Farewell, My Queen, Black Moishe [electric book reader .txt] 📗

filled the room. One shoulder was bared. I sat motionless, enthralled . . . I could not make up my mind to leave. I do not know what I wanted from the Queen, but I wanted more and more.

At last I contrived to come away, but before I withdrew, I looked at her one last time; she was passionately examining those bits of fabric. At that moment she was fifteen years old, the age she was when she first arrived in France. Fifteen . . . at most.

LUNCH AT LITTLE VENICE

(one o’clock in the afternoon).

I went to have lunch by the water’s edge, at one of the cafés set up along the north traverse of the Grand Canal, in those sham fishing villages that had continued to exist since the time of King Louis XIV and that were called Little Venice. Country folk dressed as sailors (when they were not playacting life at sea, they tilled the fields) served fish, conveyed at top speed from the ports on the Channel. I asked my waiter whether there had been a good catch. He launched into an account of dangerous moments at sea, shifting winds, shipwrecks narrowly avoided. There were a few other customers in the outdoor section of the café, including some I knew by sight. They enjoyed the account of a storm out on the open sea, and with the characteristic ability of the château dwellers to abandon reality in a split second and leap onto a playhouse stage, they joined in the game.

“And right now,” I asked when I had done with my meal and was getting ready to leave, “would it not be imprudent to put out to sea?”

I pointed to the dead calm of the Canal’s surface.

“A little, but I’m going to fetch you an experienced sailor, an old sea dog who has been through many a squall.”

A gondolier appeared, and I took my place in his boat, on the damp fabric covering the seat. This young lad belonged to a Venetian family established in Little Venice for more than a century, the Palmerini. He knew the entire history of the flotilla that plied the Grand Canal, but I had no wish to hear it. “I would rather you sang me a song.” He began singing in Italian, and at once the sad, sad gray of that near-wintry sky turned clear and bright. And so I was carried away from Trianon to find myself on the other side of that branch of the Canal, over toward the Menagerie château. I had not really planned to go there, but I was glad rather than vexed. Monsieur de Laroche, Captain-Custodian of the Menagerie, was a colorful personage. Beyond that, for me he was a friendly soul, and on that free afternoon I was quite in the mood to pay a friendly call.

VISIT TO MONSIEUR DE LAROCHE,

CAPTAIN-CUSTODIAN OF THE MENAGERIE:

“ENOUGH OF THAT”

(from two to four o’clock in the afternoon).

The like of Captain de Laroche was nowhere to be found. The most spectacular phenomenon in the Captain’s Menagerie was no doubt the man himself, an individual such that I cannot resist the urge to pen his portrait. People pretended they were observing the animals but in fact what they came to see was him . . . only not from too close-up. The pleasure of his company was best enjoyed out-of-doors.

Tall, swarthy, imposing, with military stripes and ribbons aplenty, as lavishly adorned in rings and diamonds as any financier, Laroche was the most fetid creature imaginable. At a distance of several paces, you could detect his presence with your eyes shut. He stank like a herd of billy goats, or like heaving masses of sows rolling around in the mire, or wild boars in their own muck. Compared to his aura, the air by the lake known as “stinking pond,” in the park at Versailles, was sweetly scented. He was connected by birth to the rich and ancient Provençal branch of the Moizades and, following family tradition, had first been destined for a diplomatic career, but he would have cost France all her allies. The stink of Laroche struck like a bomb. Your choice was either to exit in great haste or to vomit. With the passing of the years, a problem that had already been extremely trying in his youth assumed the proportions of a transnatural phenomenon. On the day of his Court presentation, a plan to seize him bodily and cast him forcibly into a bath having failed (he had broken one valet’s arm and smashed another’s teeth to smithereens), his household had been obliged to settle for dousing him with casks of perfume and putting two pairs of shoes on his feet in the forlorn hope of containing the man’s stench. The combined effect of his personal odor and the perfume was overwhelming. When the “debutant” made his entrance, the King (at that time Louis XV) had recoiled, and when the moment came for the young man, still heated from the violent scuffles he had just been involved in, to proffer his right cheek for the ritual salutation, His Majesty had turned away. The King clasped his hands to his handsome face in a gesture he employed regularly but which on this particular day heralded not only a particularly tenacious bout of royal melancholia but a fearful migraine as well. In order that there might be no recurrence of the incident, and to avoid giving offense to a family that enjoyed royal favor, someone had been inspired to give the new courtier a post at the Menagerie, where, it was hoped, his bodily emanations would merge with those of the lions, tigers, and other big cats. He had been appointed Captain-Custodian of the Versailles Menagerie, a coveted position, for, aside from the fact that the duties it involved were not demanding, it included the right, nay, the duty to reside in the little octagonal château built to order by Mansart for Louis XIV. The