Farewell, My Queen

was grasped all too quickly. Court, friends, relatives, all dispersed in the twinkling of an eye. Princes and courtiers made off for London, Turin, Rome, Basle, Lausanne, Luxembourg, Brussels . . . And I myself was swept along in the flood tide of that disaster. I left without stopping to consider, without questioning what I was doing. Rather than act, I simply obeyed . . . I suppose . . . Ought I to feel consoled by that thought? “The King’s Couchees have been quite deserted,” the Queen had complained. All at once, not just the Couchees but the entire château answered that description. We abandoned ship the moment the timbers began to creak. We fled.
I would like to give an account of that defeat; it happened so quickly, it was so total and complete, but in some sense it has remained a secret, a tale never told. A stealthy defeat, one might almost say . . . A moment of silent consternation, a few words so exchanged as not to be overheard, orders given, great lords disguising themselves as servants, and carriages moving at a gallop along the roads. There was no moonlight on that night of July 16, 1789, and when I turned around to look back at Versailles, the château, hidden by forest darker even than the sky, had disappeared . . . I would like to tell the story of that desertion, thus appeasing the intruders who invade my dreams and mitigating the isolation of days spent in my room, this enclosed space composed of silence, wakefulness, and writing, which I now rarely leave and which, when the fancy takes me, I call “my castle of solitude.” I shall find a place for everything that comes back to me, all the remembered fragments of a wrecked world; I shall not be so heartless as to kill that world a second time by stroking things out. My mind takes up the same facts again and again, changing them to fit my changing daydreams, while other, possibly more essential, facts have been obliterated. I do have this excuse: I speak of a time long ago, a time leading nowhere, certainly not to our grim nineteenth century, even if some people, naive in their use of numbers and fooled by hindsight, see in that earlier century no more than the prelude to this one.

VERSAILLES, JULY 14, 1789


EARLY MASS
(six o’clock in the morning).
It was a rather cool morning for July; that, I guess, is what I was thinking as I stood on a stool in my attic room, head thrust out of the window, peering at a rainy sky. Quickly, I got into my clothes, pulling winter stockings onto my legs and slipping a dark violet, nearly black dress over the heavy cotton petticoat I had worn in bed. I added a woolen jacket and a scarf, then snatched up a large umbrella. No need to snatch up the missal, however: it was always in my dress pocket, and I transferred it whenever I changed dresses. I set off hurriedly for Saint-Louis Church to hear early mass there. I knew the way by heart, but that did not prevent me from getting it wrong and going too far along the rue de la Chancellerie, instead of immediately turning right, onto the rue des Récollets. A minor error, certainly, considered in terms of distance, but the gravity of my mistake was brought home to me when I reached the fringes of the market. Clusters of poor wretches eked out an existence in the filth and corruption there. They would do anything to improve their regular fare, which consisted of the worst leavings, of bits of refuse that dogs would not have eaten. Occasionally they would fight one another for the privilege of drinking the oil that fed the wicks of the streetlamps. I could not see these people, but I could tell they were there, huddled together beside rows of hovels, scattered about in the hidden protection of anything that might serve as a shelter or simply lying dead-drunk in the gutters. I was walking as fast as I could. I slid on what I took to be some vegetable peelings and let go of my dress, which was a bit too long. Its hem got soaked in the mud, the horrible mixture of blood and filth in which that collection of huts was mired. Very close to me, things were stirring, shady dealings were being transacted, men’s voices could be heard. I ought to have taken greater care and not have crossed this ill-famed Parc-aux-Cerfs quarter alone in the gray light of a day that refused to break.
When I reached Saint-Louis Church, my heart was pounding, and I at once became absorbed in fervent prayer. We were enjoined to pray very hard for the preservation of the kingdom and for the soul of the Dauphin, poor child, who had died on June 4. At the King’s behest, a thousand masses were to be said for the soul of his son. I prayed passionately, with the uneasy feeling that there was a link between the death of the King’s oldest son and some nameless threat to France. Early morning hour notwithstanding, the church was full. Along the rows of seats, somberly clad, kneeling, silhouetted figures were whispering. The bit of light we had came from holy candles forming a border around the congregation, not from the stained-glass windows. The priest who climbed the steps up to his pulpit was not Father Jean-Henri Gruyer, curate of Saint-Louis, but Father Bergier, confessor to the Queen, to the King’s brother the Count de Provence, and to the Count’s wife. This priest must surely know a great deal that he was keeping to himself! I tried to descry, through the words he spoke, some other, subtle message, informed by facts gleaned in the secrecy of the confessional, that he might indirectly be revealing