Free Versailles by Kathryn Davis Page B

people.
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    More leaves blow in; the dogs become suddenly watchful, tense, their muzzles raised, their ears pricked. The wind lifts the Princesses hat from her head and carries it, ribbons atwirl, toward the chateau.
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P RINCESSE : Stop please!
C OOKIE : But we can't. We can't.
F LOSS: You of all people should know that we can't stop anything.
P EARL : Where the sheep is tied, it must graze.
C OOKIE : Famine and pestilence.
W INNIE : Fire and flood.
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    Suddenly everything is in motion, the agitated dogs, the blowing leaves, the Princesses gauzy white skirts. A combined sound of barking and snarling and howling can be heard, as well as the leaves' dry rattle and the flapping of fab - ric. And then, just as suddenly, the wind dies down; everything becomes perfectly still. By the time the Prince enters, stage right, the Princesse is paging through her breviary, and the dogs are lying in various postures of repose throughout the leaf-strewn garden. The Prince de Guéménée is a heavyset middle-aged man with a wild look in his eye. He is wearing a dove gray frock coat and tan riding breeches; his thinning white hair is braided into a pigtail and tied with a black ribbon.
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P RINCE : Where on earth have you been, my darling? I've been looking everywhere, calling and calling.
P RINCESSE,
setting her breviary aside:
Nowhere but here, my darling.
P OUNCE : Nowhere but nowhere, don't you mean?
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    The Prince sinks heavily onto the banquette beside the Princesse and heaves a loud sigh.
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P RINCE : Then you haven't heard.
P RINCESSE : Heard what?
P RINCE : That we are ruined.
P RINCESSE : Indeed.
She laughs nervously.
And shall we have nothing to eat but pig swill from now on?
P RINCE : Please, my darling. Try to be serious. Our debt is somewhere in excess of thirty-three million
livres.
P RINCESSE : Ours and everyone else's.
P RINCE : You don't understand. Debt is like building a castle in the air, stone by stone by nonexistent stone. To be free of a tangle you must borrow, to borrow you must be at ease, to be at ease you must spend. And then one day a real crack appears, and the whole thing falls in a heap at your feet.
He puts his head in his hands.
L ULU : Like faith.
O PHELIA: A castle built to the glory of God will never fall.
P RINCESSE : But you can't live in it, can you?
Can
you?
P RINCE : My darling, please try to concentrate. I 've had to declare bankruptcy.
O PHELIA : With faith, two fish can feed thousands.
P OUNCE : Not if there's a cat around.
P RINCESSE: YOU aren't answering me.
L ULU : Death to the cats!
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    And if I had it to do over? Would I choose to live my life differently?
    What a question!
    Change even the smallest detail, the eyelash that got in your eye that summer night when Count Axel Fersen—beloved Axel!—spirited you off with him to the North Quincunx, and the next thing you know you're an old woman raising pigs in the Perigord. An ugly old woman with multiple chins and liver spots and a head where a head's supposed to be, attached to a neck, that is, which is in turn attached to a body.
    Joséphine, he called me. A pet name, though of course I remained Antoinette, just as the Quincunx used to be called the Great Labyrinth.
    They amount to the same thing, choice and fate. No one made me be Queen, and yet. "You took the trouble to be born, nothing more," wrote Beaumarchais.
    Say goodbye to the eyelash in your eye and you say goodbye to your eye, as well. Eyebrow, eyelid. Antoinette, goodbye, you say.
    Nor would you necessarily end up old and ugly and a woman. You could be King of Sweden, for instance, a handsome young count tucked firmly under your wing. You could be a butcher, a cow. Even the handsome young count himself, tucked there firmly yet, I have no doubt whatsoever, platonically, despite the King's famous appetite for handsome young men.
    In the beginning the bodies stand empty, like milk pails waiting to be filled. Then the spirit is apportioned, completely