AFTERNOON
“Oh, mother, this is Thursday and the merry-go-round in the Parc of the Château is running. Couldn’t you take us?”
We set off, the three of us, hand in hand, crossed the arid, bare Place d’Armes where the great Louis had mustered his troops, hobbled up over the villainous paving-stones of the gray entrance court and came by beautiful leafy avenues to where the primitive circle of wooden horses whirled slowly about, as a one-armed soldier turned the crank. I was left on a bench, with the other waiting mothers, watching our children’s pleasure.
My two were at once in another world—Jimmy’s a mere wide world of enchantment, as befitted his five-year-old ignorance. He swam through the air, a vague smile of beatitude on his lips. Sally sat very straight, one hand on her hip, the other stretched out in a gesture of command. She was perhaps Charlemagne before the defeated Saxons, or possibly Joan of Arc at Orléans. Sally’s class at school begins to have some notions of history.
When the crippled soldier was tired, and we had paid our copper sous, we wandered on, to a bench in front of a statue of mellow marble. Here I sat down while the children ran about, shouting and kicking up the chestnut leaves which laid a carpet of cloth-of-gold under their feet. Their laughter sounded distant in my ears. I was hearing again the cock-sure old voice of the morning.... “Anarchy in a moment if respect for force were eliminated ... you cannot amputate a part of human nature....”
What was my little daughter saying, with her amusing older-sister air of omniscience? “Did you know, Jimmy, that it was a king who had all this made, out of nothing at all. We’ve just had that in school. It was only a bare, sandy plain, and he had all the trees brought here, and the terraces made, and the water brought here.... It cost millions and millions.”
Jimmy looked up in astonishment at the giant oak over him. “Can you carry great big trees like these around with you?” he asked.
“No, gracious, no! It was ever so long ago. They’ve grown up since. They were just scrawny little saplings. They’ve got an old picture at school that shows how it was when he was alive. Awfully ugly!”
“I wouldn’t have liked it then,” said Jimmy.
Sally hooted at his ignorance. “My goodness, you don’t suppose you’d ever have got any chance to play here if you’d lived then. Not much! We never could have got in. They had soldiers at all the gates to keep people out.”
Jimmy’s sense of the probable was outraged. There were some things too tall to be believed, even if Sally did say them. “What was it for, if nobody was allowed in?”
“It was for the king. Everything was for the king then. And he only let in his own family and his special friends.”
“I should think people would ha’ been mad to see the king hogging everything for himself,” Jimmy said vigorously.
“Oh, they were used to it,” explained Sally. “They thought it had to be that way. All the learned men in those days told them that everything would go to pieces and everybody would rob and murder everybody else if they didn’t have a king and think they loved him more than anybody else.”
Once more Jimmy’s sense of the probable rose up to protest, “They didn’t love that old hog-it-all king!” The little twentieth-century American brain refused to credit this ridiculous and inherently impossible idea.
( ... and yet how many generations of men suffered and died to affirm that idea as the natural and inevitable foundation of society!)
“Well, they thought they had to, and so they thought they did,” said Sally lucidly. “The way we love our governments now. But after a couple of hundred years or so they found out the learned men didn’t know so much, and that it wasn’t having a king that kept folks from robbing and murdering all the time. So they got together and came out here from Paris and took all this away from him. And that’s how we get in to play.”
Jimmy’s fancy was tickled by a new idea. “I bet he’d be surprised if he could see us playing here.”
Sally dramatized the scene, instantly. “Wouldn’t he though! Suppose he should come walking right down those marble steps with his high wig and his big-buckled shoes, and his clothes all solid gold and diamonds, and suppose he should walk right up to us and say, ‘You good-for-nothing common-people, what are you doing in MY park? I’ll have you boiled in oil at once!’”
Jimmy was a little intimidated. He took his big sister’s hand and said in rather a small voice, “What would you say back?”
Sally made a dramatic gesture of scorn. “I’d say, ‘Get away from here, you old King. Don’t you know you’re dead?’ And then, Jimmy, you know ghosts aren’t solid. I’d just draw off and run right through him, gold clothes and diamonds and all, like this.”
She executed a headlong assault on space and came back laughing.
Jimmy, reassured, caught the note, “Yes,” he said swaggering, “I would too, I’d say, ‘You old King, you’re dead!’ and I’d run right through him too.”
It was the most delightful of all the games Sally had invented. They went at it with gusto, their faces rosy and laughing as they took turns in dashing through the non-existent might, majesty, and glory of a dead idea.
It was a game which amused their mother quite as much as the children. I sat watching them at it, till it was time to start home back through the rich magnificence of the old park which had been planted for a king’s pleasure and which throughout the silent, purposeful centuries had grown to beauty for the people.