Versailles (13 page)

Happy days in Versailles! Music! Fireworks! We made an appearance on the balcony, the whole royal family, and only the wife and mother was seen to look a bit the worse for wear, letting her white hair hang loose to her shoulders, like a citizeness.

Whereas in Paris the bread was getting worse and worse. It was made from bad-smelling yellowish flour and had lumps in it you needed an axe to cut, and when you ate it it tore your throat and made your stomach twist with pain. Even so, people fought for the scraps like dogs. In Paris the doors of the nobility were marked with a big black P, meaning "proscribed" or condemned to death, though, really, it was the nobles and not the peasants who were the spearhead of the Revolution.

If the canaille can't have any bread, let them eat straw.
That was Laclos.

Mirabeau, a confirmed Orléanist, said that to depend on the Due d'Orléans was like building on mud. Chateaubriand said that I had a beautiful smile. Talleyrand said that no one knew what pleasure meant who hadn't lived before 1789.

To arms!!!
yelled Camille Desmoulins. People were setting the customs barriers on fire, breaking into the gunsmiths' shops, looting the stores of grain. They broke into the cellars of the Hotel des Invalides and stole twenty-eight hundred muskets and ten cannon.

That was in Paris.

On July 14, when the citizens of Paris were storming the Bastille, Louis once again wrote
Rien
in his journal, just as he had on our wedding night so many years earlier.

Everyone was leaving Versailles. Sneaking out side doors and windows, dressed as nobodies.

Goodbye, Rose Bertin! Goodbye, Polignacs!

The night the Dauphin died, the four tallow candles on my dressing table went out one after another, all on their own. A flaw in the wicks, said Madame Campan, the eternal optimist.

Even under the best of conditions, the trip from Paris to Versailles took three hours.

Eleven miles from Paris to Versailles, from the Chaillot tollgate to the Place d'Armes. Rain's been falling steadily since morning, small fierce winds tearing through the woods that line the highway, scattering brown and yellow leaves in the mud. Four miles from the tollgate to the river, then another seven to the gates of the palace. A long slow climb up a long easy valley. October 5,1789.

Everyone knows the danger is in Paris. In Paris everyone's hungry and the bloodlust is universal except, interestingly, among butchers. The summer's harvest was good, so why is there no grain? Because the Queen is hoarding it, say the pamphlets; because she wants revenge for the way she got treated during the Diamond Necklace Affair. The Queen is a glutton. The Queen wants to make her subjects starve, especially the women, to pay them back for judging her so harshly. As if she doesn't deserve it—a discredit to her sex!

The women of Paris are gathering at the Hôtel de Ville, that gargantuan eyesore. Fishwives and market women and women from the floating laundries on the Seine, as well as a number of men dressed up like women. Meanwhile, Laclos's agents are running around handing out money and brandy. A man of diverse talents, Laclos, with his long tapering fingers and his tragicomic genius, his endless fascination with desire's many deadly faces, not to mention his skill as a pamphleteer. The Queen is a dog in the manger, for instance. A dog in the manger sitting there in her big fancy palace like a brood hen on a mountain of bread, though generally he doesn't mix metaphors like that. Some of the women brandish kitchen knives or skewers; some of them beat little drums. Some of them are singing:
If the rich love gold so much, let it melt in their yaps. Voilà the sincere wish of the sluts who sell fish.

It's raining in Paris, it's raining in Versailles.

"It's Raining, Little Shepherdess," sings the Queen's musical clock. If only she were a shepherdess. They should have moved court weeks ago, left for Metz, Compiègne, Soissons. But would the King budge? Mr. All Frenchmen Are My Children?

Three roads lead into Versailles and three lead out of it: to Saint-Cloud, to Sceaux, to Paris. Le Nôtre's famous goosefoot, like the footprint of a giant mythic creature. An immense bird that landed once, balanced there skeptically on one leg to regard the marshy landscape, and then took off. The palace gates haven't been shut in over two hundred years; the palace gates are rusted open, in fact.

Such a gray dismal day, so windy and wet. Of course the King and Queen aren't afraid of a little water.

He's gone hunting in the ancient forests of Meudon, she's headed off to her fairy-tale village just beyond the Petit Trianon. She's wearing a plain linen dress and a plain lace cap because that's what she likes to have on when she milks her two dear cows, Brunette and Blanchette. She'll milk them, and afterward she'll take a pail of milk still warm from their udders and sit on a mossy stone bench beside the millpond while she drinks it from a ladle. Yellow leaves drifting across the pond's gray rain-pocked surface, doves cooing in their cotes. The table silver's been sent to the mint, also the silver toothpick cases and the silver bucket she washes her feet in, all to help relieve the bread shortage. "I am the father of a big family entrusted to my care," confided the King when she complained. Yellow leaves, poplar leaves, orange Chinese goldfish. The smell of wet moss. White geraniums and a few roses still in bloom, though the wind and rain are sure to finish them off before the day's out.

Eleven miles from Paris to Versailles.

From Chaillot Gate to the banks of the Seine, the river foam-flecked and moving fast. A long slow climb up a wet gray valley. Seven miles to go. The women are shouting,
Bread! Bread! Bread!
The highway's like mush, their shoes filled with mud.
Hang the Queen and tear out her guts! Rip open her belly and jam in your arm! Cut out her liver! Give me a thigh! I'll have a breast! I've got her heart!

They hold up their sodden mud-splattered aprons, pretending they already carry pieces of the Queen. They sharpen their knives on the milestones. They lick their lips.

What does it mean when thousands of women march through the mire, their shoes getting ruined, their brains changed to blood? Does it matter that they were lied to? That Versailles is beautiful, a dream of Paradise, their Queen bewitching, the trees turning gold?

Something that's held for hundreds of years is blowing apart.

"I've never been afraid in my life," says the King to the servant who's been sent to fetch him home from the forest. A bad day's hunt, interrupted (as he'll later write in his diary) by "events." He's drenched, not unlike the Queen, who hardly has time to finish her milk before she, too, is fetched back. Wrapping her cloak around her heavy wet shoulders, though her gait's every bit as springy and girlish as usual—she never looks back, not even for a moment.

By late afternoon the Place d'Armes is black with angry Parisians. Roaring and screaming, waving knives and skewers and brooms, they press their mud-soaked bodies against the gold rails of the fence separating them from the three inner courtyards, where a double rank of the Royal Bodyguard just barely manages to hold them off.
Cut the Queen to ribbons! Make cockades of her guts!
They spill away from the fence, darkening the three toes of the goosefoot. They jeer and howl. They pull their skirts over their heads.

Versare,
to return—the presumed Latin root of
Versailles.
As in, turn the soil and then, having done so, turn it again, over and over, until it's perfect. Which it never will be.

At some point you leave a place and that's that. At some point you reach the point of no return. Though often enough you don't know you've reached it. Don't know this is your last chance to drink in the least tiny detail, the way your entire room is contained in miniature in the crystal globes hanging at the bottom of each of your chandeliers, for instance. Miniature bed, miniature harp. Rain dripping from the eaves, shining on the stones of the Marble Court.

"I refuse to run away," says the King, claiming he'll calm the unruly spirits with kindness, which he actually does, for a while at least. He promises grain, he agrees to meet with a delegation of women, one of whom—a pretty young girl named Pierrette Chabry—is so overcome with emotion at being in his presence that she falls to the floor in a faint, after which the King himself administers smelling salts and lifts her to her feet.

In any case, things are looking up. The National Guard has finally arrived, led by Lafayette on his snow white charger. The Queen can't stand him, never could, calls him a "simpleton Caesar" even though he's devoted to her. But then the Queen hates to feel beholden to anyone.

Besides, she
wants
to run away. To the beech forests of Compiègne, the bridges and canals of Metz. Or even farther, to the Land of the Midnight Sun, where no one bats an eye if they come upon a polar bear walking down the street.

Rain pounding on the windows, rattling down the gutters.By now most of the Parisians have found shelter at Versailles, either in the King's stables or under the canopies of the portes cocheres or in a tavern or a church. Some of them are sleeping, some are wide awake and getting drunk and making plans. A horse is being roasted on a spit over a roaring fire in the middle of the Place d'Armes, and some of them are eating it. Two in the morning, wind blowing from the southwest. Each thinks himself a Brutus and sees a Caesar in each noble. All of them are wet as ducks.

Quiet now, but soon enough an angry group will break into the Cour des Princes and swarm through the palace, smashing down doors with axes, looking for the Queen. Through the Salons of Hercules, Abundance, Diana, Mercury, and Apollo, down the long Hall of Mirrors and through the Salon of Peace, past the snoring body of Lafayette—henceforth to be known as General Morpheus—collapsed on a couch, and into the Queen's apartments. Soon enough they'll hack off the heads of two of her guardsmen and stick them on pikes, before stabbing through the Queen's bedclothes and into her mattress, stabbing again and again and again, though she won't be there, having fled earlier to the Bull's Eye Chamber, where she'll be cowering, stockingless and in her petticoats, waiting for dawn with her sleepy optimistic husband and her two darling children and her lumpish brother-in-law Provence and his mean-spirited wife and her two ancient aunts-in-law Adélaïde and Victoire and the brand-new governess and all the ministers and servants who won't have gotten away yet and, yes, even her lover. Even Axel Fersen.

It's too late; there's nothing anyone can do. They're going to get hauled back to Paris.

Yet why should it be sad, the end of privilege?

Why should it be sad that Marie Antoinette never sees the Trianon again, except for the fact that it's always sad when anything ends forever.

Sad to think that a beloved place should forever be denied us, water dripping into a millpond, a cow's soft brown nostrils. The smell of grass on her breath, of rain on moss. Her moist brown eyes.

Laclos, for instance—what made him tell the women of Paris that their Queen was sitting on a mountain of bread, unless he wanted them to be "in the picture," spoiling it?

Where would you hide a leaf? In a forest.

Where would you hide a pebble? On a beach.

Where would you hide a Queen? In a palace.

Where would you hide a peasant? In a mob.

As if it were a mystery, and there were a way to solve it. As if it were possible to figure out who slipped up, and where.

October
31,
1789. A bakehouse in Paris, near the Halle aux Bleds, its door chalked with an X. It's early morning, the sun just appearing over the lopsided chimney pots of the Marais; a beautiful bright autumn day is dawning. Gradually a small crowd assembles in front of the bakehouse door.

 

C
ROWD:

The hunger-swollen belly, restore, restore.

The hunger faintness, restore, restore.

The hunger drooping, restore, restore.

The utter famine, restore, restore.

 

They begin pounding on the door, politely at first, and then with increasing fury.

After several moments the door opens and the baker's wife peers out. She's
a
middle-aged woman of medium build, whose clothes and hair and face and arms are so completely covered in flour it's impossible to tell what she really looks like.

B
AKER'S
W
IFE
: Can I help you?

S
KINNY
Y
OUNG
M
AN
,
mimicking her:
Can
I
help you? What kind of question is that?

B
AKER'S
W
IFE
: You'll have to excuse me, sir. We've been up all night baking.

B
AKER,
offstage:
Tell them to come back in an hour. Tell them there'll be bread enough for everyone in an hour.

B
AKER'S
W
IFE
: An hour. You heard him.

S
KINNY
Y
OUNG
M
AN
: I can hardly wait.

 

The baker's wife closes the door; immediately the crowd once again begins to pound on it.

 

P
RETTY
Y
OUNG
W
OMAN
: Those eyes, that lip. Am I crazy, or does she remind anyone else of a certain royal someone...?

C
ROWD
: Open up! Open up!

S
KINNY
Y
OUNG
M
AN
: Yes! Open up now or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!