Farewell, My Queen Black Moishe (short novels in english .txt) 📖

“And what about me; will I be going with you?” proclaimed the turmoil oozing from her very pores. “And what about me; will you forget me?” quavered the unspeakable chagrin overwhelming my very soul.

EXHAUSTION, SINISTER DAWN

(from two to four o’clock in the morning).

How did the time pass after that? I don’t really remember . . . I plunged back in among the wanderers, and the nighttime round continued. More uncertain than before, more scattered, increasingly eroded by the conviction that it was futile. In my case, holding as I did the secret of the royal family’s departure and believing I was virtually the only person in possession of that secret, the futility of this night watch struck me even more cruelly than it did others. And there was also the isolation imprisoning each of us, with its deep uncertainty, the mixture of wishing and fearing to learn more about the King’s decisions. In the Queen’s Gaming Room, some women had stretched out on the tables. Others, settled snugly in the window recesses, were talking in whispers, exchanging the latest news: “They kidnap our children, and demand huge ransoms in exchange.” I was back among ravaged faces, poor creatures wavering between flat despair and morbid, irrational excitement. Somnolent bodies here and there. In the room where sedan chairs were stacked, people had taken the chairs down and climbed inside. Some had drawn the curtains.

I left the Gaming Room and the Hall of Mirrors for the Lower Gallery. The apartments all along it had their doors shut. No sound came from them. Then I went back up, the way one would go to the Opera Theater, and crept along a corridor at the level of the loges. I could make out the surface of the Reservoirs, visible above the far end of the North Wing, the rather frightening ink-black mirror of their watery expanse. I lingered a moment, to look. The desolation of that dark pond, strangely suspended in space with the sky behind it, chilled me to the bone. Was it to get away from that image and from the gloomy forebodings it filled me with, that I walked aimlessly, taking the first stairway I chanced upon, a narrow, dank, smelly one, leading to other twists and turns that were darker still? For a while I met no one. Then a disconcerting company of inhabitants began to emerge. People such as I had never seen in the château until now. Were they climbing up out of the hold, driven by instinctive knowledge that over these and the next few hours the fate of the ship was being decided? I had never ventured into these regions before. As I looked, implausible beings came into view. Worn-out figures like threadbare garments, with yellowish, shrunken faces. Deformed creatures were appearing as well, individuals who were hunchbacked, one-eyed, lame, swollen with goiter, much too fat or skeletally thin. I was revolted by their lackluster eyes, their sickly masses of flesh, their blackened teeth. Others assailed my nostrils with a rancid, sticky smell. They were swathed like mummies in their old lacewear, and only with slow, deliberate care did they manage to put one foot before the other. There were also a number of women—some sort of farmwomen—who looked and moved like birds, and inspired real fear. I hastily drew aside, for I remembered, as I watched them sidling past, girded in fierce odors, amulets chinking round their necks, pockets bulging on their long aprons—as I was saying, I remembered the suspicious deaths, the rumors of poisonings that I had refused to believe at the time. I was afraid that, without having to lift a hand, they would shove a cold, slimy toad into the hollow of my back. My pointless roaming had taken me too far. I summoned up enough strength to run. I escaped them, at any rate temporarily, for if they should decide to hold their evil sabbat beneath the chandeliers of the Hall of Mirrors, it would be up to us to make way for them . . .

Breathless, sweating, I returned to my point of departure. A night such as this was no time to wander away from the vicinity of the Grand Apartments. We must remain as much as possible, and supposing that these next words still had any meaning, on familiar ground. And I found it reassuring to be back where I could hear the usual hum of conversation. And, for my greater comfort, I recognized a person who was dear to me and who, oblivious to hints that he should exercise discretion, was making no effort to keep his voice down.

I saw a large man trying to convince a much smaller one of this need for prudence. Convince him or smother him: the smaller man was struggling to break free of the giant, who, almost half again as tall as he, had him pressed against his chest.

“The alliance we formed four hundred years ago with the royal house is prejudicial neither to them nor to us . . . Monsieur de Noailles has been used quite unfairly; the suddenness of their recent favor has provoked a paroxysm of envy. The next thing you know they are yesterday’s men, while in fact they are persons of rank and condition all the more for being connected to our family.”

The sight of his face—a face remarkable for its distinguishing feature, a kind of great pimple or fleshy growth on its nose—was not required, for me to recognize the Marquess de La Chesnaye, whose position at Court was that of First Carver. He had two favorite themes: the antiquity of his family and his plans for improving the château. And because he confused the succession of names that all the various rooms had passed through from one reign to the next and even in the course of a single reign—so great was the hold exercised over him by the