by Black Moishe
My cries had come too late; I was now in her power. She was moving with the speed of disaster, her hair soaked in blood, her obscene flesh made even more obscene by her garment that hung in tatters—tatters one might see on the stage of a theater. She had emerged onto the terrace, hurtled through the clumps of flowers at the Water Parterre, careered off past the Orangerie toward the Lake of the Swiss Guards; she was coming back now, up to the Fountain of Latona, fulminating, bent on meting out punishment, turning away from the château, all the while imperatively calling down the wrath of the gods. From Latona, she darted down by way of the Colonnade to the Fountain of Apollo, her speed increasing tenfold out of frustration at finding a space devoid of humans, came then to the park’s northerly section, and crossed it with one mighty swoop, vaguely recognizing in her impetuous flight the Fountain of Enceladus, the Cupids of the Happy Isle, and the broad Neptune Basin, created for more propitious hours than these. She did not linger there; enraged at having found no one in her round of the park, she came back onto the terrace to resume possession of the château. And this time she would not confine herself to the kitchens . . .
The living Panic had charged blindly along her way, with no thought of turning around and looking back to enjoy the fruits of her stormy passage. Thus she had seen nothing of the frightened old man abandoned at the top of the stairway. At the first air current fanned up by Panic in her mad course, the menservants had fled. One of them had been nearly crushed under a carriage that suddenly swept by at a gallop. The Duke’s wife, almost as nimble as the two rascally servants, had hitched up her dress to midthigh and reached the statue of the Sphinx Child in a few quick strides. His daughter, too, had left the old man’s side, but, being rheumatic and hoary with age, she was limping along far behind. Panic does not take time; her sphere of influence is a hole in time, into which she flings everyone that she snatches up along her path.
She has understood in a flash: there is no one out in the château grounds. The place she must come back to, the place where she must do her work, is the château itself. There, unlike the park, there were victims in abundance, victims by the dozen, by the hundred, for the asking. She could start with me; I was hers, body and soul. Her hair, dripping with blood, had brushed against me. It had not left a stain, not even a mark, but in the overly fine fabric of my summer skirt there was a red dot, as when an extraneous thread gets into the weaving to produce a flaw.
Forgotten were Honorine and her commonsensical words. I began to run every which way, up the staircases and down, retracing my steps suddenly, opening a door. I lost all notion of where I was. I wanted to be made of glass so I could shatter. I wanted to be like the vase that the Queen had shattered. I wanted to be reduced to nothing.
* * *
Over the next few hours, I was aware of Panic only from the ravages she left in her wake. She stopped being seen “in person.” Seen by me, that is, for Versailles was so vast that one could readily imagine her to be operating in other spheres. One thing is certain: she was committing her rampages in conjunction with the people and their rebellion. The people had Panic working for them, we had her working against us. That, at least, is what I believed at the time, for I realized later that Panic was acting equally on both sides, but in the enclosed, defenseless, trapped space of Versailles, I could not possibly achieve such an overview . . .The hellish, unbelievable fact of a populace strong enough to attack the Bastille and succeed in bringing it down, remained a kind of barrier preventing my mind from going any further (in that connection Count Ségur would later write: “That fit of madness which, even now, describing it, I still have difficulty believing . . . ”). Repeatedly I told myself: “It was a natural, not a supernatural event. The Parisians found weapons, the citadel was poorly defended, they took it by storm. There were enough of them, they had enough rifles and cannons to carry the day.” This, though very painful, was logical. Logical reasoning had no effect. I could see them hurling their defiance heavenward, and it was the Heavens that came crashing down, in the thunderous roar of the Bastille’s collapsing towers. The people had stormed Heaven, and Heaven had fallen. It was said that since July 14 they had been laboring day and night at demolishing the Bastille. An accursed worksite! People were gathering up the stones, packing them on their backs, and going out into the provinces to sell them! Pedlars selling the ruins of Heaven. They claimed to be furnishing proof! Frankly, to me the whole affair was unthinkable. I tried to think about something else, no matter what, to take my mind off it, but I kept coming back to that. I could no longer think of anything but that . . . and ended up not thinking at all. Here was another way in which Panic operated: not just causing everyone to take flight, but putting into everyone’s mind a thing it could not conceive, substituting, for the mind’s intelligence, a whirlwind.
I came and went, came and went, a creature near madness. I had ceased to recognize people and places. I was stopping in front of paintings and talking to the people in them. Occasionally I would laugh and cover my eyes with my hands. I was talking to myself out loud. But Panic loosened her grip. A more powerful force had intervened.
From my life at Court and my constant preoccupation with the Queen, I had developed, along with the art of never missing an opportunity to gaze upon her, the more subtle art of sensing her nearness before I saw her. All at once I would know that she was not far off, that she was about to appear. What’s that you say? You knew? Knew, how? From an unexpected surge of warmth, an exquisite moment of weakness, a pounding of the heart. Others, physically present around me, would blur and move farther away. They became a vague, indistinct background against which, suddenly (for the signs telling of her imminent appearance in no wise diminished the suddenness of her arrival), she stood out.
And thus it chanced that at this moment, coming magically into view, there she was.
We were on the ground floor in a corridor with entrance doors to several of the apartments occupied by her friends. The Queen, when I saw her, was facing away from me. She was alone, holding a candlestick. She was standing at one of the doors, politely and humbly asking to be admitted. After a moment of waiting, she tried again at the lodgings of other friends. At each door, she was greeted by the same silence. Then she lost patience, became indignant, began to utter loud reproaches. But her voice dropped when, on reaching out to give one of the doors a shake, she realized that it was padlocked. As were others. With the padlocks hastily installed, more or less everywhere along the corridor, on those white and gold doors, like locks on gardeners’ huts.
The Queen had two manners of walking that I knew well: her official manner, rather slow and solemn and making her look larger; and her private one, very brisk but showing the curves of her body and with a slight swaying of the hips that made you want to sing. What I had never seen before was this heavy gait, a sagging of the shoulders, and an unsureness, a kind of stupor that inhibited her movements. A walk that betokened misfortune, betokened the discovery that there was an additional degree to her unhappiness. She had thought she could rely on her friends for support, to help her bear the estrangement of Gabrielle de Polignac, and the friends were not responding. For the first time, roles were reversed. She was asking something of them. She needed them.
The Queen had never experienced the dark side of these corridors, salons, and private studies. She had never in her life come up against a closed door. She had never opened a door, for that matter, never touched a door. There was a lost, wandering quality to her progress as she came back toward her own apartments. Like me a moment earlier, she did not give the impression of knowing exactly where she was. Her pace was rapid, but she stopped at intervals. She seemed to go in fear of a danger lurking very nearby and ready to pounce on her. She turned slightly, but could not escape. She had just entered the War Salon. She held her candlestick high, cautiously casting light into a corner or behind a screen. She could have gone to the King’s rooms to ask for protection. She did the opposite. She turned away from him. At that moment,
a breath of air put her candle out. She stood motionless, stiff, facing the impassable threshold of the Hall of Mirrors. There was no longer any guard to announce The Queen. Not a single courtier to react to such an announcement. Her presence caused no stir. Everything hung upon the movement she could not bring herself to make. She put a foot forward and drew back. She was terrified as she faced that chasm of shadow. She knew she must make the leap, find the courage to walk forward by herself, between rows of mirrors with no images.
I can still hear the sound of her dress brushing across the inlaid floor, I can see her ring-laden hands holding open the high double doors. I can feel her irregular, terrified breathing. Before her—undulating, beckoning, and treacherous, like a body of water opaquely concealing its bottomless depths—there stretches the Hall of Mirrors.
She has lost the ability to walk. Alone, she cannot walk.
I tell myself: she won’t do it. She will not have the courage to do it. And in my disordered mind, the Queen is no different from that paralytic, the old Duke de Reybaud, left by himself in his chair.
I close my eyes.
I weep for her, for them.
“All is lost,” my friend had said. He was right. All was lost, irremediably lost.
NIGHT
THE HISTORIOGRAPHER OF FRANCE IS
ENTRUSTED BY THE KING WITH A SACRED MISSION:
THE DRAFTING OF A PASTORAL LETTER
(seven o’clock in the evening).
“The Queen is alone,” I said, as I walked into Jacob-Nicolas Moreau’s study.
“The privilege of greatness, my dear.”
His tone of voice surprised me.
“You don’t understand what I’m saying. She is alone in front of closed doors. She is hurting her hands trying to open padlocks. She is alone at the entrance to the Hall of Mirrors.”
“Everything you are telling me is unimaginable and shocking. And many other things are, I suspect, in store, that will be equally unimaginable and shocking, horrors beyond measure, unless . . . ”
“You said it before, and now I’m convinced: we are doomed. The day of punishment is upon us.”
“I did say it, but possibly there is a way to avoid the worst and suspend the punishment.”
“By force of arms?”
“No, the King is prepared to make every concession in order to avoid civil war. All his actions stem from that one policy. He does not want to see killing take place among his children. He swore that no drop of French blood would be shed through any fault of his. He is having recourse to prayer. The country is seething with unrest. The people have been won over and are beside themselves with rage. The real question is to ascertain whether there is still a chance for them to come back to their senses and return to the love of God.”
“I dare say . . . but it seems to me you are considering the matter with a confidence you lacked entirely, not so long since.”
“That’s because in the interval I have been honored with a commission from the King. A charge so deeply moving and so characteristic of his great goodness that my only fear is of not measuring up to the task. That would be worse than anything. But if I contrived, were it only in part, to meet His Majesty’s expectations, then the spirit of discord might diminish, and the Revolution, which, as its name suggests, is a circular motion, might bring us back to a time of obedience. The people will be cured of this state of combustion, which must surely be hard to live with, and from which, if the truth were known, they long to be freed. They will be cured and the Nobility saved, saved from its own cynicism and hard-heartedness. We are experiencing an illness of the soul, to which no one has proved completely immune. A return to godliness of spirit is the only remedy.”
“The King had already honored you with an explicit commission, before the Estates-General convened.”
“. . . Last February, my French Monarchical Constitution Expounded and Defended. It did not enjoy the success I had hoped for. Did my diction lack vitality, did my reasoning need to be more tightly argued?” (Here I protested.) “I do not know; I shall rework it when time permits. What I do realize now with certainty is that aside from my weaknesses as a writer, the basic error lay in treating my subject on a political plane, when in fact the problem is a religious one. Politics is the enemy’s ground. Ours is faith. I must find the words that can bring an end to the state of nonbelief presently afflicting the French people, the noxious skepticism poisoning their minds. I must find words that will strike down ‘the wicked in all their effrontery,’ to use His Majesty’s sublime expression.”
“And what form will your composition take? Does it have a title?” I asked timidly.
“His Majesty has commissioned from me a Pastoral Letter to the Bishops of France. It will be sent to all the bishops in the kingdom for publication in their respective dioceses.”
“But how wonderful! This means that it is up to you to change the course of History.”
Monsieur Moreau was quivering with the excitement of it all. He sensed the critical importance of this piece of writing and how vital it was that mediocrity of any kind be excluded. That was why, though he was by nature a reserved man, he could not resist the desire to read me the opening lines. Holding his pen in one hand, and his written pages in the other, he began: “Pastoral instruction to all French bishops requiring public prayers to be offered, in accordance with the request from Louis XVI, for the granting of divine light to guide the National Assembly, and for an end to the troubles already threatening France.”
Just from his reading of the title, I was deeply moved. I could hear it echoing in the sacred precincts of a church, delivered from a raised pulpit. I had no doubts of its power to sway. I could see the whole of France on its knees.
“You are too generous, Madam,” said the Historiographer playfully, but he continued, his voice betraying even greater emotion:
“You are aware of the acts of rebellion and banditry that have been perpetrated in the capital city. If this spirit of sedition should chance to reach the confines of your Diocese or spread into those confines, you will, I am persuaded, place in its path every obstacle that your zeal, your attachment to My Person, and, most of all, the Holy Religion whose Minister you are, cannot fail to suggest. The upholding of public order is a Gospel law as it is a law of the State, and whatever disturbs that order is criminal in the eyes of God and man alike.”
It was a splendid text. Splendid and convincing. I had admired his French Monarchical Constitution Expounded and Defended, but his Pastoral Instruction was beyond compare. With this new opus, written at this moment of religious crisis and national emergency, his talent had realized its full potential. Jacob-Nicolas Moreau could not sit still. He paced back and forth between his various pieces of nonmatching furniture, picking his way along the narrow trenches reserved for walking, in what little space remained between the piles of books. His oratorical enthusiasm did not prevent him from carefully respecting the piles. He threaded his way through the labyrinth formed by towers of paper, declaiming as he went: “It is important that you be accurately informed as to the causes and consequences of the riots in Paris. These causes and consequences, revealed by you to the populations of your various dioceses, will effectively preserve them from sedition, preventing them from being either its victims or its accomplices. Revolt has been fomented by men coming from outside and infiltrating the parishes they wished to subvert. These depraved men . . . ”
But he stopped short. He rushed to the door and double-locked it. He stayed with his back against the door, arms outspread.
“Listen,” he said to me, “don’t you hear?”
My reaction was stupid: I tried to step out and see what was happening.
“Don’t go out of the room. They’re here. They’re inside the château.”
We stayed for a few minutes with our ears pressed to the door. The sounds of Versailles were familiar to me, but this one was new.
“Are they pulling cannon?”
Jacob-Nicolas Moreau ha
d softly withdrawn the key so he could look through the keyhole. What he had seen left him flabbergasted. He straightened up.
“We can go out. There is no danger.”
Indeed, there was little to be feared from the shameful band who were trying to be as discreet as they could and achieving exactly the opposite effect. The courtiers were moving out, and it was abundantly clear that they were quite unused to what this entailed. In truth, it would be hard to imagine a more unlikely, awkward group or anyone less skilled in the handling of furniture, luggage, and packages that gaped open because they were not properly tied. These people were leaving Versailles as speedily as they could, and for the few who were fleeing empty-handed with just one idea in mind—to leap on a horse and make for foreign soil—there were many more, the majority, in fact, reenacting on a smaller scale the King’s indecisive behavior. They wanted to leave, as fast as possible and without attracting notice, but balked at the prospect of traveling without their creature comforts. Perhaps, too, it occurred to them that if they were rushing off pell-mell into an unknown land, they might be glad one day to have the option of selling the rosewood console table, the marble statuette, the Sèvres umbrella stand, the sapphire-inlaid clock, or whatever object it was that they held absurdly hugged in their arms until, either to move faster or because they had just cracked their treasure in two by banging into a door, they simply left it there on the spot. Not without regret; some of them actually turned and came back to pick up the abandoned item, which in many cases had been a gift from the King or the Queen. I heard arguments and recriminations. And, as there were no children at Versailles, the courtiers were going away without them, confident that the wet nurse who had begun to suckle them would continue to do so. Or else the courtiers completely forgot them. Reverting to savagery, for they could feel rebel hands around their throats, dragging them away to be hanged from the nearest lamppost, some of these noble parents did not even remember having procreated.