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

de Castelnaux, absorbed by his inner torment, was not interested in anything else. He was uniformly indifferent to the people at Versailles, except for me, whom he detested almost as much as he did the ladies in the statues (because of my duties as reader? or “just because,” for no reason?).

If he was here, it meant the Queen could not have left. I fully agreed. Which only added to my bewilderment:

“But I don’t understand. I saw the Queen packing for her journey. If she hasn’t left yet, she’s about to. It’s a matter of hours, minutes. Everything that happens is now dictated by the National Assembly. That’s why the Queen is going away. It’s simple, isn’t it? A person can understand that without being able to read.”

“A person should certainly not lose her composure over such a trifle. The orators with their cries of rage, the register of grievances, pooh! Just so much huffing and puffing. A breath of wind . . . The King and the Queen have no intention of giving ground in the face of something so insubstantial as the National Assembly. The Representatives are puppets, marionettes whose strings they pull to suit themselves . . . My poor dear, you really are not at all yourself. Can you have taken so seriously the great opening procession of the Estates-General? Let me tell you what it really was.”

And she came and stood very close to me (it may have been my imagination, but I had the impression that the Queen’s unrequited lover was stirring in the foliage of the trees).

“The meeting of the Estates-General,” she whispered, “was decided upon by vote, with the sole purpose of providing a diversion for the King’s son as he lay dying. The Estates-General in themselves are of no importance; all they contribute is complaints and recriminations. No, the important thing was the procession announcing their opening. That was what the King wanted to give his little boy for a present. The rest doesn’t count.”

And with her fingernail she scraped away a grass blade stuck to one of the topazes decorating a wagon that had been the child’s.

THE COUNCIL MEMBERS FILE OUT OF THE CHAMBER

(ten o’clock in the morning).

I had been led to think, after the sleepless night when so many of my assumptions had crumbled (not really under the impact of a piece of news but rather in the crucible of a fateful presentiment, as when an epidemic threatens), that normal life with the rigidly set pattern, the noises and round of activities I had assimilated into my very being, had disappeared. I now thought I must have been mistaken, for when I drew near to the antechamber called the Oeil-de-Boeuf—the waiting room of a château that to its inhabitants was, in a sense, nothing more than an immense, labyrinthine monument to Waiting—I found it full of people. Those courtiers enjoying the privilege of access to the King’s Bedchamber were clustered, as close as they could get, around the door. Of the remainder, farther away, some were standing in the Oeil-de-Boeuf, others in the room adjoining it, the First Antechamber. They all had their backs to me and were facing the focal point of their attention: the double doors to the King’s Bedchamber, both of which were shut. At any moment, the usher was going to appear and announce to a perfectly silent throng the First Entries. He would come back an hour later to bring in the Lesser Entries. Everything seemed in order. The two drunken doorkeepers had been discharged and immediately replaced. My confusion of mind was forgotten. I looked for a corner where I could wait at my ease without sitting down. I went and stood behind the press of the crowd, not far from the door that led by a secret passage to the Queen’s Apartments. I leaned with my back against a window ledge. Yes, things were going better. Those whose business it was had no doubt regained control of the situation at dawn. Unless no control had ever been lost, or even imperiled, and all this had been nothing but an immense masquerade, and I, like many another, had let myself be duped . . . but what of the previous day? and the past night? Had reducing us to a state of terror also been part of the masquerade? The Great Royal Masquerade?

The courtiers spoke not a word. With each fresh arrival, a few of them would turn around and, depending on the newcomer’s importance, greet him with a slow, full nod, or a barely perceptible bow, or else ignore him altogether; indeed, with the return of daylight, the passion for treating each person according to rank had recovered all its prerogatives, and the retrospective embarrassment of having spoken, during the night, with just anyone, of having consorted, probably more than once, with people of no consequence, made the courtiers quite uncomfortable. But by morning light they remembered who they were, and the innate sense of social distances prevailed once more. Yes, they greeted one another, but only after due consideration. These passing waves ruffled the immobility of the group, then petrification would again descend over them all.

I took care to remain pressed against my window. I did not want to mingle with the group, to which I did not belong, and which, moreover, included only a limited number of women (whose very presence in this place at this hour was anomalous. I did not dwell on that “detail”: I was looking for reassurance). No doubt the women were back in their apartments, trying to get some rest. I could well have used some rest myself, but I was very anxious to learn more about the Queen’s real intentions. I met the searching gaze of Monsieur Palissot de Montenoy, who held in his hand the Gazette of Court Bereavements, one of the most eagerly looked-for publications. Someone came over to speak to him. I was not surprised; Monsieur Palissot de Montenoy