There will be many witnesses when my body, then age fifteen, opens to produce a future king. Nine months after my marriage I give birth to a baby. We will copulate through the door at the bottom of my body next, I become pregnant. When I try to picture my future husband, Louis Auguste, standing in the forests of France with hands and arms out stretched to me, I can only envision my most dear mother, dressed in black, sitting behind me like a dark wedge at her desk she awaits the courier bearing a white rectangular packet, the envelope that represents me.Īfter I am married at Versailles, when Louis Auguste and I are alone in bed, certain events will follow. Every month I will write to her and she to me, and our private letters will travel by our own couriers between France and Austria. My mother, Empress of Austria, has told me how to anticipate the meeting of our bodies and all the events of my life to come I am always in her prayers.
There must be other words than tall and strong to think of to describe him, to help me imagine and embody his reality. What is he doing this very moment, deep in the heart of France? At fifteen, a year older than myself, he must be tall and strong. I try to picture the French boy, whom I have never seen, extending large hands toward me, beckoning. Now the fingers and hands of my attendants are stretching toward my neck to remove a smooth circlet of Austrian pearls. In the months since I became fourteen, I've watched these pleasant rosebuds becomeing a bit plump and pinker. My chest is as flat as a shield, marked only by two pink rosebuds of nipples. The sky blue silk of my discarded skirt wreathes my ankles, and I fancy I am standing bare footed in a puddle of pretty water. My bare feet occupy for this moment a spot considered to be neutral between beloved Austria and France.
Having shed all my clothing, I stand in a room on an island in the middle of the Rhine River naked. I do not refer to my actual birth, mercifully hidden in the silk folds of memory, but to my birth as a citizen of France citoyenne, they would say.
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