Juliette

Juliette serves in the royal household as both domestic help and a registered nurse. Her brief appearances connect the palace’s everyday work—milking a nearly depleted cow, cleaning, and attending to an invalid—to Berenger the First’s decline and his belated questions about the lives of those who serve him.

Identity and Work

The cast identifies Juliette as domestic help and a registered nurse, placing her in two forms of service within the household. Her work is practical and immediate: she tends to domestic duties while also appearing in scenes of the King’s physical infirmity. The play gives her little biographical detail beyond these roles, but it places her labor at the point where the royal household’s routines meet the King’s failing body.

Work in the Throne Room

When Queen Marguerite returns wearing a crown and a shabby deep-crimson cloak, Juliette follows her into the room. Queen Marguerite notices dust and cigarette butts on the floor. Juliette explains that she has just come from the stables, milking the cow, which is almost out of milk, and has not had time to clean the living room. Queen Marguerite corrects her: the room is the throne room. The exchange sets the demands of domestic work against the palace’s insistence on royal form; the space requires cleaning, but even its ordinary name is subject to hierarchy.

Care and the King’s Question

As Berenger the First’s legs stiffen, Juliette appears with an invalid chair on wheels, its back decorated with a crown and royal emblems. The chair makes his physical dependence visible while preserving the marks of sovereignty on the object designed to carry him. When the possibility of an injection is raised, the King refuses it, and Queen Marie also rejects the proposal. The scene places Juliette’s nursing role within the practical care surrounding his decline, though it does not specify her response to the refusal.

Later, Berenger the First asks Juliette what sort of life she leads. She calls it a bad life; he counters that life can never be bad because that would be a contradiction in terms. Her direct answer briefly brings the experience of a servant into the royal conversation, while the King’s abstract reply leaves the difference between his philosophical assertion and her stated hardship unresolved. Juliette’s small but distinct role thus joins the play’s images of royal decay to the ordinary labor that continues around it.