by Black Moishe
“Odd,” the Historiographer added, “that someone so refined and demanding in matters of speech should have used such an expression. Outsmarted, a hateful word. The King is well spoken, though I have never been able to form a personal judgment in the matter, as he has not so far done me the honor of addressing me personally, but there is no comparison with the sense of style shown by His Lordship the Count de Provence. Monsieur is a poet. Outsmarted must have been the result of fatigue, the physical and mental fatigue of the morning’s events. Just imagine: requiring Monsieur to go from the château to the Tennis Court and back, on foot. Even asking him to go one way on foot would have been cruel.”
* * *
“We are doomed . . . ” I thought about the Queen, standing so stiffly up there on the balcony; about her pallor, emphasized by the dark-colored dress. I thought of her as an ivory statuette outlined clearly against a background of mourning garb, or as a silver tear-drop set against a black sheet. I thought of her . . . What would she do now? What about the King? If he no longer had an army, if he was left with no means of asserting his mastery over the National Assembly. . .
“The King is sorely tried by this defeat—a defeat that may have the outward appearance of a triumph, but a defeat. His immediate plans are not known. He has shut himself up alone in his apartments. He is considering . . . This morning, before his visit to the Tennis Court, he spoke vaguely of transferring the National Assembly to Noyon or Soissons, while he himself removed with the royal family to the château of Compiègne. Then he could remain in communication with the Assembly without living in the same place. This close proximity is unhealthy.”
At that moment we heard the scraping of footsteps on the other side of the wall. Rapid footsteps. Someone had been eavesdropping.
We sat there silently for a moment, listening intently. Then each of us became absorbed in our separate unhappy thoughts. Mechanically, I picked out the titles of the books published by Jacob-Nicolas Moreau. They sat imposingly on the shelves above his head, and at the very sight of them I was filled with veneration.
THE COURT UNABLE TO SLEEP.
ROAMING ABOUT, NEAR THE GRAND APARTMENTS
(from ten o’clock until midnight).
Those suspicious noises had terrified me. I was afraid to leave the room. My friend sensed my panic and offered to walk back to my room with me. Then he would come back into his study, he said, and try to get back to his work, his Lessons in Morality. No sooner had we set foot in the long, winding corridor leading above the Hall of Mirrors, than I noticed something out of the ordinary. The corridor, usually bustling with life at that time of the evening (that floor also housed part of the kitchens, and work went on there day and night), was empty. The third story, on the other hand, which had apartments and so should have been quiet at this hour, surprised us with the great number of people who were heading, as we were, in the direction of the Grand Apartments. We didn’t know how to interpret this circumstance. It could not be some nighttime festivity; the Menus Plaisirs, the Royal Entertainments, were not much sought-after these days. And there was nothing festive about the facial expressions or the attire we were encountering. Indeed, it seemed to me that some individuals were wearing nightcaps and dressing gowns.
The press of people grew as we came closer to the Grand Apartments. They all appeared disoriented, a little shamefaced at having heeded the urge to leave their living quarters and seek out the Grand Apartments and the Hall of Mirrors, plunged in semidarkness at the time, for the sole purpose of being “closer to the news,” as Lady Olderness said to us. There had been no prior consultation, but as the evening wore on, those who had come back to sup in their apartments (the caterers had condescended to come as usual with their trays of food that evening), and who had started a game of backgammon after their meal, had perceived that there was no help for it: they were not in the mood for pleasant pastimes. Then they had begun paying courtesy calls on one another. At last, since no one contrived to sit still at anyone else’s apartment, since no conversation took lasting hold, since it had seemed to all of them that while they were sitting there in a polite circle perhaps vital decisions were being made, anxiety had finally swept social convention aside. They had cut the visits short and stepped out-of-doors, and like the Historiographer and I, they had been astonished to find that everyone else was out-of-doors as well, in the strange out-of-doors that was unique to the château and meant “outside one’s own living-quarters,” in any space intended for public foot-traffic, where you were in continuous expectation of having the King or the Queen come by, and of a chance to show your presence and be seen. Such was not the reason for being abroad on that night. So great was the agitation that, perhaps for the first time in the annals of Versailles, the perpetual, anxious torment of wanting to be noticed could not continue to operate. Shadowy figures crossed paths on the stairways, in the corridors, in the anterooms. No one was talking. All were disheartened; none could foresee anything but calamities. I soon fell prey to the ambient mood and became disheartened like the others. The Historiographer had been reluctant to go back to his work. He was torn between his duty to bear witness—he was the person who was supposed to set down on paper the events of the reign—and his duty as a moral philosopher: if the will of God expressed itself through History, then his task was to make that will as manifest as possible. At last the urgent need to write his Lessons in Morality had got the upper hand. He had gone back to his book of magic spells, leaving me to wander . . . I was not at ease. I would have been glad to encounter a close friend or acquaintance. Occasionally there was a low-voiced exchange of news. What I heard did nothing to reassure me. It was all about town houses, owned by the Nobility, being destroyed and their inhabitants put to death. It was also rumored that armed bands assembling in Paris were going to attack the château. They were even now on their way. How long would it take them to get to Versailles from Paris? Twelve hours? Fifteen? They would be here by morning. I had that much reprieve. I remember realizing that I had forgotten to take books away for the night.
We were going around in circles. The least sound made us jump. Eleven o’clock had struck. “Going out” had not calmed our fears. Quite the opposite: fears had increased at the sight of the haggard appearance we presented to each other. They were gaining ground, along with insomnia and a sensation of suffocating. Under the circumstances, with the terrible awareness of how vulnerable we were, all the windows were closed. So were the curtains. And in certain public rooms, both the inside and outside shutters. The air around us as we moved from place to place was heavy and murky. For fear of making the château too easy to find, everyone had lit the smallest possible number of tapers, as they said at Court, copying the parlance of the King who had struck from his vocabulary the word candle. There were a few rooms where candlesticks lit earlier had been put out, and it was as dark as a forest. We brushed against other people or accidentally jostled them. Eyes would suddenly shine with an eerie light.
People began to get thirsty. They wanted wine, beer, fruit. They called, they rang. No one came. They could not believe it and rang again. They shouted, confidently at first, then in voices that betrayed growing uncertainty. The person who had called would stand there, hand still on the bellpull, uncomprehending. A crowd would gather round: “Well, but, what are they doing? Have they stopped hearing when we ring for them? Where are they? What has become of our domestics?” Many servants lived in Versailles, in private town houses, brand-new dwellings, while their masters preferred lodgings, however uncomfortable, at the château, so they would not have to go back to their houses every time they needed a change of attire and could always be somewhere close by, near enough to be seen. But that group suddenly had the impression that their own dwellings were occupied by the enemy and they could never go home again. They pictured themselves standing in front of their barricaded mansions, with cries of rage raining down upon them along with bottles thrown directly into their yards. Into their yards. Here at Versailles, the do
mestics had vanished, the anterooms had emptied. But when, when exactly had it started? Before supper? A little earlier? In the Hall of Mirrors, I noticed the absence of the guards who every night set up camp beds there. Were they busily plotting with the domestics? Had all of them together turned against the château? Had they gone to guide the brigands now marching on Versailles?
Night, filling the Hall of Mirrors and the Apartments with broad expanses of darkness, and melding the corridors, anterooms, and halls into a uniform pitch black, intensified my feeling of being in the midst of total destruction. A few tapers were lit; it gave me some physical relief, but that was all. It was now easier to walk around, but emotionally, it was just as taxing as before. Mental anguish was not uniting us. We kept peering stealthily at one another. We lodgers—logeants, as those who were privileged to live at the château used to be called (I loved saying the word over to myself: he’s a logeant, I’m a logeante . . .)—were experiencing the negative side of our cruel isolation. How nice, how wonderful, to live apart like this, in sublime unawareness. How frightening, how terrifying, to know nothing, or almost nothing, when the rest of the country was joining in league against us. For the fact is we knew very little. And what information we were getting was so hard to believe . . . Maybe it was just me; maybe I had gauged the value of my time so completely in terms of my reading sessions with the Queen that I had completely drifted away from reality. Perhaps I had carried the sheltering effect of “these parts” further than the others had, but I had the feeling that everyone around me, each person staggering to and fro in his separate darkness, was in the same plight as I.
I was keeping away from the windows. I preferred the corners of the rooms, the bends in the corridors, all those undefined spaces with temporary uses and variable designations, that the château had in abundance. If there was any sort of opening to the outside, I crept along the opposite wall. For it was from outside that THE EVENT had burst upon us. A word that was quite new at Court, where everyone adored the anecdote or today’s vignette; these were required to be trivial, minute, so that people could exercise their ingenuity at fleshing them out from one telling to the next, till they became for a few hours, if a sufficiently talented storyteller picked them up, fabulous narratives. An event, on the other hand, had scope and import from the start, leaving no room for invention. The thing itself frightened me, the word repelled me. I uttered it as unintelligibly as I could. I said ev . . . , but could not hide from myself the fact that something was trying to break through.
THE LIST OF THE 286 HEADS THAT HAVE TO FALL
IN ORDER TO EFFECT THE NECESSARY REFORMS.
Night very quickly produced terrible fatigue. Endurance at staying on one’s feet, a major qualification for living at Court, no longer availed. Everyone was looking for somewhere to sit. People were falling asleep here, there, and everywhere. Some were lying right on the floor, on the carpets. I took care not to step on their hands. I went into the Study Leading to the Terraces, a room (although it no longer led to any of the terraces) where I always liked to be, for its very name enabled me to imagine the Versailles of Louis XV, a château consisting entirely of aviaries, salons of vines and trellises, terraces with borders of bougainvillea . . . but on this occasion all I found there was a dismal gathering, onto which, in a manner of speaking, I stumbled. Facing a bench pushed against the wall, a few folding chairs stood in a line. A small group of people were using this arrangement to talk to one another, sitting in the dark, each one sunk in her or his private torment. Nonetheless, for the first time in a long while I was hearing at least a semblance of conversation, and the result was that little by little I began to feel more cheerful. Indeed I believed—without formulating the thought clearly in my own mind—that if we could talk to each other again, if we succeeded in rescuing, like some sacred fire, the eternal conversation that had been kept up ever since the Court was established at Versailles, then the château would live on, and royalty with it.
The listless phrases uttered first by one person then by another, in weary tones sustained by fierce determination to keep talking, brought me out of my lethargy. I have no clear memory of what was discussed . . . Subjects of no moment . . . Possibly the new heating system that His Majesty was having installed in the royal gallery of the Chapel for next winter; or The Malabar Widow, playing to full houses at the Ambigu-Comique in Paris. Finally old Father Noslin, Superintendent of the Royal Tree Nurseries, had courage enough to face the situation squarely. “It’s as though a coalition were operating,” he said, in the same measured tones that, more than ten years earlier, had succeeded in convincing a young Louis XVI to have the old trees uprooted. It must have looked a bit sparse at first, but by 1789 it was splendid. The grounds, though certain bosquets looked uncared-for, had achieved perfect equilibrium. I loved those trees. On my favorite walks, I had the feeling that I knew them each individually and that they in turn knew me. One day they had arrived at Versailles and taken root there. I would talk to them, and they had things to say to me as well . . . Shortly after my arrival at the château, when I was still settling in, Monsieur de Montdragon had taken me on a tour of the grounds. When I started going into raptures over the glory of nature, he had at once informed me that everything at Versailles was artificial, everything there had been deliberately planned, even the trees. The first ones to be transplanted had been taken from the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte. Whenever he looked at the trees on the grounds of his château, what Louis XIV saw before him were the trophies physically wrested from Fouquet, the symbols of his victory over a Superintendent of Finance too fond of lavish display for his own good. Nothing at Versailles had originated there, save the Nobility. And they were what mattered. Everything else was a setting for them . . . “Is that perfectly clear, Madam?” Monsieur de Montdragon had added. I had said yes, which was not entirely true, but I was sure that as time went by it would become perfectly clear . . . At present, however, we were no longer concerned with trees or banks of foliage.
“It’s as though a coalition were operating,” the old priest said again.
Silence followed. Monsieur de Goulas, a man of strong character, a notable gambler, and a fine trencherman, was the first to react:
“A coalition operating. I will grant you that, Father, but a coalition of whom with whom?”
Father Noslin was not in a position to be more specific. But Monsieur de Feutry responded for him. “It is a coalition of malcontents,” he said. And he described an incident he had just witnessed in the château itself. At about six o’clock on the previous evening, he had been going into the Hall of Mirrors. At the entrance, on the same side as the Salon of War, hence very close to the Grand Apartments, he had noticed a group behaving suspiciously. Four or five people were giving out tracts. Servants, common people, were eagerly reaching for the printed sheets. Monsieur de Feutry had told his lackey to get a few for him. The lackey had managed to get his hands on a number of copies and had spent a good while—despite the fact that his master was waiting—talking to the people who were handing them out. Monsieur de Feutry had refrained from comment, being impatient to read what the tract contained. It was a pamphlet, with the title List of the 286 heads that have to fall in order to effect the necessary Reforms. 286 heads! There was a slight shrinking movement along the velvet bench.
“Do you remember the names of the people they wish to behead?” asked Father Noslin.
“Certainly not you, Father. Nor me, nor, I believe, any of us here. Although there has been so little etiquette observed tonight that I am not quite sure in whose presence I have the honor to find myself . . . The first two names are those of the Queen and the Count d’Artois, of that much I am certain.”
I shuddered.
“Cutting off people’s heads in order to effect reforms; I don’t understand,” said a lady I had never seen before.
She had a clear, childish voice. She received no answer.
A man asked Monsieur de Feutry:
“Who were th
ey, I mean the people distributing the pamphlets, who do you think they were?”
“I don’t know. What I can say positively is that they looked like very ugly customers.”
A coalition of malcontents, a group of individuals who looked like very ugly customers—it all left my head in a whirl. But, where were they till now? Why were they suddenly appearing out of nowhere? They always looked happy before. All I had ever read in the gazettes was: “The people were loud in their expressions of happiness” or “The shouts and applause of the people betrayed the joy they felt at seeing their Sovereigns.”
That’s just it, I was told. The people are not the people any more. They’ve been bought. Bought by mercenaries, foreigners, mustachioed ruffians with big staves. They mingle with the populace, make inflammatory speeches, give out liquor and money. And suddenly the talk was all of prisons spilling forth their entire contingent of criminals. Crazed with freedom, killing for the pleasure of killing, they were suddenly in their element, fighting with stones and iron bars.
I was near fainting. I wondered fearfully: what will happen in the hospitals? who is to stop the lepers or those afflicted with the pox from going out into the streets, raping us, infecting us? And they would gag us, using bandages stiff with blood and pus . . . O dear God, I would rather die right now! And for a few moments I was so distressed that I wished the Court would commit suicide. So that when the brigands came they would find only corpses. How horrible! Lord God! How horrible!
I next heard:
“In Dijon, the butchers have committed unspeakable acts of violence. And in Vizille, Lyons, and Marseilles, all the guilds are taking that behavior as their cue. It isn’t just the butchers, the other trades will follow their example. The pork sellers, the cobblers, the masons, the joiners, the ironmongers, and the farriers. They all have tools and know how to use them.”