Versailles

Marble Court

Quick, quick, along the Avenue de Sceaux. Quickly. Quicker. Sky the palest blue, every trace of color wrung from it by the heat, and off to the left on the far side of the stables and the tennis court, the Sun King's Kitchen Garden, its trees still standing in orderly rows, their boughs heavy with fruit. Pears, apples, apricots, plums. A drift of leaves underfoot, though it's too early, really, the second week in August, the wind from the east and hot.

An unendurably hot wind, breath of the Devil, ovens of hell. Eleven miles to the east, Paris is on fire. The Tuileries have been set ablaze, the royal family herded off to be locked in a tiny cage behind the rostrum of the Legislative Assembly, where everyone can keep an eye on them. "What a lot of leaves!" the King was heard to observe as he and the Queen were making their way along the crowd-filled Terrace of the Feuillants, her face red and blotchy, her bodice stained with sweat.

The wind raises dust from the cobbles of the Parade Grounds, dust and heat phantoms, transparent carriages, shimmering men and women, laughing, rippling, breaking apart.

Let us go, children of France, our day of glory has arrived…

Glory, yes! Let us go!

Four hundred steps from the first of two ornate golden grilles to the second, their gates padlocked, their gilt paint chipping off. Sun directly overhead and out of the wind now. Trash and leaves, dust and grit. Seventy-six steps across the Royal Court and then tap tap tap tap tap up five long stairs and you're almost there.

Almost.

Sun beating down. Down the row of wheat I've run and now my story's almost done…

Eleven miles to the east, the young Napoleon Bonaparte watches the goings-on at the Tuileries from the second-story window of a nearby furniture shop. The Knights of the Dagger, all of them old and infirm, together with a mixed bag of cooks and grooms and laun-drywomen and spies and members of the Swiss Guard, are being thrown from the flame-filled palace windows, sometimes their entire bodies, sometimes just their heads.

Day of glory! Let us go! Little children catch the heads and impale them on sticks. The greenery runs red with blood.

Even after Russia, Napoleon will say he never saw such carnage.

And what of the fat pig that has cost so much to fatten? Let him drink! Let him get drunk! Since Nature has given him a porker's character, let him live on as a porker!

And his tigress wife, meowing sweetly, biding her time till she can scratch again?

Lock them in the Temple, throw away the key!

Leaves and phantoms, Prudence and Mars.

Sun beating down and the way so long. Sun so hot and your heart so broken.

Fifty-seven steps to cross the Marble Court, from the top of the five stairs to the front entrance. All the doors and windows boarded up and the clock stopped at half past ten. Black paving stones, black ones and white ones, 11,520 marble paving stones in all.

Diligence and Peace, Wealth and Hercules.

Eleven miles to the east, the Tuileries turns to ash.

Eleven miles, no more, no less.

Let me in! Let me in! Let me in!