The Queen's Caprice Read online

  The Queen’s Caprice

  Also By Jean Echenoz

  1914

  Three by Echenoz: Big Blondes, Piano, and Running

  I’m Gone

  Ravel

  Lightning

  S.: A Novel

  (with Florence Delay, Patrick Deville, Sonja Greenlee, Harry Mathews, Mark Polizzotti, and Olivier Rolin)

  Plan of Occupancy

  Chopin’s Move

  Double Jeopardy

  Cherokee

  The New Press gratefully acknowledges the Florence Gould Foundation for supporting the publication of this book.

  © 2014 by Les Éditions de Minuit, 7, rue Bernard-Palissy, 75006 Paris English translation © 2015 by The New Press

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to:

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  Originally published in France as Caprice de la reine, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 2014

  Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2015

  Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Echenoz, Jean.

  [Short stories. Selections. English]

  The queen’s caprice : stories / Jean Echenoz ; translated by Linda Coverdale.

  pagescm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-62097-072-0 (e-book)

  1.Echenoz, Jean—Translations into English.2.Short stories, French.3.French fiction—21st century.I.Coverdale, Linda.II.Echenoz, Jean. Caprice de la reine. EnglishIII.Title.

  PQ2665.C5A22015

  843'.914—dc232014047909

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  Composition by dix! This book was set in Stempel Garamond

  Printed in the United States of America

  24681097531

  CONTENTS

  Translator’s Note

  Nelson

  The Queen’s Caprice

  In Babylon

  Twenty Women in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Clockwise

  Civil Engineering

  Nitrox

  Three Sandwiches at Le Bourget

  Credits

  Notes

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  For the publication in English of his Caprice de la reine, Jean Echenoz has made a few minor changes in the texts. These seven récits are his favorite occasional pieces, written on subjects that inspired the author to observe, improvise, invent—for although these stories sometimes spring from historical incident, they are in the end what Echenoz wished to create: “little literary objects.”

  This tension between story and history depends in part on the ability of the reader to catch allusions and follow undercurrents of meaning that are reasonably clear to French readers but may pass completely unnoticed in English. I have therefore provided endnotes for some of these references and for a few other points of interest as well.

  —Linda Coverdale

  The Queen’s Caprice

  NELSON

  WINTER 1802, MANOR HOUSE in the English countryside, Admiral Nelson is coming to dinner. The other guests hurry over as soon as he appears in the drawing room among the candelabra, wall hangings, copper- and brassware, ancestral portraits, floral paintings, flowers. Although still battle-worn from the engagement at Copenhagen,1 he is admired; he does look tired, they reflect, but my he’s handsome think the ladies. Tired, of course, and rightly so, after all he’s been through.

  Already—so awkward for a sailor—there’d been that affliction he had experienced as a thirteen-year-old seaman upon first joining a warship, the third-rate HMS Raisonnable. He had thought it would pass but no, he had never ceased to suffer terribly, day after day, throughout his thirty years at sea, from seasickness.

  So they fuss over him, this man in an armchair near the large window overlooking some ingeniously informal gardens bordered by underbrush and backed by a wall of trees. Brandishing a tray of quivering glasses, a footman leans toward Nelson, who plucks one of them with a languid hand. Nelson is a small, thin man, affable, youthful in appearance, very handsome indeed but perhaps a trifle pale. And though he smiles like an actor playing Admiral Nelson, he seems quite fragile, friable, on the verge of fracturing into pieces.

  A slender form wearing white stockings, steel-buckled shoes, white waistcoat and knee-breeches under a blue frock coat, of which the left pocket bulges with what seems like a handful of shillings and the left breast glitters with the Order of the Bath. Nelson’s eyes sparkle as well but each with a different luster, the right one less brightly than the other. And if his hand hesitates in picking up his glass, the problem is that having contracted malaria in the Indies about twenty-five years earlier, while serving on the frigate HMS Seahorse, he has been plagued ever since by recurrent fevers, headaches, polyneuritis, and the attendant tremors.

  Since the conversation in the drawing room concerns the Treaty of Amiens, the admiral’s attention is drawn to a delicate point regarding the evacuation of the island of Elba; he is handed a newspaper that addresses the matter. Nelson places the page to his left, at an angle, and seems able to read it only in this manner, sideways—for another problem is that during the bombardment of Calvi in Corsica, while he was in command of the sixty-four-gun HMS Agamemnon, the impact of a round shot showered his face with stone shards that cost him the vision in his right eye.2

  Everyone sits down to dinner and even though small portions have been precut for the admiral, he displays deft skill in plying his knife and fork with his one hand—for yet another problem is that while his flagship HMS Theseus lay off Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where Nelson attempted to seize the port city so as to relieve enemy ships of their gold bullion, he was hit by a musket ball that, fracturing his humerus in several places, deprived him of the use of his promptly amputated right arm.

  Left left-handed, the admiral had therefore to relearn how to write and how to eat with utensils at the table—although he does resort daily to opium to relieve the pain in his phantom limb—and he acquits himself handsomely: the dinner proceeds without a hitch. Upon observing, however, that twilight is coming on, that candlesticks will soon be carried in, Nelson now rises abruptly between two courses, requests somewhat stiffly that the company please excuse him for a few minutes, and withdraws. He leaves the dining room, passes through antechambers and sitting rooms, then goes outside to the garden while the guests look at one another and frown.

  Thus one-eyed, one-armed, and feverish, the admiral finds himself among the flower beds and clumps of shrubs before going off on his own toward the woods, incidentally passing a garden shed where he borrows a full watering can. He advances into the fading daylight; he loves the contemplation of countryside, woods, and forests. He could almost live there but, rather anxious to return to sea, he prefers to visit other people’s homes to perform the following operation.

  At the edge of the wood, Nelson paces off the distance to the first trees: measuring, he selects various spots about twenty yards apart and marks each of them with a pebble. Kneeling at the first place, he begins digg
ing a hole two to three inches deep—not so easy with only one hand, but the admiral is handy with his. The job done, he feels around in his pocket to pull out not the imagined handful of shillings but a dozen acorns, placing one at the bottom of this hole he then fills in again, carefully tamping down the earth he next waters just enough, he thinks (a touch too much, actually), after which Nelson repeats this operation as many times as his supply of acorns allows.

  For he takes the very long view of things: he is retimbering and never passes up an opportunity, when away from the open sea on dry land, to sow the latter to ensure on the former, for future generations, adequate naval traffic. He has set his heart on planting trees whose trunks will serve to build the future royal fleet. From these acorns he buries will spring the masts, hulls, decks and ’tweendecks of every manner of vessel destined for commerce or the transportation of men—but warships of all kinds above all: ships of the line, corvettes, armored vessels, frigates, and destroyers that will sail the world’s oceans long after he is gone, for the greater glory of the empire.

  Yet the stout oaks of Suffolk serve not only to build ships: kegs and casks are also made from them—barrels that are carried aboard ships, moreover, and which can be of goodly service. In that vein, at Trafalgar, after the French sailor Guillemard3 draws a bead on Nelson pacing the deck of the HMS Victory, and once the musket ball enters the admiral’s body through the left shoulder, fracturing the acromion plus the second and third ribs, traversing the lung and slicing through a branch of the pulmonary artery before shattering his spine, everyone will wonder what to do with his corpse. Then they will recall that the admiral had desired, instead of being tossed overboard as dead sailors usually are, to be buried at home. To preserve Nelson until his return to England, he will therefore be immersed in a barrel of brandy, which will be sealed, strapped to the ship’s mainmast, and placed under close armed guard.

  THE QUEEN’S CAPRICE

  TO THE RIGHT OF the hand writing this lies first a terrace of faux pebble-stone tiles, with a balustrade topped by an aluminum handrail and formed by a series of Plexiglas panels through which we see the lower part of the panorama. This terrace overlooks a vast, triangular, and gently sloping lawn extending at its lower end into a more abrupt declivity, almost a bluff, bordered by a grove of evergreen oaks below which, when the wind is favorable, an invisible torrent sends muted news of its progress. So the bluff leads into a trough one might qualify as a trench, a canyon, or, more simply, a ravine. Let’s go with ravine.

  On the far side of this ravine, directly opposite, through the intertwined branches of evergreen oaks, can be seen a distant path that forms the horizontal baseline of a field sloped in symmetry with the lawn and, at its high end, bounded by hedgerows enclosing some pasture occupied by what will have to be called cows. These, aside from grazing, seem to have no other preoccupation in life than adjusting their position according to that of the sun, depending on whether or not they feel the need for some shade. This group, which is perhaps a herd and numbers no more than twenty individuals, is due south. Fine. Let us now circulate from the south toward the east then the north and so on counterclockwise, taking a complete tour of the horizon until we later arrive back at the herd and see if these cows have, in the meantime, moved.

  On their left is a farm, to which we may assume these animals belong, along with buildings we can only partially see: first off, a large expanse of wall solidly capped with a slate roof, apparently part of some residential buildings, properly speaking; next, adjoining those and roofed with what should perhaps be identified as Everite tiles, is the visible part of another construction that is probably the annex, or one of the annexes of this operation. These structures, of which one can see only bits and pieces, are in fact barely visible amid the vegetation, and to the latter we shall return. We’ll have to return to it although we could perhaps have—should perhaps have—begun with the vegetation, we don’t know.

  We don’t know insofar as it is difficult in a description or a narrative, as Joseph Conrad has someone observe in his novella A Smile of Fortune, to set everything down in due order. It’s just that one cannot say or describe everything all at the same time, can one. Some kind of order must be established, priorities set up, which can’t help but risk muddling the subject, so we’ll have to concentrate later on the vegetation, on nature, a framework no less important than the cultural objects—equipment, buildings—we are attempting at the outset to record.

  After this almost indiscernible farm to the south, then a swath of forest we will accordingly try to describe more clearly further along, one should take note on the east-northeast axis of another farm not nearly so obscured as the first one, but also farther away. Although this time it’s more like a cluster of farms, five or six, with walls and roofs of colors (dusty pink, spanking-new white, faded black, beige, and bright yellow) that vary and materials (slate or tile, stone, corrugated iron, pebble-dash, unidentified metal) just as diverse. Given how far away we are, say one or two miles from this little group of structures, we feel some hesitation: should one simply consider it a good-size farm, even a very good-size one, or may one venture to call it a hamlet? A dot on the landscape? Let’s say a hamlet. Adjoining this hamlet, moreover, are a few of its classic attributes: a small road, a path, a bridge doubtless busy spanning the river that, rushing southward, has carved out the ravine. We can recognize them rather well, these attributes, for the intervening vegetation is somewhat sparse.

  Perhaps now would be a good time to consider the importance of the vegetal realm in the matter at hand, which, since we’re attempting to describe a particular setting in the Mayenne countryside,1 is after all the very least we can do. So, vegetation. We already see in the complete southeastern arc how all these inhabited objects can be separated by heaps of trees almost exaggeratedly French in their exhaustively thorough sampling: oak, ash, beech, elm, lime, and the occasional species of more than one syllable, such as poplar. From the first farm to the hamlet, their density is absolute; their vertical compactness saturates the entire corresponding area on the other side of the ravine, leaving no room to breathe. But stepping back a little, which the morphology of the site will allow us to do as we head north, we will then be able to count on some open space: the varied horizontality of fields, meadows, fallow land, and other flat or undulating surfaces.

  Onward, onward let us go toward the septentrion.2 Whereas we earlier found ourselves, facing this ravine between us and the referential herd of cows, looking out as if on a promontory bung up against the opposite side of the ravine, now we must at first turn toward the north, looking up in a worm’s-eye view. And to do this we must get going. Indeed, although from the terrace we were able to serenely observe the entire south and a good bit of the east from a sitting position, we must now get up to go take a look at the other cardinal axes.

  We have to walk, to go around the house extended by this terrace and constructed on the flank of the promontory: the best thing to do would be to climb toward the hedgerow planted uphill from the building. The hedgerow, a line composed almost entirely of wild cherry trees, divides this private area from the countryside beyond. Standing at this border, we’ll be able to observe the northern expanse extending, we won’t say right to our feet but almost. That’s why the vegetation, from this vantage point, seems less dense, for not only is it more scattered, but we are within a vastly larger field of vision, where objects are farther away and the plant life at that distance becomes less haughty, more humble, less arrogant and lofty. Plains, small valleys, thickets, hillocks, gentle rises. Perspective has edged out close encounters to the point of offering at the horizon of this suite of scenery the relief of a distant plateau: nothing less than the highest point, at barely 1,365 feet above sea level, of the entire Armorican massif. Aside from that, closer to us, floating above the décor and three-quarters concealed by an effervescence of vegetation, is a vaguely eighteenth-century castle: fragments of pinnacles, chimneys, and turrets. And that seems to be
all.

  It appears to be all because the entire west has neither rhyme nor reason. Once past that vast perspective to the north, one finds oneself back nose-to-nose with the here and now, with little things within arm’s reach: woodpiles, tools, the black stain of some recently burned weeds, garden furniture. To the northwest lies the drivable road that, linked back to the local road and thus to the highway, allows access to the house. At the end of the circuit, a gentle wooded slope will soon rejoin the ravine. Let’s finish our tour of this house, let’s rejoin to the south the lawn, the terrace, the armchair, and the hand that, returning to its place, is finishing writing this. The cows don’t appear to have moved much unless, after performing a frenetic ballet behind our backs, they have noticed our return and demurely resumed their original positions.

  And at our feet, uncoiled on the terrace lies an orange garden hose, like a snake left for dead, and alongside which an abundant population of ants bustles in both directions, each ant staying mostly to the right as on a normal road. This traffic is quite dense and must link the ants’ dormitories near their construction site to their various workshops, grain silos, mushroom farms, egg-laying laboratories, and aphid stables. Stopping briefly when they meet, the female workers execute some rapid frontal contact, just to exchange a surreptitious kiss or remind themselves of the password for the day, unless it’s to have a quiet little laugh over the latest caprice of the queen.

  IN BABYLON

  IN THE CENTER OF a fertile plain, Babylon is a square city protected by considerable ramparts pierced by bronze gates and overlooking vast moats. Herodotus arrives there and, duly impressed, attempts to estimate the dimensions of these walls: evaluations in stades, cubits, and feet, which one is tempted at first to convert to metric but why bother. For it is not inconceivable that, carried away by his enthusiasm or fatigued by his voyage, Herodotus is exaggerating. Anyway, all authors exaggerate; they’re all bent on contradicting one another. So let’s say, to be brief, that the surface area of Babylon would be seven times that of modern Paris.