Farewell, My Queen

I had the feeling that everyone around me, each person staggering to and fro in his separate darkness, was in the same plight as I.
I was keeping away from the windows. I preferred the corners of the rooms, the bends in the corridors, all those undefined spaces with temporary uses and variable designations, that the château had in abundance. If there was any sort of opening to the outside, I crept along the opposite wall. For it was from outside that THE EVENT had burst upon us. A word that was quite new at Court, where everyone adored the anecdote or today’s vignette; these were required to be trivial, minute, so that people could exercise their ingenuity at fleshing them out from one telling to the next, till they became for a few hours, if a sufficiently talented storyteller picked them up, fabulous narratives. An event, on the other hand, had scope and import from the start, leaving no room for invention. The thing itself frightened me, the word repelled me. I uttered it as unintelligibly as I could. I said ev . . . , but could not hide from myself the fact that something was trying to break through.
THE LIST OF THE 286 HEADS THAT HAVE TO FALL
IN ORDER TO EFFECT THE NECESSARY REFORMS.
Night very quickly produced terrible fatigue. Endurance at staying on one’s feet, a major qualification for living at Court, no longer availed. Everyone was looking for somewhere to sit. People were falling asleep here, there, and everywhere. Some were lying right on the floor, on the carpets. I took care not to step on their hands. I went into the Study Leading to the Terraces, a room (although it no longer led to any of the terraces) where I always liked to be, for its very name enabled me to imagine the Versailles of Louis XV, a château consisting entirely of aviaries, salons of vines and trellises, terraces with borders of bougainvillea . . . but on this occasion all I found there was a dismal gathering, onto which, in a manner of speaking, I stumbled. Facing a bench pushed against the wall, a few folding chairs stood in a line. A small group of people were using this arrangement to talk to one another, sitting in the dark, each one sunk in her or his private torment. Nonetheless, for the first time in a long while I was hearing at least a semblance of conversation, and the result was that little by little I began to feel more cheerful. Indeed I believed—without formulating the thought clearly in my own mind—that if we could talk to each other again, if we succeeded in rescuing, like some sacred fire, the eternal conversation that had been kept up ever since the Court was established at Versailles, then the château would live on, and royalty with it.
The listless phrases uttered first by one person then by another, in weary tones sustained by fierce determination to keep talking, brought me out of my lethargy. I have no clear memory of what was discussed . . . Subjects of no moment . . . Possibly the new heating system that His Majesty was having installed in the royal gallery of the Chapel for next winter; or The Malabar Widow, playing to full houses at the Ambigu-Comique in Paris. Finally old Father Noslin, Superintendent of the Royal Tree Nurseries, had courage enough to face the situation squarely. “It’s as though a coalition were operating,” he said, in the same measured tones that, more than ten years earlier, had succeeded in convincing a young Louis XVI to have the old trees uprooted. It must have looked a bit sparse at first, but by 1789 it was splendid. The grounds, though certain bosquets looked uncared-for, had achieved perfect equilibrium. I loved those trees. On my favorite walks, I had the feeling that I knew them each individually and that they in turn knew me. One day they had arrived at Versailles and taken root there. I would talk to them, and they had things to say to me as well . . . Shortly after my arrival at the château, when I was still settling in, Monsieur de Montdragon had taken me on a tour of the grounds. When I started going into raptures over the glory of nature, he had at once informed me that everything at Versailles was artificial, everything there had been deliberately planned, even the trees. The first ones to be transplanted had been taken from the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte. Whenever he looked at the trees on the grounds of his château, what Louis XIV saw before him were the trophies physically wrested from Fouquet, the symbols of his victory over a Superintendent of Finance too fond of lavish display for his own good. Nothing at Versailles had originated there, save the Nobility. And they were what mattered. Everything else was a setting for them . . . “Is that perfectly clear, Madam?” Monsieur de Montdragon had added. I had said yes, which was not entirely true, but I was sure that as time went by it would become perfectly clear . . . At present, however, we were no longer concerned with trees or banks of foliage.
“It’s as though a coalition were operating,” the old priest said again.
Silence followed. Monsieur de Goulas, a man of strong character, a notable gambler, and a fine trencherman, was the first to react:
“A coalition operating. I will grant you that, Father, but a coalition of whom with whom?”
Father Noslin was not in a position to be more specific. But Monsieur de Feutry responded for him. “It is a coalition of malcontents,” he said. And he described an incident he had just witnessed in the château itself. At about six o’clock on the previous evening, he had been going into the Hall of Mirrors. At the entrance, on the same side as the Salon of War, hence very close to