Farewell, My Queen

the Grand Apartments, he had noticed a group behaving suspiciously. Four or five people were giving out tracts. Servants, common people, were eagerly reaching for the printed sheets. Monsieur de Feutry had told his lackey to get a few for him. The lackey had managed to get his hands on a number of copies and had spent a good while—despite the fact that his master was waiting—talking to the people who were handing them out. Monsieur de Feutry had refrained from comment, being impatient to read what the tract contained. It was a pamphlet, with the title List of the 286 heads that have to fall in order to effect the necessary Reforms. 286 heads! There was a slight shrinking movement along the velvet bench.
“Do you remember the names of the people they wish to behead?” asked Father Noslin.
“Certainly not you, Father. Nor me, nor, I believe, any of us here. Although there has been so little etiquette observed tonight that I am not quite sure in whose presence I have the honor to find myself . . . The first two names are those of the Queen and the Count d’Artois, of that much I am certain.”
I shuddered.
“Cutting off people’s heads in order to effect reforms; I don’t understand,” said a lady I had never seen before.
She had a clear, childish voice. She received no answer.
A man asked Monsieur de Feutry:
“Who were they, I mean the people distributing the pamphlets, who do you think they were?”
“I don’t know. What I can say positively is that they looked like very ugly customers.”
A coalition of malcontents, a group of individuals who looked like very ugly customers—it all left my head in a whirl. But, where were they till now? Why were they suddenly appearing out of nowhere? They always looked happy before. All I had ever read in the gazettes was: “The people were loud in their expressions of happiness” or “The shouts and applause of the people betrayed the joy they felt at seeing their Sovereigns.”
That’s just it, I was told. The people are not the people any more. They’ve been bought. Bought by mercenaries, foreigners, mustachioed ruffians with big staves. They mingle with the populace, make inflammatory speeches, give out liquor and money. And suddenly the talk was all of prisons spilling forth their entire contingent of criminals. Crazed with freedom, killing for the pleasure of killing, they were suddenly in their element, fighting with stones and iron bars.
I was near fainting. I wondered fearfully: what will happen in the hospitals? who is to stop the lepers or those afflicted with the pox from going out into the streets, raping us, infecting us? And they would gag us, using bandages stiff with blood and pus . . . O dear God, I would rather die right now! And for a few moments I was so distressed that I wished the Court would commit suicide. So that when the brigands came they would find only corpses. How horrible! Lord God! How horrible!
I next heard:
“In Dijon, the butchers have committed unspeakable acts of violence. And in Vizille, Lyons, and Marseilles, all the guilds are taking that behavior as their cue. It isn’t just the butchers, the other trades will follow their example. The pork sellers, the cobblers, the masons, the joiners, the ironmongers, and the farriers. They all have tools and know how to use them.”
The château, too, was full of masons, plasterers, nail makers . . . We had only moments left to live . . . My neighbors were talking back and forth over my head. Each one had predictions to offer of atrocities hitherto unknown. Our little chamber of anguish, there in the Study Leading to the Terraces, was ready to explode.
“What is this delirium?” piped up the same clear, childish voice, now with a moaning quality to it. “His Majesty emerges from his private office in tears, because, he says, referring to his people, ‘his children are wounding him grievously.’ Meanwhile, in Paris, the people march through the streets shouting: ‘Give us back Mister Necker, he is our father!’ Which is the father? The King or Mister Necker? And what do the children want?”
Once again, she received no answer. I wished she had. I, too, would have liked to understand. Then someone said: “The children want to choose their father. That is the new Gospel, Your Ladyship.” I do not know why, but I was seized with a fit of shaking.
IN AN EARLIER DAY, THAT TIME
WE ALL REMEMBER SO HAPPILY . . .
It was too cramped and gloomy there in the Study; we were being driven crazy. I made my way toward rooms that were not quite so dark, and as I soon became aware, everyone behaved better if a few candles were lit. One such room was the Dispatch Office. I recognized Monsieur de Pujol and Monsieur de Chèvreloup. They were engrossed in a discussion (as with any night when people stay up, periods of exhaustion alternated with renewed surges of energy). They were wondering how the Court had collectively contrived to end up in such a sorry predicament. They tried first to lay the blame on the English, always ready to rejoice in the misfortunes of France and consequently even ready to contribute to them, then they incriminated the Illuminists and Freemasons, and finally, with greater conviction, the Philosophes . . . the Philosophes? I was all ears. In the bag I carried back and forth to Trianon, there was scant place for books by writers of that ilk. But my two gentlemen, while not approving of them, had apparently read them. Their systematic attempts to undermine society, said the pair, their detemined efforts to propagate religious disbelief, their mania for defending work as an instrument of liberation, the fact that they dared to hold out the promise of happiness, had upset people’s minds. Capital punishment was what those fellows deserved. They were fuzzy-minded, dyed-in-the-wool intriguers. The right to happiness, could there ever