Farewell, My Queen by Moishe Black

Author:Moishe Black
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: George Braziller Inc.

If he was here, it meant the Queen could not have left. I fully agreed. Which only added to my bewilderment:

“But I don’t understand. I saw the Queen packing for her journey. If she hasn’t left yet, she’s about to. It’s a matter of hours, minutes. Everything that happens is now dictated by the National Assembly. That’s why the Queen is going away. It’s simple, isn’t it? A person can understand that without being able to read.”

“A person should certainly not lose her composure over such a trifle. The orators with their cries of rage, the register of grievances, pooh! Just so much huffing and puffing. A breath of wind . . . The King and the Queen have no intention of giving ground in the face of something so insubstantial as the National Assembly. The Representatives are puppets, marionettes whose strings they pull to suit themselves . . . My poor dear, you really are not at all yourself. Can you have taken so seriously the great opening procession of the Estates-General? Let me tell you what it really was.”

And she came and stood very close to me (it may have been my imagination, but I had the impression that the Queen’s unrequited lover was stirring in the foliage of the trees).

“The meeting of the Estates-General,” she whispered, “was decided upon by vote, with the sole purpose of providing a diversion for the King’s son as he lay dying. The Estates-General in themselves are of no importance; all they contribute is complaints and recriminations. No, the important thing was the procession announcing their opening. That was what the King wanted to give his little boy for a present. The rest doesn’t count.”

And with her fingernail she scraped away a grass blade stuck to one of the topazes decorating a wagon that had been the child’s.

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