Versailles

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My soul is going on a trip. I want to talk about her. I want to talk about her. Why would anyone ever want to talk about anything else?

My soul is a girl: she is just like me. She is fourteen years old and has been promised in marriage to the French Dauphin, who also has a soul though more visible and worldly, its body already formed (so I've been told) from layers of flesh and fat. In France they piss into chamber pots made of lapis and dine on common garden slugs. In France their hands smell like vanilla and they shoot their flèches d'amour indiscriminately in all directions, owing to their taste for books pernicious to religion and morals.

My soul is also powerful, but like a young girl it has wishes and ideas — yes! — a soul can have ideas like a mind does. "Antonia, Antonia, you must pay attention," I can still hear Abbé Vermond implore me, waving a book in my face when all I wanted to do was dance dance dance, as if he actually believed that to be light of heart is the same as being light of head.

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