My soul is a girl: she is just like me. She is fourteen years old and has been promised in marriage to the French Dauphin, who also has a soul though more visible and worldly, its body already formed (so I've been told) from layers of flesh and fat. In France they piss into chamber pots made of lapis and dine on common garden slugs. In France their hands smell like vanilla and they shoot their fleches d'amour indiscriminately in all directions, owing to their taste for books pernicious to religion and morals.
My soul is also powerful, but like a young girl it has wishes and ideas--yes!--a soul can have ideas like a mind does.
At fourteen, Marie Antoinette--Antonia in her native Austria--is driven in a carriage to the estate of Versailles near Paris, where she will be wed to the future Louis XVI. Antoinette, as described by Kathryn Davis, is curious and sprightly; she has trepidation about her marriage to the Dauphin, but she has cultivated also a sense of separateness from her physical existence that leaves her aloof. It's true that her body likes the pleasant things of Versailles--though the extravagant many-layered diamond necklace that helps bring about her downfall interests her not at all--but her soul looks on from inside these things with a kind of equanimity that will be tested by public hatred and, eventually, violence. Unlike many depictions of Marie Antoinette, Davis' queen gets along rather well with the fat, sensual Louis, who arrives in their bedchamber after the wedding wanting only to eat the slice of pie he's brought with him. Both are souls riding on a tide of history, and in that way, they are made for each other.
It will sound like a cliche, but here it goes: Versailles itself is like a character in the book. Davis titles each section with the name of a different room from the palace, so that the flow of the novel is like progressing through it. It is a strange and obscene place, Versailles; Davis scrupulously counts the tiles and the mirrors to give a specific sense of excess. For the revolutionaries protesting the price of bread, Versailles is a monument to crippling waste and selfishness, but Davis captures a sense of wonder and whimsy the palace possesses, a sheer clownish extravagance that demands awe. But it, too, is like Antoinette, a body animated by a soul, and for all its orange trees and hedge mazes and gilt mirrors, Versailles is separate and different from the people who move within it. In the novel's powerful last line, which comes after Antoinette and Louis have been beheaded and the palace shuttered, Davis describes "Seventeen arcades, each with eighteen mirrors. Three hundred six mirrors and in every one of them no Antoinette."
The three books of Davis' I've read couldn't be more different: Versailles, The Walking Tour, and my still-favorite, Labrador. Yet I'm starting to see a pattern in how freewheeling Davis' prose is, how eagerly it jumps through structures, points-of-view, and forms. Versailles is the most ordinary of the three, but still it has a tendency to switch from Antoinette's first person POV to a third person POV in the middle of a paragraph. When a scene takes place away from Antoinette--scheming courtiers, rabid peasants--Davis presents it in play-like dialogue. In one of these characters Bread itself--you know, the stuff you're supposed to eat cake if you can't get--is a character. I didn't feel as attached to Antoinette as I did the teenage protagonist of Labrador, but like a visitor to Versailles, I was dazzled.
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