A day and knock off when he led us up to the jewel
collections, where each case was surrounded by pop-eyed American
tourists taking on flesh at the sight of all those sparklers and
figuring up the grand total of their valuation in dollars, on the
basis of so many hundreds of carats at so many hundred dollars a
carat, until reason tottered on her throne - and did not have so
very far to totter, either.
The display or all those gems, however, did not especially excite
me. There were too many of them and they were too large. A blue
Kimberley in a hotel clerk's shirtfront or a pigeonblood ruby on
a faro dealer's little finger might hold my attention and win my
admiration; but where jewels are piled up in heaps like anthracite
in a coal bin they thrill me no more than the anthracite would.
A quart measure of diamonds of the average size of a big hailstone
does not make me think of diamonds but of hailstones. I could
remain as calm in their presence as I should in the presence of a
quart of cracked ice; in fact, calmer than I should remain in the
presence of a quart of cracked ice in Italy, say, where there is
not that much ice, cracked or otherwise. In Italy a bucketful of
ice would be worth traveling miles to see. You could sell tickets
for it.
In one of the smaller rooms of the palace we came on a casket
containing a necklace of great smoldering rubies and a pair of
bracelets to match. They were as big as cranberries and as red
as blood - as red as arterial blood. And when, on consulting the
guidebook, we read the history of those rubies the sight of them
brought a picture to our minds, for they had been a part of the
wedding dowry of Marie Antoinette. Once on a time this necklace
had spanned the slender white throat that was later to be sheared
by the guillotine, and these bracelets had clasped the same white
wrists that were roped together with an ell of hangman's hemp on
the day the desolated queen rode, in her patched and shabby gown,
to the Place de la Revolution.
I had seen paintings in plenty and read descriptions galore of
that last ride of the Widow Capet going to her death in the tumbril,
with the priest at her side and her poor, fettered arms twisted
behind her, and her white face bared to the jeers of the mob; but
the physical presence of those precious useless baubles, which had
cost so much and yet had bought so little for her, made more vivid
to me than any picture or anystory the most sublime tragedy of The
Terror - the tragedy of those two bound hands.
