Farewell, My Queen

grip. They press down upon me with all the weight of their nonbeing. I have become accustomed to “the Dream of the Grand Stairway,” but it leaves me with a lingering sense of dissatisfaction, for the faces in the dream, while recognizable, are not completely so. I am quite sure that I have known them but am unable to put a name to them.
I lived for a time at Versailles, where I was a reader to Queen Marie-Antoinette, assistant reader, I should say. It was a very minor office, made even less significant by the fact that the Queen had little taste for reading. My patron, Monsieur de Montdragon, Steward in Ordinary to the Court, though he welcomed me with the greatest kindness, had been careful to make that clear. It was a late December day, a midwinter day like today, but with no snow. The daylight had a sharp, almost metallic quality. The trees with their dark trunks stood out against a very blue sky. At the château, to venture into the gaps separating the fireplaces—and the smoke-filled, blinding, choking zones their fires produced—was to become paralyzed inside a block of ice. You had to keep moving, otherwise you might well perish. Swathed in his wolfskin pelisse, Monsieur de Montdragon had put me through an examination. From my first response, though I spoke timidly and could not help moving my fingers to keep them from going numb with cold, he had judged me fit for my duties. “You have a fine voice,” he had said to me, “rather low-pitched and not obtrusive.” And a bit later, observing my discomfort, he had added: “Go to it, my dear madam, clap your hands together; that’s a more straightforward, effective way to get them warm.” So during our interview, noiselessly, I had applauded. My patron had informed me what my duties would be, in my capacity as assistant reader to the Queen. “To sum up, I would say that, by and large, there aren’t any.” Then, in sudden anxiety, he had asked me: “But you can read, I trust? Mind you, when I consider how long it may be before the Queen sends for you, there is ample time for you to learn; and even should she discover you to be unlettered, I am sure she would not take it amiss. Her Majesty’s benevolence to all her familiars is boundless. You cannot conceive how far, in her Household, she carries the virtue of patience. As for the precise details of your obligations, Madame de Neuilly, Reader to the Queen, will explain them to you . . . if it occurs to her, for when she comes to Versailles, she is, as you can well imagine, taken up with visits, solicitations . . .” I could well imagine nothing whatsoever. My eyes and mind were quite dazzled with all the riches that surrounded me. I felt as though I had stepped into the kingdom of Beauty. I thanked Monsieur de Montdragon; he brought the interview to an end, and without pausing to reflect what an utterly unfamiliar world Versailles might be for a newcomer, he left me there in that little private room hung with yellow silk. Overcome by timidity and at the same time exhilarated by the unbelievable splendor that I sensed all about me, I remained for a time seated on a couch, waiting. Finally I found the courage to leave the little room and walk a few steps. I stopped at a glass door that opened onto an immense gallery. My earlier impression, of having been transported into a château all of gold and precious stones, persisted. If someone had told me that the slate roof-tiles of the château at Versailles were in reality slabs of onyx, I would have believed it . . .
I arrived in 1778, the year of Queen Marie-Antoinette’s first pregnancy—the felicity she had hoped for through eight years of waiting, the blessing on which prayers had centered in all the parishes and convents of France, down to the remotest monastery. In the eyes of the populace, that was the year of her true accession to royalty, the only possible justification for the position she occupied. Like everyone else, I knew the glad tidings and knew, too, that December, the month of my arrival, was the ninth of the Queen’s term. All this I knew and was aware that as reader I would one day have occasion to be in her presence. And yet my first sight of Her Majesty threw me into an unbelievable state of rapture, as though it had been a sight afforded me by purest chance, against all reasonable expectation.
The Queen—towering, huge, clad in a very full robe of white woolen stuff, on her head a bizarre cameo-embroidered turban of bright blue silk with several peacock feathers pinned to it, forming an aigrette—was striding rapidly along, at the head of a group of women who were wearing themselves out in their efforts to keep up with her. She was walking as though she were abroad in the open countryside, when in fact she was in an enclosed gallery. At that speed—which, I later learned, had been recommended by her doctor—she reached the end of the gallery after a few paces, only to wheel about and cover the course again, still with that same greedy, space-devouring stride . . . Surprise left me reeling. My legs were unsteady, my face was burning. There was something unbelievable about this apparition, a fantastical element that would forever mark all the images that followed. I thought I was seeing fire in motion.
*      *      *
I dwelt eleven years at the château—“in these parts,” as people said, referring to the Court—and never became accustomed to it, but assimilated its strangeness as a vital need. Eleven years . . . when I think about it now, it seems very remote, taking into consideration the line that separates me from that period of my life: the bloody slash mark of