Farewell, My Queen Read online

  But I was not the only one to be thus obsessed. When people said the Court, they meant the Court of Versailles. Ours was the model par excellence, toward which the eyes of every capital city, Saint Petersburg, Rome, London, Madrid, Warsaw, Vienna, and the rest, were turned. People were not unaware that despite ruinous attempts to drain the swamps, the château of Versailles had been built on an unwholesome site, and unwholesome it remained. People were not unaware of the epidemics and fevers, and the tremendous stench, which in warm weather spread through all the rooms. “The perfectly natural result of exudation from the commodes”; so the casual visitor, on the verge of feeling ill, would be informed. And the women would prettily shake their heads like a goat trying to shake free of its tether. To drive away the fetid smell, they would wave their fans a little faster. Exudation indeed! . . . People choked! And it was terrifying to behold, against the white skin of some fashionable lady, the blisters dotted across her neck by insect bites.

  Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV, would swallow spiders that had fallen into her bowl of chocolate.

  Marie Leszczyńska, wife of Louis XV, besieged by mice, would utter cries of distress. And in the early days of their marriage, the Queen’s little cries (from her perch on an armchair whence she refused to come down) charmed Louis XV. . . till the day he wearied of poor Marie and her fears, saying with a shrug: “I keep telling you, Madam, that nothing can be done.”

  Marie-Antoinette had a particular aversion to fleas and bedbugs. With the help of chemicals sent at her request from Vienna in boxes she treated as so many treasure chests, she had launched a systematic campaign. Her abhorrence of fleas was simply regarded as another of those peculiarities to be expected from a foreigner, along with her odd habit of washing before applying makeup . . .

  All this we bore without a word: the stings and bites, the pimples and sickly humors, the strange swellings and suspicious growths. We endured without complaining the numerous bodily discomforts, including—I found this specially repellent (but it left most of the courtiers quite unmoved)—an unimaginable swarming of rats, for there was food left lying about more or less everywhere in the apartments, food that had fallen under the furniture, that had been forgotten between the sheets or quite simply left to spoil in the food closets or in the warming ovens that were installed in window nooks, on landings, and under staircases. The rats thought Versailles was wonderful. By night they conducted a witches’ sabbat there, taking complete control in some of the living quarters, where floor and furniture were reduced to ruin . . .We might also have complained of finding it difficult to breathe, outdoors because of exhalations from what remained of the swamps, indoors because of the crowds squeezed into spaces that were too small. And if ever there was a place where one might die asphyxiated, it was the château of Versailles. Yet none of these evils had any importance for us, nor for the rest of the world. Our position was envied, for we were at Versailles.

  Versailles, where Fortune reigned and where at a word from a minister, or from a courtier who had the ear of those in power, your fate might alter totally from one day to the next. For the better, as well as for the worse.

  Where the best tone prevailed, and men bowed themselves out of a chamber with greater style than anywhere else.

  Where Fashion was decided. Never mind that sometimes you wore lace chewed by the mice; the cunning little creatures sometimes invented new stitches.

  Where, even in the least frequented sections of the park, at the farthest end of an avenue, at the entrance to an area of woods, some small detail of great beauty might always appear: the equivocal beckoning of a statue, the goblet of fruit and flowers carved into the stone and set against the sky.

  Where, above all, there dwelt the Queen.

  And on certain mornings, in the half consciousness that precedes waking, when I can let the state of pleasant confusion persist awhile, I make believe I am still back there. I imagine my fingers are touching the wall of the room I had there, that I am turning over in my bed, that once again I feel my hair lying in thick abundance against my pillow, and I tell myself that a few rooms away from mine, She lives and breathes.

  Versailles held me under its spell. And I was not the only one. To be sure, it was no longer the sacred place it had once been, under the dominion of Louis XIV. But Versailles continued to exercise its fascination. Wherever you went in society, you had but to pronounce these opening words: “I was at the Court . . . ” and those around you held their breath, looked at you differently. It is hard to imagine now the depth of the wounds inflicted on self-esteem “in these parts,” how humiliating it was for a courtier, after hours spent waiting in an anteroom, to confront the fact that he would not be summoned to the King’s Privy Supper. His shame was palpable. I could read it in people’s faces, in the bearing of those who had been ushered out and were returning to their carriages by way of the inner courtyard to avoid scrutiny. What I did not see was the joy of the chosen as they slipped through the half-opened door and proceeded to the sanctuary. But I could imagine it . . . And even later, during the Consulate, when Court was held at the residence of Joséphine, and Bonaparte was posing as a model republican, even then the passion for Versailles still burned. As soon as one of the official soirées ended, they made sure the doors were properly shut and said to one another: “Let’s talk about the old Court, let’s spend some time at Versailles; Monsieur de Montesquiou, tell us how they used to . . . , Monsieur de Talleyrand, tell us about . . . ” And the younger ones would draw their chairs up closer to hear the stories . . . They were doing what we do, here in Vienna.

  I am determined to set this down in writing, to recall the magic, in today’s climate, when a campaign of propaganda is tending to stigmatize Versailles as a bottomless pit of needless expenses or else speak of it as an empty stage, a landscape of dust and ashes, already dimmed by an awareness that the end was near. Marionettes with powdered perukes, men and women old before their time, puppets doomed to disappear . . . From the winners’ standpoint, those whom they have beaten and outstripped had in any event no existence worthy of the name, no future. The arrogance of young people would be touching, but for the fact that so often it leads to brutality.

  I am convinced—and my most recent impressions of the world we live in are not apt to make me change my mind—that humanity does not progress. It rearranges things in other ways, to accord with altered social standards and reflect different aspirations. The system based on a hierarchy of castes had its faults, but the one based on oppression through money does not strike me as preferable. This obsession with getting rich . . . Now there are things called banks. These, I am told, are little fortresses that are located in the center of certain capital cities and, seen from the outside, cannot be distinguished from a normal house. It is very odd to try and imagine such places. I have probably seen banks without realizing . . . My parents were poor. Whenever my mother, speaking with no hint of acrimony and actuated solely by the desire to keep some of her children alive, ventured to point out the destitution in which our family lived, my father, who was very pious and loved us dearly, would smile in response. Averting his gaze from our wretched circumstances, he would lift up his eyes toward a window and say: “Is not life more than meat and the body more than raiment? Behold the birds of the air: they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? And wherefore should you have a care to clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” My mother’s glance would follow his toward the window with its missing panes. She would smile with the same smile as his . . . The lilies of the field are trampled and trampled again by the soldiers. If there is progress, in our day, it can only be in weaponry. We kill more quickly now, and in greater numbers . . . At the battle of Essling alone there were forty thousand deaths, forty thousand deaths in thirty hours of combat . . . The mind recoils. Yes, machines for killing are improving. Aside from that, I do not
see . . .

  The château of Versailles, sacred symbol, focus of so many desires, was abandoned at the first signs of impending danger, in July 1789. The whole drama played out very swiftly. Louis Sébastien Mercier, a democrat, a Parisian, and what is worse a man of the theater, but also possessed of an honest mind lit by intuitive flashes that illumine the truth, has written: “The Revolution could have stopped on July 18 after Louis XVI had taken in his hand the national emblem—the cockade—and kissed it, on the balcony of City Hall.” I cannot but agree. The entire outcome was decided between Saturday, July 11, the day Jacques Necker, Controller General of Finance, was dismissed, and Friday, the seventeenth, the day that the King was humiliated in Paris and royalty repudiated. July 16 saw the Breteuil government dismissed and Necker recalled. That same day, the Court was in flight. Defeat was now inevitable and irreversible; Louis XVI grasped this fact, but too late. In 1792 he would admit to Count Fersen: “I ought to have left on July 14. I missed my chance and was not granted another.” Indeed, he was not granted another; whereas in his and the Queen’s entourage the chance was grasped all too quickly. Court, friends, relatives, all dispersed in the twinkling of an eye. Princes and courtiers made off for London, Turin, Rome, Basle, Lausanne, Luxembourg, Brussels . . . And I myself was swept along in the flood tide of that disaster. I left without stopping to consider, without questioning what I was doing. Rather than act, I simply obeyed . . . I suppose . . . Ought I to feel consoled by that thought? “The King’s Couchees have been quite deserted,” the Queen had complained. All at once, not just the Couchees but the entire château answered that description. We abandoned ship the moment the timbers began to creak. We fled.

  I would like to give an account of that defeat; it happened so quickly, it was so total and complete, but in some sense it has remained a secret, a tale never told. A stealthy defeat, one might almost say . . . A moment of silent consternation, a few words so exchanged as not to be overheard, orders given, great lords disguising themselves as servants, and carriages moving at a gallop along the roads. There was no moonlight on that night of July 16, 1789, and when I turned around to look back at Versailles, the château, hidden by forest darker even than the sky, had disappeared . . . I would like to tell the story of that desertion, thus appeasing the intruders who invade my dreams and mitigating the isolation of days spent in my room, this enclosed space composed of silence, wakefulness, and writing, which I now rarely leave and which, when the fancy takes me, I call “my castle of solitude.” I shall find a place for everything that comes back to me, all the remembered fragments of a wrecked world; I shall not be so heartless as to kill that world a second time by stroking things out. My mind takes up the same facts again and again, changing them to fit my changing daydreams, while other, possibly more essential, facts have been obliterated. I do have this excuse: I speak of a time long ago, a time leading nowhere, certainly not to our grim nineteenth century, even if some people, naive in their use of numbers and fooled by hindsight, see in that earlier century no more than the prelude to this one.

  VERSAILLES, JULY 14, 1789

  EARLY MASS

  (six o’clock in the morning).

  It was a rather cool morning for July; that, I guess, is what I was thinking as I stood on a stool in my attic room, head thrust out of the window, peering at a rainy sky. Quickly, I got into my clothes, pulling winter stockings onto my legs and slipping a dark violet, nearly black dress over the heavy cotton petticoat I had worn in bed. I added a woolen jacket and a scarf, then snatched up a large umbrella. No need to snatch up the missal, however: it was always in my dress pocket, and I transferred it whenever I changed dresses. I set off hurriedly for Saint-Louis Church to hear early mass there. I knew the way by heart, but that did not prevent me from getting it wrong and going too far along the rue de la Chancellerie, instead of immediately turning right, onto the rue des Récollets. A minor error, certainly, considered in terms of distance, but the gravity of my mistake was brought home to me when I reached the fringes of the market. Clusters of poor wretches eked out an existence in the filth and corruption there. They would do anything to improve their regular fare, which consisted of the worst leavings, of bits of refuse that dogs would not have eaten. Occasionally they would fight one another for the privilege of drinking the oil that fed the wicks of the streetlamps. I could not see these people, but I could tell they were there, huddled together beside rows of hovels, scattered about in the hidden protection of anything that might serve as a shelter or simply lying dead-drunk in the gutters. I was walking as fast as I could. I slid on what I took to be some vegetable peelings and let go of my dress, which was a bit too long. Its hem got soaked in the mud, the horrible mixture of blood and filth in which that collection of huts was mired. Very close to me, things were stirring, shady dealings were being transacted, men’s voices could be heard. I ought to have taken greater care and not have crossed this ill-famed Parc-aux-Cerfs quarter alone in the gray light of a day that refused to break.

  When I reached Saint-Louis Church, my heart was pounding, and I at once became absorbed in fervent prayer. We were enjoined to pray very hard for the preservation of the kingdom and for the soul of the Dauphin, poor child, who had died on June 4. At the King’s behest, a thousand masses were to be said for the soul of his son. I prayed passionately, with the uneasy feeling that there was a link between the death of the King’s oldest son and some nameless threat to France. Early morning hour notwithstanding, the church was full. Along the rows of seats, somberly clad, kneeling, silhouetted figures were whispering. The bit of light we had came from holy candles forming a border around the congregation, not from the stained-glass windows. The priest who climbed the steps up to his pulpit was not Father Jean-Henri Gruyer, curate of Saint-Louis, but Father Bergier, confessor to the Queen, to the King’s brother the Count de Provence, and to the Count’s wife. This priest must surely know a great deal that he was keeping to himself! I tried to descry, through the words he spoke, some other, subtle message, informed by facts gleaned in the secrecy of the confessional, that he might indirectly be revealing to us. Father Bergier, needless to say, let nothing escape his lips. In his customary dry, extremely unassuming voice, he eulogized Saint Bonaventure, whose feast day—July 14—it was.

  For my return to the château, I followed the correct route, along the King’s Vegetable Garden, then along the rue de la Surintendance. This itinerary might appear safer, judged from the outside; in fact, it disturbed me even more deeply. In this old quarter, which had once been the village of Versailles, many deputies of the Third Estate had taken up residence. The prospect of encountering these drearily garbed men, who talked to each other the way most people hit each other, was most unalluring. I overcame my misgivings, however, and managed to walk the full length of the street without seeing anything. Not till I was almost at the first gate of the château did I feel safe enough to recover the gift of sight. In the Royal Courtyard, the changing of the guard was under way. I hummed an accompaniment to the music of the drums and trumpets; as I went by, I took a pitcher of water from the cupboard under the stairs at little Alice’s—she was chambermaid to Madame de Bargue (who was lucky enough to have an apartment with a fountain)—and went back to my room to don formal wear. I changed my wool stockings for ones of floss silk and, to replace my scarf, chose a black-and-white tartan shawl. I did my hair very carefully. I also wanted to reorganize the readings I had chosen for the Queen. I had been notified twenty-four hours ahead: today would be one of the days when she sent for me.

  READING SESSION WITH THE QUEEN

  AT THE PETIT TRIANON: FÉLICIE BY MARIVAUX,

  SUMMER FLOWERS, THE QUEEN’S WARDROBE BOOK

  (from ten to eleven o’clock in the morning).

  The Queen had slept at the Petit Trianon, although traditionally Tuesdays were reserved for ambassadorial visits, which involved her being present at the château. Apparently, however, either there would not be any visits from ambassadors, or the Queen wo
uld not be obliged to receive them . . . I was to present myself to her not merely at Trianon but actually in her bedchamber. I looked forward eagerly to that moment. When she was in her own realm, I could hope to capture her attention. It was obvious that she was much happier at the Petit Trianon than at the château of Versailles. On each occasion, at Trianon, in the very gesture that she used when inviting me to be seated, I could detect a special sort of inner peace and outward kindness. At the château, the morning sessions of reading took place just before the beginning of the Grand Levee. I would find the Queen still in dishabille, sitting on the great theatrical bed in the ceremonial bedchamber. She would beckon to me to pass through the balustrade; I would open the little gate and proceed to seat myself on a narrow stool to the right of her bed. I could tell that she was perturbed, befuddled with sleep, and totally inattentive. In her mind, she was already being subjected to the first ritual of her day. And something of the stiff formality, the self-assured, remote, and purposeful image that it would be her duty to project, had begun to come over her. It was as though the rows of chairs and folding stools, set out ahead of time for the ladies who were going to attend her Levee, were watching her, as though the public already had its collective gaze fastened on her and was making her feel the weight of its constraints through the intermediary of those chairs. The reading sessions at the château were always hastily conducted, official, submitted to rather than enjoyed. They antagonized the Queen and left me inwardly wretched. But at the Petit Trianon, that “bouquet of flowers” given to her by the King, the entire performance was quite different. What Monsieur de Montdragon had told me was true: the characteristic aura you encountered, on coming into the Queen’s presence, indeed, as soon as you stepped into the atmosphere of her Household, was one of gentle kindness. And to anyone who was also familiar with the Households of Monsieur the Count de Provence, or that of Madame, the Count’s wife, or those of the King’s other brother, the Count d’Artois or his wife, the difference was quite remarkable. At home in her own place, the Queen avoided giving orders. She would suggest, mention, ask for each thing as a favor that someone might care to do for her and for which she would be ever so grateful. She was absolutely polite to the humblest of her servants and never evinced the slightest impatience or brusqueness in her dealings with them. She was maternal and deliberately playful with her page boys, and she addressed her female attendants in accents not just of friendship but of mutual understanding. Was it an appeal for closer affection? Did the Queen forget who she was? By no means; nor, moreover, did anyone have illusions on that score, but the atmosphere I have described was the affective, affectionate harmony in which she desired to live. The gentleness that distinguished her gestures, her tone of voice, and her dealings with other people was an extension of the tremendous elegance marking everything that came within her orbit—clothing, furniture, décor. Entering Versailles, I had thought I was entering the kingdom of Beauty. My introduction to those domains where the Queen ruled taught me that the beauty I so admired could assume a more personal, subtle, delicate hue.