A Secret History

What many people don’t know is that right before the king and queen were taken by force to the Tuilleries, the mob of starving fishwives, who broke through the entrance to Versailles shouting death to the whore whilst spitting the heads of palace guards on pikes and knives, interrupted the king and queen’s coitus. And this was to the queen’s distinct advantage because, when the rage-driven throng reached her quarters and ripped her bed, wardrobe and gold trimmed curtains to shreds, she was not among those things lying in ribbons.

It was a rare event, sex between king and queen, yes. However, the queen, not the depraved lecher she had been depicted in L’Ami du Peuple, was at 38, suddenly and unconsciously impelled by the great physiological change that had begun to stimulate hormonal fluctuations within her. It was the commencement of the queen’s reproductive swansong as well as a sense of impending doom—and need for comfort—that drove her to the king’s chambers and ultimately spared her life on that mid-autumnal morning of 1789.

No one much wants to picture the union of rotund Louis and his no-longer slender, peri-menopausal Austrian consort. No, to imagine outsized dressing gowns flapping lustily open, the cantilevered abdomen pressing down upon the royal member (now relieved of the tribulation of phimosis and in perfectly randy working order) and the lunging of his majesty’s pimply, sparsely hirsute rear towards his consort’s own broad and dimpled posterior (which had the sallow tones and insalubrious odor of heat-ripened cheese) inspires nothing more than the vague sensation of nausea. Let’s turn instead to that which was going on below stairs.

As the fishwives tore through the gilded halls of Versailles, brandishing their massive filleting knives past the epically proportioned mirrors of the Salon des Glaces, a coupling was in progress in the servant’s quarters. Neither the bellowing of the mob nor the cries of guards outside had reached them, yet they heard the fulminating rumble of a hundred poorly fed shod feet overhead.

“Christ,” said the valet as he positioned himself behind a scullery maid, who braced herself against her own Spartan little night table. “What the hell are they doing up there? It sounds like a pack of wild boar has gotten into the salon.”

This was forgotten as soon as he lifted the maid’s skirts and saw the woman’s bare bottom beneath her tightly laced corset, whose rigid stays forced her hips into two unnaturally fleshy little knolls below a wasped waist. The girl looked over her shoulder and, contriving the bashful gaze of a virginal innocent, giggled at his startled response.

“You wicked girl!” His eyes grew big, his hands searching for a proper grip on her upper thighs. “Did you expect me then?” He slapped her ass and penetrated.

Sex was the last rococo beauty in the Age of Enlightenment. In the stark clinical appraisal of the body, in an era of pleasurable privation and sense-eclipsing fury, there was always intercourse with which to sustain oneself. Funny that each act, the loutish imperial congress above and the more fluid, yet empty encounter below, acted as a grotesque reflection of the other. If the palace were seen in saggital view, one would have been able to view the simultaneous communing of the overfed and the comparatively undernourished, respectively.

They went at it with equivalent alacrity and matching zeal as the mothers of starving children searched with murderous intent for the queen. The valet pushed splendidly, chasing his sensory prize in those few moments stolen away from routine. They might be caught and for this they would surely be dismissed. In such times, perhaps it was better to be on the street than in a palace among royals. Who knew which was safer. The delectable edge of this risk made everything more potent and he rode the poor scullery maid like the royal stable master testing the Godolphin Arabian.

The king, too, chugged away valiantly, losing his enthusiastic rigidity only when he saw the bloody head of a familiar guard bobbing up and down beneath his window. Impaled on a long, steely spit, the head was made up with garish colors. The rouge, the lipstick, the powder and kohl were all, he recognized, from Antoinette’s vanity. “Good Lord in Heaven,” he said. And Antoinette looked up.

She could hear them now, outside under the window casement. And they were calling for her as they congregated below the glass panes of the single chamber they had been unable to raid. Antoinette hastily donned her dressing gown and called for her children, who were brought to her. She took them onto the balcony, holding each by the hand.

One of her virulent detractors, who stood close to the balcony and within plausible eavesdropping range, maintained that she heard the queen say, “If they have no bread, then let them eat cake!” She had said nothing of the kind, but it spread through the crowd like rampant influenza. It was on the fissured surface of every woman’s unrouged lips. Wouldn’t they all have felt further justified had they been able to see into the imperial chamber moments before?

Terrified servants came pouring into the basement quarters. Sensing, if not innocents (because how could they be?) but souls of a similarly oppressed fortune, the fishwives did not invade this area and would not kill anyone below stairs. The door of the scullery maid’s room flew open and in burst her bedmate. Her face had a look of death, her eyes red and round as wagon wheels. The sight of the scullery maid under apparent siege by the valet did not appear to faze her. She had seen her own lover’s head spitted on a pike outside. She dove immediately for the floor and hid herself under the bed.

The scullery maid’s mattress, moved by the shock of her bedmate’s leap underneath, revealed a concealed store of revolutionary broadsheets. And once the valet left, barely buttoning his trousers properly, the scullery maid, humming La Marseillaise, straightened her skirt and went to the pantries to gather provisions for the rebels.