Farewell, My Queen

. . . I shall be Minister of Ignorance. Minister of Abysmal Ignorance. ‘When all the mixed-up atoms have been separated out and returned to their original place, God will cover the whole world in absolute ignorance, so that all the creatures who now make up the world shall stay within the limits of their nature and not desire anything foreign to them nor anything better; for, in the lower echelons of the world, there shall be neither mention nor knowledge of what is to be had in the upper echelons, so that no souls can desire that which they cannot possess, and such desire cannot become a source of torment to them.’ Basilides, my dear. Greater even than Buffon . . . ‘So that all the creatures that now make up the world shall stay within the limits of their nature and not desire anything foreign to them nor anything better . . .’ They’re going to have a hard time up there finding a replacement for Necker . . . Still, if you assure me that everything is peaceful, I’ll take your word for it.”
“Better than peaceful, serene.”
“In that case, everything is the best it can be, and the only dark spot left on my horizon (and it concerns no one but me) is the ailment afflicting my ostrich . . . But, you know, I haven’t heard the royal hunt, not yesterday and not today. All is well, but the King isn’t hunting . . . Well, enough of that!”
“No, not enough of that; let’s talk about it,” I said, for I felt once again a vague uneasiness—the sense of strangeness I had had early that morning in the streets of Versailles.
But Monsieur de Laroche had moved on to another subject.
“And what are the King’s Couchees like, these days?”
“Dismal, I’m told. Poorly attended.”
A triumphant expression lit the Captain’s face. He blamed this disaffection on the ban that had excluded him from the Couchees. He harbored no resentment toward the King. Obviously it was all a plot at some lower level. Louis XVI had yielded to pressure from the other Couchee participants. Especially the page boys, for whom there was no possibility of stealthily opening a window and staying there, hidden from sight. There had been a universal complaint brought to the royal ears by the King’s First Valet for the trimester. Louis XVI had bowed to the inevitable; in any case, he had lost his taste for merriment. Laroche’s madcap behavior, which occasionally involved pulling off other men’s wigs and tossing them up onto the bed canopy or, like the King himself, laughing fit to burst as he tickled the ticklish, was not missed . . .
“The fun we had at those Couchees!” said Laroche.
And he dragged me off to the monkey enclosure. Then, as though suffering an attack of delirium, he rolled on the ground uttering cries. The monkeys leapt from end to end of their cage, hung by one arm, spun round and round. When his fit had passed, the Captain-Custodian got to his feet, as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, and solemnly declared:
“I have a great regard for you, Madam, because most of the time you are you, which is a rare and remarkable quality. When is a king a king? He is always King, of course. But in some situations he is more so than in others. Situations in which he is very much the king he was created to be. The king that no one else, standing in his place, could have been. In the case of our King Louis XVI—I realized this at once and confirmed my first opinion many times—his special moment is in the evening, before they undress him for his Couchee, when he empties his pockets and sets his knife on the bedside table. At that moment, in that gesture, he is tremendously royal.”
I went and sat on a bench, close to the water. All the various craft had docked. Enough of that had lifted my spirits. I was no longer uneasy. I had a feeling of perfect calm and of an immense stretch of time lying before me.
CHATTING AND EMBROIDERING WITH HONORINE
(late in the day, before supper).
At Versailles, even in dull weather, the sky clears as the day draws to a close, and is breathtakingly beautiful every time. It struck me so again that evening. I was sitting with my friend Honorine Aubert, First Chambermaid to Madame de La Tour du Pin. We were comfortably settled in a little room that was part of her mistress’s quarters; Madame de La Tour du Pin, a neighbor to the Princess de Hénin, resided in a large apartment above the Princes’ Gallery, high up in the buildings that formed the South Wing of the château. On one side, this apartment opened onto the rue de la Surintendance and, opposite, onto the terrace of the Orangerie. I especially liked being there, out of friendship for Honorine and also because from my room on the slope-roofed upper floor of that South Wing I could see the full glory of the heavens, but was cut off from any view of the château grounds or the city. To sit in that handsome apartment meant having a panoramic wholeness restored to me. Together we were completing a tapestry begun and then abandoned by Madame de La Tour du Pin. I have always liked embroidering. I was less skillful at it than Honorine, but as she was by nature slower moving than I, we went along at the same pace. Through the open window we heard sounds of music coming up from the apartments of the young Princess Marie-Thérèse. We were exchanging comments on how we had each spent our day. I told her that the Queen seemed to be in a more tranquil humor, one might almost say happy, despite the depth of her grief, and that it warmed my heart to see this change. Honorine was very glad. Needles