Versailles Read Online Free PDF

garden with lawns, hills, and streams. One day he made me the world.
    Really, you could put anything on your head your head your head ... so long as it didn't (excuse me) snap your neck.
    Léonard used long steel pins to hold the cushion in place and combed my own hair up over it. Then he matted everything down with pomade, creating a kind of moist hive under which fleas and lice bred, and soon enough there wasn't a fashionable lady alive who wasn't using a long thin stick identical to the one Léonard made for me, complete with a little ivory claw, to scratch away at her scalp like mad.
    Whatever I did, everyone wanted to do; whatever I wore, everyone coveted. First they wanted to copy me, then they began to hate me.
    But,
comme on dit,
one must suffer to be beautiful.
    It took forever, the royal
lever.
    By the time Louis got there he'd have been up for hours, hammering away on his forge, shooting at cats, or watching the arriving guests through his telescope. My poor dear Louis, squinting his pale blue nearsighted eyes in an effort to locate me within that thicket of courtiers and under that mountain of hair. Smiling with delight when he finally did, while attempting to appear cool and detached.
    "Bonjour, la Reine," he would say. Never one for nicknames or wordplay of any sort, my Lou-Lou, drawing up his chair, companionable. After our initial awkwardness, once we got the fact out of the way that two people couldn't possibly have less in common than a reclusive locksmith and his impudent wife, we actually became quite close, more or less along the lines of Aphrodite and Hephaestus. Just as the pamphleteers would later suggest, aiming merely to hurt but none theless hitting the target, in that vexing way that cruelly can sometimes approximate truth.
    So sweet, my Louis. What was he doing in that nest of vipers?
    "I had a dream," I recall him once confiding. "It was in another century, but the doors opened and shut the same way."

Doors
    There were more than two hundred ways to get in and out of Versailles, not counting windows. Of course the door you used depended on who you were: for instance, the kitchen gardener's third assistant's lackey, delivering cherries, would have entered through a so-called Dutch door located at the nethermost tip of the south wing; whereas the rakish Due de Lauzun liked to sneak in through a door of the type that would come to be known as French, off the Large Reception Room; and the Archduke Maximilian, arriving for a visit in February of 1775, waddled in through one of three imposing gilt-grilled doors on the south wall of the Marble Court. This was the Queen's brother—her dear little Maxie—who had, as a child of three, decked out in a blue velvet coat, white twill breeches, and white silk stockings, transported guests with his ability to recite Italian verse from memory, but who had become, at fifteen, no longer cute.
    February. Low gray skies and a dusting of snow. Snow disturbed by the carriage wheels, like bean flour in a draft. The Archduke rides with his head hanging out the window and his mouth open, catching snowflakes on his tongue. Both he and his sister adore snow and always have. When Antoinette was a little girl she told him she was made of snow, and he couldn't sleep, terrified that he'd come into her room in the morning and find nothing but a puddle.
    Definitely not cute, the Archduke Maximilian—slow, rather, and grossly fat, as well as harelipped and given to "smudging" his consonants—though that's hardly reason for the Princes of the Blood to cut him, as they do. No sooner has he huffed and puffed his way up among the noisy stinking throng of courtiers and servants and messengers and sedan chairs crowding the Queen's Staircase, barely escaped the humiliation of walking smack into a
trompe I'oeil
vista at the head of the stairs, negotiated the narrow corridor that gives through an arcaded opening onto the Room of the Queen's Guard, made his way past the