The Princess(Charles E.J. Moulton) The Princess

By Charles E.J. Moulton

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Imagine you are a princess. A real one with all that entails. Pretty, rich, active, feminine, flirtatious, tender, but also relatively humble and interested in most things.

You are born into your position, so being a royal princess is all you know, but it is not all you want to know. You are still a human being, trying to figure out what life is and how things work, how ordinary people live. You love warm baths, cranes and dahlias, and you have a beautiful singing voice.

You are irritated about your brother's coldness, how neutrally he looks at death itself. You sometimes wonder how he one day will be a king with that chilly attitude. Will he be a good king? Your sister, another princess, grows very sick and dies and that wears you down. You wonder why that had to happen.

Your mother, the Queen, is very maternal, but strict. You have a good relationship with her. You question the convention of wives obeying their husbands in marriage. The advisors in your mother's court chuckle about this.

You are a teenager and, as such, you are subjected to the things other girls also are subjected to. You have siblings you fight with and artists you like, hormonal outbursts and very best girlfriends and a poetry book.

Your mother, however, is also the Queen. Because she tries to have good relationships with neighboring countries, she marries you off with the upcoming king of another country. You have no choice but to say yes. What you think or feel is uninteresting. You have to marry the boy. He is 15. You are 14.

You are eager to know how this boy you have never met is as a person. After all, you will spend your life with him. Because you have never been with a boy before, you ask your older brother what happens when a man and a woman are together. He tells you in a very subtle way how the sword gets stuck in the holder. You are pretty innocent. Still, because you want to know something, anything at all, about physical love, you practice kissing with one of the bodyguards you like.

Leaving the palace is difficult for you. Especially leaving your mama, whom you love. So she gives you a good-luck-jewel, a family heirloom, to guard you on your way.

You travel for many weeks to get to the meeting point, have to walk part of the way because of the muddy roads. When you arrive at the private meeting point, you meet your future husband. He is a shy and hefty boy who confesses that his father was supposed to be king. But because he died, the young boy himself will now be king. He does not feel ready for it.

Still excited about becoming Queen, you meet the courtiers and receive your official welcome with pomp and circumstance.

But the excitement soon wears off. You discover that the court you have entered is filled with jealousy and intrigue. Your new brother-in-law is totally jealous of your new husband's position as crown prince, ridiculing him to the point of sickness. The old current king is senile and ruthlessly used by his mistress. Your new countrymen resent you from the beginning just because you are not from their country. You notice this resentment from the start. You also understand, the court tell you this repeatedly, that your prime job is creating a son.

After your spectacular marriage to your new husband, on the wedding night, you discover he is impotent. After a few years, that becomes a huge problem. Only a son will do, so they say. But you cannot even make love to your husband. He can't perform. People blame you, calling you a lesbian harlot. Probably because you are seen as a foreign imposter. People wonder why no children have come yet. You dine and chat with your girlfriends for company.

To top things off, your husband has inherited a broken kingdom. His grandfather ran it to the ground, sending the country into bancruptcy. The broken country is blamed on you, mostly because you cannot produce an heir. You are literally never alone, courtiers following you everywhere, even during your toiletries. As a reaction, you refuse to wear corsets. You have to do something. The whole court is a corset. More and more people blame you for your husband's impotence and your grandfather's bad economy. Now, they call you loose because you don't follow etiquette.

You become Queen, doing your best to act as your impotent husband's political advisor. You are pretty good at it, trying to form alliances and supporting the king's passion for foreign policy, although your new countrymen never hear about those good deeds. You inform yourself about all state affairs, trying to convince your husband to always take the noble and unselfish road, but the delegates still treat you badly because you are a foreign woman. The country never hears about that behavior, either.

This goes on for years and years until you nearly break down from sheer desperation. Nobody seems to understand you. In the midst of all this loneliness, desperate for some kind of affection, you fall madly in love with an incredibly handsome aristocrat, with whom you have a long and passionate affair. You make love with him in front of the fire place and in the springtime grass and he sings you songs. He is literally your first time. You both fall madly in love.

Soon enough, you are pregnant. Officially, it is the king's child, but you know your lover is the father. It turns out to be a girl. That just makes the situation worse. Your countrymen have waited for so long for an heir and you produce a girl? You love the girl, though. She is the apple of your eye. You treat her very well.

Every week, the king gives the citizens bread and food, even giving some of them work in the army. One week, though, the citizens, frustrated by circumstances, break down the gates and try to storm the palace. A disaster is barely prevented.

To get a break from all this, you take your lover's offer to join his own king of that kingdom as a cultural advisor. Officially, your lover is the royal ambassador. It is a wonderful experience. You learn his country's language and you are treated remarkably well there. And your lover is so respectful.
The poor people of his country grab your attention, however, and this makes you swear yourself two things. You want to sell one of your jewels to buy bread for the poor and you will buy less dresses for yourself. In fact, you start right away, repairing old dresses for yourself and remodelling other dresses to fit your growing daughter.

You return to your kingdom, finding out that your husband, the king, has pawned your mama's good-luck-jewel to a wealthy man to get money for the kingdom. The word gets out and jealous conspirators trick you into another trap, saying you bought an expensive necklace even though you didn’t. You read a book by a famous philosopher and people use an inhumane quote from that book and say these were your words.

Your husband has now undergone a successful operation and can make love to you. You become the mother of two sons. One of them is seriously ill.

Many people now believe all that has been said about you. You did buy the necklace, they say. You did say those things. And because the country now has been losing money for half a century and they need someone to blame, you become the target. Everything explodes into a frenzy. The old king's bad economy, your husband's impotence, your unwillingness to follow royal etiquette. The people oveethrow you and your husband, starting a massive terror regime. Your lover, the love of your life, tries to save your life, planning an escape. It fails.

Your healthy son is taken away from you by the new regime and brainwashed to hate you.

You and your husband are among the 90,000 people beheaded by the new regime. Eventually, the new leaders behead each other.

Because of all the chaos, the real story of your life is not told until years later. The problems continue after your death. A new emperor is waiting in the wings, who reinstalls the monarchy, sending millions of people into war.
You died in vain.
Your lover, the love of your life, is lynched and murdered on an open courtyard, accused of things he never did. He is aquitted after his death. The murderers receive only mild punishment.

Imagine such a princess.
She existed.

Her name was Marie Antoinette.
She was the Queen of France.

(1755 - 1793)

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