You can either refuse to give up hope or you can sink into the deepest of depressions. Eventually the horrible winter will turn to spring, no matter what. Your beautiful clocks will keep marking the hours, days, weeks, months, movements of the stars. Also, your bosom will get bigger, forty-four inches. Your husband will develop eczema. He will become increasingly despondent, unable to decide anything.
"It is the doom of our great ruling line to rest inert at some poor halfway house," said the Austrian playwright Grillparzer, "deaf to the call for strenuous endeavor." Which is why even though I knew that Charles I's fatal mistake was to listen to his wife, I also knew it was time to interfere.
Eventually the horrible winter was over. Everyone was in a better mood because Louis had taken my advice and brought Necker back as Minister of Finance. Liverish, self-satisfied Jacques Necker, with his prissy pursed lips and his understated cravats and his sanctimonious wife, Suzanne. "Savior of France he shall be," everyone was singing, "Alléluia!" As if he could actually turn back the clock. Late spring, the days mild and sweet. White asparagus, red fraises des bois. Lent had come and gone, making "alléluia" once again permissible.
The dying Dauphin sat propped on cushions by his window, eating the jujube lozenges I'd sneak to him against the doctors' orders and watching the twelve hundred deputies to the Estates-General march in procession across the three toes of the goosefoot, from one side of town to the other. Blue sky and white clouds, a fresh spring breeze. The parish priests wore black wool robes, the noblemen black silk outer coats, the Third Estate plain black suits and black tricorn hats. I had a circlet of diamonds around my head, a little heron feather in my hair.
Twelve hundred deputies. Twelve hundred and one, if you counted both faces of the Due d'Orléans. Robes pierre, Mirabeau, Talleyrand. Of course you had no way of knowing who would emerge as a hero or a villain before it was over.
Of course, then, you had no way of knowing there was going to be an "it."
After the sun had gone down the air grew chill; the Swedish stove kept burning all night long. Through the open windows came the sound of inflamed oratory, songs, cheering. Kill the rich! Liberty! Democracy! Axel described the swamps of the New World to me, tree trunks like elephant legs caparisoned in lacy green moss. In America they were wearing steel buttons and steel shoe buckles, a Republican fad that was just beginning to catch on here at Versailles, along with no wigs, no panniers, no jewels, and clothes the color of goose droppings. In Paris you could see me and Louis and the Dauphin sitting under a baldaquin at the Wax Museum, dining with Voltaire, Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin.
Axel, my knight-errant from the north. Axel, with his brown eyes and heart of fire. He wasn't especially witty, unlike everyone else at Versailles; it was a great relief, really. When urged to plight his troth with Necker's ugly daughter Germaine (the future Madame de Stael), he said it was impossible. He'd never marry, he said, since the one he loved was already taken. I always wore dark colors in his rooms, deep red, deep green.
Were we sexually intimate? What difference could it possibly make to you?
I wrote a song for him: He is my friend, give him back to me. I have his love, he has my trust; I have his love, he has my trust.
The Estates-General continued to meet. The Third Estate convinced most of the clergy and noblemen to put aside their separate identities and join in a National Assembly that would draft a Constitution and keep meeting even if the King ordered it not to, which, as it turned out, he didn't, but instead issued a proclamation ordering all the deputies to join the National Assembly.
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.
Goosefoot
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?