; Pauline organizing treasure hunts but never hiding the treasure; Diane so funny and playful, laughing at everything and everyone, pretending to feed raisins to the wooden giraffes; and little Marie-Anne, so clever and so innocent then. I smile at them, and they smile back.

How I wish that were how the world would remember us, but I know that that is only the vain hope of a silly old woman.

May God have mercy on our souls.

A Note from the Author

The story of Louis XV of France and the Mailly-Nesle (pronounced
My-ee Nell
) sisters is stranger than fiction but all too true. When I first learned about their fascinating lives, I set out to write a nonfiction account. But as I dove into the research and writing, the voices of the sisters—strong, true, funny, sometimes imperious—kept insisting on a more intimate and vivid portrait, demands best met by a fictional retelling.

Researching and writing
The Sisters of Versailles
was an exhilarating, challenging, and frustrating experience. Apart from one biography written by the eminent Goncourt brothers in late nineteenth-century France, mainly focused on Marie-Anne, little has been written specifically about the sisters. To discover them and their lives, I drew heavily on contemporary autobiographies and memoirs of the day in which they appear as secondary characters. However, most if not all of these sources contradict each other, for each account is subject to the author’s personal biases, the lapses of time (many were written years after the fact), and differing desires to titillate and exaggerate.