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215 Queen Whimsical1 Bookseller’s Foreword2 This little Tale, written in the past and on a sort of dare,* had not yet been printed at all as far as I know. Seven or eight years ago several of M. Rousseau’s friends had copies that multiplied in Paris and the provinces; one of the less dis- figured ones fell into my hands. I do not believe that the author will be annoyed with me for publishing a folly already well known and which he turned over to the public a long time ago. Queen Whimsical3 A Tale “Once upon a time there was a King who loved his people . . .” “That begins like a Fairy Tale,”4 interrupted the Druid. “It is one too,”5 answered Jalamir, “There was, then, a King who loved his people, and who consequently was adored by them. He had made every eVort to find ministers who would enter into his views:6 but having finally recognized the folly7 of such a search, he made the decision to do by himself everything he could rescue from their seething8 activity. Obstinate about9 the bizarre project of making his subjects happy, he acted consistently with that idea,10 and such peculiar conduct held him up to an indelible ridicule among the Great: the people blessed him, but in the Court he passed for a madman. Aside from that he did not lack merit; also he was named Phoenix. “If that Prince was extraordinary, he had a wife who was less so. Lively, giddy, changeable,11 mad by her head, wise by her heart, good by temperament, wicked by capriciousness; there in a few words is the Queen’s portrait. Whimsical was her name; a famous name, which she had received from her ancestors in the feminine line, and the honor of which she worthily upheld. This person, so illustrious and so reasonable, was the charm and the torture of her dear husband; for she also loved *It was a question of trying to write a tolerable and even merry Tale, without intrigue, without love, without marriage, and without lewdness. 216 Queen Whimsical him most sincerely, perhaps because of the ease that she had in tormenting him. In spite of the reciprocal love that reigned between them, they passed several years without being able to obtain any fruit from their union. The King was pierced by sorrow at this, and the Queen set herself into fidgets about it which that good Prince was not the only one to feel: she blamed everyone for the fact that she did not have any children; there was not a courtier whom she did not giddily ask for some secret for having one, and whom she did not hold responsible for its poor success. “The Doctors were not at all forgotten; for the Queen was uncommonly obedient to them, and there was not a drug that they prescribed that she did not have prepared very carefully in order to have the pleasure of throwing it in their faces at the moment that it was necessary to take it. The Dervishes had their turn; it was necessary to have recourse to novenas, to vows, above all to oVerings; and bad luck to the priests in charge of the temples where Her Majesty went on pilgrimage: she rummaged through everything, and under the pretext of going to breathe a prolific air, she never failed to turn the monks’ cells upside down. She also wore their relics, and decked herself out alternately in all their different outfits: sometimes it was a white cord, sometimes a leather belt, sometimes a long hood,12 sometimes a scapular; there was no sort of monastic masquerade that her devotion did not take into its head; and since she had a little sprightly air, which made her charming in all these disguises, she did not leave any of them without taking care to have her picture painted in it. “Finally as a result of devotions so well performed, as a result of doctors so wisely employed, heaven and earth heard the Queen’s prayers; she became pregnant at the moment that they were beginning to despair of it. I leave the joy of the King and that of the people to be guessed: as for her own, as in all her passions she went to the point of extravagance: in her outbursts she broke and shattered everything; she embraced everyone she met indiscriminately; men, women, courtiers, valets, to find...

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