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

and in order to hasten the city’s destruction, they want to place a hundred pieces of artillery at the top of the Butte Montmartre and the same number—a hundred cannon—up on Belleville, all with their sights trained on the city down below. They’re going to fire their cannon and, at the same time, put the city to the sword and the torch and kill the people, until Paris, what’s left of it, submits and asks for the National Assembly to be suspended. A diabolical plan. It has Antoinette written all over it.”

They took time out to swig from the bottle and enjoy a better foretaste of what was to come.

“. . . It’s fantastic how Austrian she is.”

“Everything about her. Her orange hair, her sharp nose . . . ”

“Her carroty hair, her little stick of a nose, like a puppet in a Punch-and-Judy show.”

“Her lips that make you think she’s above it all. Her way of holding her head way up, higher than anybody else. We who live at Versailles and see her every day—which is no treat . . . ”

“Which was no treat. We’re not going to hang on here till we grow roots. As soon’s I finish my newspaper, I’m away.”

“. . . We’ve seen her every day, and we can testify: she’s just plain Austrian. More all the time.”

“With a mouth that looks ready to spit out whatever goes in.”

“She doesn’t spit anything out because she doesn’t swallow anything. She doesn’t eat. She goes through the motions. That’s one more way she deceives the Nation.”

“But you’ve never seen her eat or not eat; you’re always on duty at that time on a Sunday.”

“Not me, no, but my brother has seen her not eating. He was determined to give his oldest kid a look at the King, as a First Communion present. It’s a tradition in our family. Well, I can tell you for certain: the Austrian doesn’t eat anything. She drinks the same glass of water from the time the meal starts till it ends. She doesn’t really drink: she wets her lips. And instead of eating she moves the same piece of meat around on her plate with the tip of her fork (because, even if she doesn’t eat, she has to have a fork, a knife, spoons, the whole caboodle, all of gold, naturally). She shoves it a bit to the right, a bit to the left, back to the middle. She hesitates over where it should go next. She calls that eating. And what’s more, she doesn’t take her gloves off at the table . . . Can you imagine? She keeps her gloves on and uses a fork . . . She takes a hammer to all our good, French ways. She shows no respect for anything French. Before she came along, the King and Queen used to eat in public twice a week. With her here, and I reckon after she goes, it’s just once a week, one measly time. You cross the country on foot, for that one chance a week, and she gives you nothing to look at. You’ve come all that way to watch her eat, and she doesn’t eat.”

“They’re horrible, those Austrians. The dirtiest, most nit-picking nation of liars you could ever hope to find. Some of their customs are really disgusting. In Austria, when you marry a girl, she’s already been deflowered by her brother. The family gets first go, then you. That’s how it worked with Antoinette. She’d lost her virginity to her brother Joseph before she came to Louis’s bed.”

“Would you want to be king?”

“On those terms, no, I would not. If things were different, I might.”

“Everything is the King’s, all those beautiful provinces, the forests, the oceans, you, me, the Orangerie, the Grand Stables and the Lesser Stables, everything belongs to him. That must give a person some kind of special feeling.”

“But how does he work it so’s he feels it belongs to him?”

“Well, when he uses things, he just takes them without asking permission. Of anybody. Whatever he decides he wants, he gets. He eats green peas on Easter Day, if he feels like it. And he eats for real, that one.”

“He’s partial to garden peas.”

“Or deputies! . . . ”

(And next instant they were lying on the ground again, doubled up with laughter, because of the King’s famous slip of the tongue when the Estates-General were holding their first meetings. He had said: “I would enjoy another helping of those deputies” instead of “garden peas”!)

“No. . .The King isn’t fussy about his food. He eats most anything.”

“. . . He eats most everything. Have you any idea what the menus for his meals are like? The most exquisite dishes and always in vast quantities. Just his everyday fare, picture it: four main courses, twenty side dishes, six joints of meat, fifteen regular desserts, thirty little desserts, a dozen platters of pastry.”

“I don’t have to picture it, my brother described it for me: creme fritters with raspberry sauce, chocolate pie, almond tarts, every flavor of sherbet—cantaloupe, lemon, fig, blackberry, pomegranate—and there were Ali Babas, too . . . There’s nobody who wouldn’t like food as fabulous as that. Just talking about it makes my mouth water. How do you suppose the gentlemen servers manage to keep their hands off?”

“They don’t keep them off. I’m sure that the King’s serving dishes have been eaten from before they get to their destination. Figure it out, it’s a long trip from the kitchen . . . the temptation is mighty strong . . . ”

“Result: the King eats things that are already partly eaten.”

“Partly eaten, and cold. You have five hundred people officially in your service, and the food you eat is cold.”

“Five hundred! The Royal Commissary must be pretty big.”

“The Royal Commissary is enormous. When you take into account that the Household Commissary includes the Royal Table-linen Officers, the Corps of Gentlemen Cupbearers, the Officers of the King’s Bread Pantry and a whole