For Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, life at Versailles was a life lived in public. From the moment they awoke in the morning to the moment they retired for the night, they were accompanied, assisted, advised, pampered, coddled, served, and observed. The marquis could not imagine living life as such a spectacle and he did not imagine that the teenage Antoinette had expected it either. Life at the royal Austrian palace of Sch?nbrunn had been, by comparison, restrained and secluded.
On one of her first duties after her marriage at Versailles—a wildly extravagant affair that drew six thousand of France’s richest and most prominent citizens—she had been ushered into her private chambers (still shadowed by a substantial coterie of her retainers, including the Princesse de Lamballe, who was to become her close confidante), and shown the royal jewels. The marquis, in his informal role as arbiter of all things elegant and artistic, had been admitted to the august group, and he had watched as this slip of a girl, dwarfed in a dress of white brocade with enormous hoops on either side, was maneuvered into a chair for the ceremony.
At Versailles, if Antoinette so much as plucked an eyelash, it was a ceremony.
Two kneeling servants presented a red velvet box, six feet long and half again as high, with several dozen different drawers and compartments, all lined in pale blue silk. The bounty within was unparalleled, and the marquis could not help tallying it all up in his head as the dauphine removed and admired each of the many treasures. There were emerald earrings and pearl collars that had once belonged to Anne of Austria, the Habsburg princess who had married Louis XIII in 1615, a diamond parure, tiaras, brooches, diadems, and a pair of newly made gold bracelets with the initials MA engraved on clasps of blue enamel. The marquis even spotted in the inventory one or two pieces that he remembered from Florence, long ago, when they had adorned Catherine de’Medici before she had decamped to become the Queen of France.
But when the dauphine withdrew a folded fan, studded with diamonds, and tried to flutter it open, the leaves remained stubbornly closed.
The Princesse de Lamballe tried to lend a hand, shaking the fan herself, but her luck was no better.
Sant’Angelo knew why; the Parisian jeweler had consulted him on its design, and the marquis himself had suggested a hidden clasp, perfectly concealed in a circle of white diamonds.
“Erlauben Sie mich,” the marquis said, leaning close. Allow me. The dauphine had flushed at his sudden proximity—and several of the courtiers reared back in shock—but when he took up the fan, undid the clasp, then, like a coquette at L’Opera, cocked his elbow and fanned himself with its silk leaves, the dauphine spontaneously laughed—which gave the others permission to laugh, too. Continuing the joke, he said in a raised voice, “Es ist unertraglich heib hier drinnen, denken Sie nicht?”—It is insufferably hot in here, don’t you think?—and Antoinette had beamed at him, grateful not only for the levity but for the taste of her native tongue. The marquis had spent many a year in Prussia, and the language was still at his command.
“May I know your name?” she inquired in German. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
“This, madame, is the Marquis di Sant’Angelo,” the Baron de Breteuil hastily inserted himself to answer. “An Italian friend of the court.”
“And a friend, I hope, to you, too,” the marquis replied. Although many of those present could probably follow the gist of the conversation, the fact that it was conducted in German formed a special bond between the two of them. Glancing around at the deeply rouged ladies in attendance, Sant’Angelo had leaned in even closer than before and whispered, “Have you ever seen so many appled cheeks? It looks like an orchard in here.”
Antoinette covered her lips and tried not to laugh. It was the custom at the French court to plaster rouge on the face like primer on a wall, and he guessed that the young girl would not yet have accustomed herself to the gaudy sight of the ripe red cheeks everywhere. Even the market women tried to copy the effect using grape skins.
“But it’s the powder,” she replied, sotto voce, her eyes straying to one of the more monumentally dusted wigs, “that makes me want to sneeze.”
“That’s what the fan is for,” he said, fluttering it again, before showing her where the clasp was hidden and handing it back. He had had a daughter, Maddalena, in a far-off time and place, and on the last occasion he had seen her she was about this same age.…