Farewell, My Queen

to allow two people to brush past one another, the doors on which were chalked the names of those few friends considered worthy enough to spend the night at the Petit Trianon. (During country sojourns at Marly, Fontainebleau, or Saint-Cloud, guests’ names were likewise written on the doors of lodgings requisitioned from local residents to accommodate those for whom rooms had not been found at the château.) There were also, in various corners, little improvised rooms for the servants, removable boards on which they would lay a thin mattress that they rolled up immediately on awakening and stowed out of sight. At the Petit Trianon, as at Trianon itself and at the château, day erased the traces of night. But not in her special place, no, not in her bedchamber, not in the private territory that she marked with her gentle sweetness, with her scent. There, night and day commingled, prolonged each other, met, and intertwined. And this was especially true in that bedchamber at the Petit Trianon, which was so dear to her because it could not be confused in any respect with an official setting. The room looked out onto an ornamental pond and onto the Temple of Love, partly hidden from view by a little forest of reeds. Forest? That at any rate was how she referred to the dozen or so reeds whose rustling, when the window was open, was part of the enchantment I found in that bedchamber at the Petit Trianon. Sounds of water and reeds, voices of the lace makers, seamstresses, spinners, and ironers, whose songs the Queen liked to hear as they went about their work in the washhouse. That, in my memory, is the music of the Petit Trianon, and not the succession of concerts held there, numerous though they were. It is the music of the garden and of women’s voices. And the fragrances? Like the music, these come in the first instance from outdoors. They are delicate, and they change in the spring with the changing garden blossoms. But one there is that persists, identical throughout the seasons: the smell of the coffee brought to the Queen for her breakfast. If I chanced to arrive just when she was having her coffee, she would ask her attendants to bring another cup for me. And the instant it touched my throat, the savor of the strong black brew, that to her was the flavor of her daily awakening, became part of the very flavor of my life. If I search my memory, there is one other fragrance, more fraught with meaning, with a very strong, smooth odor to it, that I smelled only when I came to the Petit Trianon. But I was afraid to breathe it in, because it was too closely involved with the Queen’s body and the care she lavished on it. This was a jasmine-flower salve that she had her women smear around the roots of her hair. The salve had the property of preventing hair from falling out and even making it grow. All the women longed to get some for themselves, but Monsieur Fargeon, of The Scented Swan in Montpellier, jealously guarded it for the Queen’s exclusive use.
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When her attendants showed me in, the Queen was drinking her coffee. The white hangings of her bedchamber with their colorful flowered motifs, the huge bouquets of dahlias in their crystal vases, the transparence of the finely embroidered net curtains, all conspired that morning to make you forget the dull weather. But nothing would have had any effect on me had it not been for the charm of her smile, dawning when I appeared, then, when I stood up after my curtsy, shedding a joyful, golden warmth over everything: drapes, partitions, rugs, mirrors, writing stand, and harpsi-chord, even the hollyhocks that stood in bright sprays around the half-opened curtains of her bed.
“How good of you to have walked all this way in order to come and read to me here at Trianon. And so early in the morning, too . . . I don’t know how to thank you.”
“I would walk much farther, and with the utmost willingness, should Your Majesty so desire.”
“I know, I know, you are entirely devoted to me. And it is a great comfort to me to think of all these willing people ready to offer me their services.”
A chambermaid handed me a cup of coffee. I was so flustered that I swallowed it too hot. The table stood ready, as did the stool on which, when she signaled to me that I might do so, I took my seat. My throat was on fire. I got off to a bad start, in a voice that probably sounded hoarser to me than it actually was and made me uncomfortable. I had intended, by way of light reading, to start with La Vie de Marianne, for the Queen enjoyed Marivaux, then continue with a travel narrative, and finally conclude with the few pages of pious reading (extracts from Bossuet’s sermons or from Fléchier’s funeral orations) that the Queen had been supposed to hear each day since she came to live at Versailles, thus obeying the expressed wishes of her mother, Empress Maria-Theresa. The Empress had been dead for nine years now, but I observed that with the passage of time her precepts, far from losing potency, had steadily gained it, and though in a way the Queen seemed to comply with these precepts against her will, she no longer sought to avoid them.
While praising me for my excellent choice of readings, the Queen said in the same sentence that, nevertheless, and since it was most surely all the same to me, she would prefer passages from a play. Marivaux by all means, only not La Vie de Marianne, but rather Félicie, a very short, amusing, dramatized fairy tale. She appreciated theater more readily than novels. For her, stage characters had a level of real existence to which characters in novels did not attain.