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

bent on meting out punishment, turning away from the château, all the while imperatively calling down the wrath of the gods. From Latona, she darted down by way of the Colonnade to the Fountain of Apollo, her speed increasing tenfold out of frustration at finding a space devoid of humans, came then to the park’s northerly section, and crossed it with one mighty swoop, vaguely recognizing in her impetuous flight the Fountain of Enceladus, the Cupids of the Happy Isle, and the broad Neptune Basin, created for more propitious hours than these. She did not linger there; enraged at having found no one in her round of the park, she came back onto the terrace to resume possession of the château. And this time she would not confine herself to the kitchens . . .

The living Panic had charged blindly along her way, with no thought of turning around and looking back to enjoy the fruits of her stormy passage. Thus she had seen nothing of the frightened old man abandoned at the top of the stairway. At the first air current fanned up by Panic in her mad course, the menservants had fled. One of them had been nearly crushed under a carriage that suddenly swept by at a gallop. The Duke’s wife, almost as nimble as the two rascally servants, had hitched up her dress to midthigh and reached the statue of the Sphinx Child in a few quick strides. His daughter, too, had left the old man’s side, but, being rheumatic and hoary with age, she was limping along far behind. Panic does not take time; her sphere of influence is a hole in time, into which she flings everyone that she snatches up along her path.

She has understood in a flash: there is no one out in the château grounds. The place she must come back to, the place where she must do her work, is the château itself. There, unlike the park, there were victims in abundance, victims by the dozen, by the hundred, for the asking. She could start with me; I was hers, body and soul. Her hair, dripping with blood, had brushed against me. It had not left a stain, not even a mark, but in the overly fine fabric of my summer skirt there was a red dot, as when an extraneous thread gets into the weaving to produce a flaw.

Forgotten were Honorine and her commonsensical words. I began to run every which way, up the staircases and down, retracing my steps suddenly, opening a door. I lost all notion of where I was. I wanted to be made of glass so I could shatter. I wanted to be like the vase that the Queen had shattered. I wanted to be reduced to nothing.

*      *      *

Over the next few hours, I was aware of Panic only from the ravages she left in her wake. She stopped being seen “in person.” Seen by me, that is, for Versailles was so vast that one could readily imagine her to be operating in other spheres. One thing is certain: she was committing her rampages in conjunction with the people and their rebellion. The people had Panic working for them, we had her working against us. That, at least, is what I believed at the time, for I realized later that Panic was acting equally on both sides, but in the enclosed, defenseless, trapped space of Versailles, I could not possibly achieve such an overview . . .The hellish, unbelievable fact of a populace strong enough to attack the Bastille and succeed in bringing it down, remained a kind of barrier preventing my mind from going any further (in that connection Count Ségur would later write: “That fit of madness which, even now, describing it, I still have difficulty believing . . . ”). Repeatedly I told myself: “It was a natural, not a supernatural event. The Parisians found weapons, the citadel was poorly defended, they took it by storm. There were enough of them, they had enough rifles and cannons to carry the day.” This, though very painful, was logical. Logical reasoning had no effect. I could see them hurling their defiance heavenward, and it was the Heavens that came crashing down, in the thunderous roar of the Bastille’s collapsing towers. The people had stormed Heaven, and Heaven had fallen. It was said that since July 14 they had been laboring day and night at demolishing the Bastille. An accursed worksite! People were gathering up the stones, packing them on their backs, and going out into the provinces to sell them! Pedlars selling the ruins of Heaven. They claimed to be furnishing proof! Frankly, to me the whole affair was unthinkable. I tried to think about something else, no matter what, to take my mind off it, but I kept coming back to that. I could no longer think of anything but that . . . and ended up not thinking at all. Here was another way in which Panic operated: not just causing everyone to take flight, but putting into everyone’s mind a thing it could not conceive, substituting, for the mind’s intelligence, a whirlwind.

I came and went, came and went, a creature near madness. I had ceased to recognize people and places. I was stopping in front of paintings and talking to the people in them. Occasionally I would laugh and cover my eyes with my hands. I was talking to myself out loud. But Panic loosened her grip. A more powerful force had intervened.

From my life at Court and my constant preoccupation with the Queen, I had developed, along with the art of never missing an opportunity to gaze upon her, the more subtle art of sensing her nearness before I saw her. All at once I would know that she was not far off, that she was about to appear. What’s that you say? You knew? Knew, how? From an unexpected surge of warmth, an exquisite moment of weakness, a pounding