Versailles (14 page)

F
AT
M
AN
: They think they can hide from us. They think they're so smart.
He picks up a stone and throws it at the window.

G
RAY-HAIRED
W
OMAN
: Who do they think they are?

 

The door is flung open, this time by the baker himself. He's a middle-aged man, tall and heavyset, his flour-dusted features even more difficult to make out than his wife's.

B
AKER
: Didn't you hear? An hour. First the wheat was late to the mill, and then there was no salt.

S
KINNY
Y
OUNG
M
AN
: Of course. And the moon is made of cheese. We know you've got bread in there.

 

The fat man grabs the baker around, the neck and hauls him out the door.

 

F
AT
M
AN
,
menacingly, in the baker's ear:
Do you love me?

C
ROWD
: Feed my sheep.

F
AT MAN
: Do you love me?

C
ROWD
: Feed my sheep.

F
AT
M
AN
: Do you love me?

S
KINNY
Y
OUNG
M
AN
: They say the third time's the charm.
He yanks the baker's head back by the hair, then shoves him to his knees.

C
ROWD
: Feed my sheep.

 

The crowd quickly closes in, making it difficult to see what happens next. There's a raised arm, a scream, a flash of light as the sun glints off the blade of a large kitchen knife. A pool of blood begins to spread at their feet, spreading wider and wider; the gray-haired woman turns to address the audience.

 

G
RAY-HAIRED
W
OMAN
: The roots of the wheat plant are thin and form letters, as anyone can see who digs them carefully enough. The letters run on and on in the dirt before breaking and crumbling away; you can never get them all out. But you
have
to get them all, you have to find all their branchings for the letters to spell a word, the word of happiness.

P
RETTY
Y
OUNG
W
OMAN
: Who's going to find that word now, the way the world is going?

C
ROWD:

Round the earth oven, restore, restore.

Round the hearthstones, restore, restore.

Round the foundation beams, restore, restore.

Round where the road starts.

 

The skinny young man suddenly raises a pike on which he's impaled the baker's head high above the crowd. Blood continues to pour in a steady stream from the baker's severed neck; the crowd breaks into loud cheers.

 

B
BAKER'S
W
IFE
,
peering through the broken window:
Oh my God! Oh no! My darling!
She puts her face in her hands and sobs.
He was only trying to do his job.

S
KINNY
Y
OUNG
M
AN
,
lowering the pike and positioning it so the baker and his wife are face to face, mocking:
My darling! My darling!

B
AKER'S
W
IFE
,
angry:
He was only trying to give you what you wanted.

F
AT
M
AN
: He should have thought of that when he told us to come back in an hour.

P
RETTY
Y
OUNG
W
OMAN
: He should have thought of that when he was born.

 

Holy Week, and fingers tapping lightly at my window. Mama? Gome in, come in, but it was only the rain, pattering on the new leaves of the chestnut trees and lilacs, soaking into the lawn. Filling the hole my little boy dug just that afternoon with his toy spade, attended by six bored grenadiers of the National Guard. A cool afternoon, storm clouds assembling in the west. Storm clouds darkening the far-off sky above Versailles, turning the surface of the Grand Canal to melted lead, and sending all the birds our way.

They love to dig, boys. Left to their own devices they'll dig forever and their cheeks will grow pink with exertion, their eyes like the eyes of the blind, fixed on invisible objects. Until they hit an impossibly big rock, that is, or their governess sails forth to fetch them home.

We'd been in the Tuileries for almost half a year. A monument to squalor and decay, the Tuileries. A prison disguised as a palace. Every mattress damp and swarming with silverfish, though at least by spring we had actual mattresses to sleep on instead of piles of clothes and billiard tables.

"Kings ought to proceed in their career undisturbed by the cries of the people, as the Moon pursues her course unimpeded by the howling of dogs," wrote Catherine the Great in a letter. "When Kings become prisoners," I wrote her back, "they haven't long to live." I had to write all my letters in cipher, and hide them in a chocolate box.

Spring rain, Tuesday of Holy Week. My leg hurt. My left leg, which I had injured at Christmas, our first in the Tuileries. "How will Père Noël know where to find us?" my little boy asked, and, really, I had no good answer. My darling Dauphin, my
chou d'amour.
"Let's hope he doesn't," replied his sister. "He's probably a Jacobin, in that red hat of his." I'd been racing to close the curtains, to block the faces mouthing threats at the window, when I felt my ankle twist.

Now my whole leg throbbed under the weight of the rest of me, which felt dead by comparison with the throbbing leg, and that leg, in turn, grotesquely heavy. Once I'd been light as a feather. And where was the girl with the cherry red lips? Still there, I suppose. Preparing to enter history, like her mother before her.

On the windowpanes? Just water.

On the skin? Just nothing.

No hand stroking back the hair.

But when I dragged myself from my solitary bed and down the long long hallway of the Tuileries—limping past the scaffolding and the pails of gilt and plaster, the smoke-darkened billiard room where Provence was lining up yet one more corner shot and Louis, having polished off yet one more roasted haunch of some poor dead creature, was noisily licking his fingers—and at last came limping into my daughter's room, overwhelmed by the wish to stroke her smooth blond hair back from her smooth white forehead, she swatted my hand away.

Such a cruel system, mothers and daughters. From the fear of being humiliated, deliver me, 0 Lord. Of course the God who made our world chose to put suffering and death at the heart of it. We are weak, like the Disciples, and our love is always disappointing.

For the past year she had been studying the catechism, the Serious One; the next day, Spy Wednesday, she would make her first Communion.

From the fear of being lonely, deliver me, 0 Lord.

From the fear of being forgotten, 0 Lord, deliver me.

Even then my daughter knew that tenderness had never saved anyone's life.

Outside the window the sound of pipes and drums; the sound of spring rain and with it the smell of gunpowder. That was the mood outside the Tuileries, while inside we strove to keep up appearances. The eternal
lever.
The eternal
coucher.
The eternal cavagnole. Dance, nobleman, dance, I could hear someone singing. Dance, meaning
hang him from the lamppost.

I looked down at my sleeping daughter and imagined her kneeling before the Bishop in her white gown and shoes, her hair safely tucked beneath her white veil. An earnest expression on her face, as usual—her father's own daughter. The altar rail sweet with beeswax, the whisper of pages being turned, the delicate bones of her hands tightly clasped in prayer.

I could imagine that. I could imagine no further.

From the Seine, from the Eure, from the Bièvre, from the Yvette, a vast underground network of pipes, some made of pottery, some of lead, some made of wood or cast iron, mile upon mile of them tunneling through the rich black dirt of the Îie-de-France before suddenly breaking free as aqueducts, their troughs filled with sparkling river water destined for Versailles. The rivers keep flowing no matter what the people living around them are up to. They keep idling the arched vaults of d'Orbay's immense reservoirs even after they're no longer needed, the people who relied on them for baths or fountain displays having run away the previous fall, taking refuge here and there throughout the countryside like mice.

It was Louis XIV who set the whole system in motion, sick as he was of the disgusting quality of the water he inherited from his predecessor, so green, so thick, so bad-smelling. "Never," wrote Madame de Sevigne in a letter to her daughter, "have I heard anything more agreeable than what you told me about this great beauty soon to appear at Versailles, fresh, pure, and unaffected, who will put all others to shame."

Later she'd be surprised to find out it wasn't a young woman her daughter had referred to but a river diverted from its course by an army of forty thousand men. So long as the Sun King strode the face of the earth, his dark curls gleaming with health, his virility bursting from every pore, it was possible to believe that, when summoned to him, even the water would arrive girlishly sub - missive and eager to jump into his bed.

Now it's June. The Swan drifts across the surface of the night sky, trailed by the Shepherd's Star. Time to pick the new greens, garden cress and chervil, lamb's lettuce, rocket, and sorrel. Also time to replant. Leeks, scallions. Turnips, cabbages, endive.

Meanwhile the rivers continue filling all the reservoirs of Versailles: d'Orbay's immense churchlike cisterns under the Water Terrace, three shallow rectangular basins along the Rue des Reservoirs, a water tower slyly hiding behind a
trompe I'oeil
facade on the Rue du Pein-tre-Le-Brun, a deep cylindrical holding tank on Mont-bauron Hill. The rivers fill the reservoirs and then spill from them into Versailles's many pools and lakes and canals. The Mirror Pool, the Pool of the Swiss Guards, the Nymphs' Bath, and the Grand Canal, as well as the basins of all the fountains, Latona and Saturn, Apollo, Flora, Bacchus, and Neptune. The fountains themselves aren't running, since no one's there to turn them on. Even if someone were, it would be a terrible waste—the usual display requiring over 220 gallons of water per second!—since also no one's there to watch.

The rivers feed the reservoirs that feed the millpond in the Queen's little village. Last fall's yellow leaves never got scooped away and now they're black and scummy, adhering to the banks or floating on the glaucous surface of the pond. The silver milk ladle is lying near the stone bench right where the Queen dropped it, its handle snapped in two. The orange Chinese goldfish are dead.

Before he made his getaway last October, Monsieur de La Tour du Pin saw to it that all the buildings were boarded up tight, with massive iron locks clamped on the gates, and guards standing sentry. A place under siege, Versailles, yet even so the sky is clear and blue, not a single cloud in sight. An abandoned place, sorrowful, yet things are coming back. Mignonette and starflower, anemone and rue. The water lilies are in bloom, the doves cooing and guarding their nests in the roof thatch. The farmer and his wife are still living in their little cottage on the far side of the wheat field, tending all the animals the Queen left behind—including the babies she'll never get a chance to feed, all those lambs and bunnies and chicks—and milking Blanchette and Brunette twice a day, though no longer into porcelain basins, but into tin pails.

Early morning, July 3, 1790. A carriage has drawn up to the back gate of the royal estate at Saint-Cloud, where the King and Queen have been allowed to spend their summer months, provided they return to Paris every week for Sunday dinner. As the curtain rises a cloaked figure emerges from the carriage: Gabriel-Honoré Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau, a tall man with a body like a wrung sock and a big head sprouting dark bolts of hair he wears stuffed into a taffeta bag. Mirabeau has described himself as "the mad dog from whose bites despotism and privilege will die," but he's also a man who enjoys the finer things in life, specifically wine, women, and song, and happens to be, at the moment, heavily in debt. Today he has an appointment with the Queen, with whom he hopes to strike a deal: if she will agree to settle with his creditors and give him a sizable pension, he will give her and the King the full benefit of his persuasive powers in the Assembly, where he is currently leader of the dominant party, the Patriots.

 

As the coachman wanders off, stage right, yawning and stretching, Mirabeau leans into the carriage and addresses his nephew, barely visible at the window.

M
IRABEAU
: If I'm not back in half an hour, contact the Militia.
He disappears through the gate.

 

We can see the nephew's bored face. It is, after all, quite early, the sun is warm, the birds are singing. The light is the kind of morning light that looks so fresh it makes you thirsty. Blue-gray shadows of linden trees flicker across a length of the chateau's honey-colored wall. The nephew falls asleep and begins to snore.

Enter two servants, stage left, an old man and an old woman, both wearing white aprons. The woman is carrying a bucket.

 

O
LD
WO
MAN
: Could you hear what they were saying?