Farewell, My Queen by Black Moishe (children's ebooks online txt) 📗

(The man holding my ankle stirred in his sleep. The impropriety of what he was doing had me paralyzed. I wondered whether I was destined to spend the rest of the night with my foot at the mercy of a stranger.)

“He has my full approval. A hundred million and a hundred thousand men. There, now, is a man who does not mouth elegant phrases, who does not write treatises, but goes straight to the goal. The King, for once, must pay no heed to his own pathetic, cheese-paring, thrifty bourgeois instincts (a descendant of Saint Louis with the soul of a shopkeeper!); instead, he must let Monsieur de Breteuil have money and soldiers. And then we can move on to other things. This state of turmoil has gone on much too long.”

The sleeper had come awake. When he took in the enormity of where his hand was and the extent of my shame and embarrassment—I had exposed my limb up to the ankle in pulling away—he was overcome with confusion and repeatedly craved my pardon.

WITH THE QUEEN, IN THE GILDED GREAT STUDY.

HER PREPARATIONS FOR DEPARTURE

(from midnight until two o’clock in the morning).

My head was buzzing, my temples throbbing; I wanted a fountain to splash myself with water. Or simply my bed, to snatch a bit of rest. But just as I was starting to cross the Princes’ Courtyard, I was stopped by one of the Queen’s valets. He had a note for me; I recognized the hand of Madame Campan, First Lady of the Bedchamber. The mere sight of her rounded, careful, servile writing, as civil and stupid as the woman herself, made the weight of my fatigue twice as crushing. But knowing where the message came from, I would not have dreamed of trying to avoid complying with its instructions. On the contrary, I was filled with gratitude for the order summoning me abruptly to her apartments. It was an absurd time of day for a regular reading session, but, very early on, the Queen had introduced the custom of sending for me at all hours, whenever it was certain that, even if she put off going to bed for as long as possible, an attack of insomnia was definitely in the making. In that voice of mine, which my sponsor Monsieur de Montdragon had rated as merely “subdued” and conveniently unobtrusive, the Queen had discovered a soothing quality. I could skip a passage, or read the same one twice, and the Queen would not notice. She desperately needed to forget her cares and respond to the invitation underlying the words, conveyed by my voice: “Close your eyes; rest awhile.” I would come running, half asleep, barely decent, a dress pulled hastily on over my nightgown. I would arrive to find a little table standing ready, with four lighted candles. I would slip into the shadowy bedside space and open the book. Sometimes, in the drafts of air, the flickering flames would carry the words away in a rolling movement of waves. There were heavy seas around my printed pages, as the Queen, stretched out on a daybed, listened to me the way one might listen to a nocturne. The words followed lazily, one upon the other, reduced almost to a murmur in the troughs of the waves. Deep depression would descend upon me, soon shaken off as my voice rose once again with a strength that could save both of us, so I thought, from the agony of those hours for which no one at Versailles had ever found the appropriate ritual. Both of us; I dared to say those words, but only to myself. I blushed at my own secret immodesty. I would cast a rapid glance in the Queen’s direction, as though she might have read the thoughts I dared to harbor. She appeared to be in the greatest physical discomfort. She would stretch, sit up, take her head in her hands. Then she would lie down again and close her eyes. My function was not performed at a set time; it was tied to the phase when the sea of night was at slack water. It was dependent on that dreaded zone where the worst that has happened to you resurfaces to assail you once again and drag you to the bottom. The zone where you drown. I was the boat girl, ferrying across the water those things that have thus far refused to make the crossing.

“Put me to sleep, Madam,” the Queen would sometimes request with a sigh.

In his white-gloved hand the valet held aloft a torch. I followed him. As we walked past the Quarters of the Queen’s Watch, I heard a confused sound of men’s voices, glasses being smashed, weapons falling on the floor. I also caught choruses being sung in dialects so totally incomprehensible that I mistook them for foreign languages. I actually thought that these were soldiers from the army of foreign troops, come despite the King’s counterorders to offer their support to the Queen. Their noise filled the Antechamber of the Grand Couvert, which stood quite empty; but immediately beyond, a small padded door lined with heavy dark green gros de Tours, set into a corner of the Peers’ Salon, had but to open before me, and I was in the peace and quiet of the Library, and the even greater tranquility of a little adjoining room called the Library Annex. The impression of shelter and isolation culminated when I reached the heart of the Queen’s Little Apartments, a group of tiny ill-lit spaces that were known as the Great Interior Study, or Gilt Study.

Great it was not, but gilded it was. And all that gold, applied over the white wainscoting and around the mirrors, in garlands, ribbons, delicate friezes, profiled sphinxes, over the ledges of the mantelpiece, the elbow rests of the armchairs, the table legs and harp strings, was like a wondrous curtain of rain through