"Oh, grandmother! What big teeth you have!"
"Oh, grandmother! What big—"
Presently the Queen takes a walk.
Around the Latona Fountain, where the stone frogs perch with their poor sad mouths eternally wide open, hoping against hope for a drink that never comes, and then across the bright springy turf of the Tapis Vert and toward the Grand Canal.
There was the smell of newly cut grass and boxwood, the sun at my back, pleasantly warm and the canal extending before me like a blue sparkling avenue all the way to a place where a person might fall off the edge of the world if she wasn't paying attention, which, I admit, I wasn't. Woodsmen were busy chopping the trees that hadn't made it through the previous winter, talking to each other in that easy way of the peasant class, making jokes, singing, until they saw me approach and clammed up, growing busier than ever. In those days I think I was still more admired than despised, though perhaps also (unbeknownst to me) pitied a little, pity being the prelude to contempt.
"Bonjour," I said, and came to a halt near one particularly industrious pair of broad-shouldered youths. "Comment pa va?" I inquired, whereupon in keepingwith the protocol they threw themselves obediently, if not a trifle clownishly, at my feet. The smell of sap, of wood chips and sweat and the sweet May breeze, combined with some oddly exhilarating aroma the canal was giving off, a mix of algae and trout spawn, was going to my head. "Please get up," I said, knowing that as they did they couldn't fail to catch a glimpse of slim white ankle. Even the Queen of France should be allowed to forgo her stockings on a warm spring day.
I know what you're thinking. But NO NO NO! — I would never be untrue to Louis, though I'm also willing to admit I liked to flirt, especially if the man had a long humorous mouth and clear blue eyes like the taller of the two, and so I made a joke of my own at the expense of our current Finance Minister, Turgot, a sort of rude play on words involving impotence and the single property tax, or impôt unique, he'd recently instated.
"It's a bad idea," the shorter of the two young men said. His eyebrows ran together over the bridge of his nose, giving him a grave, unforgiving look. "God's will, not the farmer's lack of it, is behind a poor harvest. The rich merchant buys what little grain there is and makes the baker pay for it through the nose, and then the baker turns around and charges the hungry woodcutter an arm and a leg for a single lousy loaf crawling with bugs. "
"No worse than that icebreaker," replied Blue Eyes, referring to Minister Turgot's machine, an ill-starred contraption that not only failed to break up the floes at the head of the Seine the previous February, but also was said to have capsized in a tantrum of whirling impedimenta, taking several of its operators down with it.
"The machine was only responsible for three deaths," said Eyebrows. "The tax will starve thousands."
"Turgot won't last," I said. "I am sure of it. Even now, wakened by the spring sun, the wheat anticipates the thresher's blade."
I could see the new leaves on the beech trees, pricked and moving this way and that like the ears of animals. Listening, listening… What is the Queen saying? What impropriety is she committing? The sun had gone behind a large dark cloud; the wind was picking up.
"And then?" said Eyebrows, lifting his axe, clearly impatient with the conversation and ready to get back to work.
"And then we shall have someone even worse," said Blue Eyes, grinning sardonically.
Suddenly a gentle rain began to fall, dotting the canal with millions of tiny bright eruptions, like flung pearls. On my cheeks and eyelashes, my ungloved hands, my uncoiffed head — for a moment I stood there, face uptilted and open-mouthed like one of Latona's frogs, and then all at once the sky filled with millions of tiny bright birds, beating their wings like mad to outrace the approaching storm, and for some reason I felt extremely happy.
"Your Majesty should find shelter," Eyebrows said, his gaze fixed on his axe blade, which he was in the process of sharpening with a whetstone. "Your Majesty might take a chill."
Blue Eyes bent to retrieve his own axe, and it occurred to me that he was trying to hide his amusement. The three of us were, after all, more or less the same age, and I was clearly in excellent health — had circumstances been different we'd no doubt have linked arms and run laughing into the beech grove. Though maybe he, too, had grown bored with the conversation. Maybe he wanted me to leave so that he could relinquish all pretense of continuing to work in what had by now become a fairly steady downpour.
"In any case," I said, "I had better get back to the chateau. The King will be looking for me."
Except of course he wasn't; he was off hunting in the densely wooded area somewhere near the Pond of the Iron Nail, and returned, as I did, drenched to the skin. "Got one," he told me, simultaneously making a note of the fact in his diary, but one what, I never had a clue.
Meanwhile the Prince de Poix, supported by the royal guards, had managed to disperse the angry mob, promising them good quality bread at two sous a loaf. Shortly thereafter the rain stopped, as quickly as it had started. I changed into Masked Desire, my latest Rose Bertin creation, and traded gossip with the Princesse de Lamballe (always an uneven exchange, given her fundamental aversion to speak ill of anyone, living or dead), and, more gratifyingly, with Artois, who told me the so-called inedible loaves wielded by the mob had in fact been cut open earlier and painted green and black, to make them look moldy. I played the harp; I did some needlework. I dined indifferently on the first asparagus of the season, likewise the first fraises des bois, cunningly baked into tarts shaped like hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs, each berry no bigger than my baby fingernail. I made eyes at this man, that man. I triumphed at roulette. Eventually I went to bed.
Can a bird fall in a snare upon the earth, where no gin is for him? Shall one take up a snare from the earth and shall have nothing in it?
Shh! Shh! Blow out the candles, offer a prayer. The body of the Queen of France is tossing and turning on her bed of needles and pins.
The body of the Queen of France, tossing and turning, and there deep inside her, what?
Lights and liver? Bones and blood?
No. The body of the Queen of France and there deep inside her the souclass="underline" the girl, taking a walk. From the gardens of Schönbrunn to the Grand Canal of Versailles; from the taste of sweet woodruff to the smell of rain and fish. A straight line connecting the two prime coordinates that, if only she'd paid better attention to her studies, she could have used to locate the third, without which her life would always lack dimension.
Every life has a shape. Even the lives of dogs, though they're born embodying theirs, unlike humans. Even Eggplant, his big round eyeballs rolling from side to side under his silky eyelids, snoring and twitching and dreaming at the foot of the bed. Even a sparrow, a trout, a flea.
Of course death is never a coordinate, not for humans at least.
Which is why it's wrong to say that a life gets cut short.
Turgot's Lament
(after Purcell)
Thy will, oh False One, has betrayed me.
My power revoked at thy behest.
More I would, but cannot save thee