Read Online The Exchange of Princesses by Chantal Thomas - Free Book Online

infanta has a passion for the ladies of the palace. They wear dresses as multicolored as parrot feathers and make even more noise than parrots do. Seated on carpets with their legs folded under them and their skirts spread out around them, they kiss the infanta, passing her from one to the other. The little girl, intoxicated by being whirled about, caresses the ladies, inhales them, clings to one’s necklace, keeps another’s flower, sucks a piece of chocolate. The ladies smell of amber and oranges. The infanta is suffused by their perfumes, by their warmth. She’s fond of heady scents, smacking kisses, full-throated songs. That evening, they kiss and hug her harder than usual, take her hands and make her jump along with them in their dances. Mariana Victoria shouts with fear and pleasure. She continually wants to start over again. The ladies of the palace are like her, always ready to start over again. And later in the night, when they’re told that the party’s over, that they have to let the infanta leave, a leaden weight comes down on their gathering. They fallsilent, stretch out on their carpets, light candles. Waving their fans, they bid her farewell. The infanta sees them disappear in a blaze.
    To Lerma, Slowly
    The departure for France takes place twice. First the infanta leaves Madrid for Lerma. Her parents make regular sojourns in the palace near the Alarzón River built by the Duke of Lerma, the favorite of Philip III, and she has often traveled there, though never with so much baggage and so numerous an entourage; however, she doesn’t differentiate between what belongs to the royal retinue and what to her own. The departure seems precipitous to her. She’s not allowed to bid farewell to Don Fernando, who’s in bed with measles, or to Don Carlos, who’s showing early symptoms of the same disease.
    The impressive cortege makes its first stop at Alcalá de Henares, which lies only a short distance from Madrid. Thus the pace of the infanta’s journey has been set: incredibly slow, little more than a standstill. To go from Madrid to Lerma, the court will take fifteen days — fifteen days to cover around fifty leagues, which averages out to less than three and a half leagues (around nine miles) per day — enough time for the twenty-five-year-old Marquise de Crèvecoeur, one of the queen’s most beautiful maids of honor, to die.
    Mariana Victoria is a particularly beloved little girl, always the center of attention. This makes her dance about,but sometimes, for no apparent reason, she starts to cry and buries her face in Maria Nieves’s bosom.
    In Lerma, the court adopts a somewhat livelier rhythm — but barely, for the king is suffering a crisis of melancholia, and neither the constant presence of Elisabeth Farnese nor the singing of the castrato Valeriano Pellegrini suffices to lift him out of his personal abyss. Aware that something serious is afoot, the infanta refuses to be separated from Maria Nieves for a second. This dark-haired, pink-skinned, radiantly healthy young woman represents for the child a distillation of her obscure memories as a contented nursling while simultaneously embodying in a single person Mariana Victoria’s multiple, supple, warm, glowing, and much-loved palace ladies.
    The portrait of Louis XV, sparkling in its diamond frame, joins the images before which Mariana Victoria says her prayers. She prays to it fervently and starts to live in its sight. Her parents lavish all sorts of considerations upon her. Everywhere she goes, her brother the Prince of Asturias takes great care to step aside so that she can precede him. M. de Popoli, the prince’s tutor, gives him back the portrait of Mlle de Montpensier, which shows her fair complexion, her black hair, her almond-shaped eyes, her unsmiling lips. She’s an attractive girl. If she were a flower, she’d be a periwinkle, the prince says to himself, slipping his hand inside his underclothes. He’s exercising his willpower. He