by Black Moishe
Gabrielle de Polignac did not seem anxious for the conversation to take a more intimate turn. She did not like talking about herself and doubtless would have preferred going back to the game of naming colors. Since the Queen insisted, however, she was obliged to say something about her mother, who had died young and for whom she had not grieved. Even when she was still alive, her mother was not much present. Moreover, Gabrielle’s memories of her were scanty. She could vaguely recall a woman of elegant figure, charmingly adorned, saying good-bye to her, that was all . . .The woman bends over the little girl, and before the child has had time to respond in kind, her mother has gone. There is the faint echo of heels along the series of dark rooms in a provincial mansion, then nothing.
“When she died, I was relieved that there would be no more of those botched good-byes: she had finally contrived to leave. My father disappeared as well. But before going off to the South of France to live, he entrusted me to a female cousin of his. It was the same sort of provincial mansion, equally vast and gloomy, but almost bare of furniture. That was something I actually liked, all those empty rooms. When I turned fourteen, I went from that cousin’s home to be reared by my aunt, Countess d’Andlau, who had a position in the Household of the Countess d’Artois. It was my aunt that married me to Count Jules de Polignac, when I was seventeen. And . . . there is no more to tell, because since then I have known nothing but happiness.”
Gabrielle de Polignac had laughed; so had the Queen, but her laughter lacked conviction.
“Still, it was kind of your mother to think of you whenever she was going away.”
“The only pity is that she never thought of me at other times. But I have no right to blame her. I do not know the woman, I never did.”
They sat in silence, each absorbed by her own reflections, and suddenly a picture, remote in time but quite clear, formed in Gabrielle’s mind.
She must have been five or six years old when a chambermaid took her, a child left to her own devices for days on end, and set out to make her beautiful. After she had been thoroughly washed, after comb and brush had been carefully applied, the chambermaid had dressed her in a white dress, put a star in her hair, and—this was the marvelous part—she had fastened two large wings to her shoulders. Then she thrust her into an immense ballroom where people were dancing. Gabrielle had been afraid at first, but everyone had treated her with great consideration, congratulating her, standing aside to let her pass, and taking care not to ruffle her splendid feathers. The ball came to an end. For two or three days, the little girl walked the corridors with her wings still attached. At last she had encountered her mother, who said to her:
“What, still costumed, Miss! Don’t you know that everything comes to an end, even a masked ball?”
“Madam,” she had wept, “I have no one to take these wings off for me.”
“There, there, Gabrielle, don’t fret; I will help you, my little angel . . . ”
And it was her mother who had unhooked those wings for her.
“Not till that moment,” Madame de Polignac had said in closing, “was I completely overcome with sadness. Mortal sadness.”
And sadness had now returned. Together, they felt it wrap them round.
At one point, their conversation shifted to recent bits of gossip about the Princess de Lamballe. Louise de Lamballe was reported to be pregnant. To counter these rumors, the Princess was constantly on horseback. As a result, she was worn down with aches and pains.
“She ought to stop. She has a weak back.”
“It hurts even worse to be slandered. I believe I caught a glimpse of our dear Lamballe earlier, when we were coming out of the Council Chambers. She did look quite ill. But in that crowd of people waiting anxiously for us to appear, she looked no more haggard than many others. The only one who always has a radiant complexion is you. You are an oasis of light in that desolation of gloomy countenances. Gloomy, not necessarily out of compassion for me, I might add.”
Gabrielle de Polignac seized this opening to apologize for daring to set aside the rule about mourning raiment. It was not intended as an act of effrontery, but as a gesture to the Queen, who, in all the black surrounding her, might thus, at least in private, find repose for her eyes and heart in a pastel color, green, the color of hope . . .
“I have lost all hope. I am touched, however, that you should have thought of me when you chose the color of your dress, green, my favorite color . . .You dressed to please me . . .You are so thoughtful, Gabrielle, so generous. With you near to me, I feel less distressed at the failure of my plans. Less distressed at the horror of the situation. We are going through an unhappy phase. Will we see the outcome? I doubt it. Nevertheless, you are right, one must have hope. I must believe in the color you are wearing . . . oasis green . . . almost the color of this bowl . . . ” (And she picked up from the mantelpiece a jade vase, turning it over and over in her hands as she spoke.) “How wonderful that there should be such a thing as colors! God might very well have created a world without colors. He was under no requirement . . . A world without colors . . . But then how would we know where a tree ends and where the sky begins? Everything would be indiscriminately merged in white. We would see without marking separation or perceiving limits. It would be restful. Perhaps. Or frightening . . . One unending day of snow . . . Unless, of course, He had created a world all of black, one unending day of night, like the day we are having now.”
The Queen detested black. For her it was the color of misfortune. But black constantly thrust itself upon her. This, despite Gabrielle and her graceful ways, despite the pale green folds of Gabrielle’s negligee, despite the pleasure they both took in their sessions of aimless, shifting chatter, when idle words elicited more idle words. They so enjoyed talking with one another, the Queen especially, but possibly both of them, that they would spend whole afternoons—and evenings!—alone together in the Queen’s Hamlet at Trianon, hidden in the grotto or shut in the little blue and gold theater, Marie-Antoinette’s little theater, her doll’s theater. They so enjoyed talking together, talking for the sake of talking, that when they actually had something to say to each other, it took them a long time to reach the point of saying it. Perhaps, after all, they never did reach it. . . Their pleasure was in the journey, not the arrival . . . But as matters now stood, their leisurely dialogue was a forbidden luxury.
I watched them as they sat there close to each other, the Queen so charmed by her friend that, without realizing it, she copied her (all at once, she would fall into the same slow rhythm of speaking—not her own usual rhythm—or wrinkle her nose in the same manner, which did not become her at all, but was very cute on the little upturned nose of Gabrielle de Polignac, an impish nose). Or she would use certain stock phrases the way her friend did, for example: “It’s all the same to me,” an expression of Gabrielle’s that infuriated Diane de Polignac, who, declarations in favor of the Philosophes notwithstanding, firmly believed that things and people were not all the same. Gabrielle had a conclusive way of using this expression; she would half close her eyes and then say, speaking very softly, that it was all the same to her. There was no use insisting, or thinking you could induce her to choose. But spoken by the Queen, “it’s all the same to me” meant something quite different. In fact, it conveyed an opposite sense. She used it to signify that she was sulking, so she would get her own way after all. Heard almost as frequently as “it’s all the same to me” was another set phrase typical of her friend, a phrase Gabrielle repeated so often that she had raised it almost to the status of a motto: “What you are telling me is beyond my grasp.” But however far she might go in unconscious imitation of her friend, this was an admission the Queen took good care not to make on her own behalf. When Gabrielle de Polignac said it, she exuded sweetness and light, she hung on your every word, she leaned toward you as if to guide you through your first experience of a lesser being. And you, out of common decency to one who had so innocently confessed her limitations, knew you would hav
e to adjust to her level. She almost felt like laughing (it was implied) at the idea that anyone could have thought her so much more intelligent than she really was, or attributed to her anything remotely resembling quickness of mind. Very, very far beyond her grasp.
“What a big place the world is!” the Queen said suddenly. “I have never even seen the sea,” she added, possibly to force a reaction from Gabrielle, whom the previous avowal had left unmoved.
“Nor have I. It is a fearful thing, I believe. Very salty, and apt to turn people away from religion.”
“The King saw it, when he went to Cherbourg. I do not know whether he touched it. He did not say anything to me on that score. He showed me on the map how to go there. But I cannot envision anything from a map, whereas from a tree or a flower, everything comes to me quite easily.” (This remark consoled me, very slightly; my having proved incapable of drawing a map was, it seemed, not so terrible after all . . .) “I need only sit in the shade of my cedar of Lebanon, and it is as though I have traveled to the Orient.”
“The whole world is here at Trianon; why put oneself to the bother of traveling?”
The question was inopportune, as Gabrielle was at once aware, but she could not undo her piece of tactlessness. Instead, it was the Queen who found something to say:
“People travel because they are bored with how things are at home, to make discoveries, or perhaps just to see for themselves. Because things are different when one is there, on the spot . . . But foreigners, the real foreigners, those who come from very far away, however hard they try, cannot make us feel what that other world is like . . . Not that I ever meet any; I have a dread of foreigners. I always think, as I did when someone suggested an interview with Voltaire, what will I say to them?”
“You forget, Madam, the visit last summer, in August, of the three envoys from Tipoo-Saëb . . . All of them diminutive, three Lilliputians. When they bent over to bow, the only thing still visible was three little turbans . . . ”
“Ah, yes, the envoys sent by Tipoo-Saëb, Sultan of Mysore . . . Their arrival had posed serious problems of etiquette. Our Presenter of Ambassadors had consulted learned treatises and found only this: ‘For extraordinary ambassadors of Muscovy, Turkey, and others on whom the King may wish to impress his greatness, nothing has been set down.’ The King had almost declined to receive them. He had had second thoughts on the matter because there were questions of geography he wanted to ask them.”
“Where is this Mysore? And is it Mysore or the Mysore?”
The Queen spread her hands to say: “I have no idea . . . ” They were odd creatures, those ambassadors. She had looked them over very closely; she had even commissioned wax figures of them to amuse her daughter, but nothing availed. Their faces would not stay fixed in her mind—they were too exotic to be remembered. They did not resemble anyone. No comparison could be made. It was like their cooking: it burned your mouth, and that was all.
“Oh, yes, now that I think of it, I do vaguely remember the one who presented me with a muslin dress. The first day, all three of them were very correct in their behavior. The following day, they seemed to have lost all interest. During the tour of the gardens, they were constantly scratching the calves of their legs . . . ”
(Both ladies laughed.)
“. . . For ten days after that, they lived shut away in their apartments at Trianon, waiting to go back to Mysore . . . to the Mysore.”
“They were like you. Afraid of foreigners.”
“They ought to have been even more afraid of the Sultan. Upon their return, Tipoo-Saëb had them beheaded.”
“Let us take care never to go to Mysore.”
They remained silent. The Queen held out her hand to her friend. And thus they held one another for a very long time, for the longest time, as though there were no crisis now, no pressure, no problem to be urgently discussed . . .There were interruptions, however, messages brought to the Queen, that she waved aside to be opened later. Nothing could disturb their mutual understanding, their singular way of being together.
“Last night,” she confided to Gabrielle, “I distinctly heard someone whispering very close to me: ‘Go ahead, do it now, she’s taking her diamonds apart.’ I felt the breath of an assassin on my neck. Sometimes I wonder whether I am losing my mind and magnifying the hatred all about me.”
“Yes, Majesty, I think you are indeed magnifying your woes. In your weariness, things look worse to you than they are. And this you must never forget: I shall always be here, at your side, sharing your trials. I shall not desert you in adversity. We shall not desert you. You have faithful friends, and grateful ones.”
Upon hearing these words, the Queen looked long and steadily at the one she called “her dear heart” and loved accordingly. And, eyes fixed upon her friend with the intensity of despair, she said to her:
“I do not magnify the hatred. On the contrary, I think it is a degree of hate that passes my comprehension. But of one thing I am certain: I have dragged you along with me into its path. Because of me, the people are determined you shall die. The French are demanding your head. In fact, that is what I have been wanting to tell you from the outset: something horrible has happened. A woman has been stabbed in her carriage. By mistake. The murderers thought it was you. You and I are surrounded. In Paris, we have been burned in effigy. After this, they will not stop at effigies. They want the real individuals, they want us, in the flesh. That is why, dearest Gabrielle, for your safety, and please understand what a wrench this is for me, I most earnestly beg you: leave this place, leave France. Do what I have not been able to do. Take your daughter, take Diane, and flee. If you do not leave, you will be massacred. You and your family. But you first of all, perhaps even you alone . . .You must move swiftly, before the wave of violence has a chance to break over you.”
The Queen has chosen her words carefully and uttered them with deep feeling. She has dared to make her proposal, which she knows is unacceptable, and is fully expecting that she will have to counter her friend’s arguments.
But Gabrielle has heard her out, untroubled. Far from protesting, she leaps at the opportunity. She agrees with the Queen: flight is imperative. It is a painful decision, but one dictated by wisdom. It will in any case be a temporary departure; they will very soon be back . . . Aghast at these calm, dispassionate words, the Queen trembles. Gabrielle can see Marie-Antoinette’s lips quivering. It makes her uncomfortable, and she turns her eyes away. The heavy silence becomes intolerable. Just to mollify the Queen, Gabrielle says a few more words, words she thinks are anodyne but that pierce the Queen like so many arrows. At last, and without raising her eyes from contemplation of the tips of her embroidery-covered feet, Gabrielle recites, all in one go, everything they will need for departure—carriages, passports, bills of exchange. Precise names and figures are given. Everything has been thought of. Having delivered her message, Gabrielle looks up. The Queen’s mouth is half open, her trembling lips painful to see. She has the imploring look of a woman who has just been struck with a fist. Gabrielle is about to say something more. The Queen enjoins her to silence, then stands up to flee from the spot. Gabrielle rushes after her and begins to moan, but stops at once when the Queen puts an arm round her waist and leans her head on her shoulder. The Queen has recovered all her beauty. And Gabrielle implores her:
“Do not let me abandon you.”
“But it is too late,” the Queen says gently. “That is precisely what you have done. You have abandoned me.”
Unlike Madame Campan, I was not accustomed to feeling transparent and afflicted with non-existence in a room where the Queen was. For that reason I was deeply troubled by the scene I am describing, but increasingly unable to do anything whatsoever except listen. I found the situation intolerable, and I was on the alert for a chance to steal away so I could stop hearing, stop seeing. The Duchess de Polignac had withdrawn. Her curtsy had seemed to me somewhat less graceful than when she arrived, but perhaps it was my imagination . . .
I was a witness to the scene involving Gabrielle de Polignac and the Queen, and were it not for the presence of Madame Campan, I would have thought I had dreamed it . . . as with another scene, several months—years?—earlier. This one took place in the ground-floor music room at the Petit Trianon, and on this occasion, too, there was a second witness, Baron de Besenval. Both of us stood mute, not daring to move. Gabrielle de Polignac was lying on top of the Queen. She held the Queen’s outspread arms pinned to the floor. The Queen was struggling beneath her friend’s body, trying to dislodge her from her victorious position.
“Say it,” a puffing, breathless Gabrielle was demanding, “Say it. Say: you win, you are the stronger.”
“I will not. I will never say anything so untrue. You are a cruel person. You use shameless tactics . . . ”
And she went off in a fit of laughter that rendered her entirely defenseless. But when Gabrielle, in turn convulsed with laughter, relaxed her grip, the Queen freed one of her hands and suddenly reversed their positions.
Baron de Besenval watched them, without laughing. It may have been the awareness of this silent, attentive, male presence that brought their game to an end.