by Black Moishe
A lady was walking with slow steps. Her husband was striding ahead. Struck by a sudden thought, she set down the hatbox she was carrying in her arms, and asked:
“What are we going to do about Henriette?”
“To what Henriette does Your Ladyship refer?”
“Our daughter, Your Lordship.”
“I beg you will not confuse all these problems one with the other. It happens there is an immediate one. The people are a tangible threat. They are drawing near. They intend to kill us. They are going to kill us. Our names are on lists. Perhaps as early as tomorrow Versailles will have been reduced to a heap of ruins, with bodies scattered about. Nothing else will remain of the last French Court. Do you quite understand, Madam?” (He was expressing himself with grandiloquence and speaking too loudly, addressing his wife as though he were at one end of a room in a feudal castle and she at the other.) “Is that the fate you desire? To die here? If so, I give you leave; I do not force you to follow me, but do not seek to delay me with trivial queries. And I would point out to you that Henriette is not our only child. You appear to take very lightly, Madam, the matter of Achille, Modeste, Sosthène, and Bénédicte.”
The lady abandoned her hatbox by a wall, almost at my feet. And thus disencumbered of her baggage and her maternal solicitude, she could move on at the same rate as her husband.
The awkward feature of the affair was the accumulation of bags, trunks, chests, and bundles that were being dragged along and had very quickly, in that narrow corridor, begun to block the passage.
The people who were leaving with baggage are the ones I remember most vividly. Because they looked so ridiculous as they struggled past. Because of the mixture of haste and waste, and their rather touching incompetence, thus exposed for anyone to see. By the very manner of their fleeing, they were forgetting what was due their rank. Perhaps that explained the shame they felt: it was not the flight, but the fact of being forced to flee in this disgraceful fashion. Flee without a presentable travel costume, as the Queen had insisted a few hours earlier, referring to herself. Many, however, rendered even more distraught by the sense of urgency, were departing empty-handed. It seemed to them that their lives were hanging by a thread, that to linger was to perish, victims of a collective massacre. I think that was when the latest of many malign rumors reached us: it was said that the underground passages at Versailles were stuffed with explosives. The château was going to blow up at any moment. Over the previous few days, the same fear had the Parisians terrorized and helpless: they were convinced that the royalists had planted bombs and Paris was about to be wiped out.
Panic took hold of me again.
“My dear, you must keep your wits about you. If we are on the point of being blown up, we are too late to prevent it. We will be dead a few seconds from now. Or else we already are. Let us put aside this rumor and return to my apartments. I will read you the next part of my Pastoral Instruction.
“Some of them are leaving without any baggage, without a change of clothing, without the basic necessities. Could they be intending to return in a few days? That would explain why they are not taking anything with them.”
“How could I possibly have the answer to your question? Who knows? But perhaps it’s as you say . . . We shall soon see them returning . . . those who escape the wrathful fury of the rebels. The others, well . . . As for us, no purpose is served by continuing to stand in the path of the herd, where we could easily come to grief. Someone might do us a mischief, and we’ve already learned all we need to know about human ingratitude.”
Just then, as though to supply him with additional proof, he spied a man in the act of pulling a small painting off the wall: Still Life with Asparagus. Jacob-Nicolas Moreau could not help intervening.
“Mister Moreau,” said the culprit, speaking with the greatest arrogance, “you are a good, decent writer, a respectable scholar, a remarkable librarian, and an unrivaled observer of human behavior, but I invite you to take your remonstrances and stuff them up your ass. You can mention that in your notebooks for the edification of posterity.”
I would have liked to come to the insulted man’s defense, but he persuaded me to hold my tongue. “Let it be, I’m used to it. My undertakings are generally greeted with nothing but derision and disdain.” Then, after a pause, he added, “The scoundrel did not mention my abilities as a Historiographer.”
Those who were running away chose the least conspicuous routes. Most of them went by way of the inner courtyards. There is a very old rule of courtesy that states the following precept: “When visiting, one must be at pains, upon leaving a group, to make one’s exit as discreet as possible. One should strive to spare the hostess the awkwardness of a formal leave-taking. For that reason, one often seizes a moment when others are arriving.” Well, I could say that in a manner of speaking, to judge solely by outward behavior, those words describe exactly what was happening. The courtiers were leaving as discreetly as possible. They were striving to spare the lady of the house the awkwardness of a leave-taking. They were even putting into practice a courteous little device sanctioned by custom: slipping out quietly, under cover of the noise made by those who were coming in. Except that their actions were no longer dictated by courtesy. . .
Panic ignores pauses. She does not consider rank, nor does she distinguish between a casual au revoir and a final adieu. For her there are only solutions or obstacles. And it happened that obstacles, unforeseen ones, were about to emerge.
The Historiographer now had the strength of a man imbued with a mission. His position was safe, unassailable. (And he maintained the same serenity, of the kind that stands above events, until the day he was incarcerated at Les Récollets Prison in the town of Versailles in 1793. Then, as a precaution, he asked his wife to burn papers of his that might compromise him. She, in her anxiety to comply, threw onto the fire all his manuscripts, including his journal.) The calmness of his demeanor had the effect of shutting me out. Not in any harsh way, but I simply could not rise to—much less maintain—his level of certainty and resolve. I could pray, in the shadows, and ask for help. The voice of God did not speak in me, certainly not for the sacred purpose of reaching out through me to touch the heart of France. I have to confess that in me the voice was barely audible. I could no longer recognize my world in the wreckage of those hours. Details caught my attention. Fragments that I was unable to set into a whole picture. I was too close or too far removed. Was it a result of having lived constantly with books, or of having lived in the paradise of gold and flowers called Versailles? In the château libraries nothing came to break up the neat line of books; the very doors gave the illusion that you were part of the library. This sheltered enclosure had now been violated.
That earlier scene, of the Queen knocking at her friends’ doors, replayed itself over and over in my mind. She calls out to them. Then she perceives that their doors are shut with padlocks. She sways, is on the verge of fainting. She tries to steady herself by grasping the padlocks. She scrapes her hands on them . . . Her fingers, laden with rings, her hands, holding apart the double doors to the Hall of Mirrors, are grazed and scratched.
There remains that “shining” of hers, a light that never goes out. “What you are trying to describe is her goodness,” says the Prince de Ligne, when I use such vague expressions.
They were fleeing. They were barely taking time to fasten the straps on their baggage. They were leaving everything behind. Everything and nothing. Those cramped, tiny rooms they had fought so hard to obtain were nothing but places where they changed their raiment. Four times a day. Without having had the least suspicion of what was coming, they found themselves living under the roof of a vanquished king, linked to a party that had been annihilated. They wanted to put as much distance as they could between themselves and that defeat. Not to be swallowed up in the catastrophe. They were deserting, with no regard for their hosts. But perhaps it was not so simple. Some of them may have had minds more divided than their behavior su
ggested.
That man there, for instance. He is in riding dress and carries a bag, but as he passes through the King’s Bedchamber, he does not fail to genuflect in front of His Majesty’s bed.
Everywhere, except in the steady accumulation of sentences constituting the Pastoral Letter, disorder mounted. The volume of noise was increasing. Chaos was gaining ground. I learned that the vestry of the Royal Chapel was being used as a camp. There were people occupying the confessionals. I beg your pardon? What’s that you say? A camp? I rushed to see. But well before I reached the vestry I realized that new elements were coming into play. There was tremendous congestion at the doors, those leading to the grounds as well as those facing the town. Oddly enough, the château of Versailles, which to me was the epitome of danger, the deadly trap, the place that was liable to blow up at any moment, the place that beyond any doubt was going to be assailed and destroyed, did not appear in that light to everyone. To me, if there was one word that summed up Versailles, it was vulnerability. For the past two days, we had been confronted with our complete lack of defensive means. In the last analysis, this lack had been our sole object of contemplation through all that sleepless night. It had been like something out of a bad dream, the realization that the only protections Versailles had were its curtains, its wall hangings, and its shutters. This was a house of cards, a château of cards, collapsing noiselessly at the first breath of hostility. To stay was to get killed; that, uncoded, was the message conveyed by the wild migration I was now witnessing. Well, this deadfall, this mousetrap was suddenly being invaded by a multitude of individuals who were seeking refuge at Versailles, “in these parts,” as though, once within its gates, in the other world tangibly represented by the château, they were entering an impregnable fort. I wrote “multitude.” I am overstating. Their wrought-up condition, the look they had of people with the devil on their tail, made me think they were more numerous than they, in fact, were. Compared with the exodus of the “lodgers,” the refugees were in the minority, but in their greedy desire to put in at the safe haven they had steered for, they were every bit as frenzied as the people running away. I could tell from their bearing and attire that the newcomers were of noble birth. They were arriving for the most part as families, sometimes with a few servants, faithful souls who, seeing their master set off on this desperate venture, had clung to his coattails or else been carried along in spite of themselves from force of habit. These servants, though passive, increased the number of newcomers and made it even more difficult to move around. The people arriving and the ones leaving collided, had confrontations, stood their ground, pushed, and were pushed back with equal firmness, both sides fully determined not to give an inch. Suddenly, under pressure from farther back in the crowd, someone’s resistance would yield. Over the unlucky person’s body, a group of deserters would stream out or a few refugees would surge in. The new arrivals, once they got past the bottle neck and had the illusion of finally being safe, were inclined to be communicative. They dropped into comfortable chairs that other people were just about to heave up out of the way. They wanted to tell their story. And since the time for convoluted speech and apt turns of phrase was long gone, they launched wild-eyed straight into tales of châteaux in flames, looting, and manhunts. Count Grisac, a Representative of the Nobility to the Estates-General, had been returning home to his demesne in the province of Limousin. He had been recognized by his peasant farmers as he turned into the road that led to the little village. Hatred flared. They brandished their pitchforks as they shouted: “String him up! We’re going to hang you high, Your Lordship! We’re going to bust you open, bleed you like a stuck pig! We’re gonna get you, we’ll tear your heart out, we’ll have your guts to weave our baskets with.”
“ ‘We’ll have your guts to weave our baskets with’? Did they really say that?” asked a young woman wearing an immense hat. She was bending over a wicker trunk that she was trying to shut with a dog leash and did not turn around to pose her question.
“Well, yes, in their local dialect, of course.”
Two château servants who were crossing the salon arm in arm, striking the floor very noisily with their heels, burst into loud laughter (walking noisily was, I suppose, one of the lessons in the new Directions to Servants by the Irish Protestant Jonathan Swift; farther away, moreover, I noticed other domestics conscientiously breaking one of the feet on every chair). Count Grisac had a baby face and protruding eyes. The sound of the servants’ laughter made him uncontrollably angry. With his fist raised, he threw himself upon the two louts, who caught him from either side and neutralized him with a few punches. He came to rest on the floor, not far from the lady with the wicker trunk. She went through the motions of tucking her skirt more tightly to her body, as though to emphasize the boundaries to her personal dignity, as well as the fact that the misadventures of the fallen Count were no concern of hers. The Count, though thoroughly battered and still lying there, could not stop talking. His face no longer displayed any kind of emotion, while his mouth continued to say:
“Little Pierrot, the tenant farmer’s son, a lad who has played with my children, managed to clamber up onto the footboard and break the carriage window. I know the child very well, why, I can’t think of anyone I know better than young Pierrot, he’s the one, little Pierrot’s the one who on the anniversary of my birth date always comes and sings me a poem, made up by my villagers specially to please me, for they’re clever people, y’know, they’re not a bunch of boobies, not at all . . . ”
The lady had shut her trunk. She stood up and tried to slip out through the door, but once again it was badly blocked with people. At first she tried to push her trunk along bit by bit. Faced with a negative result, she made no further attempt to push it and waited for the surge of movement to carry it through. But nothing was moving. Suddenly changing her strategy, she looked consider-ingly at a window whose lower edge was level with a mezzanine a few steps up. She withdrew from the group of people petitioning to leave by way of the door and asked me to help her jump out and then throw her trunk out to her. I drew open for her a panel of the honey-colored curtains that hid the window, and she jumped. There was a crash, followed by tears.
They all wanted to tell their story and convince themselves that they really were still alive. From these tales I inferred that while there were some people who were arriving from far away, from big houses on country estates—and who had barely avoided perishing in burning buildings or being gutted by their farm people—many were coming from no farther afield than Paris or places even closer.
There was one woman who had only come from nearby Villed’Avray and had had the merest brush with danger, but because she spoke in a loud voice and was red-faced and voluminous, she nevertheless contrived to interest one and all in her epic narrative. She was the widow of a Farmer-General of Royal Taxes, and since the death of her husband, she had ceased to keep abreast of political events. Hence, on the morning of July 14, when an express messenger had arrived from Paris and handed her a note to the effect that Paris was in the throes of upheaval and that a troop of rebels had set out in the night to lay hands on her and her neighbor—Monsieur Thierry, the King’s Personal Valet—and carry them forcibly away, she was stunned. Monsieur Thierry, who was a more plausible candidate than herself for being carried forcibly away, had taken to his heels without asking for details, so that she found herself alone with her daughter. Agony! That’s what she had endured, sheer agony! It was written right there on that paper: they intended to carry her off and burn her house down. Prompt action was called for. She had taken with her, besides her daughter, only one servant woman and had left all the other domestics where they were. The three women had started to bury the good plate but finally, unequal to the task, had left orders with some of the servants to do it for them. (“You can imagine how well my instructions will be followed!”) Agony! It had been nothing less than agony! The only money she had brought away was five thousand livres and a pocketbook of valuable pa
pers . . . It wasn’t much to manage on for several days; it was too much, if she started to think about robbers. Well, now, the fact was that during the entire journey she had thought of nothing but robbers. When they arrived at Versailles, the torment had reached the limit of what a person could bear. For one thing, where were they supposed to sleep? Three women, including a fearfully squint-eyed servant . . . On the first night, that wretch of a Jeannon had led them to a hovel, and the next day, before vanishing into the blue, she had led them to a den of thieves. This was what things had come to. This was where that slattern of a Jeannon had taken them. Everything in that pigsty was on the side of the rebels: the campbeds, the filth, the bedbugs. Look, just look . . . She stuck out her chin, not, in her case, an attractive feature. People were starting to wish they could interrupt her. But the stream of words resumed. In the course of the journey there had been a hundred moments when she was sure she was going to die. Every time she had encountered two or three country people in a group, or a merchant had doffed his hat to her, she was sure they were going to kill her. And she was still convinced it was so. Nothing could rid her mind of that notion: they were out to kill her.
“But the fact is they spared you. You did not die,” I said, because I did not care for the way this woman, in the throes of her “agony,” clung to me, squeezed my hands, and treated me exactly the way one might mangle a handkerchief or twist one’s dress in a fit of despair.
My observation was taken as a piece of insolence. The new arrivals, who throughout all her lamentations had shown no sympathy for the Farmer-General’s widow, were suddenly in league with her. They loathed our view of the situation, the attitude, in their eyes, of a privileged, protected group. We had stayed snug in the château. We did not know what was happening out there. If proof were needed, it lay in our readiness to flee, to choose the attacks of highwaymen over the comfort of our indolent existence in the lap of luxury. Whereas they had seen how things were. They had the right to state an opinion. We were to keep our opinions to ourselves and help them. That was all they expected of us.