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

and stuff them up your ass. You can mention that in your notebooks for the edification of posterity.”

I would have liked to come to the insulted man’s defense, but he persuaded me to hold my tongue. “Let it be, I’m used to it. My undertakings are generally greeted with nothing but derision and disdain.” Then, after a pause, he added, “The scoundrel did not mention my abilities as a Historiographer.”

Those who were running away chose the least conspicuous routes. Most of them went by way of the inner courtyards. There is a very old rule of courtesy that states the following precept: “When visiting, one must be at pains, upon leaving a group, to make one’s exit as discreet as possible. One should strive to spare the hostess the awkwardness of a formal leave-taking. For that reason, one often seizes a moment when others are arriving.” Well, I could say that in a manner of speaking, to judge solely by outward behavior, those words describe exactly what was happening. The courtiers were leaving as discreetly as possible. They were striving to spare the lady of the house the awkwardness of a leave-taking. They were even putting into practice a courteous little device sanctioned by custom: slipping out quietly, under cover of the noise made by those who were coming in. Except that their actions were no longer dictated by courtesy. . .

Panic ignores pauses. She does not consider rank, nor does she distinguish between a casual au revoir and a final adieu. For her there are only solutions or obstacles. And it happened that obstacles, unforeseen ones, were about to emerge.

The Historiographer now had the strength of a man imbued with a mission. His position was safe, unassailable. (And he maintained the same serenity, of the kind that stands above events, until the day he was incarcerated at Les Récollets Prison in the town of Versailles in 1793. Then, as a precaution, he asked his wife to burn papers of his that might compromise him. She, in her anxiety to comply, threw onto the fire all his manuscripts, including his journal.) The calmness of his demeanor had the effect of shutting me out. Not in any harsh way, but I simply could not rise to—much less maintain—his level of certainty and resolve. I could pray, in the shadows, and ask for help. The voice of God did not speak in me, certainly not for the sacred purpose of reaching out through me to touch the heart of France. I have to confess that in me the voice was barely audible. I could no longer recognize my world in the wreckage of those hours. Details caught my attention. Fragments that I was unable to set into a whole picture. I was too close or too far removed. Was it a result of having lived constantly with books, or of having lived in the paradise of gold and flowers called Versailles? In the château libraries nothing came to break up the neat line of books; the very doors gave the illusion that you were part of the library. This sheltered enclosure had now been violated.

That earlier scene, of the Queen knocking at her friends’ doors, replayed itself over and over in my mind. She calls out to them. Then she perceives that their doors are shut with padlocks. She sways, is on the verge of fainting. She tries to steady herself by grasping the padlocks. She scrapes her hands on them . . . Her fingers, laden with rings, her hands, holding apart the double doors to the Hall of Mirrors, are grazed and scratched.

There remains that “shining” of hers, a light that never goes out. “What you are trying to describe is her goodness,” says the Prince de Ligne, when I use such vague expressions.

They were fleeing. They were barely taking time to fasten the straps on their baggage. They were leaving everything behind. Everything and nothing. Those cramped, tiny rooms they had fought so hard to obtain were nothing but places where they changed their raiment. Four times a day. Without having had the least suspicion of what was coming, they found themselves living under the roof of a vanquished king, linked to a party that had been annihilated. They wanted to put as much distance as they could between themselves and that defeat. Not to be swallowed up in the catastrophe. They were deserting, with no regard for their hosts. But perhaps it was not so simple. Some of them may have had minds more divided than their behavior suggested.

That man there, for instance. He is in riding dress and carries a bag, but as he passes through the King’s Bedchamber, he does not fail to genuflect in front of His Majesty’s bed.

Everywhere, except in the steady accumulation of sentences constituting the Pastoral Letter, disorder mounted. The volume of noise was increasing. Chaos was gaining ground. I learned that the vestry of the Royal Chapel was being used as a camp. There were people occupying the confessionals. I beg your pardon? What’s that you say? A camp? I rushed to see. But well before I reached the vestry I realized that new elements were coming into play. There was tremendous congestion at the doors, those leading to the grounds as well as those facing the town. Oddly enough, the château of Versailles, which to me was the epitome of danger, the deadly trap, the place that was liable to blow up at any moment, the place that beyond any doubt was going to be assailed and destroyed, did not appear in that light to everyone. To me, if there was one word that summed up Versailles, it was vulnerability. For the past two days, we had been confronted with our complete lack of defensive means. In the last analysis, this lack had been our sole object of contemplation through all that sleepless night. It had been like something out of a bad dream, the