The gardens of Versailles were spectacular at night, especially the fountains. Arcs of water glittered in the moonlight, falling from mermaids’ tails and satyrs’ horns into massive stone basins. As Beatrice walked past, burrowing deeper into the jacket she’d borrowed, a few droplets sprayed onto her ponytail. She took in a breath, inhaling the scents of roses and cut grass.
Louise fell back onto the lawn with childlike abandon, stretching her arms to either side as if she were making a snow angel. Beatrice settled next to her and looked up at the stars. They were scattered like teardrops against the velvet tapestry of the sky.
“Is this your version of meditation? To remind you how big the world is, how small your own role in it, all of that?”
“Don’t be silly, Béatrice. My role in the world is not small, and neither is yours.”
“You know, I’ve always hated meditation,” Beatrice mused. “Like at the end of a yoga class, when they make you lie there in Savasana with your eyes closed? I spend the whole time making lists in my head, thinking of everything that I should be doing instead of lying on a yoga mat.”
“That’s the reason I don’t do yoga. It’s an inefficient way to work out,” Louise said crisply, and Beatrice bit back a smile. “Stargazing was never about meditation for Maman, either. It was about spending time together. Romping around in the grass, letting me feel like an ordinary child for once. She knew all the constellations and the myths that went with them—Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Charlemagne and his belt.”
“Charlemagne is a constellation?”
Louise lifted a hand to point at three stars in a row. “See those three? They’re his belt.”
“I hate to break it to you, but that’s Orion, not Charlemagne.” Beatrice was trying very hard not to laugh. How utterly French of Queen Marie-Anne, to see her own forebears in the night skies.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Louise huffed. “Of course it’s Charlemagne. Where else would he hang his sword, if not on a belt?”
Beatrice decided not to press the issue. “So your mom is into astronomy?”
“My mother is the smartest person I know, yet she can be so foolish.” Louise plucked a blade of grass, then let it fall back to the earth. “She has so much to give—intellectually, personally—and still, she spent years chasing fad diets and plastic surgery, hoping that if she could somehow get skinny enough or beautiful enough, she might actually make my father love her. She thought she could get him to stop his endless string of affairs and actually stay with her.”
Beatrice had heard rumors of Louis XXIII’s wandering eye, but it was another thing to hear Louise talk about it so bluntly. Beatrice’s parents had genuinely loved each other and had hoped their daughter would marry someone she loved, too—which was more than most royal marriages ever aspired to.
Many kings and queens assumed infidelity from the outset. They treated their marriages with the cynical detachment of a business venture, coming together only when duty required it.
“It’s sad, how unhappy she ended up,” Louise went on, in a detached voice. “I always wonder what she would have done with her life if she hadn’t been born to be queen.”
Beatrice blinked. “What do you mean, she was born to be queen?”
“Everyone knew she and my father would marry, since they were both children. Her family are the Ducs d’Uzès; her parents are close friends with my father’s parents. It was just assumed. Like you and Theodore, yes?”
“I love Teddy!”
“Oh.” Louise sounded a little surprised. “Well, I’m glad for you. Most queens are not so lucky.”
Beatrice wasn’t sure how to answer that.
They both stared up at the stars for a long minute, letting the enchanted folds of night settle around them. Finally, Beatrice asked, “Does your mother come here often?”
“She and my father have separate households. She’s lived at Chenonceau since I was ten. I got to visit her on holidays,” Louise said stiffly.
“I’m sorry. That sounds hard, living here with only your father. He seems…” Strict, callous, harsh. “Demanding,” she said aloud.
“He’s disappointed in me.”
“That’s absurd! What reason can he possibly have for being disappointed in you?”
“Why do you think?” Louise said wearily. “The same reason everyone has been disappointed in me for my entire life. I wasn’t born a boy.”
Beatrice shifted onto her side. She suddenly wished that she could see her friend’s face, but Louise’s profile was shrouded in darkness.
“It’s not the Middle Ages; people don’t think that way anymore,” she protested.
Louise scoffed. “You really expect me to believe that there is no one in America who wishes that Jefferson had been born first? Does every man in your country support your position as head of state? ‘Fantastic!’ they all exclaim. ‘A woman telling us what to do! We should let her do her job without interfering or complaining!’ ”
“Well…no,” Beatrice said haltingly. “I have plenty of critics, men and women alike. But I’m not sure it’s sexism.”
“Really? What is it, then?”
Beatrice hesitated. Because it was sexism, wasn’t it? Beatrice’s detractors never said it aloud, never authored op-eds that stated Beatrice shouldn’t rule because she’s a woman. They just criticized everything she did. If she wore a new dress, she was extravagant; if she recycled an old one, she had no style. If she was photographed holding a glass of wine, she was a lush; if she didn’t drink at an event, she was pregnant, or boring, or rude to her hosts. If she was caught in a photo unsmiling, then she wasn’t likable; if she smiled too broadly, she was trying too hard.
“You’re right,” Beatrice said slowly.
“It’s the same for me. You know the French have never had a queen regnant before. Unless you count the eight weeks that Eleanor d’Aquitaine ruled between husbands, in the twelfth century,” Louise added sarcastically. “My father never said it aloud, but he didn’t have to. He feels uncomfortable with the fact that a woman will succeed him.”
Something fell on Beatrice’s hand; she realized it was a blade of grass. Louise was plucking them like flowers, one at a time with the relentlessness of a bulldozer, then letting them drift back down.
“My parents tried and tried to have another child. It wasn’t until I was twelve, when it became clear that no little brother would ever emerge to save the day, that the Assemblée Nationale changed the laws of succession. I went from being an heir presumptive to an heir apparent,” Louise explained. “Otherwise the throne would have gone to our closest male relative—my fourth cousin Pierre, the Duc d’Anjou.”