Excerpt from Farewell, My Queen by Chantal Thomas, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I arrived in 1778, the year of Queen Marie-Antoinette's first pregnancy, the felicity she had hoped for through eight years of waiting, the blessing on which prayers had centered in all the parishes and convents of France, down to the remotest monastery. In the eyes of the populace, that was the year of her true accession to royalty, the only possible justification for the position she occupied. Like everyone else, I knew the glad tidings; knew, too, that December, the month of my arrival, was the ninth of the Queen's term. All this I knew, and was aware that as reader, I would one day have occasion to be in her presence. And yet my first sight of Her Majesty threw me into an unbelievable state of rapture, as though it had been a sight afforded me by purest chance, against all reasonable expectation.

The Queen, towering, huge, clad in a very full robe of white woolen stuff, on her head a bizarre cameo-embroidered turban of bright blue silk with several peacock feathers pinned to it forming an aigrette, was striding rapidly along at the head of a group of women who were wearing themselves out in their efforts to keep up with her. She was walking as though she were abroad in the open countryside, when in fact she was in an enclosed gallery and at that walking speed--which, as I later learned, had been recommended by her doctor--reached the end of it after a few paces, only to wheel about and cover the course again, still with that same greedy, space-devouring stride . . . Surprise left me reeling. My legs were unsteady, my face was burning. There was something unbelievable about this apparition, a fantastical element that would forever mark all the images that followed. I thought I was seeing fire in motion.


I dwelt eleven years at the château--"in these parts," as people said, referring to the Court --and never became accustomed to it, but assimilated its strangeness as a vital need. Eleven years . . . when I think about it now, it seems very remote, taking into consideration the line that separates me from that period of my life: the bloody slash mark of the Revolution. But also very near, probably because life in that place bore no resemblance to anything else. Time at Versailles was purely ceremonial; it was spent differently, marked off by curious signposts. Its real divisions were not calculated in terms of years, or months, or even weeks, but in terms of days. There was a Perfect Day; its program had been set more than a century earlier by Louis XIV: Prayers, Petty Levee, Grand Levee, Mass, Dinner, Hunt, Vespers, Supper, Grand Couchee, Petty Couchee, Prayers, Petty Levee, Grand Levee . . . Each day since that time was supposed to reenact the Perfect Day. Life at Versailles was a succession of identical days. Such at any rate was the rule, from an absolute standpoint. But reality never ceased to throw up obstacles. The reenactment was never completely successful. We were doomed to wither and decline. Life at Versailles could only degenerate . . . Tiny modifications became snags, reforms became upheavals, and so on, leading down to the days in July of 1789 that saw the King capitulate and the Court disperse-the collapse, in less than a week, of a ritual system that I had assumed was fixed for all time. In any case, that first view of the Queen, which no painting or sculpture of a goddess has subsequently dimmed, had entrenched me from the outset in a timeless world. Life at Versailles was a succession of like days. That was the Rule, and I believed in it.


But I was not the only one to be thus obsessed. When people said the Court, they meant the Court of Versailles. Ours was the model par excellence, toward which the eyes of every capital city, Saint Petersburg, Rome, London, Madrid, Warsaw, Vienna, and the rest, were turned. People were not unaware that despite ruinous attempts to drain the swamps, the château of Versailles had been built on an unwholesome site, and unwholesome it remained. People were not unaware of the epidemics and fevers, and the tremendous stench, which in warm weather spread through all the rooms. "The perfectly natural result of exudation from the commodes"; so the casual visitor, on the verge of feeling ill, would be informed. And the women would prettily shake their heads like a goat trying to shake free of its tether. To drive away the fetid smell, they would wave their fans a little faster. Exudation indeed! . . . People choked! And it was terrifying to behold, against the white skin of some fashionable lady, the blisters dotted across her neck by insect bites.

From Farewell My Queen by Chantal Thomas. Copyright Chantal Thomas 2003. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.