Farewell, My Queen Read online

  My visit was expected. I went up the marble stairway leading to the second story where her bedchamber was. I can still see the curve of the stairway, the blue-and-white porcelain pots that were set on the steps (the sight of them always made me long to go to Holland; I am exceedingly fond of windmills), the somewhat narrow corridor, built to allow two people to brush past one another, the doors on which were chalked the names of those few friends considered worthy enough to spend the night at the Petit Trianon. (During country sojourns at Marly, Fontainebleau, or Saint-Cloud, guests’ names were likewise written on the doors of lodgings requisitioned from local residents to accommodate those for whom rooms had not been found at the château.) There were also, in various corners, little improvised rooms for the servants, removable boards on which they would lay a thin mattress that they rolled up immediately on awakening and stowed out of sight. At the Petit Trianon, as at Trianon itself and at the château, day erased the traces of night. But not in her special place, no, not in her bedchamber, not in the private territory that she marked with her gentle sweetness, with her scent. There, night and day commingled, prolonged each other, met, and intertwined. And this was especially true in that bedchamber at the Petit Trianon, which was so dear to her because it could not be confused in any respect with an official setting. The room looked out onto an ornamental pond and onto the Temple of Love, partly hidden from view by a little forest of reeds. Forest? That at any rate was how she referred to the dozen or so reeds whose rustling, when the window was open, was part of the enchantment I found in that bedchamber at the Petit Trianon. Sounds of water and reeds, voices of the lace makers, seamstresses, spinners, and ironers, whose songs the Queen liked to hear as they went about their work in the washhouse. That, in my memory, is the music of the Petit Trianon, and not the succession of concerts held there, numerous though they were. It is the music of the garden and of women’s voices. And the fragrances? Like the music, these come in the first instance from outdoors. They are delicate, and they change in the spring with the changing garden blossoms. But one there is that persists, identical throughout the seasons: the smell of the coffee brought to the Queen for her breakfast. If I chanced to arrive just when she was having her coffee, she would ask her attendants to bring another cup for me. And the instant it touched my throat, the savor of the strong black brew, that to her was the flavor of her daily awakening, became part of the very flavor of my life. If I search my memory, there is one other fragrance, more fraught with meaning, with a very strong, smooth odor to it, that I smelled only when I came to the Petit Trianon. But I was afraid to breathe it in, because it was too closely involved with the Queen’s body and the care she lavished on it. This was a jasmine-flower salve that she had her women smear around the roots of her hair. The salve had the property of preventing hair from falling out and even making it grow. All the women longed to get some for themselves, but Monsieur Fargeon, of The Scented Swan in Montpellier, jealously guarded it for the Queen’s exclusive use.

  * * *

  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. It was not all the same to me. Nothing that had to do with her was all the same to me. I did not dare to tell her so. Blushing and embarrassed, I went to the bookshelves and fetched down the volume she wished for. She had rejected the passages I had prepared: my feelings were hurt. At the same time, it flattered me to be joined with her in reading from a play, to be giving her the cue to her lines. It was one way of gaining access to that temple of intimacy, that most secret of secret places: her theater at the Petit Trianon. I tried to visualize the blue of the velvet chairs, the fragility of the blue and gold papier-mâché ornaments. I imagined it as a dollhouse proportioned to the Queen’s taste for whatever was very tiny, suited to the passion she had for scaled-down objects, miniatures, anything small. Small, petit, her pronunciation of this word was a delight; she made the first consonant too hard, then let the remainder of the word melt away in a sigh as though her mouth were kissing the ambient air. Petit, little, everything to do with Marianne is little (for instance, the Queen loved hearing me read aloud: “I omit entirely the period of my early childhood years, when my instruction consisted of learning to make innumerable little items of feminine apparel . . . ”), but she had rejected La Vie de Marianne. There we were in Félicie. The Queen was the fairy. I was playing Félicie, the young girl.

  I began:

  “FÉLICIE. One cannot but agree that the weather today is fine.

  “HORTENSE (THE FAIRY). And as a result we have been walking for a long while.

  “FÉLICIE. And as a result, though my pleasure in being with you is always very great, I have never been more aware of it than today.

  “HORTENSE. I do believe that you love me, Félicie.”

  And I responded with all my soul, trying to restrain my fervor when I realized that unlike me, the Queen was reading tonelessly. She was delivering her lines without putting the least expression into them. She was reciting passages with her eyes shut, wearing a look of concentration as though she were reciting irregular verbs. She had completely forgotten that I was there. Totally absorbed in the effort of memorization, she was muttering the words for her own benefit. I would come to a stop, whereupon she would go back to speaking audibly, and the fairy tale would resume its course . . .

  The fairy has asked the girl what gift she desires to have bestowed on her, and the girl has replied: “Beauty.” At once the fairy grants her wish and Félicie is overjoyed.

  “HORTENSE. You rejoice at my gift; I wonder if it should not make you uneasy instead.

  “FÉLICIE. Be assured, Madam. You shall have no c
ause to repent.

  “HORTENSE. So I hope; but I mean to add one thing more to this present I have just given you. You are going out into the world; I want you to be happy out in the world, and for that I need to be perfectly informed of your inclinations, in order to ensure that the sort of happiness you find will be the one most suited to you. Do you see the place where we now are? This is the world.

  “FÉLICIE. The world! And I thought I was still quite close to home.”

  At which point the Queen had had enough. Among the books I had put on the table, she had espied the latest issue of the Magazine of New French and English Fashions. That was the reading she wanted to hear. It was all about bonnets, the ornaments for grand Court apparel, and trimmings for ladies’ dresses:

  “Dresses are commonly trimmed with a webbing of gold or silver, but the ornaments preferred today are tulle or net trim, accompanied by garlands of various flowers mingled with clasps fashioned into love knots.” A questioning note must have crept into my voice, for the Queen, her manner unpleasantly troubled, firmly directed me to continue . . . “To these are added acorns in the Chinese manner, or horns of plenty scattering flowers and berries over the background of the fabric. When the background is plain, a dress may also be adorned with flowers and plants in imitation of nature, such as sunflowers, lilies, hyacinth, lily of the valley, hawthorn . . . ” She was entranced. But it was when I embarked on the topic of embroidery work that she truly listened to me with bated breath: “From lawn caracos embroidered in a variety of colors, our ladies of fashion have rapidly moved on to dresses likewise embroidered. This vogue for embroidery is so pleasing that they are bound to put forth their best efforts in the perfecting of it.”

  Embroidery work was the great innovation of that July. The Queen, as though gripped by inspiration, sat suddenly erect amid her pillows with a surge of energy such as I had not seen her display of late. She called for The Queen’s Wardrobe Book. The reading session was at an end; what followed was the responsibility of Rose Bertin. By the time I had retrieved the books I had brought with me and arranged them in my big cloth bag, the Queen was already absorbed in contemplation of her precious Wardrobe Book. Eyes fixed on the samples of fabric glued to its pages, she was withdrawn from the world. She was choosing her gowns. And as though, in her insatiable desire for those stuffs—those silks and velvets, those goffered materials and fabulous weaves created to please her—the sense of sight did not suffice, she was stroking the samples with her fingers, wanting to feel them against her skin as she sat there and gazed pensively off into space. Absentmindedly, she removed her nightcap. Soft and very fair, her hair spread cloudlike over the pillow, while at the same time a powerful smell of jasmine filled the room. One shoulder was bared. I sat motionless, enthralled . . . I could not make up my mind to leave. I do not know what I wanted from the Queen, but I wanted more and more.

  At last I contrived to come away, but before I withdrew, I looked at her one last time; she was passionately examining those bits of fabric. At that moment she was fifteen years old, the age she was when she first arrived in France. Fifteen . . . at most.

  LUNCH AT LITTLE VENICE

  (one o’clock in the afternoon).

  I went to have lunch by the water’s edge, at one of the cafés set up along the north traverse of the Grand Canal, in those sham fishing villages that had continued to exist since the time of King Louis XIV and that were called Little Venice. Country folk dressed as sailors (when they were not playacting life at sea, they tilled the fields) served fish, conveyed at top speed from the ports on the Channel. I asked my waiter whether there had been a good catch. He launched into an account of dangerous moments at sea, shifting winds, shipwrecks narrowly avoided. There were a few other customers in the outdoor section of the café, including some I knew by sight. They enjoyed the account of a storm out on the open sea, and with the characteristic ability of the château dwellers to abandon reality in a split second and leap onto a playhouse stage, they joined in the game.

  “And right now,” I asked when I had done with my meal and was getting ready to leave, “would it not be imprudent to put out to sea?”

  I pointed to the dead calm of the Canal’s surface.

  “A little, but I’m going to fetch you an experienced sailor, an old sea dog who has been through many a squall.”

  A gondolier appeared, and I took my place in his boat, on the damp fabric covering the seat. This young lad belonged to a Venetian family established in Little Venice for more than a century, the Palmerini. He knew the entire history of the flotilla that plied the Grand Canal, but I had no wish to hear it. “I would rather you sang me a song.” He began singing in Italian, and at once the sad, sad gray of that near-wintry sky turned clear and bright. And so I was carried away from Trianon to find myself on the other side of that branch of the Canal, over toward the Menagerie château. I had not really planned to go there, but I was glad rather than vexed. Monsieur de Laroche, Captain-Custodian of the Menagerie, was a colorful personage. Beyond that, for me he was a friendly soul, and on that free afternoon I was quite in the mood to pay a friendly call.

  VISIT TO MONSIEUR DE LAROCHE,

  CAPTAIN-CUSTODIAN OF THE MENAGERIE:

  “ENOUGH OF THAT”

  (from two to four o’clock in the afternoon).

  The like of Captain de Laroche was nowhere to be found. The most spectacular phenomenon in the Captain’s Menagerie was no doubt the man himself, an individual such that I cannot resist the urge to pen his portrait. People pretended they were observing the animals but in fact what they came to see was him . . . only not from too close-up. The pleasure of his company was best enjoyed out-of-doors.

  Tall, swarthy, imposing, with military stripes and ribbons aplenty, as lavishly adorned in rings and diamonds as any financier, Laroche was the most fetid creature imaginable. At a distance of several paces, you could detect his presence with your eyes shut. He stank like a herd of billy goats, or like heaving masses of sows rolling around in the mire, or wild boars in their own muck. Compared to his aura, the air by the lake known as “stinking pond,” in the park at Versailles, was sweetly scented. He was connected by birth to the rich and ancient Provençal branch of the Moizades and, following family tradition, had first been destined for a diplomatic career, but he would have cost France all her allies. The stink of Laroche struck like a bomb. Your choice was either to exit in great haste or to vomit. With the passing of the years, a problem that had already been extremely trying in his youth assumed the proportions of a transnatural phenomenon. On the day of his Court presentation, a plan to seize him bodily and cast him forcibly into a bath having failed (he had broken one valet’s arm and smashed another’s teeth to smithereens), his household had been obliged to settle for dousing him with casks of perfume and putting two pairs of shoes on his feet in the forlorn hope of containing the man’s stench. The combined effect of his personal odor and the perfume was overwhelming. When the “debutant” made his entrance, the King (at that time Louis XV) had recoiled, and when the moment came for the young man, still heated from the violent scuffles he had just been involved in, to proffer his right cheek for the ritual salutation, His Majesty had turned away. The King clasped his hands to his handsome face in a gesture he employed regularly but which on this particular day heralded not only a particularly tenacious bout of royal melancholia but a fearful migraine as well. In order that there might be no recurrence of the incident, and to avoid giving offense to a family that enjoyed royal favor, someone had been inspired to give the new courtier a post at the Menagerie, where, it was hoped, his bodily emanations would merge with those of the lions, tigers, and other big cats. He had been appointed Captain-Custodian of the Versailles Menagerie, a coveted position, for, aside from the fact that the duties it involved were not demanding, it included the right, nay, the duty to reside in the little octagonal château built to order by Mansart for Louis XIV. The Menagerie, erected at the end of one branch of the Canal on the farther side
of the Grand Trianon, was, by all accounts, a most superior place before the Captain arrived. On the ground floor there was a large salon done in rockwork, kept permanently cool by fountains and by rivulets that ran among ferns. It was an ideal meeting place in hot weather and on those stormy late afternoons so common at Versailles. People engaged in converse there. They played at charades or at word portraits, and it was commonly said that with the murmur of the water in their ears and the softness of moss forming a tapestry over the uneven walls round about them, wit flowed more freely in that place and was more happily infectious than anywhere else. Under Laroche these wellsprings of sociability had dried up at the source. Still, as Versailles was constantly overpopulated, there were always individuals housed at the Menagerie. But besides accepting this arrangement for stays of limited duration only, sojourners also arranged things so as to occupy not the Menagerie château but its little adjoining lodges, in short, to reside as far away as possible from the Captain’s evil-smelling lair. If memory serves, in July of that year Monsieur de Lally, Madame de Gouvernet, and her aunt were in residence there. Upon my arrival, as I stepped out of the boat onto dry land, I could not see any of these persons. I could see only the Captain-Custodian. He stood at the entrance to his domain, under an arch of boxwood. He was smoking a pipe. The Captain was, as ever, full of energy, energy deriving, so he claimed, from his principles of hygiene, since, as he put it, “every time you take a bath, you lose a bit of yourself.” His rings sent out glimmers of light much more luminous than the dreary colors of the sky. In his own way, Laroche was a sun. He was firmly convinced this was so, but without falling into the sin of pride, for he was in all sincerity and with fanatical affection the faithful vassal of Louis XVI, whose Couchees he had enlivened over many years.