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Authors: Rose Tremain
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…’
At that moment a distant bell chimed the hour of five o’clock and the
Surintendent
hastily thrust my Letter back into my hands, with no apology for having broken its seal, and made as if to depart. But I reached out and again held fast to his arm. ‘Please, Monsieur,’ I said, ‘I beg of you, tell me where I am to lodge. My journey has been a long one and I am very tired.’
‘I am sorry,’ said the
Surintendent
, ‘but I must leave you, Sir. I am needed elsewhere. Indeed, I am already late, as I know by the five o’clock bell. As to
logements
, you will have to take your chance on the upper floors. Versailles is very crowded at the moment, as you can see. Your best chance is to offer to pay money to someone willing to share some little corner with you.’
‘What? What do you mean, “some little corner”?’
The man shrugged his thin shoulders. ‘It’s the best you will come by,’ he said. ‘Here, even a Marquis must sometimes sleep in a passageway.’
It is night now.
I am lying on a tilting cot in a cold upper room. A screen made of linen gives me a little privacy, but the rest of the room is occupied by a Dutch Clockmaker, to whom I have given three English shillings to share his room and his pisspot. He lies in a narrow bed, snoring like a hog.
I have opened my Valises – found at last where I had left them – so far as to procure a nightshirt and a nightcap, which I have put on, but there is nowhere to hang my clothes or set out my few possessions, but only this Portion of space in a very small room under the leads of the
Grand Commun
.
I fall into a shifting kind of sleep and am awoken almost immediately, or so it seems to me, by the gnawing hunger in my belly, which has passed from a State of Longing to a State of Agony so fierce as to make me cry out. And I think, on the sudden, that this is the kind of hunger Will Gates would suffer, were I to cast him out of Bidnold and I know that – at all or any cost to myself – I must never do this. And I swear that I will not.
My mind returns once more to the kitchens down beneath me. The Clockmaker has informed me that the food prepared there goes all to the
Grands Appartements
, where the King and his entourage consume it in great quantities. Nobody, I am told, who inhabits the
Grand Commun
is ever fed, for the reason that the King believes the expense of this to be too great.
‘How are we to survive?’ I ask.
For answer, the Dutchman (whose skin is very pink and healthy but whose jaw appears occupied perpetually by the grinding of his Lower Molars upon the Upper) opens a wooden box he has brought with him and shows me what it contains, which is a quantity of pots of Jam and bags of Oatmeal. On this, he tells me, he lives. He drinks water from the garden fountains. For ten successive days he has attempted to procure an audience with Madame de Maintenon, the King’s Mistress and Confidante, for that he is a distant cousin of her dead husband, the poet Scarron, and she, allegedly, a great admirer of Dutch Clocks, but so far she has not been ‘at leisure’ to see him.
‘I will try again tomorrow,’ he says. ‘And the day after that.’
I have no Jam or Oatmeal and I really cannot steal from the Dutchman. But added to my hunger, now, is a terrible thirst and I know that I cannot lie here a moment longer. I must attempt to find some sustenance and some water.
I take off my nightcap and put on my wig. I tug on my stained breeches and my dusty coat and my shoes, much worn down by trying to hold my feet on the ground in the jolting and tilting coach.
Taking a Tallow candle, I go out into the passage, which is blocked, here and there, by men asleep on pallets of straw, such as those upon which the mad people used to rest at Whittlesea. I step over these and, by long searching and some wrong turnings, find myself once again on the ground floor opposite the door to the kitchens.
I turn the handle. A delicious odour of roasted meat
At that moment a distant bell chimed the hour of five o’clock and the
Surintendent
hastily thrust my Letter back into my hands, with no apology for having broken its seal, and made as if to depart. But I reached out and again held fast to his arm. ‘Please, Monsieur,’ I said, ‘I beg of you, tell me where I am to lodge. My journey has been a long one and I am very tired.’
‘I am sorry,’ said the
Surintendent
, ‘but I must leave you, Sir. I am needed elsewhere. Indeed, I am already late, as I know by the five o’clock bell. As to
logements
, you will have to take your chance on the upper floors. Versailles is very crowded at the moment, as you can see. Your best chance is to offer to pay money to someone willing to share some little corner with you.’
‘What? What do you mean, “some little corner”?’
The man shrugged his thin shoulders. ‘It’s the best you will come by,’ he said. ‘Here, even a Marquis must sometimes sleep in a passageway.’
It is night now.
I am lying on a tilting cot in a cold upper room. A screen made of linen gives me a little privacy, but the rest of the room is occupied by a Dutch Clockmaker, to whom I have given three English shillings to share his room and his pisspot. He lies in a narrow bed, snoring like a hog.
I have opened my Valises – found at last where I had left them – so far as to procure a nightshirt and a nightcap, which I have put on, but there is nowhere to hang my clothes or set out my few possessions, but only this Portion of space in a very small room under the leads of the
Grand Commun
.
I fall into a shifting kind of sleep and am awoken almost immediately, or so it seems to me, by the gnawing hunger in my belly, which has passed from a State of Longing to a State of Agony so fierce as to make me cry out. And I think, on the sudden, that this is the kind of hunger Will Gates would suffer, were I to cast him out of Bidnold and I know that – at all or any cost to myself – I must never do this. And I swear that I will not.
My mind returns once more to the kitchens down beneath me. The Clockmaker has informed me that the food prepared there goes all to the
Grands Appartements
, where the King and his entourage consume it in great quantities. Nobody, I am told, who inhabits the
Grand Commun
is ever fed, for the reason that the King believes the expense of this to be too great.
‘How are we to survive?’ I ask.
For answer, the Dutchman (whose skin is very pink and healthy but whose jaw appears occupied perpetually by the grinding of his Lower Molars upon the Upper) opens a wooden box he has brought with him and shows me what it contains, which is a quantity of pots of Jam and bags of Oatmeal. On this, he tells me, he lives. He drinks water from the garden fountains. For ten successive days he has attempted to procure an audience with Madame de Maintenon, the King’s Mistress and Confidante, for that he is a distant cousin of her dead husband, the poet Scarron, and she, allegedly, a great admirer of Dutch Clocks, but so far she has not been ‘at leisure’ to see him.
‘I will try again tomorrow,’ he says. ‘And the day after that.’
I have no Jam or Oatmeal and I really cannot steal from the Dutchman. But added to my hunger, now, is a terrible thirst and I know that I cannot lie here a moment longer. I must attempt to find some sustenance and some water.
I take off my nightcap and put on my wig. I tug on my stained breeches and my dusty coat and my shoes, much worn down by trying to hold my feet on the ground in the jolting and tilting coach.
Taking a Tallow candle, I go out into the passage, which is blocked, here and there, by men asleep on pallets of straw, such as those upon which the mad people used to rest at Whittlesea. I step over these and, by long searching and some wrong turnings, find myself once again on the ground floor opposite the door to the kitchens.
I turn the handle. A delicious odour of roasted meat
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