The road to revolution—etiquette at Court,
but dignity, wanting.
§
As rare as fossil butterflies, and as beautiful,
Marie Antoinette and her ladies laugh,
watching her little dogs prance
on hind legs for a sweet.
A cloaked man enters; he bows,
and as he bows reveals the blade. A lowly Count,
his daughter’s season at the Court
ended when she wrote to him
about the rape.
As he lunged, he dropped, a pistol ball
opening his skull when the guard
swung round—the knife as he fell
shearing the Queen’s bodice, its pearls
popping across the marble floor.
The Queen cried, ‘They always blame me,
these country girls and their families.
They ask for introductions—they ask
for whatever they can get. They beg
for titles, and never think about
the rest. What am I supposed to do?
Just look at this: this dress was new.’
§
‘Would be a pity,’ she said, ‘to stop when so fairly on the road.’
§
Her education at fifteen
remarked upon—in singing, in her eloquence
in reading Tasso and Dante, and she, dressed in white
with a plain straw hat, a little switch
in her hand, was often seen
walking on foot, followed by a single servant.
Her Empress mother knew
the jealousies of Court, the vanities of ruffs
and lace lappets, and consulted
the Vienna doctor, Gassner, a pretender
to Second Sight, with, Will my Antoinette be happy?
Gassner squirmed, muttering,
‘Your Imperial Highness,
there are crosses for all shoulders....’
§
‘Ah, Madame, we have all been killed
in our masters’ service—but better
to die than to implicate anybody.’
§
The King, riding through the forest
hunting stag, came upon
a burial party—one, standing by the grave
wiping away sweat, the other, digging
in his turn, and beneath a nearby tree
the coffin, covered in a filthy cloth.
The King asked, ‘What manner
was the death?’
The one standing offered, ‘The King’s taxes.’
§
‘True nobility, gentlemen, consists
in giving proof of it.’
§
From Latin classics to the Latin
of all the prayers, from the works of Racine
to the vaudeville of Rose et Colas,
his memory the handmaid of his wit—
from the inner chamber, the King’s voice
high and shrill, his interests elsewhere.
Timid, inquisitive and addicted to sleep—
too shy to rule, he left decisions of State
to others, his secret obsession a forge
for making locks.
Bowing low in his Presence, behind his back
his courtiers, their sniggering caricature—
‘The King’s nose, snout of a boar.’
§
Happiness does not dwell in palaces:
‘Of course, I shall be either hissed or applauded.’
§
Paris: never a good word for ‘the Austrian.’
With The Marriage of Figaro, its plot
obscure, contrived by swindlers
in society corrupted by foreigners, the Queen
a perfect fit, they said.
Her comment to her ladies: ‘I like big hats,
rouge and opera—where’s the harm?’
§
Nothing as dangerous as recent authority—
the rabble—always ready to insult misfortune.
§
The States General, the remedy now poison.
A six-franc piece, cut into its face the words
Midnight, 12th July—‘three pistols’... the password
for insurrection.
In the King‘s Chapel, even the musicians
now in the uniforms of grenadier captains.
§
The King’s head, taken, and Marie’s—at their deaths,
it was noted, they both had colds.
The bodies
to a quicklime pit—long dissolved
when Napoleon came to look.
But that’s another story.
Estill Pollock | The Comeback
Contents | Mudlark No. 74 (2023)