Free The Exchange of Princesses by Chantal Thomas

loweredeyes, but that fact in no way authorizes the child to raise her own and look at him. “Your marriage with the House of France is a great joy to me,” he whispers with an air of dismay. At this point the infanta would really like to slide to the floor and be comforted. The king explains to her, or to an invisible confessor, that this marital union will atone for the great crime of the thirteen-year-long War of Succession, a crime for which he, Philip V, born Duke d’Anjou, is responsible before the Lord. The king falls to his knees and prays to be forgiven for his sins. The queen, the Duchess de Montellano (holding the infanta, who has gone completely limp), the grand inquisitor, a group of courtiers, a bevy of priests and nuns, and a few dwarfs immersed in the shadows imitate the royal gesture. Mariana Victoria has an urge to take refuge among the dwarfs in the dark corner, but she doesn’t have time to act. She is set on her feet and directed without further delay toward the Unknown. The king and queen give their daughter a ceremonious escort, not taking leave of her until they reach the foot of the stairs. There the royal parents are overcome by sadness and, as they will later declare, near fainting. Together.
    What’s the urgency that compels these parents, in the dead of winter, to dispatch a little girl they claim to cherish on a journey that could well kill her? Isn’t her marriage nothing but a mirage, toward which they must rush headlong before it vanishes away? Mariana Victoria herself has already vanished from her parents’ field of vision. And whether she dies or arrives at her destination, they won’t see her again. They’ve said goodbye to a child who from now on, in theireyes, will be dead, except as she may be viewed in some more or less faithful portraits.
    When Will We Get There?
    Along the way, amid the cold and the jolting, the infanta constructs a wall between herself and the landscape, a wall of dolls placed vertically one on top of another and firmly intertwined. In the two parental recommendations she’s received — to become
entirely
French and to atone for her father’s sins — there’s nothing specific about the duration of her journey. She’s going away, that’s for sure, but for how long, and where?
    At Christmas Mass in the little village where the cortege makes a halt, the Infanta’s chair is placed so close to the Nativity scene that the pressure of the crowd filling the modest church causes her to end up on the straw. Had the ass not blocked her progress, she would have gone farther. Back in the coach the following day, she opens the gifts the peasants brought her. Those that are appropriate — dolls and marionettes of various kinds — she inserts into the wall. She calls for handkerchiefs and shawls to fill the holes.
    She doesn’t cry too much and doesn’t complain. All the same, for no apparent reason, she occasionally lets out a piercing scream.
    Every morning she wakes up in a different room. She who, in the Alcázar or the Buen Retiro Palace, used to take so much pleasure in nestling in her bed and jingling the little bells suspended beside her (to protect herself from the threatof scary thunderstorms) and playing with the moon and stars that hung from a little arch above her head, she who would never fall asleep without putting Carmen-Doll to bed first, with her long brown hair spread out on a pink lace pillow identical to her own but smaller — she doesn’t recognize a thing. She clutches Carmen-Doll to her chest and speaks to her until they doze off.
    The infanta is terrified of black pigs. She thinks they carry the evil eye. The villages she passes through are filled with such pigs, enormous, stinking, blocking the road. The farther her journey takes her, the more black pigs there are. Pigs and priests and old women. And young ones too, whom she glimpses inside houses as dark as the pigs. The infanta travels hidden behind her wall of dolls. If she’s