Farewell, My Queen Read online

  Not very far, as it turned out. They were only going to the Salle du Jeu de Paume, the Tennis Court, where the National Assembly now met. It was a place all three of them knew quite well, having played any number of tennis matches there when they were young. But under the circumstances, the place had presumably lost something of its familiarity. The King was walking faster and faster, head down while the crowd acclaimed him. The Count d’Artois, keeping almost abreast of him, was being heartily booed. The Count de Provence, left hopelessly behind, perspiring freely and out of breath, was looking around for a chair to rest on. We went with them as far as the doorway. There we would be obliged to stop, and we watched enviously as Monsieur de La Tour du Pin, in his capacity as a Representative of the Nobility, went on into the Tennis Court. We remained outside, while round us the ranks of the crowd were swelling. After a few minutes, during which we could not hear anything, there was applause, then shouts, then once again nothing audible, and finally roars of joy. “That bodes well,” Honorine whispered. And already, before the King and his brothers had come back out, some highly excited young men appeared who had come to give the news. So that bit by bit, we were able to piece together everything that had transpired.

  The King had declared before the National Assembly: “There are no matters more pressing or that touch my heart more deeply than the fearful disorders that reign in the capital city . . . ” At the start, he had been listened to attentively but with hostility. The public was expecting a new edition of his earlier declarations and his reiterated determination not to yield. Then, when he had announced the reason for his presence, there was endless applause. It was difficult to hear him over the uproar triggered by his announcement. And the King, who upon those previous occasions had been listened to in glum silence, was moved by the enthusiasm of the Representatives. He could not go on speaking. After several attempts, he had finally managed to conclude: “. . . and relying upon the love and faithfulness of my subjects, I have ordered the troops to withdraw from Paris and Versailles. I authorize you and even urge you to make my intentions known throughout the capital city.” In the Assembly the tears and transports of delight had risen to fever pitch. And even after a formal response from Bailly, President of the Assembly, reminding everyone present that the dismissal of ministers dear to the Nation was chiefly responsible for the troubles, ovations went on undiminished.

  When the King emerged, nothing could have equaled the happiness of his demeanor. His words had produced a triumph. And to my knowledge, it was surely the first time they had produced any effect other than discouragement. He was intoxicated by this oratorical success. Along his path, the shouts and tears went on unceasingly. Some, in the excess of their enthusiasm, lay down on the ground so he would walk on them.

  Where the King’s departure had been unobtrusive, his return bordered on mass delirium. It took him more than an hour to cover the short distance from the Tennis Court to the château. His brothers, this time, were walking ahead of him. They were surrounded, or followed, by all the Representatives. The King walked on, to uninterrupted acclaim from the crowd, with their shouts of: Long live the King, Long live the Nation, Long live Liberty. The Representatives of the three Orders had joined hands, to form a chain and an enclosure in the middle of which the King, the Count de Provence, and the Count d’Artois moved onward. The King was going along with the same heavy, ungainly walk, but his head was no longer bowed. Very close to him the Count de Provence showed every sign of exhaustion; he was virtually being carried by the gentlemen whose arms supported him. The Count d’Artois, meanwhile, driven by a crude streak in his nature that all too often got the better of him, was responding with insults to any Representative who came close enough to touch his person. His brothers’ ill humor did not affect the King. He was savoring his triumph, greedily drinking in the expressions of his people’s love, and becoming intoxicated with both. The Representatives, hands linked, were endeavoring to keep the crowd at a distance, but the crowd was hard to keep in check. People wanted to come close to the King; they wanted to touch him. A woman of the people had tried to kiss him. “Let her come to me,” he said. She had thrown her arms around his neck with an impetus that sent him staggering. The King seemed utterly bewitched by the ecstatic sense of communion with the multitude. So often, over the past several days, he had felt inclined to “scold” his people; now he could love them again, and his sternness melted in the joy of this reconciliation. When the King had returned to the château, he had soon reappeared on the second-story front balcony, with the Queen, the Dauphin, and the royal princes and princesses. But what metamorphosis was this? On the King’s countenance was no lingering sign of joy. Beside him the Queen stood quite rigid, not waving. Instead, she took the Dauphin’s little hand, where he stood in front of her, and waved that at the crowd. She it was who gave the signal for retiring into the château. She was the first to leave, with her son His Royal Highness the Dauphin, while Madame the King’s daughter, Marie-Thérèse, the little girl dubbed by the Queen “Little Miss Sobersides,” clung to her father’s hand and would not leave the balcony. She looked down with great curiosity at all these people gathered below her, shouting aloud their love for her father. The King now looked quite dejected. He followed his wife, as did the Count and Countess de Provence, the Count and Countess d’Artois, and their children.

  Gabrielle de Polignac, Governess of the Children of France, had not appeared on the balcony. “The Duchess is like a mole,” someone said. “She burrows beneath the surface, but a pickaxe will force her up into the open; we’ll find her.”

  ENTHUSIASM OF THE CROWD.

  I AM CONFIDENT OF VICTORY

  (afternoon).

  The demonstrations of love and gratitude had again found expression in loud acclamations. These became strident when the King had gone to hear Mass and the motet Plaudite Regem manibus was sung. There were rounds of applause, promises of fidelity, tears. An entire crowd caught up in a frenzied show of love. They were all stamping their feet and clapping so hard that the noise drowned out the singers of the King’s Choir.

  Since that time I have learned about crowds, about mobs. The mob will shout acclaim or hurl insults at anyone, or anything. The object of their emotion is of no account. The mob is roused by the feeling of being a mob. Its hysteria mounts in proportion to the strange phenomenon of self-awareness or awareness without the self. “I am no one,” says the mob. Multiplied by thousands, this nonpersonhood is an irresistible force. And I surrendered myself to it, for the space of an emotional outburst, which I could grasp because I seemed to hear, to have within reach of my senses, tangible proof of the people’s love for their King. And I really did have the proof, but what I did not know, then, was that there could exist a people as changeable, as quick to pass from tears of compassion to cries for murder, as the French . . . In my naïveté, I, too, began to applaud, along with everyone else. I was shouting Long live the King, Long live the Nation, Long live Liberty. Honorine was dancing where she stood and hugging the people next to her. She kept saying that she ought to leave, that Madame de La Tour du Pin might be needing her services, but she made no move to go. At last she made up her mind and pushed her way through the densely packed crowd. I stayed. Soon there was no further sound, whether of singing or prayer, coming from the Chapel. The members of the royal family had no doubt dispersed and gone their several ways back to their respective apartments. Unless perhaps the three brothers, after their unplanned walk and consequent upon its spectacular success, had chosen not to part, but to take their meal together with their wives, at the apartment of the Countess de Provence, as quite often happened . . . The crowd—which extended well beyond the Place d’Armes and as far as the entrances to Saint-Cloud, Paris, and Sceaux Avenues—continued to wander about, but the bursts of applause were subsiding. We needed some sort of sign or signal to get us fired up again. None came. I felt as I did at the theater, when the actors had taken their final bow and I desperately waited for them to come bac
k one more time . . . waited in vain. I could see that, on the contrary, most of the château windows were shut and their curtains drawn. And suddenly I felt sad—just the way I had felt cold and discouraged that morning. I had witnessed the erecting of something like an immense and perfect monument to the glory of the King, and now I was conscious only of the cracks already splitting it and its lack of a firm foundation. I went back to the wing that housed my living quarters, the South Wing where my shelter nestled.

  What I am neglecting to report, and what probably inspired the debatable image I used, of a monument, is that with the gradual lessening of the applause, discussions started up again. Beside me, the townspeople of Versailles (one of them worked at La Belle Image tavern; I had seen him before, on his regular deliveries of lemon drink to the château) were arguing about the latest events in the capital city. Not merely did they unhesitatingly qualify the supposed taking of the Bastille as a mental aberration; they had already gone further, with gleeful comments about the following plan: the people were proposing to erect, on the spot where the Bastille had stood, a monument dedicated to King Louis XVI, who Restored Liberty.

  “On the spot where the Bastille stood?” I asked.

  There was silence; distrustful glances were sent in my direction. The group of townsfolk moved away from me. The tavern keeper turned around to look at me and whispered something to his cronies.

  NIGHT

  IN THE STUDY OF JACOB-NICOLAS MOREAU,

  HISTORIOGRAPHER OF FRANCE

  (from nine until ten o’clock in the evening).

  I have a character trait that has not improved with the years: I find it difficult to face reality squarely. I had heard someone say: “The people have seized the Bastille.” I had noticed the hard, withdrawn expression on the face of the Queen when she had appeared on the balcony and that motion of her body when, instead of presenting her son, showing him to the public, she had sought rather to conceal him. She had kept him in front of her for barely a few minutes, then moved him so that he was at her side, and little by little the child had become partly hidden by her dress (a maneuver that had drawn spiteful remarks from those around me). Several times the Queen had turned around as though someone had been supposed to come and fetch her son—her only surviving son—and was slow in coming. Someone . . . the Governess of the Children of France, of course. All this I had seen, and it would have been worth my while to pause for a moment and let my mind take in the implications, but “it” couldn’t, “it” does not function that way. With me, Captain de Laroche’s catchphrase “Enough of that” is an irresistible tendency, or almost irresistible, for that same mind has a strength of obstinacy, or a latent anxiety, that reacts to signals coming from outside and more or less forces me to see them.

  Besides, was the King’s air of triumph really convincing? If that had truly been the case, some part of his joy would have spread through the Court, whereas what took place was quite the reverse. Indeed, the contrast was strange, between the delirious ovations from the crowd and the rigid stance of the princes and princesses—and the King himself—on the balcony. As though they had been replaced by wax dummies.

  When is the King, king?, Captain de Laroche had pondered. Certainly not when he came and stood on the balcony. And the Queen, queen, even less so.

  After supper (I ate alone in my room, having brought back with me, on a tray, a small trout pâté, an artichoke, and some strawberries, given to me by a woman friend in the service of a marquess who enjoyed the privilege of “eating at Court,” that is, of being boarded at the château by courtesy of the King), I made my way to the study of Jacob-Nicolas Moreau. I was sure I would find him there. And even in the exceptional event of his not being there, I would have gone to the little library off his study and taken one or two books for the night.

  My friend the Historiographer of France was very inadequately housed. Truth to tell, he was not housed at all. For his domestic needs, in that totally candle-smoke-blackened study, he had only a great freestanding wardrobe, on the floor of which he had spread a straw mattress. When compelled by excessive fatigue, he would rest there for an hour or two. So going to see him meant going into that dark, dusty cubbyhole, completely lined with books, and situated on the topmost floor but one, that is to say the fourth floor, in the North Wing, not far from one of the five or six Royal Libraries, the Attic Library, which expanded, but only via narrow corridors, into a first and then a second library annex plus several physics and chemistry rooms. Rather unsettling places to have so close by, making the Historiographer feel as though he were living in an extension of the fields of study that were the King’s particular passion. Jacob-Nicolas Moreau worked unceasingly. He was obsessively conscious of the importance of his task. No less strong was the torment of knowing with certainty that he must, by his sole deservings, wipe out the stain that the name of that disbeliever Voltaire represented in the long, virtuous succession of Historiographers of France.

  The idea that I might be disturbing him never bothered me, for we were on such close terms that he would simply have told me if my visit were unwelcome. But this time, when I went in, I immediately became aware that the Historiographer was not doing anything, which was most exceptional. He was sitting not at his worktable but in a low armchair, among piles of books. He at once stood up, offered me the armchair, and sat down on a footstool that was even lower. Both of us were now totally hemmed in by tall, labyrinthine piles of books. Above this chaotic scene hung an immense crucifix. What little light found its way into the room, through a very high window, illuminated the crucified Christ. My friend took my hands in his and said in a lifeless voice (indeed, it seemed to me he had been crying):

  “We are doomed. The King has sent away the army of foreign soldiers that Monsieur de Puységur brought in. Only the presence of that army gave him the self-confidence to dismiss Necker—assuming the decision came from him and not from the Count d’Artois or the Queen, but we’ve reached a point where it makes no difference. That army was his sole support. He gave in to pressure from the so-called National Assembly. He has given in on that point. He’ll give in on everything. Just think of it, my dear, when he gave his speech to the Representatives, he was standing up and hatless. This is the end. I’d been predicting it for a long time, but no one could be more shocked or devastated than I.”

  I was speechless.

  “All we can hope for now is that the regular troops won’t be won over. They say that in Paris the French Guards cannot be counted on. Here, they still can be, but for how long?”

  “What about the Bastille? Everyone says it has been seized and is going to be destroyed. What do you think of so preposterous a notion?”

  “I think what you said yourself: the whole idea is outrageous. I had already been told of this by others. But there I draw the line, and I say, ‘You are WRONG. What you are telling me is simply not possible.’ I do not deny that we are in a bad situation, but that is no reason for believing every wild tale you hear. Let us think it through, my dear. Can such an enterprise be undertaken without an order from the King?”

  “N . . . n . . . no . . . o.”

  “And to your knowledge, has the King given such an order? Remembering that one of the projects he has had in mind for a long time is, as it happens, to have the Bastille demolished.”

  I hesitated.

  “Not that I am aware, no . . . ”

  “Then why would you expect it to be destroyed?”

  It began to rain hard. Monsieur Moreau stood up. He was of average build, rather short, pale-complexioned, round-faced, with sagging cheeks. He sat down at his table and lit a candle. I felt cast into outer darkness, buried beneath the books. And even when we were once again at eye level, my feeling of being underneath persisted. He said again:

  “The Bastille cannot be seized, it would be a superhuman endeavor, you might as well set out to smash the Alps or dry up the Ocean. But we are still doomed, for all that; outsmarted, as Monsieur the King’s brother said.�
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