Versailles

Mirabeau

Early morning, July 3, 1790. A carriage has drawn up to the back gate of the royal estate at Saint-Cloud, where the King and Queen have been allowed to spend their summer months, provided they return to Paris every week for Sunday dinner. As the curtain rises a cloaked figure emerges from the carriage: Gabriel-Honoré Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau, a tall man with a body like a wrung sock and a big head sprouting dark bolts of hair he wears stuffed into a taffeta bag. Mirabeau has described himself as "the mad dog from whose bites despotism and privilege will die," but he's also a man who enjoys the finer things in life, specifically wine, women, and song, and happens to be, at the moment, heavily in debt. Today he has an appointment with the Queen, with whom he hopes to strike a deal: if she will agree to settle with his creditors and give him a sizable pension, he will give her and the King the full benefit of his persuasive powers in the Assembly, where he is currently leader of the dominant party, the Patriots.

As the coachman wanders off, stage right, yawning and stretching, Mirabeau leans into the carriage and addresses his nephew, barely visible at the window.

MIRABEAU: If I'm not back in half an hour, contact the Militia. He disappears through the gate.

We can see the nephew's bored face. It is, after all, quite early, the sun is warm, the birds are singing. The light is the kind of morning light that looks so fresh it makes you thirsty. Blue-gray shadows of linden trees flicker across a length of the chateau's honey-colored wall. The nephew falls asleep and begins to snore.

Enter two servants, stage left, an old man and an old woman, both wearing white aprons. The woman is carrying a bucket.

OLD WOMAN: Could you hear what they were saying?

OLD MAN: Eh?

OLD WOMAN: Oh, for heaven's sake. You and I both know there's nothing wrong with your ears.

They lean against the back of the carriage. The woman sets down the bucket; the man slips a loaf of bread from under his apron and begins to eat.

OLD WOMAN: The way I'm thinking, she's the one who wants to go, he's the one who wants to stay.

The old man keeps chewing. The sun brightens; the sound of birdsong gets louder.

OLD WOMAN: They tell me she hardly touches her food. Sends her plate back untouched. She stares pointedly at the bread. They tell me her hair's coming out in handfuls.

The old man pretends to cry.

OLD WOMAN: That's easy for you to say.

OLD MAN: I didn't say a thing.

They continue leaning against the back of the carriage, the man chewing, the woman watching him.

OLD WOMAN: Are you planning to eat all of that?

The old man smiles, nods.

OLD WOMAN: You're not even going to give your dear friend Héloïse one little bite?

OLD MAN: I might, if she weren't so disagreeable.

There is the sound of a door slamming closed, footsteps on gravel.

OLD WOMAN: Try to look busy. She removes a wet rag from the bucket and begins washing a fence post.

OLD MAN: As long as I live, I'll never get used to you.

Mirabeau approaches the carriage and raps on the door; his nephew wakes with a start.

NEPHEW: Back already?

MIRABEAU: She asked me to kiss her hand. He is clearly overcome, emotions playing across his big face, its surface as pale and crater-pocked as the surface of the moon.

NEPHEW: And did you?

MIRABEAU: Of course. He pauses, looking back at the chateau. You should have seen her. I've always thought her admirers must be exaggerating, but now I know that everything they say is true. Even after all she has suffered — when she led me into the garden, I swear her feet never touched the ground. She is an angel. An angel with brains. The King has only one man near him, and that is his wife. He opens the carriage door and begins to climb in, then stops to cast one final glance at the chateau. Of course I kissed her hand. She is very great, she is very noble, she is very unfortunate, but I am going to save her.

Mirabeau settles himself in the carriage; the coachman takes his seat and shakes the reins. Birdsong and sun, linden light and shadow. A beautiful summer morning.

OLD MAN: The boy's right to ask. You don't want to kiss something if you don't know where it's been.

OLD WOMAN, singing: Oh, it'll happen, all right. It'll happen. We'll have no more Kings, we'll have no more Queens…

I thought I was going home. Home, that is, and not Versailles. I could hear the sound of children at play, little children speaking German, guck mall guck mal! and the wild splashing of a marble fountain in bright northern sun, instead of rain, more rain and thick gray skies and black umbrellas everywhere you looked. We used to slide in our stocking feet across the sun-bright floors of the Great Gallery at Schönbrunn, Max and Carlotta and Antonia and poor dead Joseph. Starrkopf, Mama called him, the Stubborn One. Just as she called our father Mousie.

"Take two days every year to prepare for death," he suggested in his little notebook. "Have no particular affection for any one thing and, above all, have no passion."

For your life, I guess he meant.

The hands of the beloved on your shoulders, their heat and weight and pressure. The beloved's hands, binding you to the earth. As if there might be something wrong with desiring the alternative.

Slip away. Shh.

And in the end the signs of your passage erased little by little, fingerprints on cutlery, sweat on bed linens. Traces of your body, that sweet, faltering companion, as opposed to the more durable evidence of a signature, a treaty, an embroidered vest, a lock.

I prepared for death every day. I kept a bottle of oil of sweet almonds with me at all times, to use as an antidote, since I was evidently surrounded by people who wanted nothing more than to poison my morning roll or the sugar I liked to stir into my water at bedtime.

Of course I had trouble sleeping. It was never quiet in the Tuileries, though the noises weren't festive as they were at Versailles, but mostly furtive, a muffled dragging and bumping all night long. On the other side of the window the streets of Paris, generally wet and spreading out forever around us. Rue de Rivoli, Rue de Castiglione, their curbs like rivers and the river itself swollen and brown and heedless, longing to leap its banks.

Sometimes the weather cleared, but then there was the terrible prospect of the stars, a whole black sky full of them, exploding and falling…

Bitch. She-wolf. Pig.

Names can hurt you.

Those men in the Assembly, who did they think they were? Marat, with his bad skin and his bad temper. Prissy little Robespierre, with his carrying little voice.

As for Mirabeau, he'd proved to be no help at all, despite the money I continually forked over. Fan the fires of disorder until a longing for the old order returns — that seemed to be the extent of his so-called advice, after which he proceeded to spend a passionate night with a pair of opera singers, and died. Poor Mirabeau! Two years of rest before the Jacobins dug him up and carted him off with the carrion to the knacker's yard.

It was a mistake I made more than once, thinking a man could help me, thinking he was powerful enough to do me some good just because he was a man. I didn't want to be the powerful one.

I didn't want to be like my mother, though after a while I think I began to understand the way she'd seen her life, all the people around her so inert, so stupid. Like the beautiful gauze-winged dragonfly imprisoned in amber, a gift from King Gustavus. A treasure, Louis said, and he used it as a paperweight.

Home. I wanted to go home, or at least as far as Metz.

Besides, everyone was leaving Paris. Everyone. I ordered a traveling armoire, a huge thing with drawers and compartments, and packed it full of dishes and knives and forks and dice and decks of cards and chamber pots. Mirrors. Candlesticks. A manicure set. During the last year we had all changed size and shape, Louis growing fatter and fatter, myself thinner and thinner, the Serious One growing breasts and hips, and the Love Cabbage, just turned six, never managing to remain the same size or shape from one minute to the next.

Have I mentioned that his hair was the color of caramel? That it was thick and curly? That his legs were plump and strong? That I loved him more than life itself?

So hot, the summer of 1791. Hot and humid and wet, steam rising from the camellias in the Tuileries Gardens, from the flower beds, the paving stones. Mercy had been called back to Vienna; Necker had resigned. The clergy had been ordered to ignore the Pope and swear allegiance to the State. My brother Leopold, like most of the other European monarchs, was busy saving his own skin. We were being spied on through keyholes. "Go fuck yourself," said my usually mild gentle husband, when Lafayette proposed the first of several escape plans.

From Meaux to Chälons to Pont-Sommevel. Sainte-Menehould, Clermont, Varennes. Dun, Mouzay, Stenay, Baâlon.

Away from the blurred rain-drenched sound of Meaux to the snow-covered peaks of the mountains.

Away from here and to there.

To Antonia standing on that island in the middle of the Rhine over twenty years ago, completely naked, her Austrian gown pooling at her feet. The pavilion walls flapping in a sweet spring breeze. Birds chirping, goose bumps on her skin. Bare knees and bare elbows. Navel. Little naked girl — and if she knew then what I know now?

Never go back. YOU WILL NEVER GO BACK.

You will leave everything behind. Everything. Every buckle, every clasp, every pin, every ring.

On June?o we put on disguises and sneaked from the Tuileries; I was a governess dressed in brown.

In a specially outfitted berlin we flew through the night, out the city gate at La Villette and generally eastward, the Marne unspooling to our right like a length of moonstruck silk. A clear night, very hot; the children fell asleep almost immediately. "By the time we get to Chälons," Louis confided, "I will be a completely different person." We ate cold meat and rolls, I even drank a little wine. The sky began to grow lighter, roosters to crow in all the farmyards; eventually we could see fields of wheat, fruit trees and houses.

I remember feeling happy, looking out the window at the new day. Almost as if I were doing exactly what I wanted for the first time since I'd been forced to leave Vienna when I was fourteen years old. I saw a round blue pond with white ducks swimming on it. A dark-faced woman wearing a green-and-black-striped shawl. I saw a field red with poppies, a field yellow with rape.

We veered north into the long shadows of the Argonne Forest; it seemed cooler, though it was still hot.

Then the berlin had an accident, going over a bridge. Then the soldiers didn't wait for us in Pont-Sommevel, or anywhere else along the route for that matter. Then we got caught.

I thought it was like an ant trying to climb out of a teacup. All those painstaking small steps up a steep smooth wall, across tiny hand-painted forget-me-nots and rosebuds and the next thing you know you're back where you started. Back in the Tuileries, back in the mess at the bottom of the cup, and the people of Paris are out of their minds with joy. They're organizing street fairs, sending up hot-air balloons. They're hanging thousands and thousands of lanterns in the Tuileries Gardens, as if the idea of hanging lanterns from trees was something they'd only just come up with, and not something I'd been doing at Versailles for years.