On the morning of my palace tour, I stood outside Grace’s former home under clouded skies, nervously waiting for the doors to open. The palace, painted a pale pink, was much smaller than I’d always imagined it to be. Ahead of me, smartly uniformed carabiniers guarded the way, and to my right, a crew of workers with jackhammers dug up the cobblestones outside the palace, the sounds of their drills echoing across the square.
At the entrance, a young woman in a navy-blue dress introduced herself. Her name was Marina, and she was my guide. We hurried through the security area so we could stay ahead of the school groups that would soon be following behind us. Marina led me through a small entranceway and up a narrow staircase to the palace’s main gallery overlooking the courtyard. I recognized this place immediately: it was the Galerie d’Hercule, where Grace, my mother, and the other bridesmaids had posed for photographs immediately before the wedding ceremony. I had looked at those familiar black-and-white photographs so many times: the picture of Grace, standing at the marble balustrade, looking out over the palace courtyard, my mother in the background, keeping her within her sights. The group photographs with the little flower girls standing on either side of Grace, holding their bouquets in their little white gloves, my mother to Grace’s far left. The photo where Grace stops to adjust my mother’s hat, looking at her so tenderly.
Now I was standing in the same spot where those photographs had been taken, the grays of the past transformed into vivid life and color. What the black-and-white images had failed to convey was the jewel tones of the frescoes on every wall of the gallery, saturated with the deepest reds, yellows, and greens.
Following Marina, I walked through the rooms of the palace, each one filled with gilded French furniture, with chandeliers of cut Venetian glass hanging overhead. I stood in the throne room, with its red brocade walls and large golden throne, where Grace and Rainier’s civil ceremony had taken place the day before their cathedral wedding. Above our heads there were murals depicting each of the signs of the zodiac, and in that moment, I was certain that both my mother and Grace would have approved of these astrological symbols, feeling reassured that the planets were watching over them that day.
In these hallways and rooms, Grace, the movie star and princess, finally became human to me. I imagined her here, walking as a wife and mother within her own home. To what degree had this palace been a gilded cage, as some of her biographers suggested? By all accounts, she was happy with her husband and her children—but she had sacrificed her career for her life here, and it was impossible to believe that there weren’t days when she missed her work, her home in New York, her independent existence. Not long before her death, Grace confided to her friend Judy that she felt almost envious of my mother’s freedom to come and go as she pleased while living in Philadelphia. These were the years when Carolyn struggled with stable housing, before she moved to the shelter.
“I know it might sound awful and insensitive,” Grace explained. “But the thought of just getting up every day and doing what that day brings you sounds wonderful to me in certain ways.”
Was it a mark of how tightly Grace’s role as princess was circumscribed that she equated my mother’s vulnerable situation with freedom and anonymity? I had read in Judy’s book that it had been Grace’s intention, just before her death, to find an apartment in Manhattan and live there for at least some part of each year. She missed New York, she told Judy. New York was her town, the city where she felt most herself. She even talked about starting her career again, maybe with a role on Broadway. Some part of her must have wished to recapture those formative years of youth, with their excitement and promise. Grace was due to come to New York in September 1982, to begin her search for an apartment, but she never made the trip. She died that same month, on September 14.
Three years later, when my mother arrived in New York to live at the shelter, she had been rounding a circle that even a princess had been kept from completing.
* * *
AFTER MONACO, I took the short train ride along the coast to Nice and Cannes, to see the places where I had stayed with my mother and Robin all those years ago. And from Cannes, I took another train, this time heading west, deeper into France. I was going back to Lourdes, to the place where my mother had taken my sister and me to find a cure.
At Lourdes, I visited Saint Bernadette’s grotto, just as I had done with my mother and sister. Again I walked alongside the crowds of pilgrims, making their way to the shrine, with its white statue of the Virgin Mary that seemed to glow within the craggy rocks. I walked the narrow cobbled streets of the city, imagining my mother and how she must have felt when she came here, with two daughters and without money or plans for what would happen next. I tried to put myself in my mother’s shoes: What did she think she was doing coming here? How did she think she would be able to make a life for herself in France? Everywhere I turned in Lourdes I was reminded of my mother: the statues of the saints; the people praying, their heads bowed and
