Because they were the most influential family in Montreal, nothing they did could really be interpreted as gauche. The minute they engaged in an activity, it went from being considered uncouth to being something others did not have the money to pull off.
It was not considered polite to bring a child to any gathering of adults. But Louis made it clear that he and his daughter were inseparable. And thus like a child who comes to the throne early, Marie found herself surrounded by adults. Given Louis’s wealth, everyone was quick to comply with his eccentric demands. Everyone knew there was very little way to capture Louis’s heart; he was immune to their sycophancy, in a manner only someone who once mastered the art themselves could be. Everyone knew the only way to please Louis was to do it through his daughter.
Guests found themselves frequently asking Marie what she was going to do when she grew up. Of course, none of them actually believed she was going to do anything when she grew up other than get married. That gave an even more comic ring to Marie’s charming prophecies.
“I would very much like to travel in a circus and be a lion tamer,” she told the mayor and his wife. “I would be very gentle with the lion. I would brush his mane. And I would give him caramels. He would let me put my head in his mouth. And he would never dream of clamping down his jaws. We would walk down the street. And I wouldn’t need to put a leash on him.”
“I think I shall be an opera singer,” she announced to a group of society women. “But I don’t really like singing loudly. So I shall sing into a speaking trumpet. What I mostly like about the idea of being an opera singer is that I will get to eat whatever I want and become fat. I think it would be nice to be so fat!”
“I would like to become an arctic explorer,” she told a group of dour investors. “I like wearing many coats. And I should like to murder my own walrus one day. I love all animals, but I don’t like walruses. They are too frightening.”
She would blink charmingly. And adopt a look of na?veté, knowing that what she was saying was at once precocious and endearingly idiotic. Marie had a natural gift for being charming. She could be coy and na?ve and silly. But she did it in such a creative way, anyone might say she had a genius for it.
She enjoyed uttering the most nonsensical things she could ponder: “I worry that when it rains, the rocks in the yard will turn into frogs and hop away.” Nonsense literature was in vogue, so her idiotic remarks were interpreted as ingenious.
Adults understood the subtext to her sense of humor. They understood when she was being absurd and coy and fanciful. Other children did not. She was frankly more amused by her own conversation than that of people around her. She was quite aware that she had a mastery over social interaction, that she, despite her young age, was more amusing and sophisticated than the people around her. She rarely paid much attention to what others said, using it merely as a springboard for her witticisms.
* * *
Whether or not she was actually intelligent was something debated by her tutors. She fell asleep whenever anyone began reading to her. As soon as one or two sentences were read, her head would nod with alacrity. She decided anything she could learn was too difficult to learn. She was satisfied by having access to whatever came to her intuitively and without effort. But the truth was that she knew very little, so nothing could undermine her arrogance and confidence. If she pressed herself to learn, she would be aware of her own limitations and that frustrated her.
She put up quite a fit when it came to her piano lessons.
“If only those tunes weren’t so long,” she complained. “I can only learn a ten-second song, or else my brain and hands begin to ache.”
“Well, then let’s work on a ten-second song.”
“I simply can’t today. I’m exhausted. Perhaps tomorrow.”
They sent for a doctor to see why it was that Marie became so tired in her lessons. Her tutor said she had never seen anything like it. In fact, she thought it might be dangerous. Marie fell asleep so abruptly and deeply when she was reading aloud from Le Morte D’Arthur, the tutor was afraid for a moment she had killed the child.
The doctor suggested Marie eat fewer sweets. The amount of cakes and treats she ate over the course of a day might be what was causing her to sink into mini comas. Marie’s sweet tooth was a phenomenal thing.
What were the sweets she had eaten that day? A rum ball that had been set on fire in front of her, so when she ate it, it was warm, as though she were biting into the heart of a beast. A chocolate mousse that melted in her mouth and filled her whole body with sweetness. There were chocolates filled with brandy that she had sucked the alcohol out of. She felt how a bird would feel after drinking nectar and then flying about high in the sky. And there was a princess cake. It was a round dome covered in a hard pink shell you had to strike with your spoon. When the hard icing cracked, it was like witnessing an earthquake. It made her shiver with delight. There was a tiny rose on the cake. Sometimes the rose was made out of icing and sometimes it was a real flower. She couldn’t help but bite into it to find out.
* * *
Marie had a way of consuming culture too. She was fascinated by any sort of theatrical performance. No matter where she was sitting in an audience, she always acted as though the play was being put on just for her. When they came home from a puppet show, she’d explain to the maids the tragic entanglements the puppets had gotten themselves into. She explained it as though the puppets were very dear friends of hers and their happiness was her own. One of the maids instinctively threw her arms around Marie, in sympathy for the hardship she had suffered on account of the puppets.
Marie began screaming during a play when a villain plunged a knife through the heart of a heroine. Her father had to take her out into the foyer. She was inconsolable. Afterward, her father brought her backstage to see how the actors were all alive and well.
She was upset by a doll that had a dour expression. She tried over and over to make the doll happy, but nothing seemed to work. She had so many different dolls, and yet she became focused on that one. Her father brought it to the doll hospital to have it repaired. The doll maker painted a different smile on the doll’s face. This pleased Marie to no end. How it made the doll feel, on the other hand, was harder to say.