Farewell, My Queen by Black Moishe (children's ebooks online txt) 📗
- Author: Black Moishe
Book online «Farewell, My Queen by Black Moishe (children's ebooks online txt) 📗». Author Black Moishe
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When her attendants showed me in, the Queen was drinking her coffee. The white hangings of her bedchamber with their colorful flowered motifs, the huge bouquets of dahlias in their crystal vases, the transparence of the finely embroidered net curtains, all conspired that morning to make you forget the dull weather. But nothing would have had any effect on me had it not been for the charm of her smile, dawning when I appeared, then, when I stood up after my curtsy, shedding a joyful, golden warmth over everything: drapes, partitions, rugs, mirrors, writing stand, and harpsi-chord, even the hollyhocks that stood in bright sprays around the half-opened curtains of her bed.
“How good of you to have walked all this way in order to come and read to me here at Trianon. And so early in the morning, too . . . I don’t know how to thank you.”
“I would walk much farther, and with the utmost willingness, should Your Majesty so desire.”
“I know, I know, you are entirely devoted to me. And it is a great comfort to me to think of all these willing people ready to offer me their services.”
A chambermaid handed me a cup of coffee. I was so flustered that I swallowed it too hot. The table stood ready, as did the stool on which, when she signaled to me that I might do so, I took my seat. My throat was on fire. I got off to a bad start, in a voice that probably sounded hoarser to me than it actually was and made me uncomfortable. I had intended, by way of light reading, to start with La Vie de Marianne, for the Queen enjoyed Marivaux, then continue with a travel narrative, and finally conclude with the few pages of pious reading (extracts from Bossuet’s sermons or from Fléchier’s funeral orations) that the Queen had been supposed to hear each day since she came to live at Versailles, thus obeying the expressed wishes of her mother, Empress Maria-Theresa. The Empress had been dead for nine years now, but I observed that with the passage of time her precepts, far from losing potency, had steadily gained it, and though in a way the Queen seemed to comply with these precepts against her will, she no longer sought to avoid them.
While praising me for my excellent choice of readings, the Queen said in the same sentence that, nevertheless, and since it was most surely all the same to me, she would prefer passages from a play. Marivaux by all means, only not La Vie de Marianne, but rather Félicie, a very short, amusing, dramatized fairy tale. She appreciated theater more readily than novels. For her, stage characters had a level of real existence to which characters in novels did not attain.
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