Scot Walker--Play A Little Traveling Music, Maestro

Play A Little Traveling Music, Maestro

Part One in A History of the World

Click here for Part Two

Scot Walker

Portrait of Marie Antoinette of Austria by Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty on display in the Palace of Versailles at Wikimedia Commons.

As a retired history teacher, I’m excited to post this as the first in my projected History of the World as Re-written by an Octogenarian. Next up I’ll planning a new insight into Calpurnia, Caesar’s wife, but now away we go with Marie Antoinette:

Queen Marie Antoinette tried not to snivel as she dug into her jacket for the 500-Franc note she’d hidden there and listened to the Girl Scouts hovering in the corridors. If they can reach me before the party begins, I’ll buy twenty boxes of their caramel chocolate chip cookies, and tomorrow, I’ll stuff them in my mouth and chew but not swallow!

In the morning, as her jailers led her from her cell, in a long white gown and her pockets filled with caramel cookies, she addressed the abhorrent screaming masses with nothing more than these words: “Play a little traveling music for me and enjoy the show!” Then she smiled as the executioner paraded her in a rambling donkey cart through the streets of Pairs, down to the river Seine, then thrice around the great Cathedral of Notre Dame as vegetable-tossing, howling, laughing, screaming masses of peasants jeered at her and made disgusting sounds with the noses and lips until the donkey cart finally stopped in front of those bloody thirteen steps that ascended the platform where the guillotine sat waiting hungrily for Marie Antoinette’s head.

Marie, daughter of the Austrian Empress Maria Teresa, and more or less still Queen of France, shouted once more: “Play a little traveling music, maestro—it’s going to be a hot trip tonight!” then, as the crowd eagerly anticipated hell’s fire and brimstone flickering their flames eagerly awaiting a defunct beheaded queen, howled in giggles, guffaws and raucous laughter, she shoved caramel cookie after caramel cookie into her mouth and chewed enough to fill her entire mouth and throat a moment before she placed her head in the guillotine and awaited the still dripping bloody blade that swooshed down in so rapid a movement that the crowd felt the earth itself was shaking.

And how they howled as the blade came thundering down, crashing, crunching, splitting, chopping, splintering with the fiercest sounds the crowd had ever heard, but it was Marie’s neck, crammed full of caramel that split the blade into bits flinging bits and pieces far out into the crowd, cutting a few of the wagons in two, severing the head of a hungry awaiting rat and soaring over the donkey cart—missing the sad donkey by a hair. And then the people cheered as Marie Antoinette stood triumphantly, regally, royally again as their queen, gulping and swallowing shouted triumphantly “Let us all eat caramel,” little knowing how history would erroneously record those joyous words and miss-record her caramel salvation. “C’est la vie!” as “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.”

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