A Life, by Laura Chalar

Presumed to be a portrait of Marie Angelique Fontanges, anonymous, details not known.

A Life

Little Fontanges, seventeen to the Sun King’s forty,
was gilded Versailles’s version of your perfect 

underage starlet: small lovely breasts, oval face, 
that teasing pout now made ubiquitous by selfies

and hair to die for. She was said to be good-natured
but stupid. The family having gauged her mortal

frame’s worth, they steered her all the way into
the royal four-poster. Soon pregnant (a major 

turn-off for HM), she lost a bit too much blood
in childbirth, court gossips jeering that she’d been

wounded in service. Her winter boy lasted only
a few days, the mother ailing on for another year: 

discharged with a duchy, turning to piety in the usual
abbey – then dead at nineteen, a footnote to a hairstyle.

​Laura Chalar

Laura Chalar was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. She is a lawyer and writer whose most recent poetry collection, Unlearning, was published by Coal City Press in 2018. Her short story collection The Guardian Angel of Lawyers was published by Roundabout Press in 2018.