by Black Moishe
I said no more. The lady let go of my hands. Her daughter fanned her and settled her comfortably so she could give her full attention to the terrible adventure of a Noble Representative. He began by expressing agreement with the lady’s point of view. The roads were indeed dangerous and the peasants armed. The most frightful events, however, were taking place in the capital city, seat of the insurrection and source of the torrent of violence threatening the entire country. Unlike the lady, who was still extremely upset and had not stopped weeping and wailing, the Representative had initially shown a certain cool detachment, as though he were giving a well-prepared public speech. But, with his very first words, his confidence deserted him. He could only stammer out a few phrases, to the effect that the populace had stopped the coach he had hired to come back from the Assembly. After that, everything had happened very quickly. He had been taken to City Hall through a crowd of armed people. On the Place de la Grève, where criminals were executed, they had shown him the black-clad body of a decapitated man, and said, “See that? That’s Monsieur de Launay. What’s left of Monsieur de Launay. Take a good look, because in a little while you’ll be just like him.”
The man was shaking, speaking incoherently. The saber that takes your head off in one sweeping blow, the hands tightening around your neck to strangle you, the rope being slipped over your head: to them, these things were tangible and concrete. They made it clear that they considered us soft, out of touch with reality. They were eager to tell their stories, partly to reassure themselves, and also to persuade us not to venture out, to stay where we were, safe. It was of no avail. The recital of all those horrors did not stop those about to flee from wanting to flee, nor did it stop the incomers from taking to the road again later that night.
Panic was jubilant. She had us all in her power. She was manipulating us however she liked. Once more, savagery was rising to the surface. Despite having been warned of what would happen to them out there, the departing château dwellers were frantic to go. Their behavior no longer showed any consideration for rank, sex, or age:
A snarling Court dandy used his knee to block the path of a venerable old man. A haughty dowager found herself swept aside by a little Burgundian woman, screaming: “My parents were taken hostage and their female companion murdered before my very eyes!” But she showed no inclination to turn around and go back to rescue them. A peer of the realm had the experience of being collared by a bourgeois nobody, who under normal circumstances would never have dared look him in the eye. All this was brought about partly by sheer numbers, but also and especially by the power of revelation that was driving the courtiers out from the château with tremendous force, a reversal of the force of inertia that for years had kept them passionately chained to the place, unable to stay away.
The new arrivals had met horror, face on. They could bear witness to the fact that, despite what some people were obstinately repeating, the insurrection had spread beyond the capital city. But, unlike the terror-stricken crew of Versailles, who were abandoning ship, they had not heard the mast snapping off, nor felt the deck slide out from under their feet to slope steeply down toward the abyss; they had not seen, upon the announcement that the King had sacrificed his armies and his government ministers, the waves part to swallow up centuries of dynasty. That morning the Court had surrendered once and for all. The defeat had become a fact; deep inside them, the deserters had known it was so. That defeat had released them from their code of honor and left them no recourse other than flight.
In the midst of so much disorder I had difficulty moving from one spot to another. The château, as Monsieur de La Chesnaye was fond of pointing out, did not have an entrance worthy of its splendor. Just now, it would have been more relevant to say it did not have an exit . . .There was the noisy sound of a window being opened. A woman wearing a high, fluted bonnet leaned out to hang a caged parrot from one of the shutters. The bird was shocked into silence.
People were abandoning birds in their cages, they were forgetting they had children, were casting aside, so as not to add one more burden to their expedition, the little black slaves who carried Milady’s parasol. These hapless youngsters were to die of cold the following winter, and perhaps, as they stood wide-eyed and motionless, what they already apprehended was their own fate. The dogs could smell betrayal in the air and were barking as when death is present. They went dashing away down the corridors or surged in packs up the staircases.
My confusion of mind became worse and worse. People were telling me to leave. People were pleading with me to stay. I was hearing vivid descriptions of the carnage out there. I was being reminded that “they” would soon be here. The gallop of a horse in the courtyard brought my heart into my mouth. The Queen, it was reported, had gone down to the Dauphin’s apartments. She was obsessively anxious about him. It did imply, though, that she had managed to cross the Hall of Mirrors alone. Unless she had gone around it, which I was inclined to think she must have done. I was mistaken.
“You are the stronger” had been reversed.
LAST READING AT THE QUEEN’S APARTMENTS
(from eight to nine o’clock in the evening).
I walked through the so-named Madame Sophie Library and went soundlessly into her lavender-blue room, the Great Bathing Room of her new apartment on the ground floor. I thought at first it was empty, for I did not immediately see the Queen, lying on the daybed. She was wrapped in a white satin dressing gown, under a canopy hung with midnight blue. The bed was high, narrow, and angled toward windows looking onto the Marble Courtyard. To escape inquisitive eyes, the Queen had had a hedge of flowers planted in the Courtyard, and a cherry tree as well. The windows were closed, but the curtains had been left open, for they were really not needed with the interlacing of foliage and flowers swaying outside and making a muffled sound as of stealthy footsteps. The Queen was lying on her side. She had her back turned to me. She seemed huge, with very long legs tapering from broad hips to extraordinarily slender ankles. I thought this must be the first time I had seen her hips, for that part of the body is usually concealed by the fullness of a woman’s skirts. And just as, on those occasions when I smelled her jasmine-scented hair salve, I tried not to breathe because that would have invaded her unbelievable privacy, so this time I tried not to look at her. I made a conscious effort, turning my eyes away from that alluring body stretched out in the blue-tinged half light. I looked steadily at the window where dark shadows stirred. Then I brought my gaze back to her. She was not sleeping. With a fingertip, she was following the outline of swans and seashells decorating the wainscot. She was giving it her complete attention, just the way she had so often become utterly absorbed in contemplating her Wardrobe Book. But now it was rather as though she were deciphering a new alphabet.
“Put your books down, Madam. I have at my bedside what I wish to hear you read.”
She had turned over as she spoke and was pointing to a little table, where a bundle of letters lay stuffed into a pocketbook. An impression of strength and certainty emanated from the Queen. And though she lay quite still, I felt a strange sort of weightlessness and a spiraling movement, bearing me upward. All fear of disturbing her privacy had vanished. I went and picked up the letters and handed them to her. She chose unhesitatingly. The letters were arranged in an order that she knew by heart. The Queen smiled at me. It was like being in the presence of a loving, peaceable giantess. I kissed her hand. She smiled at me again, a smile more kindly yet. The air was preternaturally light. I went to sit at a small table where four lighted candles had been set. I began:
“Madam and dearest daughter,
“I spent the whole of yesterday more in France than in Austria and went back in my mind over all the happy time that is now long past. Even to remember it is a consolation. I am very glad that your little girl, whom you describe as such a sweet child, is recovering her health, and glad also for all you have told me about how matters stand between you and the King. We must hope for a good outcome. I confess
I did not know with certainty that . . . ” (here I spoke more slowly, being unsure whether I ought to read everything aloud, but she urged me to do so) “. . . you and he did not sleep together; I suspected it. I can find no fault with what you tell me; it strikes me as perfectly valid, but I would have liked you to sleep German style, more on account of a certain intimacy that results from being together.
“I am very pleased that you intend resuming all the public ceremonial at Versailles. I know at firsthand just how boring and meaningless these rituals are, but believe me, if they are not observed, the ill consequences that follow run much deeper than the little vexations of the ceremonial, especially where you are, in a nation so quick to take offense. Like you, I had very much hoped that winter would bring an end to the Emperor’s travels, but he is fully occupied with preparations for journeying to the Netherlands in early March and remaining abroad all summer. These absences increase every year, and my worries and anxieties are increased as well, and at my age I could well do with support and consolation, and I am losing all those whom I love, one after another; I am sorely afflicted . . . ”
The Queen had sat partly upright against the head of the bed, with that same wonderful suppleness and visible lengthening of herself. She repeated the words for her own benefit: “I am losing all those whom I love, one after another . . .Vienna, November 3, 1780.”
These past few weeks, I had so often found her weeping and despondent that I expected to see her tears come. Instead, she remained perfectly in control of herself, even conveying a suggestion of some mysterious inner rapture. She leaned back, propping one shoulder against the blue wall with its motif of swans and seashells. And once again I was overwhelmed by the feeling I had experienced the very first time she had appeared before my wondering eyes: she mingled with the rest of us out of a kindly disposition and from goodness of heart, but in reality, she belonged to a different order of magnitude and moved in a different sphere, that of the statues on the château grounds and the goddesses emerging from the ornamental ponds. Long and white, with one hand pushing back her hair, she floated before my eyes. And her voice, which drew me to her, a voice that asked me to be even closer to her, was repeating, softly but without hesitation:
“I am losing all those whom I love, and I am afflicted. But I shall not let my affliction get the better of me. I shall follow, in this as in all things, the example of my mother the Empress.” And she added, without any transition, as if she were just discovering the finish on her bathing-room walls and the repeating motif that decorated them: “The King is very fond of swans, as I am.”
What she next asked me to read was not another letter from Maria-Theresa of Austria, but the Rule to Be Read Every Month that her mother had given into her care when she left Vienna as a girl. She recited it from memory, keeping time with my reading, and to some of the words she restored Austrian stress. Her voice no longer had the least trace of softness; harsh and aged, the voice was compelling because it was terrifying. I was maddened with fright. I clung to the table and did not finish reading the text. The flames rose very high. And in the shadows where the Queen was, I could no longer distinguish anything. But that deep voice went on without me: “You will take time to meditate as often as you can during the day, especially at Holy Mass. I trust you will hear Mass, and be edified by it, every day and even more than once on holy days and Sundays, if that is the custom at your court. As much as I wish you to occupy your time with prayer and instructive reading, I would not by any means have you follow or seek to introduce practices other than what is customary in France. You must not make particular claims, nor cite as an example how things are done here, nor ask that our usages be imitated there; on the contrary, you must participate without reserve in whatever the Court is accustomed to do. Go, if possible, after dinner, and especially each Sunday, to Vespers and evensong. I do not know whether the custom in France is to toll the angelus, but do not fail to meditate at that time, if not in public, at least in your heart. The same holds for the evening period or whenever your steps take you past a church or a cross, without, however, performing any outward action but those in common use. That need not prevent your heart from retiring within itself and offering inward prayers, God’s presence being the sole means to that end on every occasion. Your matchless father possessed this ability to perfection. When entering churches, let yourself in the first instance be filled with the greatest respect and do not give way to your curiosity, which causes the mind to be distracted. All eyes will be upon you, so do nothing that may give rise to rumor or be grounds for scandal. Be pious, respectful, unassuming and submissive. But most of all, pious. Lastly, let me say, to sum up, and in the sure knowledge that if you do not stray from this admonition, nothing regrettable will come to pass: as much as you can, my dear daughter, be on your knees, at prayer . . . ”
“Come now, it is time they dressed me,” uttered in her ordinary speaking tones, broke the spell cast by a dead mother’s voice speaking unfalteringly across the years. I cannot say the voice disappeared; I knew it was there now and for always, but it would never again make itself heard.
“I must assemble my good friends the de Polignac family and impress on them the necessity to leave. Their kind hearts will not let them obey. As for you, Madame Laborde, I have a request to make of you as well, and I hope that in the kindness of your heart you will not demur. If I remember rightly, you assured me the day before yesterday that you would journey far, very far, to please me. Well, this is not the time to go back on your word. Make the journey; leave this place. You will be included in the escape of the Duke and Duchess de Polignac. And as the Duchess is unfortunately too famous and is wrongly held in disrepute, I must beg you to don her clothing and occupy her seat in the carriage. She, in turn, will disguise herself as a townswoman, a simple lady companion, or even a servant. What matters is that either she should pass unnoticed or, if by mischance your group were stopped by men of the National Guard, that Madame de Polignac should escape with her life.”
It was almost nine o’clock in the evening. I barely had time to fetch a few things before the darkness swallowed me up.
People were fleeing; others were arriving. The ones arriving bore on their countenances the marks of insults and blows. There was a great difference between terror at the prospect of a hostile attack and actually casting oneself into the enemy’s clutches.
I went back to my room. I wanted to take with me the things I cared most deeply about. But as I looked around, misty-eyed, at what had been the setting for my personal life through all those years, everything in it seemed to me equally precious. I could not save the little white marble vase unless I also took the straw-yellow paper background against which my successive bouquets of flowers had shown to advantage. I wanted the mirror, because it was the first one I had owned and because I had never gone to stand in front of it without feeling a shiver of sinfulness. I wanted the embroidered bedspread that had been with me since my boarding-school days, so worn in places as to be transparent.
Lastly, or rather firstly, I wanted to keep my room.
My Bedroom of the Perfect Sleep.
My private Office of the Setting and the Rising Sun.
At once my Library and my Bathing Room.
My Boudoir of Conversations.
My white and rainbow-colored room. My room.
I had been so taken with it that on certain evenings, I had actually preferred it to the finest shows on the stage of the château Opera House. In my room, I could be delightfully relaxed. There I prepared my readings for the Queen, I read, I dreamed, I recited my lists. Through its attic window, I followed the metamorphoses of the clouds. Within its walls, precisely because the space was so constricted, I felt safe, out of reach. This contentment had saved me from the frenzy of moving out that had the courtiers running distractedly here and there.
I liked to hear, while still asleep in my bed, the thump of pitchers being set down in the hallways, the sound of arms drills out in the courtyard.
I also liked, when only half awake, to pick up a book, read a few pages, and fall back asleep. Often it was Honorine who came and woke me up. We would start our day by laughing, before we spoke.
My bedspread was frayed and threadbare, reflecting the volume of sleep it had known in my company. It was imprinted, but invisibly to other eyes than mine, with the thousand and one outlines of my world of dreams.
I would not leave my bedspread behind.
Not the bedspread, and not the candlestick . . .
What about my books? I started by filling my velvet bag with books, but that made it heavy, and there was no room left for clothes. I lifted the bag to test its weight. I hesitated. I was well aware that for this scrambling journey on which the Queen was dispatching me, my presence had to be weightless. I abandoned the books. I took only a few pieces of clothing that I rolled up in a shawl.
Into my bag I put two hats, slippers, and a pair of ankle boots.
I would find whatever else I needed when we got there.
Got where?
I went to say good-bye to Jacob-Nicolas Moreau. He opened his door to me, with the air of someone whose mind is not entirely on what he is doing. Convinced of the greatness and gravity of his task, he had been working unremittingly at his discourse.
“Oh, my dear friend!” was all I could say.
And I dissolved in tears.
He took me in his arms. I could not find the words to explain why I was leaving. I was not fleeing on account of fear but from a sense of duty. I was simply obeying. But even at the time, I was being pulled in two directions. I was torn. I could have, and I should have, evaded receiving such an order or found some way not to comply. Moreover, since all I was being asked to do was take someone else’s place and pass myself off as that other person, my role was interchangeable. It did not matter a great deal whether it was me . . . I was being too quick to obey. I ought to have stopped for a moment’s reflection. But I was beyond the point of rational reflection and was being carried along at a speed and by passions that were foreign to me . . . Instead of admitting to my scruples, I preferred to inquire about the Pastoral Letter to the Bishops of France.