Versailles Read Online Free PDF Page A

Bertin's handiwork, were of the most exquisite fabric and cut.
    My windows slightly open and facing south—even the mildest breeze carried with it the smell of orange blossoms. Southern light, light from the Midi, turning the crystal facets of my chandeliers to honey. I was the Queen of France! The Queen of France, bathing her soft white body (chastely hidden under a flannel gown) in her swan-shaped tub on wheels. The Queen of France donning her taffeta wrapper and dimity slippers, before returning to bed for a breakfast cup of chocolate and a breakfast roll, Eggplant curled adoringly at her feet.
    Then the door leading to the Salon of the Nobles would fly open (letting in a faint whiff of stink from those endless unlit hallways where the lowest of the low tunneled their invisible way throughout the chateau) and the parade would begin. Abbé Vermond with some tiresome piece of state business, or occasionally a letter from my mother. "Madame my dear daughter"—for so she addressed me—"They say one cannot tell the Queen from the Princes, that they are shockingly familiar with you..." And who might be this
they
who told her that? None other than Count Florimund Mercy d'Argentau, blabbermouth Austrian envoy to the court, planted there by Madame my dear mother, and otherwise known as Mercy.
    Next my two brothers-in-law, the so-called familiar Princes of the Blood, fat pedantic Provence, and elegant witty Artois (whose observation that there was only one King of France, and that was the Queen, Mercy couldn't let slip to my mother fast enough), followed by the little Princesse de Lamballe, a pretty but not especially bright widow of two and twenty, who would wring her unnaturally gigantic hands and burst into tears at the least provocation, a trait I willfully mistook for warmheartedness, so eager was I to have a girlfriend more or less my own age. All of them sitting there watching me drink my chocolate and eat my roll, Vermond stiffly, Provence hungrily, Artois somewhat salaciously, as the Princesse de Lamballe discreetly blew her nose. A tableau I often found myself studying in the immense mirror on the opposingwall, where all of us appeared ludicrously small in comparison to the furniture, like dolls made to live in the wrong size dollhouse.
    At some point the toilet table would be rolled in and the Grande Toilette would commence, during which Monsieur Léonard would do my hair while a crowd of high court officials, including those ill-dressed hags pushing forty I'd made the mistake of referring to as "bundles," looked on, their panniers mashed together. Initially they came to ooh and aah and garner fashion tips, but eventually, I'm sony to say, their chief objective was to compile evidence against me, and not just (as I thought) because I was so much better looking, even with my hair in curling papers, but also (as my mother had to keep on reminding me) because I was Austrian.
    As if marrying Louis could undo centuries of enmity between our two countries. As if I had always been, was, and would always be Antonia, never Antoinette. As if on the stroke of twelve I could remove my face the way I'd remove my mask at a ball, revealing my true monstrous aspect.
    Or, as the pamphleteers wrote:
    Â 
Little Queen of twenty-one,
If you don't stop making fun,
We'll kick you straight back home.
    Â 
    After Léonard took off the curling papers, he frizzed my hair with a hot iron, combed it out with nettle juice, powdered it with bean flour, then mounted a ladder in order to affix the horsehair cushion that would form an armature for the final hairdo.
    Cypresses and black marigolds and wheat sheaves and fruit -filled cornucopias—a hairdo reminding everyone that while they mourned the loss of one King, they also looked forward to the bounty the next would bring. Or how about the Inoculation Hairdo, commemorating the Princes' victory over smallpox? One day Léonard made me Minerva. One day he made me an English