Farewell, My Queen

that a few rooms away from mine, She lives and breathes.
Versailles held me under its spell. And I was not the only one. To be sure, it was no longer the sacred place it had once been, under the dominion of Louis XIV. But Versailles continued to exercise its fascination. Wherever you went in society, you had but to pronounce these opening words: “I was at the Court . . . ” and those around you held their breath, looked at you differently. It is hard to imagine now the depth of the wounds inflicted on self-esteem “in these parts,” how humiliating it was for a courtier, after hours spent waiting in an anteroom, to confront the fact that he would not be summoned to the King’s Privy Supper. His shame was palpable. I could read it in people’s faces, in the bearing of those who had been ushered out and were returning to their carriages by way of the inner courtyard to avoid scrutiny. What I did not see was the joy of the chosen as they slipped through the half-opened door and proceeded to the sanctuary. But I could imagine it . . . And even later, during the Consulate, when Court was held at the residence of Joséphine, and Bonaparte was posing as a model republican, even then the passion for Versailles still burned. As soon as one of the official soirées ended, they made sure the doors were properly shut and said to one another: “Let’s talk about the old Court, let’s spend some time at Versailles; Monsieur de Montesquiou, tell us how they used to . . . , Monsieur de Talleyrand, tell us about . . . ” And the younger ones would draw their chairs up closer to hear the stories . . . They were doing what we do, here in Vienna.
I am determined to set this down in writing, to recall the magic, in today’s climate, when a campaign of propaganda is tending to stigmatize Versailles as a bottomless pit of needless expenses or else speak of it as an empty stage, a landscape of dust and ashes, already dimmed by an awareness that the end was near. Marionettes with powdered perukes, men and women old before their time, puppets doomed to disappear . . . From the winners’ standpoint, those whom they have beaten and outstripped had in any event no existence worthy of the name, no future. The arrogance of young people would be touching, but for the fact that so often it leads to brutality.
I am convinced—and my most recent impressions of the world we live in are not apt to make me change my mind—that humanity does not progress. It rearranges things in other ways, to accord with altered social standards and reflect different aspirations. The system based on a hierarchy of castes had its faults, but the one based on oppression through money does not strike me as preferable. This obsession with getting rich . . . Now there are things called banks. These, I am told, are little fortresses that are located in the center of certain capital cities and, seen from the outside, cannot be distinguished from a normal house. It is very odd to try and imagine such places. I have probably seen banks without realizing . . . My parents were poor. Whenever my mother, speaking with no hint of acrimony and actuated solely by the desire to keep some of her children alive, ventured to point out the destitution in which our family lived, my father, who was very pious and loved us dearly, would smile in response. Averting his gaze from our wretched circumstances, he would lift up his eyes toward a window and say: “Is not life more than meat and the body more than raiment? Behold the birds of the air: they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? And wherefore should you have a care to clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” My mother’s glance would follow his toward the window with its missing panes. She would smile with the same smile as his . . . The lilies of the field are trampled and trampled again by the soldiers. If there is progress, in our day, it can only be in weaponry. We kill more quickly now, and in greater numbers . . . At the battle of Essling alone there were forty thousand deaths, forty thousand deaths in thirty hours of combat . . . The mind recoils. Yes, machines for killing are improving. Aside from that, I do not see . . .
The château of Versailles, sacred symbol, focus of so many desires, was abandoned at the first signs of impending danger, in July 1789. The whole drama played out very swiftly. Louis Sébastien Mercier, a democrat, a Parisian, and what is worse a man of the theater, but also possessed of an honest mind lit by intuitive flashes that illumine the truth, has written: “The Revolution could have stopped on July 18 after Louis XVI had taken in his hand the national emblem—the cockade—and kissed it, on the balcony of City Hall.” I cannot but agree. The entire outcome was decided between Saturday, July 11, the day Jacques Necker, Controller General of Finance, was dismissed, and Friday, the seventeenth, the day that the King was humiliated in Paris and royalty repudiated. July 16 saw the Breteuil government dismissed and Necker recalled. That same day, the Court was in flight. Defeat was now inevitable and irreversible; Louis XVI grasped this fact, but too late. In 1792 he would admit to Count Fersen: “I ought to have left on July 14. I missed my chance and was not granted another.” Indeed, he was not granted another; whereas in his and the Queen’s entourage the chance