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

“Our King is an ogre. Only ogres eat on that scale.”

“But he’s a nice ogre. I like Bailly’s motion to ‘have, on the ruins of the recently demolished Bastille, a monument erected to the glory of Louis XVI, friend to his people, friend of liberty.’”

“I like all the motions. The patriotic ones. Motions are a great invention! . . . Still, the King can’t eat everything, or use everything. He can’t be out horseback riding and hearing a concert at Trianon at the same time.”

“He’s not actually very big on music! Except the Saint Hubert’s Day concerts. But the Foreigner inflicts her damned Austrian music on everyone, with that Gluck of hers.”

“He can’t ride his three thousand horses all at once.”

“He can if he wants. There’s nothing he can’t do.”

“You’re right. Under normal circumstances, he can do anything. If he touches someone, they’re cured; if he’s out riding and a condemned man comes his way, the man’s life is saved.”

“But then who touches him, when he gets sick?”

“His witch of a wife. That’s why he’s careful not to get sick.”

“But he does get sick just the same. She sees to it he gets sick. She’s slowly poisoning him. She keeps poison hidden in her rings. She also uses ground glass.”

“A regular Medici!”

“The King has a tougher constitution than the Dauphin did, so the King has survived. Whereas the child succumbed pretty fast. But he died knowing who was responsible. You know what his last words were? ‘Stand to one side, if you please, so I may have the pleasure of seeing my mother weep.’ Of course the wicked stepmother wasn’t really weeping; she was pretending. Is there going to be a war?”

“There sure is, if he doesn’t get rid of the Poisoner.”

“But what could he do with her?”

“They say she’ll be exiled, shut up in the fortress at Ham, sent back to Vienna, shipped off to do penal servitude in Santo Domingo, set ashore and abandoned in Guyana, or branded with a red-hot iron the way they did to that poor, sainted de La Mothe woman. The Austrian will be chained up with cartloads of her fellow sluts, dumped onto a vessel, and sent to the island of Tahiti, all in among the savages, to be a fisherwoman . . . ”

“. . . No, no, she’d enjoy that!”

“They’ll make her mend the fishing nets, round the clock. And every time she looks as if she’s about to fall asleep, they’ll whip her. She’ll be forced to keep right on plying her mending hook the whole time. She’ll have cuts all over her fingers, and when salt gets in them she’ll yell with pain. Another possibility is to keep her in Paris and put her through the same torture they used on the Nuremberg Virgin.”

“The Austrian, a virgin? Not likely.”

“The Nuremberg strumpet, more like!”

“The whore!”

“They could also put her in prison at Bicêtre. Or make her sweep the streets of Paris.”

“Sweep the streets of Paris! Hold on, now! . . .You’re going a bit far . . .That I admit, I would love to see! The Queen dressed in homespun, with her head shaved, and a broom in her hands. And the Parisians at their windows emptying their shit over her head.”

“In homespun? Why not naked, why go on paying for her to have clothes? . . .There’s something else people say about her, but this isn’t a punishnment, it’s something she is that deserves to be punished: they say she’s tribadistic. Have you heard it, too? D’you get what it means?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess. Tribadistic, lesbian, sort of like Austrian. No difference, really. She’s Austrian: she’s lesbian. That’s how it was with her mother—Austrian, lesbian, same thing.”

The two men were still puzzled. One of them pointed to the newspapers lying on the ground.

“Have you read what’s in those?”

“Some of it, not a lot. I don’t read fast enough to keep up, these days. I was okay as long as nothing was happening.”

“Give it a try anyway, Moinel.”

He opened a newspaper (“Man, it’s printed so small!”), and he read, struggling to separate out the syllables:

“. . . Motion to withdraw the troops and create a Citizens’ Guard. Sire, . . . when once we have become alarmed for our freedom, neither curb nor rein can hold us back . . . Sire, we beseech you in the name of this our native land, in the name of your future prosperity and renown: send your soldiers back to the posts from whence your councillors brought them . . . Consider! Why would a King beloved of twenty-five million Frenchmen seek at great expense to surround his throne with a few thousand hastily summoned foreigners? Sire, in the midst of those who call themselves your children, let yourself be guarded only by their love; the Representatives of the Nation are called upon to join with you in establishing the preeminent rights of royalty on the im-mu-ta-ble foundation of the freedom of the people . . . ”

Both men were moved to tears. They stood up and embraced one another. They kept repeating, like a magic formula: “on the im-mu-ta-ble foundation of the freedom of the people.”

And all of a sudden, one of them reacted:

“But, Pignon, we’ve won! The newspaper is even slower at catching on than you are. Those troops have withdrawn; even if there are a few still hanging around, we’ll get ’em! They’re as good as dead. Just the way we’ll get her, that Messalina!”

And he shook his injured fist at Marie-Antoinette’s windows. I was devastated. As though I had aided and abetted them in dragging the Queen’s name through the mud.

FOR ME, A TIME OF DISTRESS AND CONFUSION.

ENCOUNTER WITH A SENSIBLE WOMAN.

OMNIPRESENCE OF “THE QUEEN’S UNREQUITED LOVER.”

I must have looked completely lost when a woman in the service of the late Dauphin came walking toward me. She was transporting a cartful of toys from the château of Meudon to the toy cupboard