Farewell, My Queen

by Black Moishe

  “I have to admit he was quite a man with the ladies. Intendant des Menus Plaisirs, the King’s Little Pleasures, as it’s officially called. He was that, all right, but the first pleasures he looked after were his own, and they weren’t specially little! He had married a young’un and still spent his nights chasing after actresses. And d’you know why the Marshal-Duke was such a stud?”

  “You’re always asking me whether I know or I don’t know. It really bothers me. It’s like every two minutes you were calling me a dummy.”

  “Right, so you don’t know. No problem, a man can learn, he can improve his knowledge. Well, since you don’t know, I’ll tell you: the Marshal-Duke was such a stud because of milk baths. When he woke up, while he was drinking his first bottle of champagne, he took a milk bath.”

  “You sure it wasn’t the other way round?”

  “Wuddya mean, the other way round?”

  “He didn’t drink a bowl of milk, while having a champagne bath . . . ”

  “No. You’re not a real fast learner. No, seriously, citizen, milk baths help stave off those attacks where a guy can’t perform.”

  “Attacks like that are strictly for the nobs. With ordinary people like us, it doesn’t happen. Nature takes its course. But even supposing, let’s say a guy was really tired . . . It could never happen, but okay, just for the sake of argument, supposing . . . Once you know that, about the milk baths, where does it get you? My wife, who’s a wet nurse, is suckling six babies right now. Even if I made those kids go without, that would never give me enough to have a bath!”

  “You’re too quick at spotting problems!”

  “And what happened to the bath milk after he was through with it? What did he do with it?”

  “He didn’t do anything. But his personal valet took it and sold it, and it poisoned our children. The aristocrats take milk baths and our children die. The same as with the flour. The flour shortage comes from them using it all to make gruel for their cats! Or the houses! People have no place to bed down for the night. In winter the ones who are the poorest drop like flies. In the charity shelters they pack them together on straw to sleep. In the hospitals, they put them three or four to a bed. You wake up in the middle of the night, you’ve got a dead guy lying against you, stretched out stiff and cold. I’m not kidding!”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know . . . ”

  “And meanwhile, they own so many châteaux that there are some they’ve never set foot in; they don’t even know where they are, in which province . . . They’ve inherited them . . . They don’t give a damn about them . . . Can you imagine all those bedrooms, the beds, the big fireplaces, the . . . ”

  “Like here.”

  “And their dogs! You’ve seen where they keep their dogs! In kennels lined with satin, studded with gold nails. Each one like a gem of a little house. You look at those kennels and all you can think is: Man, I sure wish I could be one of those dogs. And mind you, the choice bits of food go to their mutts! What a bunch of wastrels, profiteers, bloodsuckers!”

  “Hyenas, cankers, bastards! What’s more, not all the soldiers in the foreign armies have gone. You can hear German dialect being spoken in the parts of town where working people live. There are Spaniards, too. They’re tough customers, those Spaniards. If they’re told to wipe us out, they’ll do it.”

  “The people here in the château will issue the order for us all to be killed, and not give it a second thought.”

  “Not the King! He cares about us. He’s good. But her; she’d do it without a blink! I command you! I can just hear her shouting, in her own lingo: ‘Let them be slain, all of them, to the last man!’ ”

  “She has a lot of faults, but it can’t be denied that she speaks French. You’ve heard her, same as me.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t matter. I’ve been reading the newspapers, where it gives the complete program of the Court faction, and it’s worse than you think. They want to reduce Paris to starvation, and in order to hasten the city’s destruction, they want to place a hundred pieces of artillery at the top of the Butte Montmartre and the same number—a hundred cannon—up on Belleville, all with their sights trained on the city down below. They’re going to fire their cannon and, at the same time, put the city to the sword and the torch and kill the people, until Paris, what’s left of it, submits and asks for the National Assembly to be suspended. A diabolical plan. It has Antoinette written all over it.”

  They took time out to swig from the bottle and enjoy a better foretaste of what was to come.

  “. . . It’s fantastic how Austrian she is.”

  “Everything about her. Her orange hair, her sharp nose . . . ”

  “Her carroty hair, her little stick of a nose, like a puppet in a Punch-and-Judy show.”

  “Her lips that make you think she’s above it all. Her way of holding her head way up, higher than anybody else. We who live at Versailles and see her every day—which is no treat . . . ”

  “Which was no treat. We’re not going to hang on here till we grow roots. As soon’s I finish my newspaper, I’m away.”

  “. . . We’ve seen her every day, and we can testify: she’s just plain Austrian. More all the time.”

  “With a mouth that looks ready to spit out whatever goes in.”

  “She doesn’t spit anything out because she doesn’t swallow anything. She doesn’t eat. She goes through the motions. That’s one more way she deceives the Nation.”

  “But you’ve never seen her eat or not eat; you’re always on duty at that time on a Sunday.”

  “Not me, no, but my brother has seen her not eating. He was determined to give his oldest kid a look at the King, as a First Communion present. It’s a tradition in our family. Well, I can tell you for certain: the Austrian doesn’t eat anything. She drinks the same glass of water from the time the meal starts till it ends. She doesn’t really drink: she wets her lips. And instead of eating she moves the same piece of meat around on her plate with the tip of her fork (because, even if she doesn’t eat, she has to have a fork, a knife, spoons, the whole caboodle, all of gold, naturally). She shoves it a bit to the right, a bit to the left, back to the middle. She hesitates over where it should go next. She calls that eating. And what’s more, she doesn’t take her gloves off at the table . . . Can you imagine? She keeps her gloves on and uses a fork . . . She takes a hammer to all our good, French ways. She shows no respect for anything French. Before she came along, the King and Queen used to eat in public twice a week. With her here, and I reckon after she goes, it’s just once a week, one measly time. You cross the country on foot, for that one chance a week, and she gives you nothing to look at. You’ve come all that way to watch her eat, and she doesn’t eat.”

  “They’re horrible, those Austrians. The dirtiest, most nit-picking nation of liars you could ever hope to find. Some of their customs are really disgusting. In Austria, when you marry a girl, she’s already been deflowered by her brother. The family gets first go, then you. That’s how it worked with Antoinette. She’d lost her virginity to her brother Joseph before she came to Louis’s bed.”

  “Would you want to be king?”

  “On those terms, no, I would not. If things were different, I might.”

  “Everything is the King’s, all those beautiful provinces, the forests, the oceans, you, me, the Orangerie, the Grand Stables and the Lesser Stables, everything belongs to him. That must give a person some kind of special feeling.”

  “But how does he work it so’s he feels it belongs to him?”

  “Well, when he uses things, he just takes them without asking permission. Of anybody. Whatever he decides he wants, he gets. He eats green peas on Easter Day, if he feels like it. And he eats for real, that one.”

  “He’s partial to garden peas.”

  “Or deputies! . . . ”

  (And next instant they were lying on the ground again, doubled up with laughter, because of the King’s famous slip of the tongue when the Estates-General were holding their
first meetings. He had said: “I would enjoy another helping of those deputies” instead of “garden peas”!)

  “No. . .The King isn’t fussy about his food. He eats most anything.”

  “. . . He eats most everything. Have you any idea what the menus for his meals are like? The most exquisite dishes and always in vast quantities. Just his everyday fare, picture it: four main courses, twenty side dishes, six joints of meat, fifteen regular desserts, thirty little desserts, a dozen platters of pastry.”

  “I don’t have to picture it, my brother described it for me: creme fritters with raspberry sauce, chocolate pie, almond tarts, every flavor of sherbet—cantaloupe, lemon, fig, blackberry, pomegranate—and there were Ali Babas, too . . . There’s nobody who wouldn’t like food as fabulous as that. Just talking about it makes my mouth water. How do you suppose the gentlemen servers manage to keep their hands off?”

  “They don’t keep them off. I’m sure that the King’s serving dishes have been eaten from before they get to their destination. Figure it out, it’s a long trip from the kitchen . . . the temptation is mighty strong . . . ”

  “Result: the King eats things that are already partly eaten.”

  “Partly eaten, and cold. You have five hundred people officially in your service, and the food you eat is cold.”

  “Five hundred! The Royal Commissary must be pretty big.”

  “The Royal Commissary is enormous. When you take into account that the Household Commissary includes the Royal Table-linen Officers, the Corps of Gentlemen Cupbearers, the Officers of the King’s Bread Pantry and a whole lot more . . . ”

  “Our King is an ogre. Only ogres eat on that scale.”

  “But he’s a nice ogre. I like Bailly’s motion to ‘have, on the ruins of the recently demolished Bastille, a monument erected to the glory of Louis XVI, friend to his people, friend of liberty.’”

  “I like all the motions. The patriotic ones. Motions are a great invention! . . . Still, the King can’t eat everything, or use everything. He can’t be out horseback riding and hearing a concert at Trianon at the same time.”

  “He’s not actually very big on music! Except the Saint Hubert’s Day concerts. But the Foreigner inflicts her damned Austrian music on everyone, with that Gluck of hers.”

  “He can’t ride his three thousand horses all at once.”

  “He can if he wants. There’s nothing he can’t do.”

  “You’re right. Under normal circumstances, he can do anything. If he touches someone, they’re cured; if he’s out riding and a condemned man comes his way, the man’s life is saved.”

  “But then who touches him, when he gets sick?”

  “His witch of a wife. That’s why he’s careful not to get sick.”

  “But he does get sick just the same. She sees to it he gets sick. She’s slowly poisoning him. She keeps poison hidden in her rings. She also uses ground glass.”

  “A regular Medici!”

  “The King has a tougher constitution than the Dauphin did, so the King has survived. Whereas the child succumbed pretty fast. But he died knowing who was responsible. You know what his last words were? ‘Stand to one side, if you please, so I may have the pleasure of seeing my mother weep.’ Of course the wicked stepmother wasn’t really weeping; she was pretending. Is there going to be a war?”

  “There sure is, if he doesn’t get rid of the Poisoner.”

  “But what could he do with her?”

  “They say she’ll be exiled, shut up in the fortress at Ham, sent back to Vienna, shipped off to do penal servitude in Santo Domingo, set ashore and abandoned in Guyana, or branded with a red-hot iron the way they did to that poor, sainted de La Mothe woman. The Austrian will be chained up with cartloads of her fellow sluts, dumped onto a vessel, and sent to the island of Tahiti, all in among the savages, to be a fisherwoman . . . ”

  “. . . No, no, she’d enjoy that!”

  “They’ll make her mend the fishing nets, round the clock. And every time she looks as if she’s about to fall asleep, they’ll whip her. She’ll be forced to keep right on plying her mending hook the whole time. She’ll have cuts all over her fingers, and when salt gets in them she’ll yell with pain. Another possibility is to keep her in Paris and put her through the same torture they used on the Nuremberg Virgin.”

  “The Austrian, a virgin? Not likely.”

  “The Nuremberg strumpet, more like!”

  “The whore!”

  “They could also put her in prison at Bicêtre. Or make her sweep the streets of Paris.”

  “Sweep the streets of Paris! Hold on, now! . . .You’re going a bit far . . .That I admit, I would love to see! The Queen dressed in homespun, with her head shaved, and a broom in her hands. And the Parisians at their windows emptying their shit over her head.”

  “In homespun? Why not naked, why go on paying for her to have clothes? . . .There’s something else people say about her, but this isn’t a punishnment, it’s something she is that deserves to be punished: they say she’s tribadistic. Have you heard it, too? D’you get what it means?”

  “Uh, yeah, I guess. Tribadistic, lesbian, sort of like Austrian. No difference, really. She’s Austrian: she’s lesbian. That’s how it was with her mother—Austrian, lesbian, same thing.”

  The two men were still puzzled. One of them pointed to the newspapers lying on the ground.

  “Have you read what’s in those?”

  “Some of it, not a lot. I don’t read fast enough to keep up, these days. I was okay as long as nothing was happening.”

  “Give it a try anyway, Moinel.”

  He opened a newspaper (“Man, it’s printed so small!”), and he read, struggling to separate out the syllables:

  “. . . Motion to withdraw the troops and create a Citizens’ Guard. Sire, . . . when once we have become alarmed for our freedom, neither curb nor rein can hold us back . . . Sire, we beseech you in the name of this our native land, in the name of your future prosperity and renown: send your soldiers back to the posts from whence your councillors brought them . . . Consider! Why would a King beloved of twenty-five million Frenchmen seek at great expense to surround his throne with a few thousand hastily summoned foreigners? Sire, in the midst of those who call themselves your children, let yourself be guarded only by their love; the Representatives of the Nation are called upon to join with you in establishing the preeminent rights of royalty on the im-mu-ta-ble foundation of the freedom of the people . . . ”

  Both men were moved to tears. They stood up and embraced one another. They kept repeating, like a magic formula: “on the im-mu-ta-ble foundation of the freedom of the people.”

  And all of a sudden, one of them reacted:

  “But, Pignon, we’ve won! The newspaper is even slower at catching on than you are. Those troops have withdrawn; even if there are a few still hanging around, we’ll get ’em! They’re as good as dead. Just the way we’ll get her, that Messalina!”

  And he shook his injured fist at Marie-Antoinette’s windows. I was devastated. As though I had aided and abetted them in dragging the Queen’s name through the mud.

  FOR ME, A TIME OF DISTRESS AND CONFUSION.

  ENCOUNTER WITH A SENSIBLE WOMAN.

  OMNIPRESENCE OF “THE QUEEN’S UNREQUITED LOVER.”

  I must have looked completely lost when a woman in the service of the late Dauphin came walking toward me. She was transporting a cartful of toys from the château of Meudon to the toy cupboard of the new Dauphin, on the ground floor of Versailles. I was exhausted. Between weariness and shame, I was of a mind to proclaim my woes. I scarcely knew the woman, but I needed to talk to someone. I made her the confidant of all my fears, in a rush of chaotic and contradictory verbiage. I told her in the same breath that we had to save the Queen and that the Queen had gone, that she had to be protected and that she had fled, that her bedchamber, indeed all her apartments, were empty. I had personally helped with her departure, so I knew whereof I spoke . . .

  “You re
ad too much, Madam,” she said jokingly. “It is wiser to confine oneself to what one can actually see. Words are dangerous. They told me so when I was just a little girl, and I am convinced they were right. I had an uncle who wanted to teach me to read. My father was against it. He said: ‘I want the child to be happy.’ The King and Queen are still at the château. Believe me. Each of them is lying peacefully in a royal bedchamber, still asleep. They are recruiting their strength for the day that is presently breaking. They will need it.”

  “How can you be so sure? I stood for a while under the windows of the Queen’s Bedchamber. I saw no sign of life. The curtains were open as usual, but in the bedchamber nothing was stirring.”

  “And what about that man over there; do you see him? Does his presence have no significance for you?”

  A few meters away, more or less hidden behind a bush, I could see the scarecrowlike outline of a man who was perfectly familiar to me; indeed, I had the impression that I was forever seeing him. Everyone referred to him as “the Queen’s unrequited lover”. . .Yes, I had to agree, his presence was significant; among his other oddities was his insistence on never being very far from where the Queen was. With his body straining in the direction of the place where she happened to be—a place sometimes hidden from his view but whose location, mysteriously, he could always sense—the Queen’s unrequited lover stood and waited. His real name was Monsieur de Castelnaux, and in the days when he was of sound mind, he had filled the position of Counselor in the Bordeaux Courts. But his mania now engrossed him so utterly that it was hard to believe he had ever had a name, a position, and a profession. Among the courtiers, as with Captain de Laroche, though this man was more tragic than comical, Monsieur de Castelnaux was a source of great amusement. The sayings of one and the other were repeated, their speech and manner imitated for fun. That may explain why both of them stand out so clearly in my memory, and why I can quite effortlessly call up the sallow complexion, the wild-eyed facial expression, of the man “madly” in love with the Queen. Call up, as well, his figure, curiously apt to pass unnoticed because it blended in so easily with the trees and branches, but haunting, too, because it might suddenly come into view anywhere. All one had to do was cross the invisible line of communication established by his monomania, linking him at all times to the Queen.