by Black Moishe
No one knew what announcement Field Marshal de Broglie was making at that moment to the members of the War Council. But it was known that he had not gone to bed and had spent the night in consultation. Among us, almost all conversation had stopped. A few prone figures were to be seen, in silhouette, dozing on seats here or there. Others were erect as though on the lookout, but they were as unsubstantial as ghosts. You would only have had to touch them or say very softly “hello,” and they would have vanished. In some places, wall candelabra had been lit, giving to this daybreak scene an appearance much like that observed at the end of palace festivities.
In the Grand Apartments, in the antechambers, the small salons, the studies, in the public ceremonial areas as in the most secret places, on the stairways, in the corridors and passageways, behind official doors and hidden entrances, fear was a compact, material presence. A substance that had hardened overnight and now held us immobilized. I wanted to get out, to escape. I felt that if I did not do so now, it would never be possible again. I no longer believed that a hostile intrusion was imminent or that we were really about to be surrounded. Perhaps “they” were approaching, but they were still far off. A new day was dawning. The view in every direction was still wide open. I pushed my way through the assemblage of ghosts—my confederates. I caught another glimpse of Monsieur de La Chesnaye. The shadow of his double nose was swaying back and forth over a poor, prudish maiden lady, Adèle-Élisabeth Bichebois, a laceworker, who had strayed into our midst, a basket over her arm.
I had to go outside; I had to breathe.
JULY 16, 1789
DAY
OUTSIDE, UNDER THE WINDOWS
OF THE QUEEN’S BEDCHAMBER
(between five and six o’clock in the morning).
Outside, I followed the Princes’ Wing of the château. I walked as if I knew where I was going, when in reality I had not the remotest idea. Over toward the Orangerie I saw a girl wearing a grumpy expression and with circles of fatigue under her eyes. She was coming away from the apartments of His Royal Highness the Count d’Artois. He may have been the only man, on that night, who found time for an interlude of pleasure before plunging back into the maelstrom. It was in his nature, like his taking lessons in tightrope walking instead of applying himself to serious studies. I have always been of two minds where the Count d’Artois is concerned: I felt, and continue to feel, strenuous moral disapproval, but I could not help being attracted. So I pointedly turned my steps away from that low creature, thus showing my contempt and at the same time refusing to concern myself with the libertine behavior of the King’s brother.
As for deciding which way to walk, no decision had been required of me. There was only one way my feet could take me: willy-nilly, I was now under the windows of the Queen’s Bedchamber. From the time I had left her, I had been obsessed by a single thought: she was packing for departure, she was abandoning Versailles. Metz was not a pleasure sojourn like any other, it was a fallback position, before the battle. And since at that moment I did not for one second imagine that the King could be of a different mind, I assumed the departure of the royal family was imminent. The royal family accompanied by the Polignacs, that is, for in my view it was a certainty that if the Queen insisted on the presence of Gabrielle, her “inseparable,” she would take with her, and under her protection, the whole clan. And bitterly I recalled how Diane de Polignac had spent part of the night going from one group to another, collecting information. And exhorting us to have no thought in our mind but the welfare of the King and Queen. Easy for her to lecture others on what they should do, when she knew that, come what might, she would not be separated from the Queen. Since I, however, would almost surely not be “going along” on the journey to Metz, what did “acting in the best interest of the Queen” mean in my case? Waiting for her? Trying by every possible means to join her in Metz? I looked around me. There was a pale sky. The clouds, moving rapidly, seemed to skim the treetops. A recent rain made the scent of the orange blossoms even stronger and the white of the statues even less lustrous. I gazed upward. What if she was already gone?
In a moment of folly—since in all likelihood she had not yet left the château but was shut away from view in her Little Apartments, continuing to make her arrangements for departure—I stepped back several paces in the hope that I would catch a glimpse of her. No one in sight, of course. No movement on the other side, no silhouetted figure. I walked away, feeling terribly lost. The stabbing sensation of loneliness that had been with me these last few days became unbelievably intense. And the château grounds, in all their stunning beauty, turned against me. The prospect of living here without her caused me atrocious, unbearable pain. I sat down at the top of the steps, overlooking the Latona Fountain. And suddenly, I could stand it no longer; I stretched out full length on the marble landing and gave way to wracking sobs. I could hear myself crying, and far from trying to exercise restraint, I wished I could cry even harder. I wanted the tears to flow even more abundantly, in torrents: I was dispossessed. The earth had opened beneath my feet. It was going to swallow me up. I did not struggle. Rather, I fell . . . and found myself lying across the stairway, gasping for breath. Then, as in the aftermath of an earthquake, an unfamiliar calm swept over me. I regained a measure of self-control and looked for some water to bathe my face, but the Latona was dry. I went to a stone bench opposite the facade and, in a curiously detached way, as though I had been a visitor out for a walk, sat observing the château from outside.
AN EERIE SILENCE.
The curtains were still drawn (only the ones in the Queen’s Bedchamber had been left open). I could easily have imagined that the entire château was fast asleep. The silence all around was untroubled. That was a surprise. No noise. The tiny vending stalls that sprang up like weeds—outside, against the fences, and inside, the length of the Lower Gallery and on a number of staircases—must, I thought, be closed. I saw no sign of the animated, energetic crowd of barterers, vendors, beggars, visitors, and gawkers that normally began passing through the château gates at first light. They would jostle the troop of cobble sweepers, and the sweepers, unhurried, conscious of their right to occupy the courtyards, calmly went on with their work. But this morning the cobble sweepers were gone.
Sitting on my stone bench, I was straightening out my clothes as best I could. I smoothed my hair (at that time I wore a chignon, set quite low, with a lock of hair escaping from it to fall over one shoulder). I opened my prayer book. But the silence hanging over Versailles was so unaccustomed that it claimed my attention. The silence intrigued me. It amounted to an enigma. Let me be clear about something that most people would probably have trouble imagining today: noise was inseparable from Versailles. The sound of Versailles remains a part of me even now. It is a single block compounded of a myriad individual sounds: ritual, military, religious, the changing of the guard and the ringing of the bells, a continuous background of barking, neighing, coach wheels turning, orders being shouted, raised voices at day’s end, music being played on all sides in the night, and the endless to-and-fro of servants’ footsteps on the wooden floors. All this surrounded by the din, the disorder, the dust of the omnipresent construction projects, never finished and always starting up again, the permanent “work in progress” that went on night and day: painting, beautifying, making alterations to apartments, adding balconies, relocating stairways, laying ornamental tiles, hanging shutters, repairing chimneys. You stopped to admire a canvas by Watteau or Hubert Robert, and a few steps farther along you tripped over scaffolding and saw blobs of plaster flying through the air . . . The noise comes back to me occasionally, perhaps deafening to the outsider, but deep, violent, mysteriously nourishing, vitally necessary to the person living inside it. These recurrences of the sounds of Versailles fill me with delight. I savor them. I pick out the individual themes, I play them back to myself, varying the rhythms and interpretations . . .
The silence of this particular morning was made more remarkable by a sudden
realization that besides the absence of visitors there was another phenomenon: the French Guards had deserted in the night, disappearing as one man. They had followed the example of their comrades in Paris. Gone were the sounds of boots and the click of heels, the arms drills, orders repeated for the changing of the guard, the watchwords and songs that had punctuated my life just as surely as morning Mass and evening prayers. The amazing bustle in and around the château, the daily metamorphosis from château to caravansary, had suddenly ceased, and I was left stupefied. I was still “in my own home,” but in a state of mental confusion; I had lost the living bond between an external hubbub and my inner music, my tonality of soul. I was no longer rendered powerless by the stupor of defeat and the fear of being attacked, as I had been in the middle of the night. Instead, I was terrified at finding myself in an unrecognizable space, a space emptied as though under the threat of a plague; I was terrified at having been transported overnight to a place with a curse on it. I now had a better understanding of why the proposal to keep the gates closed had been so ineffectual: Versailles was open. It was the opposite of a fortress. Versailles let everybody in. The vendors who offered licentious engravings and publications that they hid in the folds of their capes, the impostors who rented a manservant for the day, disguised him as an ambassador, and attempted to gain an audience with the Monarch, passing themselves off as kings of distant islands . . . The schemers, too, the intrigantes, women who waited spiderlike in the antechambers, along the garden paths, behind the bushes, prepared to do anything that would catch a noble lord in their web . . . There was a time, during more dissolute reigns, when the first person these ladies sought to seduce was the King. Under Louis XVI they had given up trying. As they had no hope of attracting his attention, they had lowered their sights. The King was so chaste that if occasionally, on the way from his apartments to the Chapel, he addressed a few words to a woman (this did not happen often; in general, if he wished to acknowledge someone, he went no further than a curt nod), it could only be an elderly woman . . . But the human tide of sightseers, adventurers, schemers, coming in wave after endless wave, impelled by need or greed, was only the most visible part of another, less evident but deeper, current carried by a nameless force. This current was the stream of beggars, and its force lay in the very might of their destitute condition. The beggars were numberless, nameless, relentless. They surrounded the château on every side. They were driven off and, unfailingly, back they came, dirtier, sicklier, more crippled than before. Now humble, now threatening. The château offered them any number of hiding places where they could lie in wait. Officially they were banned from Versailles, but they paid no attention. They knew they could always count either on a guard being momentarily distracted, or on the darkness that reigned virtually everywhere the moment you stepped outside the perimeter of the Grand Apartments—a deep, impenetrable darkness, relieved only for a brief instant by a few candles that soon melted, their glimmer a pathetic effort against the boundless shadows of night. (The “lodgers” disbursed ruinous amounts in their struggle with the dark. There were winter days when they spent as much on candles as the entire season would have cost them had they stayed in their country mansions, where people took the weather as it came and darkness when it fell.) Which is why the beggars thumbed their noses at regulations. For who shall keep Night from entering in?
“One of these days,” Madame de Grasse had complained after being accosted as she left her apartments by a group of miserable wretches whom her household servants had mercilessly thrashed, “a beggar will bring the plague into the château with him.” As for me, I sometimes felt that the plague was near at hand, whenever the usual smells of Versailles (strong smells, of course, but I had come to appreciate them) were augmented by the sickly, sugary odor of rotting flesh. Impossible to eradicate, because its source could not be traced, and intermittent, this stench would suddenly be there and as suddenly be gone. Gripped by a spasm of nausea, I would close my eyes. A dead body? at Versailles? That was specifically prohibited; there must be no corpse at the château unless the dead person was a member of the royal family . . . Despite which, yes, there was a dead body . . . I was not the only one to notice it, but no one spoke up . . . And then the stench would dissipate. It was at its worst only for a while . . . And now? Since there was no longer anyone to stop them, would the beggars come swarming into the château? Had they joined forces with the populace that was marching down upon us? I doubted it: the beggars constituted a distinct populace of their own.
THE VICTORS REJOICE
(about eight o’clock in the morning).
Around me, everything was silent and empty, hostile and threatening. I set off to seek refuge in my room. Perhaps I would read awhile, if I was unable to sleep, for I had reached a level of anxiety where it was unlikely that I would fall asleep. That was when I saw them: two doorkeepers, their persons in scandalous disarray. They had thrown their blue cloth jackets on the ground, and there, right under the windows of the Queen’s Bedchamber, in shirtsleeves, with a bottle of wine set down at their feet, they were jabbering away to each other. One was straddling a marble statue; the other, his back propped against the statue’s base, was putting a makeshift bandage over his hand. Together, the two were not talking—they were shouting. I was forced to stop: they were barring the way to my room. I ought to have turned around and used a different doorway. More to the point, I ought to have sent them packing, ordered them out from under the windows of the Queen’s Bedchamber, instead of staying there listening to them. There is a horrid fascination in hatred and vulgarity, in the thing that, some day or other, is going to swallow you up.
“Y’know what I did yesterday morning when the Duke de Richelieu came in?”
“No, what?”
“Nothin’.”
“You mean you didn’t stamp your foot twice while you announced in your loudest voice: His Excellency the Duke de Richelieu?”
“I didn’t let out a peep. The Duke stopped at the entrance to the salon and waited. Looked at me, he did. I di’nt say nothin’, I tell ya.” (He was bellowing, crazed with his own daring, his legs thumping against the statue.) “Duke and peer he may be, but I didn’t do nothin’. I didn’t move a muscle, I didn’t say a word. Anyhow, why announce him? He knows what his name is. I don’t care if he is an old wreck before his time. A degenerate, a rotten fruit of his father’s debauched loins, he still knows his own name. Your name is the last thing you forget. Isn’t that right, Boineau?”
“Moinel, stupid. My name is Sylvain Moinel.”
“See? Even you remember your name.”
“And don’t be so goddam smart! Why d’you have to poke fun at everybody? Isn’t the Duke de Richelieu enough excitement for you? I can supply you lots more like him. There’s no shortage.”
“Thanks, Boineau, I knew you were one of us.”
Although he had an injured hand wrapped in a bandage, the other man leaped up and punched his companion to make him fall. The one astride the statue held on and was about to hit back, but did not dare. He was inhibited by his partner’s injured hand.
“Okay, Moinel, it was just my little joke. My own name is Pignon, Chrétien Pignon. I didn’t mean no harm. If a guy can’t have a laugh these days, when will he? Hey! To celebrate the Bastille, and the freeing of the prisoners, and the processions and all that stuff, at home, the wife and me, we busted everything in the place. I mean, we wrecked everything. The bed, the table, clay pot, the tumblers. By the time we were done, there wasn’t nothin’ left but an iron pot, and we bashed her till she was all shrunk up. My wife was the one who threw it at the window so’s it split the paper apart.”
“You’re lucky to have a wife like that. She’s way more fun than mine. That Suzette, she’s always goin’ to church. She prays. She says turning ourselves into a republic is something that’s gonna have to be atoned for and it’s gonna be a long time, a real long time. Our children’s children will still be paying. What if she’s right? It gives me t
he creeps, it really does. Sending our children, and our children’s children, to roast in hell, are you prepared to do that?”
“You’re about as cheerful as your wife, for gosh’s sake! I never thought I’d see the day! . . . The day I refuse to greet a lord and peer. The day the world is ass over tit. Because that’s what a revolution is, after all. You take a thing, no matter what, and you turn it ass over tit.”
“No matter what, eh! In that case, a person might as well take a woman and a cutie to do what you’re talking about. That’s it, let’s do things in the right order here, let’s start by revolutioning a whore! But you haven’t told me what reaction you got from the present Duke de Richelieu. We have to be precise, y’know, because the old man—the Intendant des Menus Plaisirs, this one’s father, the Marshal—was so famous and he lasted such a long time that nobody believes the son is now the Duke. There are still some who call him the Duke de Fronsac.”
“Does he set them straight?”
“Does he ever! He sets them so straight he’s all worn out!”
And they both went off in a fit of giggles. The one on the statue slid down off his perch. The other man was rolling on the ground with laughter. I observed their behavior as one might observe monsters. What metamorphoses were taking possession of this place and the people it harbored? These two, who previously stood as stiff and dumb as pokers in their cloth uniforms and were as inanimate as the doors they tended, were now talking back and forth at the top of their lungs, and lying on the ground, waving their arms and moaning about how it hurt to laugh so hard; but then one of them would repeat “He sets them so straight he’s all worn out” and the braying would start again . . .
They cried and wiped their eyes with their shirts. They would start to get up and then collapse. Their laughter was a subtle allusion to the last duel fought by the poor Duke de Richelieu nine years earlier when he was still the Duke de Fronsac. His father’s marriage to a young widow, at the age of eighty-four, had been the subject of various mocking gibes. Overhearing one of these, the Duke de Fronsac had challenged the scoffer to a duel and killed him.