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

and the sweepers, unhurried, conscious of their right to occupy the courtyards, calmly went on with their work. But this morning the cobble sweepers were gone.

Sitting on my stone bench, I was straightening out my clothes as best I could. I smoothed my hair (at that time I wore a chignon, set quite low, with a lock of hair escaping from it to fall over one shoulder). I opened my prayer book. But the silence hanging over Versailles was so unaccustomed that it claimed my attention. The silence intrigued me. It amounted to an enigma. Let me be clear about something that most people would probably have trouble imagining today: noise was inseparable from Versailles. The sound of Versailles remains a part of me even now. It is a single block compounded of a myriad individual sounds: ritual, military, religious, the changing of the guard and the ringing of the bells, a continuous background of barking, neighing, coach wheels turning, orders being shouted, raised voices at day’s end, music being played on all sides in the night, and the endless to-and-fro of servants’ footsteps on the wooden floors. All this surrounded by the din, the disorder, the dust of the omnipresent construction projects, never finished and always starting up again, the permanent “work in progress” that went on night and day: painting, beautifying, making alterations to apartments, adding balconies, relocating stairways, laying ornamental tiles, hanging shutters, repairing chimneys. You stopped to admire a canvas by Watteau or Hubert Robert, and a few steps farther along you tripped over scaffolding and saw blobs of plaster flying through the air . . . The noise comes back to me occasionally, perhaps deafening to the outsider, but deep, violent, mysteriously nourishing, vitally necessary to the person living inside it. These recurrences of the sounds of Versailles fill me with delight. I savor them. I pick out the individual themes, I play them back to myself, varying the rhythms and interpretations . . .

The silence of this particular morning was made more remarkable by a sudden realization that besides the absence of visitors there was another phenomenon: the French Guards had deserted in the night, disappearing as one man. They had followed the example of their comrades in Paris. Gone were the sounds of boots and the click of heels, the arms drills, orders repeated for the changing of the guard, the watchwords and songs that had punctuated my life just as surely as morning Mass and evening prayers. The amazing bustle in and around the château, the daily metamorphosis from château to caravansary, had suddenly ceased, and I was left stupefied. I was still “in my own home,” but in a state of mental confusion; I had lost the living bond between an external hubbub and my inner music, my tonality of soul. I was no longer rendered powerless by the stupor of defeat and the fear of being attacked, as I had been in the middle of the night. Instead, I was terrified at finding myself in an unrecognizable space, a space emptied as though under the threat of a plague; I was terrified at having been transported overnight to a place with a curse on it. I now had a better understanding of why the proposal to keep the gates closed had been so ineffectual: Versailles was open. It was the opposite of a fortress. Versailles let everybody in. The vendors who offered licentious engravings and publications that they hid in the folds of their capes, the impostors who rented a manservant for the day, disguised him as an ambassador, and attempted to gain an audience with the Monarch, passing themselves off as kings of distant islands . . . The schemers, too, the intrigantes, women who waited spiderlike in the antechambers, along the garden paths, behind the bushes, prepared to do anything that would catch a noble lord in their web . . . There was a time, during more dissolute reigns, when the first person these ladies sought to seduce was the King. Under Louis XVI they had given up trying. As they had no hope of attracting his attention, they had lowered their sights. The King was so chaste that if occasionally, on the way from his apartments to the Chapel, he addressed a few words to a woman (this did not happen often; in general, if he wished to acknowledge someone, he went no further than a curt nod), it could only be an elderly woman . . . But the human tide of sightseers, adventurers, schemers, coming in wave after endless wave, impelled by need or greed, was only the most visible part of another, less evident but deeper, current carried by a nameless force. This current was the stream of beggars, and its force lay in the very might of their destitute condition. The beggars were numberless, nameless, relentless. They surrounded the château on every side. They were driven off and, unfailingly, back they came, dirtier, sicklier, more crippled than before. Now humble, now threatening. The château offered them any number of hiding places where they could lie in wait. Officially they were banned from Versailles, but they paid no attention. They knew they could always count either on a guard being momentarily distracted, or on the darkness that reigned virtually everywhere the moment you stepped outside the perimeter of the Grand Apartments—a deep, impenetrable darkness, relieved only for a brief instant by a few candles that soon melted, their glimmer a pathetic effort against the boundless shadows of night. (The “lodgers” disbursed ruinous amounts in their struggle with the dark. There were winter days when they spent as much on candles as the entire season would have cost them had they stayed in their country mansions, where people took the weather as it came and darkness when it fell.) Which is why the beggars thumbed their noses at regulations. For who shall keep Night from entering in?

“One of these days,” Madame de Grasse