six generations

marie-louise is irish, pretty, & ambitious.

she wants to leave shoemaking behind her,
but doesn’t quite know how.

her world is echoed in tom’s but she
never scrawls poetry with his elegant hand,
instead choosing to hold it all inside her
cupped against her heart.

(they are, ostensibly, worlds apart.
but they say it would only take six generations
for him to find her.)

she is still just as ambitious,
but she can’t hate her rival.

jeanne-antoinette suffers miscarriages as
marie-louise takes off her clothes, thinking;
"the king could never love someone
with hands so rough from laundry as mine."

(they could have had their immortality.
spanned across lifetimes, fled across the ages,
without choosing right from wrong.)

in this, she is lucky:
jeanne-antoinette is blamed for the war
marie is sure she caused.
nonetheless, she does not pause in spinning off her charm.

for a moment, she thinks she would quite like to be reinette,
and she quietly knows she is not alone:
diderot haunts the little queen, silently in awe,
as marie misses steps on the dance-floor,
aware she is slipping behind in the game.

(they are each gems of the same shine,
marie with her heart, tom with his soul,
reinette with her smile.
tom is busy & reinette is wilting.
marie wants to save them both.)

voltaire goes to visit her, and marie swears that she
does not have a fascination with immorality.
still, she doesn’t know what she is thinking,
pitching herself against the woman.

marie gets the king’s bed, for a time,
but reinette steals his heart, and still her
smile does not touch her eyes.

marie is married off and never makes the same mistake twice.

a/n: the girl in the fireplace. any guesses on tom? i would have wanted to be reinette, myself, but i am more marie-louise. “i run into your thought from across the room” . it’s the…the connection of the catalysts. history is written by the victors, so i must be the only one to feel sorry for her.