Becoming Marie Antoinette by Juliet Grey

“What?” was all I needed to say before I saw her lip begin to quiver.
    “Maman announced something at dinner. I wanted to tell you myself before you heard it from anyone else.”
    We seated ourselves side by side on my bed as we had when we were younger, swinging our legs and letting our bare feet graze the floor.
    My sister clasped one of my hands in hers. Several moments elapsed before she could speak. “I suppose it was inevitable,” she said, choking on a sob.
    I grabbed her other hand. “What was?” My stomach tumbled over like an acrobat losing his balance on the wire.
    “My portrait—the one Monsieur Ducreux is completing. It is being sent to Naples. To the king.” Her voice broke. “To Ferdinand the … Ferdinand the idiot. It’s been settled between Maman and his father, the king of Spain—I am to replace Josepha as his bride.”
    The room began to spin. “No, it cannot be so! Not you, too!” I threw my arms about Charlotte’s neck and pressed my head against her bosom. Without stays she had become soft and round. Although she would not turn sixteen until August, she had grown into a woman. Fertile. And therefore ripe to become a queen.
    I searched for an argument against the match. “But you do not even speak his language!”
    “There is no need,” Charlotte replied dolefully. “Court,Parliament—like everywhere else, business is conducted in French; it is the common language of diplomacy. And I will have an entourage of good German maids to converse with in our native tongue. Even His Sicilian Majesty does not speak the language of Dante and Petrarch. We have been informed that he knows only the local Neapolitan dialect.” She wrinkled her nose as though she smelled week-old fish. “It is the patois spoken by the peasants.”
    Charlotte apologized to me then, sorry to have teased me in front of the duc de Choiseul on the evening of his arrival at the Hofburg. Despite Maman’s kind words about her talents and abilities, Charlotte admitted that she had felt a bit envious of my destiny, astute enough to realize that Monsieur Ducreux had come to Vienna on my account and that painting
her
portrait as well had at first been no more than a subterfuge, intended to deflect attention from the import of my role in Austria’s future. Yes, Charlotte acknowledged, someday we would all become queens of somewhere—but I, the baby of the family (except for Maxl, of course), the girl everyone viewed as the silly goose, would eventually preside over the most elegant court in Europe, while her own fate would be far less glorious.
    “So now
I
am being dispatched to a noisy backwater in order to shore up Maman’s ties with the Spanish Bourbons, just as you will one day bring the support of the French branch of the house to our Hapsburg family tree.” Never one to control her temper, my sister’s tirade began to gain both volume and speed. “Do you know that when King Ferdinand learned of Josepha’s death, the ninny staged a mock funeral procession through his palace in Naples? He dressed one of his footmen as a woman and stippled the man’s face and arms with chocolate to mimic the ravages of the pox!” At my aghast expression, Charlotte paused for breath. “Oh,
ma petite
,” she sobbed, “you cannot begin to imagine how miserable I will be.”
    “What sort of monster is this king? How can Maman let you go?” But I already knew the answer. We were expected to hold our heads proudly, roses in full bloom on the stems of our swanlike necks, and submit to whatever destiny Maman arranged for us. But it didn’t begin to lessen the pain of parting. I was still grieving over the death of our sister Josepha. And we both knew that once Charlotte reached Naples it was entirely possible, if not probable, that we might never see each other again. “I can’t bear to lose
you
, too,” I told my sister, clutching her shoulders as if I might keep her there, at the edge of my bed, with the sheer power of my