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

ask that our usages be imitated there; on the contrary, you must participate without reserve in whatever the Court is accustomed to do. Go, if possible, after dinner, and especially each Sunday, to Vespers and evensong. I do not know whether the custom in France is to toll the angelus, but do not fail to meditate at that time, if not in public, at least in your heart. The same holds for the evening period or whenever your steps take you past a church or a cross, without, however, performing any outward action but those in common use. That need not prevent your heart from retiring within itself and offering inward prayers, God’s presence being the sole means to that end on every occasion. Your matchless father possessed this ability to perfection. When entering churches, let yourself in the first instance be filled with the greatest respect and do not give way to your curiosity, which causes the mind to be distracted. All eyes will be upon you, so do nothing that may give rise to rumor or be grounds for scandal. Be pious, respectful, unassuming and submissive. But most of all, pious. Lastly, let me say, to sum up, and in the sure knowledge that if you do not stray from this admonition, nothing regrettable will come to pass: as much as you can, my dear daughter, be on your knees, at prayer . . . ”

“Come now, it is time they dressed me,” uttered in her ordinary speaking tones, broke the spell cast by a dead mother’s voice speaking unfalteringly across the years. I cannot say the voice disappeared; I knew it was there now and for always, but it would never again make itself heard.

“I must assemble my good friends the de Polignac family and impress on them the necessity to leave. Their kind hearts will not let them obey. As for you, Madame Laborde, I have a request to make of you as well, and I hope that in the kindness of your heart you will not demur. If I remember rightly, you assured me the day before yesterday that you would journey far, very far, to please me. Well, this is not the time to go back on your word. Make the journey; leave this place. You will be included in the escape of the Duke and Duchess de Polignac. And as the Duchess is unfortunately too famous and is wrongly held in disrepute, I must beg you to don her clothing and occupy her seat in the carriage. She, in turn, will disguise herself as a townswoman, a simple lady companion, or even a servant. What matters is that either she should pass unnoticed or, if by mischance your group were stopped by men of the National Guard, that Madame de Polignac should escape with her life.”

It was almost nine o’clock in the evening. I barely had time to fetch a few things before the darkness swallowed me up.

People were fleeing; others were arriving. The ones arriving bore on their countenances the marks of insults and blows. There was a great difference between terror at the prospect of a hostile attack and actually casting oneself into the enemy’s clutches.

I went back to my room. I wanted to take with me the things I cared most deeply about. But as I looked around, misty-eyed, at what had been the setting for my personal life through all those years, everything in it seemed to me equally precious. I could not save the little white marble vase unless I also took the straw-yellow paper background against which my successive bouquets of flowers had shown to advantage. I wanted the mirror, because it was the first one I had owned and because I had never gone to stand in front of it without feeling a shiver of sinfulness. I wanted the embroidered bedspread that had been with me since my boarding-school days, so worn in places as to be transparent.

Lastly, or rather firstly, I wanted to keep my room.

My Bedroom of the Perfect Sleep.

My private Office of the Setting and the Rising Sun.

At once my Library and my Bathing Room.

My Boudoir of Conversations.

My white and rainbow-colored room. My room.

I had been so taken with it that on certain evenings, I had actually preferred it to the finest shows on the stage of the château Opera House. In my room, I could be delightfully relaxed. There I prepared my readings for the Queen, I read, I dreamed, I recited my lists. Through its attic window, I followed the metamorphoses of the clouds. Within its walls, precisely because the space was so constricted, I felt safe, out of reach. This contentment had saved me from the frenzy of moving out that had the courtiers running distractedly here and there.

I liked to hear, while still asleep in my bed, the thump of pitchers being set down in the hallways, the sound of arms drills out in the courtyard.

I also liked, when only half awake, to pick up a book, read a few pages, and fall back asleep. Often it was Honorine who came and woke me up. We would start our day by laughing, before we spoke.

My bedspread was frayed and threadbare, reflecting the volume of sleep it had known in my company. It was imprinted, but invisibly to other eyes than mine, with the thousand and one outlines of my world of dreams.

I would not leave my bedspread behind.

Not the bedspread, and not the candlestick . . .

What about my books? I started by filling my velvet bag with books, but that made it heavy, and there was no room left for clothes. I lifted the bag to test its weight. I hesitated. I was well aware that for this scrambling journey on which the Queen was dispatching me, my presence had to be weightless. I abandoned the books. I took only a few pieces of clothing that I rolled up in a shawl.

Into my bag I