Confessions of Marie Antoinette (11 page)

Axel makes certain to carry his diplomatic pouch whenever he visits me at the Tuileries. Inside the portfolio are official papers embossed with the seal of the King of Sweden requesting Count von Fersen’s regular reports to His Majesty on the state of affairs at the French court. The count has called on me several times a week since the royal family’s mandatory
déménagement
last October. What I cannot tell him openly, and what he is unable to observe on his own, he gleans from my tears and my sighs.

We are often shadowed as we walk through the huge wings of the palace, from the Royal Court to the Court of Princes and the residential Pavillon de Flore, but we are never disturbed. Even the revolutionaries are cautious about the way they treat those with the credentials of an ambassador. The members of the National Assembly do not wish to have it bruited about in foreign courts that
they are less than civilized or that their goals for the Nation are anything but lofty.

Axel and I often have our conversations in the chapel. The guards assigned to watch me have little use for the Almighty. They have now been indoctrinated to worship the Nation above all, followed by the Law, a deity that appears to change its shape by the week. I am convinced that the very fact that they are no longer supposed to fear God frightens them, and so they avoid the chapel, which makes it the safest haven in the palace for a royalist.

The count and I mount the sweeping staircase in the Central Pavilion. We stop on the first landing and enter the chapel. Sunlight streams in from the clerestory windows in visible rays, the way the divinity’s presence is announced in a seventeenth-century allegorical painting.

The chapel in the Tuileries Palace has nothing of the grandeur and opulence of its counterpart at Versailles. And yet I find comfort in the relative simplicity of its décor. The panels of the vaulted ceiling depict Biblical and mythological tales. The eye of the worshipper is drawn upwards by trompe l’oeil pilasters painted to resemble pink-veined marble. Inside the hushed sanctity of the chapel there are plenty of places for me to converse quietly with Axel. Rather than remain in the open, seated in one of the pews, we step into the sacristy, just behind the altar. No one else is there. Even the court’s confessors are making themselves scarce these days.

I motion toward a small table covered by a white cloth trimmed with lace, and we sit upon hard wooden chairs. Axel opens his leather portfolio and withdraws a smaller pouch that is secured with an intricate mechanism. He opens it and lays several documents on the table. I am about to peruse one when he places his hand over mine.

“You are looking exceptionally sad today,” Axel murmurs.

“I am thinking about my mother. Today would have been her
seventy-third birthday. Every May thirteenth I light two candles: one for the Virgin Mother and one for Saint Theresa. I have not yet done so today.” A tear escapes the corner of my eye and I catch it with my fingertip. “This November she will have been in the Kaisergruft for ten years. Where has the time gone?” I sigh.

I clear my throat and return to the paper. It is a table, filled with combinations of letters. “Polyalphabetic substitution ciphers,” Axel says, “now that you have become proficient with monoalphabetic ones.”

Yes—after more than half a year of practice, meeting several times a week with my charming and handsome tutor. I unsuccessfully suppress a chuckle, wondering what my mother might have thought about my mastery of these essential elements of espionage. “Do you know that when I was a child, I was such an appalling student that my governess used to write out my lessons herself and allow me to trace over her words?” The laugh now bubbles over my lips. “Maman was so preoccupied with the affairs of the empire that I don’t think she ever noticed what remarkably adult penmanship I had for a ten-year-old!”

Axel squeezes my hand sympathetically. His palm is warm. I look into his eyes. This afternoon they are the color of a peacock feather’s eye. “Louis does not know I am learning to write in cipher,” I whisper. “There is much I no longer trouble him with. He has so many burdens …” My words trail off and I find myself looking at the windows, towards the darkening sky. The sacristy feels very gloomy when there is no sunlight to illuminate it. “I decided in October to assume as many of the responsibilities as I can. I never asked his permission. I think”—I begin to weep—“that he would refuse my aid on principle. He believes that by allowing the revolutionaries to triumph in any way, he has failed his people and he must be the one to remedy things. But I”—I lay my head upon my hands, as my striped silk sleeves muffle my sobs—“I am the
reason the people are so unhappy, the reason they wish to destroy the monarchy. And I must be the one to do whatever it takes to save us.”

I hear the scrape of Axel’s chair as he pushes himself away from the table and stands behind me. And I turn into his embrace, throwing my arms about his waist and burying my face in his torso, staining his embroidered yellow
gilet
with salty tears. He holds me until my sobs subside, until my resolve to confront our adversaries returns. God is watching us, but He is wise enough to understand our interaction, Axel’s and mine. He does not bear witness to a lover’s illicit passion, but to the expression of comfort that one friend provides to another in deepest distress.

“We will have much more time to practice the cryptography this summer,” I tell Count von Fersen. “The Assembly is permitting us to go to Saint-Cloud. We leave in less than two weeks.” Axel can discern the relief in my face at the knowledge that we will be able to leave Paris and escape, if only for a few months, the crucible of revolution. “The air will be more healthful for the children,” I say.

“And the climate more so for you,” he adds meaningfully, referring to the ugliness of the current political debate here in the capital.

“We will not be so closely watched there,” I say, absentmindedly playing with one of the silver buttons on Axel’s vest. There are moments when I still regard him as a lover and wish for the touch of his lips against my skin. But more and more I think of him, yes, as a friend,
bien sûr
, but more than that, as a kind of savior. He is providing me with the tools and the knowledge to triumph over our enemies.

“Come. Explain to me how the polyalphabetic ciphers work,” I say, settling down to the task at hand as I pick up the chart.

Axel sits beside me again and points out how each letter in the
alphabet will be replaced or substituted with one of two letters in its partner pairing. “This is just an example of the enciphering. We’ll practice by writing to each other. After you master this code, we will move on. Once it becomes necessary to correspond in cipher we will have to change the codes every week. Your memory will be taxed as it never has been before.”

“And I thought learning the plays of Molière and Beaumarchais was difficult,” I jest.

I want to write Axel a letter to express how grateful I am to him for teaching me this skill. It will take me hours before I am competent enough with the polyalphabetic system to write even the simplest encrypted sentence. It is nearly dusk when I finally manage to write two words on a scrap of paper.
Je t’aime
.

I am exhausted from the mental exertion. My head throbs. Axel strokes my hair, letting me weep in his arms for as long as the tears will flow.

We are only a little more than six miles outside Paris but the Château de Saint-Cloud is an oasis of calm compared to the seething cauldron of hatred in the capital. “Listen!” I say to Louis.

He cups his hand to his ear. Then he shakes his head. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly!” I clap my hands with girlish glee. Gone is the constant cacophony of the rabble outside our windows, their promenading in the gardens at all hours, their insults shouted across the courtyard, cruel syllables that echo and bounce off the Tuileries’ stone façades, and the distant rumble of drums and artillery.

It has been some time since we have visited Saint-Cloud. The king purchased the palace in my name three years ago when we sought a more salubrious climate for the first dauphin. Louis Joseph was never well; the poor child’s spine was deformed and his lungs required all the healthful air we could provide. Even when
the breezes were charming, the Château de Versailles smelled rank, the result of more than a century of hygienic neglect. The sewers never properly drained. The chimneys perpetually smoked. Countless cats and dogs marked their territory at will. In the absence of pisspots in every room, the thousand courtiers who resided under our sloping roofs, our visiting ministers, and any tourist eager to see how and where the king and queen of France lived, relieved themselves in the corners and stairwells, behind tapestries and draperies, in vases and urns. I could return to Versailles blindfolded and still know it by the smell.

The renovations I had commissioned at Saint-Cloud in 1787 from Monsieur Mique, who had designed le Petit Trianon’s pastoral
hameau
, will seem unfamiliar now. We could not even afford to complete them. But whatever has been done will be preferable to the Tuileries where, like the animals in the royal menagerie at Versailles, we are permitted only the illusion of freedom.

Rushing into the palace ahead of their governess, our children immediately make a game out of traversing the black and white tiled entrance hall, hopping from one black square to the next and imposing a penalty—two squares backwards, on the diagonal—for accidentally stepping out of bounds and landing upon a white tile instead.

After only one day, the entire royal family is in a buoyant, festive mood. Even Monsieur and Madame are filled with uncharacteristic pleasantries and compliments, although they refuse Louis’s offer to remain with us at Saint-Cloud, preferring to take up residence in a villa nearby.

Our sojourn at the château is most delightful. June brings a riot of color to the formal gardens, where every day the dauphin romps, growing more accustomed to the company of exuberant hounds. To my immense joy, after a few weeks, he no longer fears them. As a family, we walk all the way to the park at Meudon in the evening,
although the air there hangs about my shoulders like a shawl woven of sorrows. For it was at Meudon that my firstborn son, only eight years old, drew his last breaths. I did not believe it a year ago when the abbé Vermond, in his endeavors to console me, assured me that the first dauphin had departed this life for a better one. After everything we have seen since last July, I am now certain my old friend was right.

“Louise, can you play billiards?” the king inquires one evening. The table, covered in green baize, is set up in the Salon d’Aurore. Above the heads of the players, which include Madame Campan, the princesse de Lamballe, and my husband, half-clad nymphs cavort with winged putti in a permanent depiction of daybreak, the painted sky tinged with soft yellows and pinks. The gilded walls of the gaming room are a riot of reds and vermilions, one of the only salons to incorporate my scheme for a Chinoiserie décor. The atmosphere deliberately invokes my childhood and the round Chinese Room at Schönbrunn, one of my favorite salons in the Hapsburgs’ summer palace.

Madame de Tourzel shakes her head, too awed to try her hand with the cue in the presence of the king. “Nonsense,” Louis insists. “Billiards are a fundamental part of anyone’s lexicon of pastimes. I will personally take charge of your lessons!” And as soon as the game in progress is completed, the king keeps his word and gives the royal
gouvernante
her first tutorial at the billiards table. The children are frightfully amused for it seems their governess has dreadful aim and the balls do not roll toward the pockets but skip and jump all over the baize as if she were skimming pebbles over a lake. We have not laughed so much in months. I wish I could bottle this moment in one of Monsieur Fargeon’s flacons and daub it on my wrists and behind my ears whenever I find myself once again in need of mirth and merriment.

EIGHT

The Lion Lies Down with the Lambs

J
ULY
1790