‘Who goes to her salon?’ I asked.
Sir Gideon glanced at me and took a moment to look at what I was wearing. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Writers. Philosophers. Nobody interesting. But it is your chance to go and stare at the progeny of the Sun King himself. Don’t you want to do that?’
‘Oh, my goodness, yes!’ Edgar cried. ‘A princess.’
‘A bastard!’ Sir Gideon corrected, but then grinned. ‘Albeit a royal one.’ Then he clapped his hands. ‘Excellent. Then on y va!’
The palace was all Palladian symmetries in glowing golden stone. Sir Gideon waved a note of introduction to the royal guard. We were ushered into the wide, beautiful garden, which was said to have been planted by a sister of Charles II of England, who had married Louis XIV’s brother. I did not know it then, but her husband was interested in men, not women.
From the garden, we walked up flights of marble stairs until we were shown into a large, light-filled room. Elegant people – they were always elegant, I began to realise – stood around, in periwigs and gleaming silks. Their eyes fell on us judgementally as we entered, then flitted off, ostentatiously bored already. At the end of the room, on not-quite-a-throne, sat Madame la Duchesse herself, eighty years old, regal, exhausted-looking. She wore a bright pink wig with long ringlets that tumbled suggestively over her low décolletage and nestled into the finely creased crêpe of her powdered bosom. ‘A vision!’ Sir Gideon declared, and I found it oddly cruel, though Edgar laughed. Then my brother turned to me, whispering:
‘Can you believe it? We are here to meet a princess! Who can imagine such a thing?’
‘A bastard,’ I observed ironically, arching my eyebrows, ‘albeit a royal one.’ Edgar did not laugh.
A line assembled before the Duchess, who nodded in precisely the same way at anything said to her by those who queued: ‘I am here from Alsace.’ ‘My father is dead.’ ‘I am your long-lost cousin.’ ‘I am visiting from the moon.’ Each time, no matter what was said, the same stately nod. I realised she was not even listening; she had, quite literally, heard it all before. As each person bowed and departed, the line shuffled along, until we were next. An usher whose wig was crisp like spun sugar asked our names so we could be presented. ‘Les messieurs Bowen,’ I murmured. ‘D’Angleterre.’ The usher, puzzled by the pronunciation, practised it back to himself: ‘BOW-WANG. BOW-WANNN.’
‘Les messieurs Bow-wang,’ he declaimed. ‘D’Angleterre!’ He then added, softly in French: ‘These young men have come all the way from England.’
Madame la Duchesse did not seem impressed by this at all. ‘Ugh, I see.’
The usher then turned to us and asked, still in French: ‘Her Highness would like to know how you find Paris.’
Madame la Duchesse had asked no such thing. ‘Oh, marvellous!’ Sir Gideon replied. Edgar and I stood mute at his side. ‘It is quite marvellous! All the parties. All the cake.’
The usher turned back: ‘They said that it is an incomparable vision, quite unlike their home city. They add that the highlight of their visit is coming to meet you.’
‘I see,’ said Madame la Duchesse, nodding. ‘Yes, I hear London is nothing but shops. All trade. How vulgar. How can London compare to Paris? Of course it cannot.’ She sounded rather animated. I wondered if all those who had preceded us resented this. She had not been nearly so rude when discussing Alsace or the moon. ‘Do they think London is vulgar?’
She looked at us through narrowed eyes, her ancient cheeks caked in powder, sticky with rouge. Edgar grinned and bowed. Did he not hear what she had said about trade? Were we not trade? The usher bowed again to his mistress and then turned back to us: ‘Her Highness wishes you a prosperous visit.’ We all of us spoke French, but were pretending that the usher had indeed translated what the Duchess had said. Then he extended his hand to one side in dismissal. I stared at the princess, the dust-thick powders of her wig, a maquillage one could have cut with a butter knife. Then Madame moved forward in her seat and cried: ‘Wait!’ The usher froze. ‘Ask them if they have philosophers in England.’
‘Yes,’ I said, causing Sir Gideon to flash me a look, as if, in implying I knew anything about philosophy, I had said the wrong thing. Some irritation sparked up in me, so I could not stop myself. ‘Has Her Highness heard of Sir Francis Bacon? He had many of Descartes’ most famous ideas first.’
The usher looked bilious and asked me, in English: ‘Can you mean to suggest to the great-aunt of the King of France that Descartes was not the most original thinker of the seventeenth century?’ Pah! went the usher, before adding sharply, still in English: ‘All Englishmen are liars. That much is plain!’
The Duchess, who adamantly spoke only French, was confused by the sound of odd English words over which she had only a slim grasp.
‘Bacon?’ she cried. ‘Comme lardon? I don’t understand what these fools are going on about. It is all quite confounding!’ The princess now turned her gaze on me, and I saw in her eyes not recognition, not connection, but a cold, contemptuous anger. ‘And do you know Rousseau in England?’
‘Yes,’ I said, my rebellious spirit unbowed, ‘Your Highness, of course.’
The Duchess’s anger seemed only to swell at the idea that people might have heard of Rousseau in England.
‘And what about Piron?’
‘No!’ Edgar interjected before I could say any more. ‘We have never heard of Piron in England!’
At this, Madame la Duchesse seemed satisfied.
‘Pfft, these English,’ she spat, ‘they have never even heard of Piron! What barbarians!’
The three of us glanced at each other, stifled our giggles, bowed and shuffled off. Behind us, the usher was introducing the next visitors.
Three weeks after we made the acquaintance of Sir Gideon and his circle, Edgar and I were invited to a party in the city palace of an elderly cardinal to celebrate the recent death of the King’s all-powerful mistress, Madame de Pompadour. We had made no other real connections, so this invitation was purely thanks to Sir Gideon, of course: indeed, I could not help but feel that we belonged to him. Sir Gideon informed us that the Pompadour’s enemies were having a wonderful time now she was dead. ‘Can you imagine?’ he cried. ‘Can you imagine how amusing it is?’ It did not seem so to me.
The party was held in a large salon hung lavishly in cream and pink drapes, its ceiling decorated with rows of silver birdcages suspended above the partygoers’ heads. Inside each cage was a different songbird; forty-three in total, one for each year that the Pompadour had lived, and each was singing a different song, the individual calls uniting in a screeching cacophony. French doors from the salon led to a quiet courtyard, lined with potted orange trees in bloom. Someone said that at the end of the night, the birds would be released in the courtyard and shot by a master marksman brought in from Rambouillet especially for the occasion. And so the joke about Madame de Pompadour was revealed: eventually, every songbird has to die.
Everyone was in splendid dress. No one danced but rather whirled about in an endless exchange of pleasantries, ceaselessly turning from person to person. Edgar launched himself in headlong, talking on in his buoyant, fluent but accented French. Watching him, I felt a great affection for his optimism and lack of guile. I wanted Edgar to succeed and be happy, and so I decided to make good efforts to be social as well. I strode up to strangers and attempted conversations in good faith. But how I hated it, how unnatural and forced it felt. It is all very well to know how one should stand, or how to talk about Petrarch, but nothing had prepared me for the bell-chime of horror I felt as I looked at one person after another and wondered: would they speak to me?