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

We have to be precise, y’know, because the old man—the Intendant des Menus Plaisirs, this one’s father, the Marshal—was so famous and he lasted such a long time that nobody believes the son is now the Duke. There are still some who call him the Duke de Fronsac.”

“Does he set them straight?”

“Does he ever! He sets them so straight he’s all worn out!”

And they both went off in a fit of giggles. The one on the statue slid down off his perch. The other man was rolling on the ground with laughter. I observed their behavior as one might observe monsters. What metamorphoses were taking possession of this place and the people it harbored? These two, who previously stood as stiff and dumb as pokers in their cloth uniforms and were as inanimate as the doors they tended, were now talking back and forth at the top of their lungs, and lying on the ground, waving their arms and moaning about how it hurt to laugh so hard; but then one of them would repeat “He sets them so straight he’s all worn out” and the braying would start again . . .

They cried and wiped their eyes with their shirts. They would start to get up and then collapse. Their laughter was a subtle allusion to the last duel fought by the poor Duke de Richelieu nine years earlier when he was still the Duke de Fronsac. His father’s marriage to a young widow, at the age of eighty-four, had been the subject of various mocking gibes. Overhearing one of these, the Duke de Fronsac had challenged the scoffer to a duel and killed him.

“I have to admit he was quite a man with the ladies. Intendant des Menus Plaisirs, the King’s Little Pleasures, as it’s officially called. He was that, all right, but the first pleasures he looked after were his own, and they weren’t specially little! He had married a young’un and still spent his nights chasing after actresses. And d’you know why the Marshal-Duke was such a stud?”

“You’re always asking me whether I know or I don’t know. It really bothers me. It’s like every two minutes you were calling me a dummy.”

“Right, so you don’t know. No problem, a man can learn, he can improve his knowledge. Well, since you don’t know, I’ll tell you: the Marshal-Duke was such a stud because of milk baths. When he woke up, while he was drinking his first bottle of champagne, he took a milk bath.”

“You sure it wasn’t the other way round?”

“Wuddya mean, the other way round?”

“He didn’t drink a bowl of milk, while having a champagne bath . . . ”

“No. You’re not a real fast learner. No, seriously, citizen, milk baths help stave off those attacks where a guy can’t perform.”

“Attacks like that are strictly for the nobs. With ordinary people like us, it doesn’t happen. Nature takes its course. But even supposing, let’s say a guy was really tired . . . It could never happen, but okay, just for the sake of argument, supposing . . . Once you know that, about the milk baths, where does it get you? My wife, who’s a wet nurse, is suckling six babies right now. Even if I made those kids go without, that would never give me enough to have a bath!”

“You’re too quick at spotting problems!”

“And what happened to the bath milk after he was through with it? What did he do with it?”

“He didn’t do anything. But his personal valet took it and sold it, and it poisoned our children. The aristocrats take milk baths and our children die. The same as with the flour. The flour shortage comes from them using it all to make gruel for their cats! Or the houses! People have no place to bed down for the night. In winter the ones who are the poorest drop like flies. In the charity shelters they pack them together on straw to sleep. In the hospitals, they put them three or four to a bed. You wake up in the middle of the night, you’ve got a dead guy lying against you, stretched out stiff and cold. I’m not kidding!”

“Yeah, yeah, I know . . . ”

“And meanwhile, they own so many châteaux that there are some they’ve never set foot in; they don’t even know where they are, in which province . . . They’ve inherited them . . . They don’t give a damn about them . . . Can you imagine all those bedrooms, the beds, the big fireplaces, the . . . ”

“Like here.”

“And their dogs! You’ve seen where they keep their dogs! In kennels lined with satin, studded with gold nails. Each one like a gem of a little house. You look at those kennels and all you can think is: Man, I sure wish I could be one of those dogs. And mind you, the choice bits of food go to their mutts! What a bunch of wastrels, profiteers, bloodsuckers!”

“Hyenas, cankers, bastards! What’s more, not all the soldiers in the foreign armies have gone. You can hear German dialect being spoken in the parts of town where working people live. There are Spaniards, too. They’re tough customers, those Spaniards. If they’re told to wipe us out, they’ll do it.”

“The people here in the château will issue the order for us all to be killed, and not give it a second thought.”

“Not the King! He cares about us. He’s good. But her; she’d do it without a blink! I command you! I can just hear her shouting, in her own lingo: ‘Let them be slain, all of them, to the last man!’ ”

“She has a lot of faults, but it can’t be denied that she speaks French. You’ve heard her, same as me.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t matter. I’ve been reading the newspapers, where it gives the complete program of the Court faction, and it’s worse than you think. They want to reduce Paris to starvation,