The Brooklyn Rail

In her memoir, Aurelia, Aurélia (2022), Kathryn Davis reflects on the rituals that made up her life with her husband Eric, who had recently died of cancer. They walked their dog Lucy. They watched the television show Lost. They read the newspaper in bed. “I can’t remember the last time Eric and I sat together in bed that way, sharing the paper,” Davis writes. He was there, and suddenly, he was gone.

This month, following the success of Aurelia, Aurélia, Davis’s publisher Graywolf Press is reissuing her 2002 novel, Versailles. Davis penned much of Versailles from the perspective of Marie Antoinette reflecting on her life, starting with her journey in 1770 from Austria to France to marry the Dauphin, and ending with the guillotine in 1793.

In the pages of Versailles, Davis can be found turning over the same questions that would govern her memoir twenty years in the future: What constitutes a life? And, what is a soul? “My soul is going on a trip,” Antoinette says at the novel’s opening. “I want to talk about her. I want to talk about her. Why would anyone ever want to talk about anything else?” Who or what is this soul? She is a fourteen-year-old girl leaving home forever, her mother’s instructions ringing in her ear: Eat your food. Sit up straight. Be prudent. Take care. She loves to dance and act. She has wishes and ideas. As Antoinette becomes a beloved princess and ultimately the reviled last Queen of France, her physical body morphs into the figure readers know from art, film, and literature: the towering wig, the pug in her lap, the elaborate gowns. But her soul remains the same.

One morning, when a crowd of hungry people shows up at the gates of Versailles to protest the growing bread shortage, Antoinette isn’t there to witness it. Instead, she’s taking a walk. Her thoughts wander to memories of home, and her siblings and mother. “Inside my body, my soul stirred,” she says. “Changeless, changeless, as if that could compensate for all the rest.”

Later, after the crowd has cleared, Antoinette returns to the palace and the rituals that fill her life: a new gown, mindless conversation, dinner, gambling, bed. “Shh! Shh! Blow out the candles, offer a prayer,” she says at the end of the night. “The body of the Queen of France is tossing and turning on her bed … and there deep inside her the soul: the girl, taking a walk.”

Davis writes much of the novel in this abstract, ethereal voice that reads like a soul untethered from a body. This version of Antoinette is vain, arch, and often contemptuous of her subjects at court and in the streets—but she is also observant and sincere. When recalling her husband’s sullen disposition on their wedding night, she tenderly reflects that, “It wasn’t … the bed that he didn’t want to share. It was the life.”

The prose is often fragmented and erratic, as though Antoinette has just remembered something disturbing (“Really, you could put anything on your head your head your head”). Looming over every scene is a creeping sense of peril, as when musicians at a party begin to play, “their gigantic shadows sawing away madly on the wall behind them.”

Versailles is loosely structured in chapters that alternate between Antoinette’s perspective, architectural digressions on the expansion of Versailles, poetry, and scenes from stage plays featuring her increasingly discontented subjects and gossipy courtiers. Reflecting Davis’s meticulous historical research, the story includes a buffet of references to natural landmarks, finance ministers and revolutionaries, and the proper names of rooms and windows in Versailles. Unless you’re a scholar of French history, it can be dizzying at times. As always, Davis does not hold her reader’s hand—you’ll just have to keep up.

In Aurelia, Aurélia, Davis explains that she was compelled to watch Lost for the same reason that so many viewers ultimately rejected it: the creeping suspicion that the show’s creators never had an endgame in mind. “The thing about cancer,” Davis continues, referencing her husband’s diagnosis, “is that it seems bestowed haphazardly, the system governing its bestowal as inscrutable as the system prevailing on the island” in the show.

The kings of France never imagined that it wouldn’t rain for the entire summer of 1774—the same year that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette took the throne. That dry summer was a catastrophic break from the natural order that kept the country’s grain production stable, and its people fed. It turns out that, when it doesn’t rain and people get hungry, kings and queens don’t get to play at being gods anymore.

With Versailles, Davis manages to render an entirely fresh characterization of a person who became a punchline. It is an absorbing meditation on how we spend the time we’re given, who we are at our core, and the forces of nature that we can and cannot control. It is a treasure to rediscover and an apt follow-up to Davis’s memoir.

“At some point you leave a place and that’s that,” Davis writes as the starving people of Paris march on Versailles for the last time, and though she is writing of Antoinette’s last days, I think of her husband Eric, reading the newspaper in the morning. “At some point you reach the point of no return. Though often enough you don’t know you’ve reached it.”