Sunday, October 14, 2012

Marie Antoinette Eats Cake, parts 733 - 736



733. Since Marie Antoinette and Angela were both ten years old they engaged in all the activities you would expect of children that age, they created tea parties for their dolls, had long conversations about what boys could be like, read each other passages out of romantic French novellas stolen from their parents libraries.


734. Their favorite occupation however was spying from a distance on the common children outside of the kitchens where all of the service population and their children spent the day waiting for access to to the palace functionaries who's job it was to sign all the receipts, pay all accounts, and inventory all goods purchased. These transactions could take many hours so the bulk of the time was spent in idleness.


735. It was a palace in Austria circa 1750,  there was no such thing as security, common people, servants, even beggars as well as farm animals wandered the grand halls of the palace undisturbed. You might think  the royal inhabitants would be annoyed by this but they were not because all of those people were invisible to them, nonexistent. They did not notice them in the same way they did not notice the foul odors of inadequate sanitation.


736. But Marie and Angela noticed the children of the peasants. They spent more than two hours each morning getting dressed in their elaborate dresses and having their hair done, imagine what they thought of children their own age, covered with dirt and dressed in only a flour sack tied at the waste with a rope, their feet and hands black as coal. Both Marie and Angela had procured flower sacks and rope for themselves to be used for secret play acting.  

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