Farewell, My Queen

by Black Moishe

  The Queen’s unrequited lover was a tall, thin man, his greenish face marked with the scabs of small cuts, which he scratched at, causing them to bleed. Most often, he was silent, preoccupied with his obsession. He was a sinister sight, painful to behold. You found yourself wishing he were somewhere else. At the least, it would have been a great relief to stop running into him every time you were answering a summons to the Queen’s presence. Vain hope: he was always there. Throughout the two evening hours taken up by the Queen’s Games, he stood motionless, facing Her Majesty’s Square; at the Royal Chapel, likewise, he chose a seat just below the royal balcony where she could look down and see him, and he never failed to be present at the King’s Dinner or the ceremonial Public Repast. When the Queen went to Mademoiselle Montansier’s theater, he sat as close as he could to her loge, and, locked in one position, devouring her with his great imploring eyes, not for a single moment did he turn away from her. Leaving the château to travel elsewhere, one might have hoped for a respite from this baneful individual. No such thing. For ten years, wherever the Court had gone, so too had he. In fact he went ahead. He would leave for Fontainebleau or Saint-Cloud the day before the Court set out, and when the Queen arrived at these various residences, the first person she encountered upon alighting from her carriage was her lugubrious admirer. During the Queen’s sojourns at the Petit Trianon, his passion became even further inflamed. He would hastily have a bite to eat with one or other of the guards, and spend the entire day, even in rainy weather, going round and round the gardens. He walked with long strides, always keeping to the edge of the ditches. In all weathers, he wore the same garments, a green jacket and yellow breeches. His waistcoat, which must once have been elegant, was in tatters. From the jacket, pieces of lining protruded. The colors were washed-out. His faded clothes showed lighter streaks, giving the impression that water never stopped trickling down him, even when the sun was shining. He held in his hand a plumed hat, whose feathers were almost completely reduced to their central shaft. Leaves and twigs caught in his jacket collar. The Queen’s unrequited lover had a rented room in the town, but most of the time he spent his nights outside, standing watch beneath the windows of his goddess. It had to be exceptionally cold, or snowing, for him to abandon his post. And I can even remember one winter morning when, in the wan light of day, and while the only things still discernible on the snow-covered surface of the gardens were the black flocks of crows, he had been found stretched out on the frozen ground, just at the foot of the statue of King Louis XV. They had carried him to a sentry box. When he had come back to life, he had known a moment of terror, because from this unfamiliar place, he could no longer determine the whereabouts of his adored one.

  How had he gone from somewhat excessive royalist fidelity to this utterly unbridled love? Or was madness already incipient in the way he collected everything having the remotest relation to the Queen’s existence? Not an engraving, not a printed line appeared without his buying it or copying it over into a large notebook that he called Journal of Coincidences or Register of Events Ordained by Fate. By way of an epigraph, he had written, in huge letters on the first page: “A Large Circle gathered in the Queen’s Apartments.” The same sentence recurred several times, but written in a feverish, irregular hand. Queen might take up an entire page. The notebook of the unrequited lover was black, with a thick cardboard cover. The corners of it were worn, and like his clothing, the black of the cover and the ink of the written sentences were smudged, bleached by the inclemencies of the weather.

  Most of the time, he was content simply to be there, close to Her side or calculating with unfailing accuracy the exact location of Her presence. At the Petit Trianon, the Queen often met him when she was out walking, alone or with her children. He would bow and turn rigid, as though struck by lightning. After a certain interval, which he required in order to recover from his emotions, he would resume his patrol along the edge of the ditch (he also walked along the Grand Canal, on the very brink). The Queen was by now some distance off; he would gaze after her, still deeply affected by the “coincidence.” She, for her part, never went out of her way to avoid him and never turned aside when she had allowed him to kiss her hand and he remained bent over, his nostrils pinched, his eyes white, trembling from head to foot. He did not have the strength to stand erect again; a lackey had to help him. The Queen saw to it that this was gently done: “Do not hurt him,” she ordered. Badly shaken, beside himself, the Queen’s unrequited lover would wag his head this way and that, and try to fend off the impending attack of nerves. Most often, under the effect of Her presence, he succeeded. The attack would come later. Then he could be heard, howling in the bosquets, Marie-Antoinette Queen of France and Navarre, Marie-Antoinette Queen of France and Navarre, and adding, in litany sequence, Marie-Christine, Marie-Élisabeth, Marie-Amélie, Jeanne-Gabrielle, Marie-Josèphe, Marie-Caroline, sisters to my Queen. Those who had seen him in that state knew that he gashed his face with his nails and banged his head against the statues—all of which he hated, reviling them as usurping women, filthy trollops, harlots of the open marketplace. But other times, most times, the ceremony of an encounter with Marie-Antoinette went off much more tranquilly. Ecstatic at the miracle of her hand in his, he would only murmur, “My Queen,” and remain kneeling, motionless—for eternity, if he could have had his wish.

  The Queen, who was incapable of committing a harsh act however slight, had thought of a tactful way to escape his unwanted attentions. One day she had given Monsieur de Sèze permission to enter Trianon, and had then sent word that he was to proceed to Madame Campan’s quarters. The First Lady of the Bedchamber had been instructed to brief the celebrated lawyer concerning the obsession of the unrequited lover, and then send for the lover, so that Monsieur de Sèze could have a private conversation with him. Skilled in handling every sort of case, Monsieur de Sèze spoke to him for almost an hour and made a great impression on his mind, probably because, listening to the lawyer, Monsieur de Castelnaux had responded to an old form of discourse that he himself had once used professionally. Convinced, if only for the moment, and restored to his former self, he penned a note to be conveyed to the Queen, informing her that, as she found his continued presence unwelcome, he was withdrawing forthwith to his native province, where he would return to his earlier pursuits. The Queen, much pleased, expressed to Monsieur de Sèze the extent of her royal satisfaction. Half an hour after the lawyer’s departure, Monsieur de Castelnaux was announced. He had come to say that he retracted what he had written, for he could not, simply by willing himself to do so, stop seeing the Queen. This declaration, soberly delivered but accompanied by behavior suggestive of deadly resolve, had been unpleasant for the Queen. She had smiled at him and signaled for him to be ushered from her presence, and then she had merely said: “Very well, let him pester me, but let him enjoy unhindered the pleasure of being free.” No sooner was the freedom of the gardens restored to him, than Monsieur de Castelnaux, marveling at the fortune of not being separated from his love, had declaimed his litanies with exceptional enthusiasm. For once, Marie-Amélie, Jeanne-Gabrielle, Marie-Josèphe, Marie-Caroline, sisters to my Queen! had rung out like an ode to joy, enriched by Marie-Thérèse, Béatrice-Charlotte, daughters to my Queen! But his confusion of the living and the dead had been particularly painful to Marie-Antoinette, for the previous night, as she was returning late to seek her bed, four candles set on her dressing table had gone out one after the other, and she could not help interpreting this occurrence as a sinister augury.

  Monsieur de Castelnaux, absorbed by his inner torment, was not interested in anything else. He was uniformly indifferent to the people at Versailles, except for me, whom he detested almost as much as he did the ladies in the statues (because of my duties as reader? or “just because,” for no reason?).

  If he was here, it meant the Queen could not have left. I fully agreed. Which only added to my bewilderment:

  “But I don’t understand. I saw the Queen packin
g for her journey. If she hasn’t left yet, she’s about to. It’s a matter of hours, minutes. Everything that happens is now dictated by the National Assembly. That’s why the Queen is going away. It’s simple, isn’t it? A person can understand that without being able to read.”

  “A person should certainly not lose her composure over such a trifle. The orators with their cries of rage, the register of grievances, pooh! Just so much huffing and puffing. A breath of wind . . . The King and the Queen have no intention of giving ground in the face of something so insubstantial as the National Assembly. The Representatives are puppets, marionettes whose strings they pull to suit themselves . . . My poor dear, you really are not at all yourself. Can you have taken so seriously the great opening procession of the Estates-General? Let me tell you what it really was.”

  And she came and stood very close to me (it may have been my imagination, but I had the impression that the Queen’s unrequited lover was stirring in the foliage of the trees).

  “The meeting of the Estates-General,” she whispered, “was decided upon by vote, with the sole purpose of providing a diversion for the King’s son as he lay dying. The Estates-General in themselves are of no importance; all they contribute is complaints and recriminations. No, the important thing was the procession announcing their opening. That was what the King wanted to give his little boy for a present. The rest doesn’t count.”

  And with her fingernail she scraped away a grass blade stuck to one of the topazes decorating a wagon that had been the child’s.

  THE COUNCIL MEMBERS FILE OUT OF THE CHAMBER

  (ten o’clock in the morning).

  I had been led to think, after the sleepless night when so many of my assumptions had crumbled (not really under the impact of a piece of news but rather in the crucible of a fateful presentiment, as when an epidemic threatens), that normal life with the rigidly set pattern, the noises and round of activities I had assimilated into my very being, had disappeared. I now thought I must have been mistaken, for when I drew near to the antechamber called the Oeil-de-Boeuf—the waiting room of a château that to its inhabitants was, in a sense, nothing more than an immense, labyrinthine monument to Waiting—I found it full of people. Those courtiers enjoying the privilege of access to the King’s Bedchamber were clustered, as close as they could get, around the door. Of the remainder, farther away, some were standing in the Oeil-de-Boeuf, others in the room adjoining it, the First Antechamber. They all had their backs to me and were facing the focal point of their attention: the double doors to the King’s Bedchamber, both of which were shut. At any moment, the usher was going to appear and announce to a perfectly silent throng the First Entries. He would come back an hour later to bring in the Lesser Entries. Everything seemed in order. The two drunken doorkeepers had been discharged and immediately replaced. My confusion of mind was forgotten. I looked for a corner where I could wait at my ease without sitting down. I went and stood behind the press of the crowd, not far from the door that led by a secret passage to the Queen’s Apartments. I leaned with my back against a window ledge. Yes, things were going better. Those whose business it was had no doubt regained control of the situation at dawn. Unless no control had ever been lost, or even imperiled, and all this had been nothing but an immense masquerade, and I, like many another, had let myself be duped . . . but what of the previous day? and the past night? Had reducing us to a state of terror also been part of the masquerade? The Great Royal Masquerade?

  The courtiers spoke not a word. With each fresh arrival, a few of them would turn around and, depending on the newcomer’s importance, greet him with a slow, full nod, or a barely perceptible bow, or else ignore him altogether; indeed, with the return of daylight, the passion for treating each person according to rank had recovered all its prerogatives, and the retrospective embarrassment of having spoken, during the night, with just anyone, of having consorted, probably more than once, with people of no consequence, made the courtiers quite uncomfortable. But by morning light they remembered who they were, and the innate sense of social distances prevailed once more. Yes, they greeted one another, but only after due consideration. These passing waves ruffled the immobility of the group, then petrification would again descend over them all.

  I took care to remain pressed against my window. I did not want to mingle with the group, to which I did not belong, and which, moreover, included only a limited number of women (whose very presence in this place at this hour was anomalous. I did not dwell on that “detail”: I was looking for reassurance). No doubt the women were back in their apartments, trying to get some rest. I could well have used some rest myself, but I was very anxious to learn more about the Queen’s real intentions. I met the searching gaze of Monsieur Palissot de Montenoy, who held in his hand the Gazette of Court Bereavements, one of the most eagerly looked-for publications. Someone came over to speak to him. I was not surprised; Monsieur Palissot de Montenoy was very well liked. He had an insatiable curiosity about people, living and dead alike; and since his curiosity was served by exceptional powers of observation and remarkable deductive skills, he was rightly considered one of the best sources of information about life at Court and circles of influence in Paris. His knowledge ran the gamut from the latest piece of gossip to the complexities of diplomatic negotiations. And, unlike Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, who interpreted History within the framework of the Eternal Scheme of Things, the gazeteer of Court bereavements, with his predilection for even the smallest details, saw History from the standpoint of a human life. He kept a register of the last words uttered by people who were dying. I had no special sympathy for the gazeteer, but, in order to obtain more information, I placed myself within earshot. What a surprise! For perhaps the very first time, Monsieur Palissot de Montenoy admitted that he did not know anything special. He knew only what was generally known: that the King had withdrawn the foreign troops. The only difference was that he could supply a figure: there were some 60,000 men involved. But as for the rest—was the King going to yield to the Estates-General or was he not, concerning their demands that Breteuil’s government be dissolved and Necker brought back?—he was as much in the dark as everyone else (I did notice, with considerable relief, that he made no references to the Queen’s travel preparations). To retrieve his reputation and prove that he did after all have something to tell, the gazeteer of Court bereavements announced some very recent demise of which he alone had been informed. But the death that was preying on everyone’s mind did not involve one individual. And the questioner, disappointed, left Monsieur Palissot de Montenoy’s side. The gazeteer must have felt somewhat vexed. He stood for a few minutes with head slightly bent as though beneath the weight of his reflections. But it was not in his nature to be discouraged for long. He raised his head and began once again to scrutinize the people present.

  There had been a time in the Oeil-de-Boeuf when the existence of so many unresolved enigmas would have given rise to wagers. Bets would have been laid on the chances of Necker’s being recalled. And the stakes, there beneath the fresco representing child bettors, might have risen high, quite possibly as high as when people were betting on the sex of the Chevalier d’Eon or the Queen’s pregnancies. But on this occasion, in that room with its floor smooth from hundreds and hundreds of feet treading their invisible paths across it again and again, no one dared offer any comment, nor place any bet. Nevertheless, it soon became abundantly clear to me that the atmosphere was thick with gloomy prognostications. The air of irresponsibility that I had breathed with my very first awakening at Versailles, making life there feel so effortless (perhaps because some superior power—God? the King? Court Etiquette?—oversaw its continuance), was a thing of the past. My little burst of optimism faltered.

  None of the gentlemen present had shaved, or powdered his hair, or even changed his clothes. They were wearing the garments they had been wearing the previous evening (which meant in effect the garments they had worn all night), mourning clothes, as prescribed by etiquette, which, for
the death of His Royal Highness Xavier-François, Dauphin of France, forbade the wearing of colors for two-and-a-half months. Since July 12 we had been in the second period of mourning, that is, for the men, costume all of black with black buttons and plain muslin cuffs, black silk stockings and goatskin shoes, shoe buckles and sword of silver. I saw one man who had not progressed beyond the first period. He continued to wear a sword and shoe buckles of bronze, and cuffs of cambric. On this day, his solecism passed unremarked . . .There was something generally somber emanating from the deep mourning that draped the entire château, its every nook and cranny, its smallest panel . . . and something particularly distressing about this group of people in funereal garb, silent, all their attention focused on a closed door. Everyone had noticed the defection of the French Guards. There was no one left to defend the château except the Swiss Guards. Fear had gone up a notch. It could be detected in a nervous tic common to several courtiers: with tousled hair, and a worried look on their faces, they kept straightening their perukes, not looking at what they were doing, the same way, so it was said, that in the dark night of her blindness an aged Marchioness du Deffand had once endlessly tied bows.

  All these dark costumes were being steeped in a strong smell of food. It came from a nook on the left of the doorway to the King’s Bedchamber, where Füchs, the Oeil-de-Boeuf custodian, was regularly encamped. At the moment, he was busy cooking his breakfast Welsh rabbit. The courtiers were marinating in an odor of onion, cheese, and alcohol that merged with the smell of pea soup, Füchs’s regular fare. Füchs, who was rough-mannered, banged his spoon against the cast-iron stove. He swore in his booming voice. Poking up the fire, his face close to his mess tin where a slice of dark bread spread with cheese lay sizzling, he muttered plaintively: