I'm Dying Laughing (75 page)

They drove on and on. About ten, they reached Versailles, parked the car and visited the palace. Stephen walked with his mother, Christy with Fairfield, Emily with Dale, courting and cajoling.

‘One cannot have
désespoir
on a day in May rolling, strolling, and with a loved cousin’ (she kissed him), ‘loved friends, loved husband and children. Think of the joy, oh, life is so full!

‘I’m so tired of our hotel, Dale, and the grandeur. I’m glad we came here to this greatest absurdity of all. And such a quiet day! Versailles for the Howards alone! Suppose we lived here? I think I’d like it. Would you, Dale?’

‘If we lived like they did. Have you read about the
fetes
they used to have?’

‘Oh, yes, oh, yes. Hunting the girls on horseback, and the parties in the woods.’

But Dale, interested in history, explained to her all about Versailles, its splendour, the money it took to build it, what the rooms meant, the way the court lived. He was very enthusiastic. He had often read about it, but not seen it before.

They walked through the halls, rooms, the salons, past long windows, through apartments as if in a crystal, past strange little corners and washrooms. The living quarters seemed small and dubious enough.

‘Well, I’m glad we’ve done better than that in America,’ Fairfield said.

Emily said, ‘Oh, darling Christy, my own Christy, how do you like Versailles?’

‘It has old age and crumbling charm,’ he said.

‘Listen to him! A European aesthete,’ said Emily, delighted.

‘Let’s quit this boneyard,’ said Fairfield.

Emily declared that Fairfield, now sixteen, was the picture of Marie-Antoinette when, as a girl-bride, she came to Versailles from Austria to marry the prince and become the
dauphine.

‘What a fairytale! And there is sweet little Fairfield, always coolly complete by herself, untouched, as if the place belonged to her. I alas, am also untouched—but with me, it is alas, old age! And look at my darling Christy, oh, Dale, explaining it all so soberly, just as you are to me; oh, wise youth, a man already! There are tears in my eyes, Dale!’

They went to lunch. Emily was delighted. There were French ladies in charming clothes, ‘Just as then, but not the French of then, the French of now, of the rue de la Paix, the rue St-Honore, the avenue Matignon. We all belong here, Dale, now. Except me, the Cinderella, perhaps. But I’m a happy one, the prince married me long ago, and here I am with three or four beautiful kind sisters and brothers! Ah, me, what happiness!’

She leaned close to Dale so that her shining fair hair touched his forehead and said aloud, ‘Dale, I must keep this mine forever. I am going to write
Versailles and Emily Wilkes,
their lives together! Or no, I will write it all into The Monster, my masterpiece.’

Dale laughed, ‘How queer you are! But not dead, and like nothing ever before.’

‘But I’m vulgar, Dale.’

‘Well, you have a right to be anything you like, you’re a great woman.’

She put her hands to her head, ‘My goodness. The hair rose on my skull. In the USA no one would ever say that to a woman. It’s the spirit of Versailles.’

‘Versailles is great and vulgar, magnificent and enduring,’ said he.

She said, ‘We are gently and languidly involved with all sorts of pasts. Henri IV said Paris is worth a mass and I guess I would say the same. Then my past, your past, so different from mine, so enchanting and the little lakes here with their long-ago pasts and the special past of Stephen who was here when he was twelve, for he too, golden scion of this golden family, has seen it all long ago and almost forgotten it.’

Stephen said, ‘Yes, I thought it was something I had dreamed.’

‘Ah, Dale, what a family, to have such dreams! To be able to think that Versailles was only one of their dreams! I shall bring my little Giles here, so that he too will think it is something he dreamed. Yes, Giles shall have such dreams. Ah, my God, the beauties of this life! How strange that the rich, the bourgeoisie should have such a beautiful life! What a dilemma! What a puzzle! For surely their minds and lives are finer that those whose dreams are back streets, garbage cans, vacant lots filled with rubble, howling landlords, roaches in the kitchen! What horrible dreams they are! They make me shudder, make me suffer! Well, well—life, dear sweet, difficult, promising life.

‘And now this is going to be one of Fairfield’s dreams too. Fairfield had such a dream on her sixteenth birthday! I cannot say what manner of dream it was! Ha-ha. For Fairfield will not admit she ever saw the boneyard.’

She passed along with Dale to Anna and linked her arm in Anna’s.

‘Dear Anna, what poetic joy! Versailles is now part of the lifeblood of all of this wonderful dear family of Stephen’s and mine. How strong, how intoxicating, how insistent the dead past is as it lives at Versailles. It overhangs, it is imminent, it threatens. It threatens only because it is empty. Empty—’

She broke away from Anna and said mournfully, ‘Yes, it is past and grey, cold, strange, formal, inhuman. And yet, with the Trianons, the woods, the paths, the islets and the shadowy couples and the lone walkers—what are they thinking of? Not the grey and cold. Even the lovers here cannot be thinking what our lovers think of in Central Park and Far Rockaway, not quite the same nuances, eh? Oh, well—that was my dream when I was young. I wish I had been Fairfield. I mean in Fairfield’s lucky place.

‘Think of it, the soft hush of green young May—

‘Think of it—this past that is Lethe, this deep, soundless, overwhelming of individuality, this dream-past rushed on us, over us, and spoke silently to us, rushed over us without seeing us perhaps, in its tranquillity. To have lived like that, in this magnificent happy past, and to be gone now, but to have this for your life-dream. Ah, me. We are sad creatures. What are our lives compared with theirs?’

Dale, excited by her talk, was talking to her. She listened abstractedly, saying sometimes, ‘What wonderful details! Oh, your memory, Dale, for all that’s tender and true in the dear past!’

But she said suddenly, ‘And yet, Dale, it seems to me a frozen, graven image like an old cathedral on a winter day, full of tenderness, an essentially hollow idiot, yet deeply comforting, at least for me who have lived through this rich afternoon. I taste death and total loss and I like the taste; it is sweet to the taste.

‘You know, I am writing about Marie-Antoinette. It is meant to be good. I have the memory of all these Marie-Antoinettes of all degrees, all doomed; and the sadness of their stately doom, behind the unspeakably rich and voluptuous and happy life a horrid sound, coming out of the gorgeousness pushing through into the forefront, the slow-paced tumbrils, the towering guillotines, the last moment, the awful axe. And it is this most awful of scenes, itself wickedly vulgar which saves this park from vulgarity.’

Dale explained, ‘Louis-Quatorze was the decadence of his own age. All the great men came to flower and withered before he came to the throne, little overdressed, big-wigged monkey. William Blake said, “A man is big if his wig is big.”’

She said, ‘To me, suddenly, it is terrible, dead, ossified, and what is not living is vulgar. What is this but an arid man-made, slave-made landscape, thirsty and starving and loveless?’

‘That is because you do not and cannot belong to the past, Emily.’

‘Dale, Dale! I am decadent, too. You don’t know. Oh, Dale, you are the one to save me. Your great understanding, your wisdom—you would see what is wrong with me and bring me back to life. You would cut away all the decadence and I would be what I once was, a girl so full of life and joy and hope, you can’t imagine it! No one knows what I was like. I didn’t know myself. It is only now when all is lost—all is lost, Dale, I am lost!’

‘You are not lost, you are tired; and if ever you were lost you would go down like they did, nobly and vigorously, to leave a legend, too.’

She threw herself into his arms. He was surprised, but he held her. They were behind the others; and the others, because of their lively conversation were paying no attention to them.

‘Dale, I love you. How is it that you know what words to say? What a heart you must have! What a tender, good mind. I need you. Won’t you come to live with us and give me life again? Oh, I have been through such torments as no one knows; and I can’t talk about them. I don’t want to. I only want someone near me, just in the same house, to whom I can go sometimes and say just these words, “Help me, console me; and don’t ask what I am suffering.”’

Dale set her on her feet, linked his arm in hers and made her begin to walk again. He said, ‘The revolutionary general, the knight of the revolution, Lazare Hoche, came from Versailles. They were not all faded and outmoded. It was this desert, as you call it, which produced revolutionary genius. The blood is there in the stones. Yes, if they had simply withered downhill into death and dusty oblivion, more and more faded, out of date, childish, figged out and silly as they seem now in the museums, they would not attract us at all, and not a woman of genius like you. Our attitude to them would be the attitude of the wild Kentuckians towards the British. What was their code? “No institution of theirs, no law, nothing to recall that wild and wicked land.” But the French with their good sense and their love of all that was theirs, arranged it so that the whole monument they left behind, this most extraordinary of French gravestones, is not merely not repulsive, not merely the broken pediment of Ozymandias. We can look there and think, they lived and they had the good fortune to yield to their betters, the vulgar proles. And both sides had the splendid good taste to obliterate all of that life on the grand tragic scale.’ Emily said, ‘Ah, yes, the tumbrils are absolutely necessary to Versailles.’

‘How bloodthirsty you are! Memories of the Indian frontier, I suppose.’

‘No, I am afraid. When I think what they could do. See that vast cobblestoned courtyard, the lifeless palace—it would be dull and vulgar if not for the terrifying memory of the furies, clawing at the cobblestones, their feet gaping with festering wounds, dirt ground in and scarred everywhere, filling the air with their rotten breath, spoiling the gilt with their fierce dirty paws; and think of the broken, yellow, torn nails, the knotted joints, overturning, tearing, breaking with hate, pocketing, shouting, jeering, lusting, and bad, bad, as conquerors are always bad, jealous, mean, and justified eventually by history. What a terrible picture! It makes me hang my head. I can’t even cry. My eyes are empty. I am empty. If that can happen, why live?’

Dale laughed, ‘Take Louis XIV. I have no sympathy with the talentless old monster. Louis XIV came to the throne with twenty-three million Frenchmen and ended with fourteen million. The
soleil
ceased to shine for nine million. A record. Anyone could have done the same mischief with less damage to the people.’

‘Ah, no. The image of Versailles is not Louis Exe-Eye-Vee, Louis the Fish-eye, strutting like a toad on red heels, over a crowd of half-human cowed courtiers. For me there is only one spectacle, the frightened, beautiful queen who began her days innocent and soft as Fairfield, gentle and full of a girl’s senseless, impossible hopes. There she comes now to a hideous reality, the reality of monsters and ruffians. Why monsters? Nature never made monsters like human beings. She shows herself, bravely to the wild, wild, heartless, vicious mob; for jealousy, envy, murderous hate are vicious and heartless. All the green and lovely places of France are haunted, all the great places are crowded with terror; the Terror, and others. The sound of the tumbrils is heard through the land and every spring, every dread summer, every year of drought and every year of grain—we wonder, we fear! Oh, why are we here? A land of blood.’

Dale looked at her sideways. ‘My eye, how you take on. I always thought you found Europe so tame. Dear old Europe, the tame, trodden pasture etc.’

‘With Versailles it’s all said. No phrases unturned. And it all meant nothing. The beautiful and doomed. Oh, I adore it. And I get a fierce sense of triumph from gaping at it and thinking, They’re gone! Just a vulgar Arkansas maid. But alive and so triumphant. Ha-ha. Yes, thinking it over, Dale, I really do adore it and triumph over it. We have defeated you in the end, my dear friends, architects of all this noisy, silent elegance. If I could knit I would have come and spent a happy afternoon looking up at the façade and thinking a few names for future reference: De Gasperi, purl one, knit one, drop one, Paul-Henri Spaak, purl one, knit one, drop one, Governor Dewey, drop one, Sumner Welles, drop one, General Marshall and his plan in his pocket, knit one, drop one. I believe there is a strong streak of both Lady Macbeth and Madame Lafarge in my soul. I know Christy would tell me there were no knitters, no Madame Lafarges, but I would make them if they didn’t exist. I’m like that myself. There must have been!’

Dale laughed, ‘Ah, Emily, come on, come to England and cheer us up. Let’s have some fun. Come along. You don’t really like the French at all. No one really does; but they don’t know what to do about it. It’s a sin against culture to say you don’t like the French. And your view of the French Revolution—all derived from Dickens. You yourself are a Dickens or maybe a George Sand—you haven’t realized yourself yet. Come to England and I’ll make you work the right way. I’ll make you!’

Emily drew back, ‘Jehosaphat! Your family is certainly one for making other people work. The true aristocratic touch, eh? Even in the woodlot in spring! Say do I look like that, I guess so; a workhorse, eh?’

They joined the others, found their cars and drove back to Paris, and that evening dined at another fine restaurant, Laserre in the Champs-Elysées. All this time they knew nothing of shortages, milk, bread, wine, meat nor sauce, nor gas nor clothing, nor money nor time. Yet secretly Emily and Stephen were gnawed by fear; their work unsold and big debts behind them and before them. With the family and in this state of mind, they visited museums, shows, shops, gardens.

Some days before the end, going back to Anna’s hotel, Emily sauntered with her mother-in-law, who was to leave in two days for America, with Fairfield and Olivia. Christy was to go over to them in the summer. Anna spoke of this.