Free Versailles by Kathryn Davis

escaped the fireplace. Go away! Go away! The glass doors were caulked shut and pasted over with paper, and on all sides thick tapestry screens were held in place with rope, just barely protecting her from a great press of people, watching and whispering on the other side. The smell of vinegar, lavender, hyssop. A hand inside her, a hand on her stomach, and, shamefully, her naked body exposed from the waist down.
    Such pain. Open the doors! Please!
    But this was no dream, and the next thing she knew there was the Princesse de Lamballe's hand right in front of her face, her awkward overlarge fingers with their embarrassingly chewed nails making the private signal they'd settled on for
girl.
    All those chairs and clocks and mirrors and crystals and chimes and hands and mouths and noses sucking up what little air there was—first came a muffled thump as the Princesse fainted, followed by a low moan as the Queen followed suit.
    "Warm water!" shouted the terrified accoucheur, who thought she was dying. "She must be bled in the foot!" But the room was so packed with princes and counts and countesses and foreign dignitaries as well as everyone who'd wandered in from the courtyard, not to mention all the furniture and knickknacks, that there was no way to get a basin of water through to him, and so he was forced to lance her foot without it. One quick jab and a jet of blood came spurting forth; naturally this cured her at once.
    It was December 20, eleven o'clock in the morning; Antoinette had been in labor for eight hours. Louis smashed through the caulk and paper and glass, letting in gusts of cold winter air and a few flakes of snow. "Poor little thing," Antoinette is reported to have said to her daughter, "though you were not wanted, you will be my very own the more for that. A son would have belonged to the state, but you will be my happiness, and soothe my sorrows." Meanwhile the accoucheur, who would have received a pension of forty thousand
livres
for delivering a boy, did his best to hide his disappointment, wrapping the infant in blankets and handing her over to the Princesse de Guéménée. Through the broken panes the Orangerie terrace was barely visible, empty of palms, its two little reflecting pools glazed over with ice, staring blindly up at the lightless gray sky. A salute of one and twenty guns was fired, the meager number echoing the accoucheur's disappointment.
    Two years later it would be a salute of one and a hundred guns, and the festivities celebrating the long-awaited birth of an actual heir to the throne would go on for weeks. In Paris the tocsin would ring without cease for three days. Fireworks would explode over the Seine, the fountains pump wine, and enormous heaps of meat and mountains of bread appear for the taking. Little Louis Joseph, decked out in gold raiment, would prepare to receive adoration as if he were the Baby Jesus.
    Two years later delegations of tradespeople would come, bearing gifts: the chimney sweeps a miniature chimney with a regally clad boy crawling out the top, the locksmiths an elaborate and mysterious lock designed to release, when the King finally figured out how to spring it, a tiny Dauphin of steel. The whole world would come to pay its respects, and the whole world would be welcome, with the possible exception of the gravediggers, who'd be sent packing after showing up with a Dauphin-sized coffin.
    Granted, it wasn't as though the birth of Marie-Thérèse Charlotte went completely unmarked. Prayers of thanks were offered for the opening of the Queen's womb, and it seemed possible, if only for a moment, that the French people might be willing to let bygones be bygones.
    But only for a moment. Once it sunk in that Antoinette wasn't going to die, once word got out that her belly had been restored to its former supple state and that she was eating cream of rice with biscuit and a little poached chicken, everybody suddenly remembered how much they didn't like her. The