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

less distressed at the failure of my plans. Less distressed at the horror of the situation. We are going through an unhappy phase. Will we see the outcome? I doubt it. Nevertheless, you are right, one must have hope. I must believe in the color you are wearing . . . oasis green . . . almost the color of this bowl . . . ” (And she picked up from the mantelpiece a jade vase, turning it over and over in her hands as she spoke.) “How wonderful that there should be such a thing as colors! God might very well have created a world without colors. He was under no requirement . . . A world without colors . . . But then how would we know where a tree ends and where the sky begins? Everything would be indiscriminately merged in white. We would see without marking separation or perceiving limits. It would be restful. Perhaps. Or frightening . . . One unending day of snow . . . Unless, of course, He had created a world all of black, one unending day of night, like the day we are having now.”

The Queen detested black. For her it was the color of misfortune. But black constantly thrust itself upon her. This, despite Gabrielle and her graceful ways, despite the pale green folds of Gabrielle’s negligee, despite the pleasure they both took in their sessions of aimless, shifting chatter, when idle words elicited more idle words. They so enjoyed talking with one another, the Queen especially, but possibly both of them, that they would spend whole afternoons—and evenings!—alone together in the Queen’s Hamlet at Trianon, hidden in the grotto or shut in the little blue and gold theater, Marie-Antoinette’s little theater, her doll’s theater. They so enjoyed talking together, talking for the sake of talking, that when they actually had something to say to each other, it took them a long time to reach the point of saying it. Perhaps, after all, they never did reach it. . . Their pleasure was in the journey, not the arrival . . . But as matters now stood, their leisurely dialogue was a forbidden luxury.

I watched them as they sat there close to each other, the Queen so charmed by her friend that, without realizing it, she copied her (all at once, she would fall into the same slow rhythm of speaking—not her own usual rhythm—or wrinkle her nose in the same manner, which did not become her at all, but was very cute on the little upturned nose of Gabrielle de Polignac, an impish nose). Or she would use certain stock phrases the way her friend did, for example: “It’s all the same to me,” an expression of Gabrielle’s that infuriated Diane de Polignac, who, declarations in favor of the Philosophes notwithstanding, firmly believed that things and people were not all the same. Gabrielle had a conclusive way of using this expression; she would half close her eyes and then say, speaking very softly, that it was all the same to her. There was no use insisting, or thinking you could induce her to choose. But spoken by the Queen, “it’s all the same to me” meant something quite different. In fact, it conveyed an opposite sense. She used it to signify that she was sulking, so she would get her own way after all. Heard almost as frequently as “it’s all the same to me” was another set phrase typical of her friend, a phrase Gabrielle repeated so often that she had raised it almost to the status of a motto: “What you are telling me is beyond my grasp.” But however far she might go in unconscious imitation of her friend, this was an admission the Queen took good care not to make on her own behalf. When Gabrielle de Polignac said it, she exuded sweetness and light, she hung on your every word, she leaned toward you as if to guide you through your first experience of a lesser being. And you, out of common decency to one who had so innocently confessed her limitations, knew you would have to adjust to her level. She almost felt like laughing (it was implied) at the idea that anyone could have thought her so much more intelligent than she really was, or attributed to her anything remotely resembling quickness of mind. Very, very far beyond her grasp.

“What a big place the world is!” the Queen said suddenly. “I have never even seen the sea,” she added, possibly to force a reaction from Gabrielle, whom the previous avowal had left unmoved.

“Nor have I. It is a fearful thing, I believe. Very salty, and apt to turn people away from religion.”

“The King saw it, when he went to Cherbourg. I do not know whether he touched it. He did not say anything to me on that score. He showed me on the map how to go there. But I cannot envision anything from a map, whereas from a tree or a flower, everything comes to me quite easily.” (This remark consoled me, very slightly; my having proved incapable of drawing a map was, it seemed, not so terrible after all . . .) “I need only sit in the shade of my cedar of Lebanon, and it is as though I have traveled to the Orient.”

“The whole world is here at Trianon; why put oneself to the bother of traveling?”

The question was inopportune, as Gabrielle was at once aware, but she could not undo her piece of tactlessness. Instead, it was the Queen who found something to say:

“People travel because they are bored with how things are at home, to make discoveries, or perhaps just to see for themselves. Because things are different when one is there, on the spot . . . But foreigners, the real foreigners, those who come from very far away, however hard they try, cannot make us feel what that other world