Before Versailles (7 page)

Wouldn’t it be fun, she had said to Louis in her perfect French, her head tilting to one side, and again he was amazed that he’d ever thought her unattractive, wouldn’t it be fun if we gave a ballet, you and me and Monsieur and her majesty? Don’t you think that would be great fun?

Yes. Yes, he did think that would be great fun. There was almost nothing he liked better than music, listening to music, playing music, composing music, hearing music someone else had composed, singing the words to the music. And dance was the beautiful sister of music, his second favorite thing, to dance. He had an innate ear, an innate talent for both. They fed his soul. He was the best dancer of the court. Everyone knew. And they didn’t say it simply to flatter him.

“You’re too good to me,” said Maria Teresa, and startled, his mind a million miles away, Louis took her hand and raised it to his lips.

“So I hope always to be,” he said, his way of speaking gentle and courteous. Courtesy had become his mask to hide a growing dismay with himself, with her. He had vowed to love no others, but others were in his mind, all the time now.

Hauteur in her glance, Maria Teresa cut her eyes to Olympe as if to say, he’s mine.

Outside in the antechamber, Louis rapped out a quick command to his secretary. “Have a fan made with the Louvre as its subject and one of Saint-Germain, and one of Fontainebleau. The most skilled painter in Paris. For her majesty. And have him paint
fleurs-de-lis
on the end sticks.” The Louvre was his primary palace, and
fleurs-de-lis
were the lilies of France, an emblem, a symbol of French royalty.

To remind her where her home is, he thought, striding through his throne room and down a set of stairs, his gentlemen and bodyguards following, out into the sun, which he loved. It was kind of the viscount to send her a fan. And clever. Playing upon her homesickness. How had he known of her homesickness? Who in her household is his spy? Louis wondered. The viscount’s spies were everywhere. Someone his dear cardinal trusted had told him so, but he hadn’t quite believed it at first. Now, he had begun to feel that he couldn’t sneeze without the viscount, this powerful minister whom his court treated so deferentially, knowing it and sending an embroidered handkerchief. Or, was he on his way to becoming as sick with suspicion as his father had been?

Louis’s face showed a certain hawkish sharpness, and the men nearest him fell back a little, wondering if they’d displeased. Odd, they’d say to themselves later, how we didn’t used to care so much. Louis had been king for a long time. But the cardinal had also been alive, and in the cardinal, true power had lain.

God, I despise myself, thought Louis, striding across his private courtyard and through the massive arch of a gatehouse out into open grounds behind the palace to where there was a long landscape canal and he could take a decent walk before he held his morning council meeting. He meant to be good to his wife, meant never to hurt her, but his heart was hungry, like a tiger’s. He’d wanted to lay that heart at her feet, wanted to love in the way men loved women in the romances, in the troubadour’s ballads. In his mind was a ballad: Off with sleep, love, up from bed, this fair morn, see for our eyes the rose-red, new dawn is born, now that skies are glad and gay in this gracious month of May, love me, sweet, fill my joy in brimming measure, in this world he hath no pleasure that will none of it.

He could have sent her ladies from the chamber and climbed into bed with her, whispering that ballad to her as his hands roamed her body, fill my joy in brimming measure, he could have said as he touched her, but he didn’t love her that way. He’d made this marriage out of duty and hoped that love would grow. And now he was beginning to understand it never would, not that he didn’t respect her—her nobility was of the highest—not that he didn’t like her. She was an obedient, pious wife. But he didn’t love her. The thought twisted his gut.

Something drove him. Where? To whom? It seemed to him women were everywhere, following him with their eyes, curtsying to him, the tops of their breasts defined and soft above their tight bodices. Why didn’t he just take one of them and satisfy this need the way he had once done with Olympe? What was he longing for? Some spark? Some tenderness? Some depth to answer the depths in his own heart? Where was there a woman whose price for him was above rubies?

“Write to his majesty the king of Spain and beg him to send young cup-of-gold cuttings. Tell him it would be a favor to me if his gardeners sent cuttings from vines that have grown under the windows her majesty once looked out from,” he told his secretary, never pausing in his restless stride. “From those vines only.”

B
RIEFLY SNEAKING AWAY
from the flutter that was the dressing of her majesty, the sullen Olympe and the beauty, whose name was Athénaïs, leaned out opened windows in a nearby chamber to watch the king stalk through his courtyard.

“Did you see him ignore me? I might as well not exist. I don’t think he likes me.” Athénaïs was truly astonished.

“He’s ripe,” said Olympe. As the queen’s superintendent, she was an important figure at court. But her power was deeper than that. She was among those few whom Louis counted as true friends. And once upon a time, before his marriage, she’d been more than friendly with him in bed. “There is going to be a mistress soon. I can feel it. There’s something around him I sense, a heat.”

“I wish it were me!” Athénaïs brought hands to her mouth as if she’d said something wrong. “Oh, I’m terrible. Not that I would yield; I’m saving myself for marriage, of course. But he is enthralling.”

There was no dishonor in becoming a king’s mistress. In this, as in other things, the court was clear-eyed and unsentimental. It was longstanding tradition that there be one.

You would yield, thought Olympe, with a sharp glance at the maid of honor, younger, fresher than she, but not by much. You would yield, and me, well, I have nothing to save. When he falls, and fall he will, he’s going to be mine.

Chapter 2

OUIS DISMISSED HIS COUNCIL AND WHISTLED FOR HIS DOGS
. His valet said his favorite dog wasn’t acting in her usual manner, and he wanted to see for himself.

“Belle,” he called and stroked her sleek head when she appeared, ahead of the pack, as always. “That’s my good girl. Are you sick, my sweet one, my mighty hunter?” He knelt on one knee to take her handsome head in his hands and examine her face. He could see nothing different.

“Your majesty, just a word, if I might.”

He started. He hadn’t realized he’d been followed. He kept his hands on Belle’s head a moment or two longer, his mood suddenly irritable. Business for this morning was over. This man who broke into his privacy could just as easily have spoken to him this afternoon, for he met with his council twice a day, in the mornings and in the late afternoon, had done so since the death of Cardinal Mazarin. Now was his time for pleasure; in his mind he was already atop his horse, riding to the river, to gaze on the guise pleasure had taken, lily-white skin, chestnut hair, an enchanting laugh. A king’s business is never over, he heard his beloved cardinal’s voice echo in his mind, so he stood and pretended that he hadn’t been caught murmuring to a dog by the one man he most wanted to impress.

That man bowed. It was the Viscount Nicolas, his superintendent of finance, whom the court expected to become Louis’s chief minister. The treasury was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was one of the reasons why the viscount was so important. He kept the kingdom from tipping over into the abyss, had done so for years. He was a collector of taxes, a maker of loans, and, also, a maker of men.

“Monsieur does me the honor to ask if I, in my humble way, might make a pleasing argument he be allowed a place at this council. Is there a time when I might make such appealing to you, your majesty?” As always, the viscount was suave and as smooth as honey.

“A bribe,” asked Louis. “Are you attempting to buy me?”

Nicolas blinked, then bowed low, his eyes on the floor. “How clumsy I am. I’ve offended, when all I wished to do was champion a man I think would add much to our governance. His highness, your brother, is your most loyal servant. I’ll say no more.” The viscount unbent and met Louis’s eyes. “Allow me to be of service in another way. I understand you are searching for cup-of-gold vines. It happens that I have some at my estate not far from here. They are yours.”

Good God, thought Louis, how can he know that already?

“I become clumsiness entirely,” Nicolas said as Louis’s silence lengthened. “This is not my morning, is it?”

The viscount referred to an earlier, terse exchange about funds to rebuild the navy.

But Louis laughed. If there was one attribute the viscount possessed—and he possessed many—it was charm. “You surprise me, viscount, that’s all. Can you read my mind? I was speaking of the vines only this morning.”

“I assure you I am not omniscient. The Countess de Soissons was kind enough to tell me.”

“Send every vine you have, then. I accept them with pleasure.”

Nicolas smiled, as if he lived only to please his sovereign, and in spite of himself, Louis smiled back. I could like this man, he thought, but can I trust him?

“My only wish is to serve you to the best of my talents,” the Viscount Nicolas said as if he had read that thought, too.

Feeling awkward and graceless, Louis turned back to his dogs. He knew he should say something equally fulsome, such as how the viscount’s least talent was a treasure, but he just wanted to put distance between himself and this man, who seemed too smooth, too capable, too kind, and—was it simply pique on his part and how he hated that it might be—too certain of himself. It was as if he tolerated Louis’s whim to rule without a chief minister, all the while knowing such was impossible, that it was simply a matter of time before Louis realized it, too. That’s what the court was whispering behind his back. No one believed he could manage without a Mazarin.

Gesturing that he wished no friends as companions, Louis walked not to his wife’s apartments but in another direction altogether, toward a quieter, less-used part of the palace. He passed through halls and unoccupied bedchambers and then through the silent ballroom an ancestor had built. It was a magnificent room, a long chamber with huge, wide, handsome bays on each side to let in light through floor-to-ceiling windowed doors with expensive and rare glass in them. Everywhere were the emblems of its builder-king, his letter “H” embossed and entwined, along with the “C” of his queen, but also the crescent moon of the goddess Diana—Diana, also the name of that king’s mistress. The large frescoes at one end were allegories of Diana also, Diana and the hunt, that king’s favorite things. Two huge bronze satyrs embellished each side of the enormous fireplace, the satyrs signifying lust, the lust that king had felt for a woman.

Lust. Thou shalt not commit adultery. His heels clicked on the intricately patterned wooden floors. The scratch of his dogs’ nails against the floors was a comfort to his ears. He was on his way to an old, neglected chapel just on the other side of this ornate ballroom. No one used it anymore, there being a far grander one his father had built in another wing, but Louis liked this one. He felt hidden from the world in it. It had become too small for the size of the court, but it was right for him, for his need to have some time alone, some time away from others.