Remember Me (11 page)

They went to Versailles. Ludwig kept glancing at Richard. He found it difficult to believe in personal felicity. He kept expecting to catch the destructive curve of a smile. He felt shy, the way children do at their first party, wanting terribly to be asked to dance, and yet afraid to disappoint. He was a king. He had never before heard anybody laugh easily in his presence.

This visit was the most important thing he had ever done. He was risking everything, and he hoped that Richard appreciated the risk. The carriage entered Versailles le Vieux.

It counted for something, it turned out, to be able to intimidate that silly little man, the Emperor of the French. Word had been sent ahead, as word should always be. The spiritual inheritor of the Sun King might go
where he would, touch what he pleased, see what he must. That was good.

Yet, as they rattled across the Place des Armes and passed under the square iron gate, Ludwig realized that he had let a stranger into his secret world forever, and he trembled. The one thing no one must ever do is to allow anyone into the secret laboratory where the self manufactures its dreams, those myths essential to our survival. Thus he understood, in the moment of his fear, why Wagner would never allow him to cross the threshold of his operas into the midst of the creative act. It made him more tolerant of Wagner now that he felt the same fear.

As they passed under that gate and came before the façade, it seemed to him that they entered into the vast physical model of an ideal; for vulgar and ineffectual and garish though it be in detail, Versailles still embodies the geometry of royalty. It is a diagram of the problematical structure of the elect, meaningless except as a symbol and vastly out of scale. Versailles is not a building, but a system of logic. It is not a palace, but a labyrinth whose significance is clear to us only when we realize that the Minotaur was not a monster, but the personification of the dynasty of Crete.

It is not given to every man to walk the parquet of his own mind, or to hear his footsteps behind him in the corridor. It was given to him now, for the first time, not to pace there alone.

At the entrance to the château he turned to look back. He saw not the town of Versailles, but it was as though he were at Berg or Hohenschwangau, uneasily aware of Munich below him.

He wanted to stretch out his arms. He felt absurdly small and fragile. He wanted to say: “Look, I am King,
but have pity. I am only a boy. Leave me this last
companion
for my guide.”

As he looked down the vista towards Versailles le Vieux he seemed to see the rabble of 1789 rushing
towards
him like rats, so ravenous they would destroy the symbol that fed them, as one day the rabble of Munich might pour out towards Hohenschwangau for him. When the king grows weak, it is the duty of the king to die. Yet the last priest-king of Nemi was not murdered. He died of neglect. There is no one so impotent as those whose power has been forgotten.

Richard stirred beside him, stalwart, strong, and
smelling
of pungent brown leafmould. Ludwig turned and went inside.

They entered the Galerie des Glaces. Nothing would ever make Richard a courtier. There was something in him heavy and of the hills. His elegance, though it was there, was that of a warm animal, brown like his horses, an atmosphere wild yet gentle. He was that part of
Bavaria
that was born loyal to its kings. Wherever he was, he stood stolidly in mental woods.

Richard’s heels echoed heavily on the parquet, where Ludwig walked too lightly, with a filigree strut that was not the walk he would have chosen for himself at all. He went down the hall, catching their staggered reflections in the squat panes of the mirrors. He seemed to see there not himself or Richard, but Louis XIV, supercilious and sallow eyed in his periwig, a man who, like Wagner, was more intelligent than the role he had chosen to play, more fastidious, but equally trapped in the wrong body.

All at once the gallery became too powdered and too futile. He had to get outdoors. Reality lived outdoors.

It had been easier for Louis XIV. He had lived in a world in which irony was still a weapon, and not an act of
suicide. Behind him he had had the sunburst of personal power. There was not much power left to royalty any more.

Ludwig escaped to the Petit Trianon. He felt better at once. There it was quiet, placid, and somehow Austrian. He fitted better there, and so did Richard. He paused to watch Richard move unhurriedly across the courtyard towards the entrance, and thought that through the years he would see him move like this, unhurriedly towards a house. He determined therefore that he must have a dwelling like the Trianon, from which to watch this familiar figure approaching. He had always wanted to be able to go to someone. That someone might come to him was a novel idea.

He glanced around to catch a glimpse of Marie
Antoinette
. She was everywhere. Versailles Château is haunted by the ghost of majesty, impersonal, sardonic, and a little smelly. But the Petit Trianon is haunted by a woman. She still lives there. She looks out of the windows. She sits in the
salons.
She runs down the stairs, with one hand on the balustrade, to meet Count Fersen or
Cagliostro
in the park. And when you turn around, she is
watching
you with a smile. She sits outside, on the grass, under a parasol, absorbed at sketching. She laughs.

Sophie would never have been able permanently to inhabit a room in this way. She was too small to have any part of eternity. Now he seemed to see that bland,
irresponsibl
e
, dynastic face, as Marie Antoinette turned to look at him.

They stood in her bedroom, looking out of the window at the park. In little palaces the furniture always seems to have gathered there by accident. A palace is in some sort a theatre, so the furniture is always stage furniture, assembled impromptu for the performance of a hundred plays. He looked around the room and saw Richard
smiling
at him. It made him flush, for he had been caught out in a thought. But for once that did not make him furious. They stood rather far apart, with a table between them, as though they had been transported separately through time to meet unexpectedly in this room.

To turn to speak, and to realize that the thought has been uttered and answered already in the other mind, is an ultimate experience. It is a form of love, and the
deepest
intimacy there is. Ludwig did not need Marie Antoinette. They went outside through the bosquet to the Petit Hameau.

Once more he felt shy. He saw that this miniature village, which was false in France, would be real in Bavaria. For this toy town was somehow heartbroken. Looking at it, he longed to go home, where instead of this toy domesticity, there would be possible a real domesticity with Richard, his wife and children, so that by means of Richard he could enter a low-ceilinged, well protected ordinary life he could enter in no other way. With Richard’s children he had discovered
unexpectedly
the joy of being an adopted uncle.

For the secret of the Petit Hameau is not that it is the foolish plaything of a spoiled, tactless queen, but that it is the reconstructed childhood of a girlish exile. For him that sort of exile was ended. Richard had given him back his childhood as it should have been, so that now he could return to Berg.

As silently, together, they started the long stroll through the past towards the palace, unexpectedly all the fountains began to play, the air first filled with that hushed, magical lull which comes before rain, to tell you that something is about to happen. He knew now that reality was not in this stale French air, but in the tart, crisp, lucid air of Bavaria.

Everywhere they could hear the fountains from a
distance
, their soft hiss to the wind, the endless, soothing, delicious sparkle as the jets rose and fell like crystal music muted by regret. Tritons and sea-horses, nereids and amphitrites, their flanks glistening, rode stationary in the same eternal spray. He listened to the sharp gasp and gurgle of the waters, forced upward in the air in one great shimmering release, to burst into a thousand glittering mirrors in the air, and his own body stirred and came alive. Freedom from the self is to take delight in
somebody
else, to want merely to admire them for being there, without the necessity to touch.

They reached the basin of Neptune. The screen of water spread like the tails of a choir of transparent
peacocks
. As he watched, his spirit exactly fitted the
contours
of his body for the first time, and life became actual. For the first time in his life he felt complete.

He shut his eyes with pleasure.

When he opened them, the curtains of water had parted, it was days later, and they were galloping under the trees towards Nymphenberg, which was the capital of his dynasty and inheritance, now that he was of an age to spend. It was here he had been born. It was here that he was born again.

One feels a certain sympathy for Richard. It is not altogether pleasant to be the victim of a metaphysical honeymoon. But one feels sympathy for Ludwig too. Since most of our life is spent in the nightmare of waking, in which we perceive that we are only other men’s means, it is as well that we are at least permitted to dream once. And besides, a dream without waking would be no dream, for then we would not be able to remember it.

Unlike Versailles, Nymphenberg is a palace which demands no audience. Before him Ludwig saw the
high-pitched
roofs, the white walls, beyond which lay the magic of the gardens. They stayed together there for several weeks.

It was not Richard’s fault if the experience wore thin. He had a wife, children, and a certain stability within himself. He could not be different every day. It is the tragedy of those who need diversion, that we can repeat everything about an experience except the first time we underwent it. Unless they are willing to change
themselves
, they must constantly change the water in their tank. It was something Ludwig never realized.

It took him a little while to feel disappointment again. They went sometimes to the Pagodenberg, sometimes to the Amalienberg, and everything they did pleased him at first.

They would walk at dawn in the wet woods. He would look down an unmown avenue, crowded with
spontaneous
daisies, towards the wing of the palace in which he had been born. Did he, as a child, look down that avenue towards himself, happy at the age of twenty-two, smile, wave, and coo with pleasure; and did that give him courage to survive until, now, he could look back down the avenue towards himself as a newborn child? He lifted an arm and waved towards the baby he had been, saying: “Yes, you were right. It is true.”

The petals of the daisies were wetly plastered to the short black boots Richard still wore, refusing to be
anything
but the equerry he was. They laughed and moved on through the park woods.

How do we sweep towards tragedy? And what is tragedy? Tragedy is hope. Among the sedges of the Badenburgersee, a captive artificial lake, they stood
beside
the ruffled cool grey water and looked at the
Monopteros
among the frail trees. It was one of those circular
open tempietti eightenth-century noblemen liked to
scatter
about their gardens. As a child he had always been puzzled that it contained no statue. Now he thought he knew why. It was not an Eros temple left unfinished, but a temple in which you stood to think about the Eros of your thoughts.

Mostly, during those untarnished weeks, they went to the Amalienberg, that small, one-story casino hidden in the trees. It had been built for a happy Princess, a
century
ago, and it was as a result a happy place. There one knew how rapture could be cold and smell of snow and warm linen, hot from the warming-pan. It was wonderful. It would not fail. Yet he had said that others would not fail, and they had. He felt uneasy. Perhaps he was aware of a failure in himself, for he was not built for joy. He could not bear the strain. It ripped him apart, when he would have been inviolable.

He approached the Amalienberg by night. He saw the lights through the trees and hurried on. He liked to be separated from Richard, for then he could meet him again. He was already trying to freshen up the experience. He went up the five shallow steps and into the rotunda room.

It was like an ice palace. In the centre the chandelier glittered with tall white candles, and the mirrors on the walls caught up the leaping flames and echoed them
endlessly
. This room was a glacial cave. The walls were pale blue, but all the plaster work was silver. In the reflections of the candles, the rococo sparkled, danced, and
shimmered
like a fast wave hanging against the sky before it fell. The building was full of the thin, hollow, whining melodies of ice, a grotto in a glacier, in which truth rang out along the galleries of a crevasse.

Richard had not yet come. Ludwig waited for him. To
wait for him made him feel nubile. Soon he would snuggle up to brown warmth, like a satiated puppy after its first determined toddle towards independence, when its legs gave out and it sat down surprised and weak, but on the whole delighted, with a puzzled frown, to find the world so big, itself so small.

Lying in the shadows, Ludwig caught a glimpse into the silver gilt mirror which reflected the square corners and edges of infinite rooms through endlessly open doors. The Amalienberg was a warm place in the snow.

But once one is satisfied, there then comes the gnawing hunger for something else, the nostalgia for hunger itself, and with it the awful despair of being complete, and so at last knowing that one may be nothing more. He had used the Amalienberg up. He was trying to keep his own emotions alive. He decided that they should meet, in future, at the Pagodenberg.

The Pagodenberg was deeper in the park and much more male, if only because it had before it water. Among its autumn trees, it was proper to a marriage, which also has an upper and a lower floor. It was less delightful than the Amalienberg, but more substantial, a satisfaction from which something had escaped, and yet in which something remained.