Versailles

The Baker and His Wife

October 31, 1789. A bakehouse in Paris, near the Halle aux Bleds, its door chalked with an X. It's early morning, the sun just appearing over the lopsided chimney pots of the Marais; a beautiful bright autumn day is dawning. Gradually a small crowd assembles in front of the bakehouse door.

CROWD:

The hunger-swollen belly, restore, restore.

The hunger faintness, restore, restore.

The hunger drooping, restore, restore.

The utter famine, restore, restore.

They begin pounding on the door, politely at first, and then with increasing fury.

After several moments the door opens and the baker's wife peers out. She's a middle-aged woman of medium build, whose clothes and hair and face and arms are so completely covered in flour it's impossible to tell what she really looks like.

BAKER'S WIFE: Can I help you?

SKINNY YOUNG MAN, mimicking her: Can I help you? What kind of question is that?

BAKER'S WIFE: You'll have to excuse me, sir. We've been up all night baking.

BAKER, offstage: Tell them to come back in an hour. Tell them there'll be bread enough for everyone in an hour.

BAKER'S WIFE: An hour. You heard him.

SKINNY YOUNG MAN: I can hardly wait.

The baker's wife closes the door; immediately the crowd once again begins to pound on it.

PRETTY YOUNG WOMAN: Those eyes, that lip. Am I crazy, or does she remind anyone else of a certain royal someone…?

CROWD: Open up! Open up!

SKINNY YOUNG MAN: Yes! Open up now or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!

FAT MAN: They think they can hide from us. They think they're so smart. He picks up a stone and throws it at the window.

GRAY-HAIRED WOMAN: Who do they think they are?

The door is flung open, this time by the baker himself. He's a middle-aged man, tall and heavyset, his flour-dusted features even more difficult to make out than his wife's.

BAKER: Didn't you hear? An hour. First the wheat was late to the mill, and then there was no salt.

SKINNY YOUNG MAN: Of course. And the moon is made of cheese. We know you've got bread in there.

The fat man grabs the baker around, the neck and hauls him out the door.

FAT MAN, menacingly, in the baker's ear: Do you love me?

CROWD: Feed my sheep.

FAT MAN: Do you love me?

CROWD: Feed my sheep.

FAT MAN: Do you love me?

SKINNY YOUNG MAN: They say the third time's the charm. He yanks the baker's head back by the hair, then shoves him to his knees.

CROWD: Feed my sheep.

The crowd quickly closes in, making it difficult to see what happens next. There's a raised arm, a scream, a flash of light as the sun glints off the blade of a large kitchen knife. A pool of blood begins to spread at their feet, spreading wider and wider; the gray-haired woman turns to address the audience.

GRAY-HAIRED WOMAN: The roots of the wheat plant are thin and form letters, as anyone can see who digs them carefully enough. The letters run on and on in the dirt before breaking and crumbling away; you can never get them all out. But you have to get them all, you have to find all their branchings for the letters to spell a word, the word of happiness.

PRETTY YOUNG WOMAN: Who's going to find that word now, the way the world is going?

CROWD:

Round the earth oven, restore, restore.

Round the hearthstones, restore, restore.

Round the foundation beams, restore, restore.

Round where the road starts.

The skinny young man suddenly raises a pike on which he's impaled the baker's head high above the crowd. Blood continues to pour in a steady stream from the baker's severed neck; the crowd breaks into loud cheers.

BBAKER'S WIFE, peering through the broken window: Oh my God! Oh no! My darling! She puts her face in her hands and sobs. He was only trying to do his job.

SKINNY YOUNG MAN, lowering the pike and positioning it so the baker and his wife are face to face, mocking: My darling! My darling!

BAKER'S WIFE, angry: He was only trying to give you what you wanted.

FAT MAN: He should have thought of that when he told us to come back in an hour.

PRETTY YOUNG WOMAN: He should have thought of that when he was born.

Holy Week, and fingers tapping lightly at my window. Mama? Gome in, come in, but it was only the rain, pattering on the new leaves of the chestnut trees and lilacs, soaking into the lawn. Filling the hole my little boy dug just that afternoon with his toy spade, attended by six bored grenadiers of the National Guard. A cool afternoon, storm clouds assembling in the west. Storm clouds darkening the far-off sky above Versailles, turning the surface of the Grand Canal to melted lead, and sending all the birds our way.

They love to dig, boys. Left to their own devices they'll dig forever and their cheeks will grow pink with exertion, their eyes like the eyes of the blind, fixed on invisible objects. Until they hit an impossibly big rock, that is, or their governess sails forth to fetch them home.

We'd been in the Tuileries for almost half a year. A monument to squalor and decay, the Tuileries. A prison disguised as a palace. Every mattress damp and swarming with silverfish, though at least by spring we had actual mattresses to sleep on instead of piles of clothes and billiard tables.

"Kings ought to proceed in their career undisturbed by the cries of the people, as the Moon pursues her course unimpeded by the howling of dogs," wrote Catherine the Great in a letter. "When Kings become prisoners," I wrote her back, "they haven't long to live." I had to write all my letters in cipher, and hide them in a chocolate box.

Spring rain, Tuesday of Holy Week. My leg hurt. My left leg, which I had injured at Christmas, our first in the Tuileries. "How will Père Noël know where to find us?" my little boy asked, and, really, I had no good answer. My darling Dauphin, my chou d'amour. "Let's hope he doesn't," replied his sister. "He's probably a Jacobin, in that red hat of his." I'd been racing to close the curtains, to block the faces mouthing threats at the window, when I felt my ankle twist.

Now my whole leg throbbed under the weight of the rest of me, which felt dead by comparison with the throbbing leg, and that leg, in turn, grotesquely heavy. Once I'd been light as a feather. And where was the girl with the cherry red lips? Still there, I suppose. Preparing to enter history, like her mother before her.

On the windowpanes? Just water.

On the skin? Just nothing.

No hand stroking back the hair.

But when I dragged myself from my solitary bed and down the long long hallway of the Tuileries — limping past the scaffolding and the pails of gilt and plaster, the smoke-darkened billiard room where Provence was lining up yet one more corner shot and Louis, having polished off yet one more roasted haunch of some poor dead creature, was noisily licking his fingers — and at last came limping into my daughter's room, overwhelmed by the wish to stroke her smooth blond hair back from her smooth white forehead, she swatted my hand away.

Such a cruel system, mothers and daughters. From the fear of being humiliated, deliver me, 0 Lord. Of course the God who made our world chose to put suffering and death at the heart of it. We are weak, like the Disciples, and our love is always disappointing.

For the past year she had been studying the catechism, the Serious One; the next day, Spy Wednesday, she would make her first Communion.

From the fear of being lonely, deliver me, 0 Lord.

From the fear of being forgotten, 0 Lord, deliver me.

Even then my daughter knew that tenderness had never saved anyone's life.

Outside the window the sound of pipes and drums; the sound of spring rain and with it the smell of gunpowder. That was the mood outside the Tuileries, while inside we strove to keep up appearances. The eternal lever. The eternal coucher. The eternal cavagnole. Dance, nobleman, dance, I could hear someone singing. Dance, meaning hang him from the lamppost.

I looked down at my sleeping daughter and imagined her kneeling before the Bishop in her white gown and shoes, her hair safely tucked beneath her white veil. An earnest expression on her face, as usual — her father's own daughter. The altar rail sweet with beeswax, the whisper of pages being turned, the delicate bones of her hands tightly clasped in prayer.

I could imagine that. I could imagine no further.