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

and it was as though I held her suspended in midair, or floating upon a river, like the sun-haloed vision of the princess in the story. But when Gabrielle de Polignac was announced, the Queen escaped me. The Queen’s serving women vanished. Countess La Fayette was heard no more. Madame Campan was requested to stay. I stayed as well, for Madame Campan had decided that I could make myself useful (her sister and Madame de Rochereuil were busy somewhere else) by carrying on with the task of putting things away. She had been absorbed by this quiet, painstaking transfer of objects ever since she had been informed that the departure would not take place.

TODAY: RAIN, DOUBTS, AND MY PAGES SCATTERED OVER

THE FLOOR. THEN, WITH THE RETURN OF

SUNLIGHT, I AM THE GUEST OF THE PRINCE DE LIGNE

(Vienna, June 1810).

I would do well to put into practice, now, the advice of Monsieur de Montdragon, and clap my hands all by myself in bed. My lace mittens are not enough protection, and woolen ones make my fingers go numb. The feeling of always being cold is aggravated by the pains I am suffering, brought on by a terribly humid month of June. So rainy, muddy, and generally disastrous a month that I see no hint of June as the harbinger of summer. Angst is present, anguish of the spirit. Recumbent, with eyes shut, weakened because I have lost all desire to take food, I think to myself: Why not just die, why go on waiting hopefully for something, especially the return of fine weather. Besides, what difference can summer weather make? What can it add to your existence? The scent of flowers, blue sky, voices of people outside . . . what good is all that? How is that going to give you back the energy to live? These pages of mine have fallen on the floor and are scattered over the rug. When I am forced to walk a few steps in my room, not only do I take no care to avoid treading on them, I deliberately stick the tip of my cane into the paper to crumple it, tear it, kill it. My days are deadly dull. I fall headlong into my nights as into a bottomless pit of sleeplessness. Sometimes when I am feverish, my mind wanders. On two occasions, I have caught myself starting out to say a prayer to the Virgin Mary and suddenly speaking the Queen’s name instead: “O Marie-Antoinette . . . ” The second time, I gave a start of surprise when my invocation was repeated by the voice of her mad lover, exploding inside my head. Can it be, that in the place where he now is, among the dead, he continues to declaim his litanies, disturbing the souls given over to Eternal Rest, while the Queen, in her goodness, continues to pardon him? The sense of something undefined, that came to me with the snow, I now feel with the rain. Despondency—vast, immense, certainly out of proportion to what is after all merely bad weather—makes tears come to my eyes. I hear the raindrops beating on the courtyard paving stones, in a continuous, regular leitmotif. The recurring theme of vain futility, vanitas vanitatum, vanity of vanities . . . That is what I hear in the monotonous sound of the water. Against its basso, in which other noises are lost, the rain swells at times into downpours. It bangs at my windowpanes (because wind intervened, the rain a moment ago was striking the glass almost at right angles), then subsides, sinking back into its truculent, regular mode, designed never to stop; either that or it turns to a fine drizzle, so that when I part my curtains in the morning, they open to reveal a November fog. Odors of wet hay hang over the streets of Vienna. The Danube overflows its banks, as it does when the winter snows melt. One hears reports of landslides, bridges collapsing. In the poverty-ridden outlying quarters that form a belt around the city, the first deaths in an outbreak of cholera have been recorded. I do not know Paris, for I came directly from my home in the provinces to Versailles, so I don’t know whether it is a capital city dedicated to the cult of death (I mean as a vocation, not just as a result of some crisis, such as the Reign of Terror), but I know that Vienna is. This is the capital of the Kingdom of Death. If you doubt this, you have but to go for a walk on the Graben and see, in the noisy coming and going of carriages and with all the foot traffic, how you are brought up short by the towering Column of the Plague. You cannot tear yourself away; tentacular and terrifying, the column has seized you . . . I am slipping. I have lost the summer of fear but am not back in the season of the living. I am adrift, huddled under my eiderdown. I have a sensation of being cast out, expelled. If I could breathe deeply, I am sure everything would be restored to me: I would dwell once again in that ancient, antediluvian world, that world on the other side of the River of Time. The brilliance of the Queen’s eyes, looking at me for a moment when I capture her attention, has faded and died. The Princess de Montpensier is just a skeleton now, swaying over the water. And all those faces, so young, so near, with their little curls sticking out from under their white perukes and their ambivalent smiles, have retreated into the darkness whence they sprang. Their powdered foreheads, their red lips, and their white hands, hands made not to grasp and hold but to touch, caress, make airy motions . . . Is that why, when the time came, they immediately let go? From an inability to clutch firmly, to hang