‘Father, I cannot show what I do not feel.’

The King lifted his shoulders in exasperation. ‘The Duc de Richelieu has already left for Dresden,’ he said. ‘He will make the arrangements for your marriage, which will not be long delayed.’

Then with his irresistible charm Louis ceased to be the King and became the father. He laid his hand on the Dauphin’s shoulder. ‘Be of good cheer, my son,’ he said. ‘And remember this: every sorrow, no matter how great, must pass.’

Then the Dauphin only looked at him with disbelief in his melancholy eyes.


* * *

It was a frightened little girl of fifteen who was married to the Dauphin a few months later.

It was a terrifying ordeal to say goodbye to your home and come to a new country, particularly when the Queen of that country might not be friendly disposed because she remembered that your father had displaced hers.

But solemn little Marie-Josèphe was determined to be a good wife. She knew she was not beautiful, but neither had her predecessor been, and in two years she had succeeded in winning the love of the Dauphin. She herself was determined to do the same.

The Queen’s coldness was apparent, but that was made up for by the warmth of the King’s greeting. He seemed to understand exactly how a young girl would feel on leaving her home and her family. He implied that he would be a father to her and that he was very glad to have her with them.

There was another whom she noticed when she first made the acquaintance of the royal family – a sad-eyed girl in her late teens who embraced her warmly and with sympathy such as she had rarely encountered.

This was the Princesse Anne-Henriette, the Dauphin’s sister, who came to her on the day of the wedding celebrations and told her how the Dauphin had loved his first wife and how bitterly he still mourned her.

‘You must not be hurt,’ said the Princesse, ‘if he does not appear to be interested in you. If he were it would merely show his fickle nature. Be patient for a while and then, I know, one day he will love you as he loved her.’

‘You are so kind to me,’ said the frightened little bride. ‘I cannot tell you what the friendship, which you and His Majesty have shown me, can mean when one is a long way from home.’

‘To be sent from home,’ murmured Anne-Henriette. ‘It is something we Princesses all have to fear. It hangs over us like a shadow, does it not?’

And she was thinking that, had she been called upon to leave home for England, to be the wife of Charles Edward, she would have been completely happy. Where was he now? A fugitive . . . hiding from the Hanoverian forces. One day though he would drive the German usurper from the throne; the real Kings, the noble Stuarts, would reign again in England; and when that happened he would not forget the French Princesse whom he had promised to make his Queen.

The little Dauphine was watching her. ‘I am sorry,’ said Anne-Henriette. ‘My thoughts were far away.’

And the young bride put her hands in those of her sister-in-law and smiled at her. It is strange, thought Anne-Henriette, that because we are both afraid of the future we can give courage to each other.


* * *

The ceremony of putting the newly married couple to bed was over. The Dauphine trembled, for as yet the Dauphin had scarcely spoken to her.

He hates me, she thought; and fervently she wished that she were home at the court of her father.

The Dauphin was lying at one side of the bed; she was at the other. It seemed as though he wanted to put as great a distance between them as possible.

Neither of them spoke, but at last she could endure the silence no longer and she said: ‘I am sorry. I did not want to marry any more than you did. I did not want to come to France. I cannot help it. It was not my wish.’

Still he said nothing. Then she saw that the tears were quietly falling down his cheeks.

To see him cry like that made her feel that he was younger than she was, in more need of comfort, and she forgot the greater part of her fears.

She stretched out a hand and timidly touched his arm.

‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I know how you feel.’

He turned slightly towards her then. ‘How can you know?’

‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘because I love my family. I know what it is to love people and to lose them.’

‘You cannot know what it is to lose Marie-Therese.’

‘I do know. You loved her dearly, and she died. You feel you will never be happy again.’

He nodded, and suddenly he threw himself down upon his pillow and began to sob. ‘No one understands . . . no one . . . no one!’

‘I understand,’ she said, and stroked the hair back from his forehead. ‘Poor little Dauphin, I understand.’

He did not reject her caress and she continued to stroke his hair.

‘You . . . you will despise me,’ he said.

Then it seemed to the young girl that she had acquired new wisdom. ‘No,’ she told him, ‘I shall not. I respect you for loving her so much. It shows me that you are a good person . . . that . . . that if I am a good wife to you I shall have nothing to fear. You might in time love me like this. That makes me happy, for when she first came you did not love her any more than you love me.’

The Dauphin turned his face away from her, and every now and then his body heaved with his sobs.

She bent over him. ‘Please . . . you must not try to suppress your grief. It does not matter if you show it to me. I understand. It makes me happy that you loved her so much.’

The Dauphin did not answer. But he took her hand and held it to his hot, damp cheek.

And that night the Dauphin, mourning his first wife, cried himself to sleep in the arms of the second.


* * *

So necessary had the Marquise de Pompadour become to the King’s comfort that she found herself rich, courted and almost first minister of France. In every château she had her special apartments, and she had already acquired the châteaux of Selle and Crécy and had spent a great deal of money in embellishing them.

She became noted for her extravagance, for the desire to possess beautiful things had always been with her, and in the past she had often dreamed of what she would do when she was in that position which was now hers.

Abel was now at Court and had been given the title of Marquis de Vandières; but he was uneasy.

‘I find it embarrassing,’ he told his sister, ‘to be treated as such an important person, not because I have done anything to make me so, but because of my relationship with you.’

‘You are important,’ she told him gaily. ‘If anyone shows disrespect to you, I shall be very angry with them.’

‘That is the point,’ he told her sadly. ‘They do not show their contempt, but I feel they despise me all the same.’

Poor Abel! He lacked the ambition of herself and her mother.

‘I should be content,’ he told her, ‘if I might become Director of Public Works when Lenormant gives up. That would be enough for me.’

‘I am angry with my family,’ she told him. ‘I want to help them so much, and they will not let me.’ She was sad thinking of the loss of her mother and her little son, who had died recently. She would have insisted on their joining in her good fortune. There was her little daughter Alexandrine; a good marriage should be made for her.

As for François Poisson, he could have had a title had he wished.

He had laughed when she had suggested this to him; he told her he was happy enough on his country estates, and asked for nothing more.

‘The Marquis of this . . . the Comte of that! Oh, that’s not for me. I’ll stay plain Poisson. Don’t worry about old François. You get on with your whoring at the Palace. I’ll keep out of the way, but I’ll remain old Poisson.’

Surely, she thought, a woman in my coveted position had never had a family which demanded less!

Meanwhile she continued to reign at Court, and how happy she was when she and the King could escape from the wearying Etiquette of Versailles. What pleasure to sit down to a meal in the petits appartements without the presence of the officiers de la bouche – those five servants who must taste every dish before it was served to the King – or of the officiers du goblet, five others whose duty it was to taste the wine.

The poor Queen had not the opportunity of escaping from Etiquette as had the King. Perhaps she was more patient and accepted it more readily. She had not been at Trianon for many months because a dispute was in progress, between her governor there and her fruit-woman, as to who should supply the candles for the house. It was a fine point of Etiquette, as candles must not be supplied by the wrong person; and until the dispute was settled there could be no candles for Trianon.

The whole Court had heard of the affair of the Queen’s counterpane on her official bed, and no one thought it extraordinary. She had noticed that the counterpane was dusty and pointed this out to one of her ladies. The complaint was passed on to the valet de chambre tapissier who declared that it was not his duty to remove such dust, as the counterpane was not tapisserie but meuble, and must therefore be removed by a garde meuble. A controversy then ensued, between the guards of the furniture, to discover whose duty it was to dust the counterpane; for, if a servant had performed this duty when it was another’s, it would have been considered a breach of Etiquette, and it was the constant desire of the lower stratum at Versailles punctiliously to ape the upper.