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BioGede
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9 April 1778.
My name is Elise de la Serre. I am ten years old. My father is Francois, my mother Julie, and we live in Versailles: glittering, beautiful Versailles, where neat buildings and grand chateaus reside in the shadow of the great palace, with its lime-tree avenues, its shimmering lakes and fountains, its exquisitely tended topiary.
We are nobles. The lucky ones. The privileged. For proof we need only fifteen-mile road into Paris. It is a road lit by overhanging oil lamps, because in Versailles we use such things, but in Paris the poor use tallow candles, and the smoke from the tallow factories hangs over the city like a death shroud, dirtying the skin and choking the lungs. Dressed in rags, their backs hunched either with the weight of their physical burden or of mental sorrow, the poor people of Paris creep through streets that never seem to get light. The streets stream with open sewers, where mud and human effluent flow freely, coating the legs of those who carry out sedan chairs as we pass through, staring wide-eyed from the windows.
Later, we take glided carriages back to Versailles pasess figures in the fields, shrouded in mist like ghosts. These barefoot peasants tend noble land and starve if the crop is bad, virtual slaves of the landowners. At home I listen to my parents' tales of how they must stay awake to swish stick at frogs whose creaking keeps landowners awake, and how they must eat grass to stay alive. Meanwhile the nobles prosper, exempt from paying taxes, excused from military service and spared the indignity of the corvee, a day's unpaid labor working on the roads.
My parents say Queen Marie Antoinette roams the hallways, ballrooms and vestibules of the palace dreaming up new ways to spend her dress allowance while her husband King Louis XVI lounges on his lit de justice, passing laws that enrich the lives of nobles at the expense of the poor and starving. they talk darkly of how these actions might foment revolution.