Bitter Greens (43 page)

Françoise spent her days praying and doing good works. Athénaïs spent her days gambling and alternatively storming at the King and trying to charm him. Neither strategy worked. The King was icily polite and gave Athénaïs a new position as the
surintendante
of the Queen’s household – an honour that allowed her to be treated as a duchess, including the right to sit down in the Queen’s presence. Athénaïs was in despair. ‘He always gives away such favours when an affair is over. He made Louise de la Vallière a duchess. It’s like paying off a servant. I won’t have it.’

But she did not turn down the position, or rail against the King any more. Indeed, Athénaïs seemed weary and defeated. Her weight once again ballooned, and people began to make cruel jokes about the size of her thighs. In May, several of the Parisian fortune-tellers were burnt to death. The fourteen-year-old daughter of one was forced to watch so she would not be tempted to follow her mother’s career. Another witch, it was said, had died in the torture chamber. My sleep was tormented by nightmares.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Athénaïs said when I confided my fears to her while airing out her petticoats one evening. ‘You are nobly born. Your grandfather was the Duc de la Force, your father was the Marquis de
Castelmoron. You are distant kin to the King himself. They will not dare accuse you.’

In June, Madame de Poulaillon was tried at the Arsenal. She came from a noble Bordeaux family; my own mother had known her parents. Young and beautiful, she was accused of trying to poison her wealthy husband so she could marry her lover. By all accounts, the prosecutors had wanted her to suffer the punishment of torture and beheading, but the Chambre Ardente took pity on her and sent her to a severe prison for ‘fallen women’, where she was condemned to hard labour for the rest of her life. ‘She was nobly born,’ I told Athénaïs. ‘Yet they dared to put her on trial.’

‘Charlotte-Rose, this is not like you. What has happened to Dunamis?’

I didn’t know. All my courage, all my boldness, seemed to have leaked away from me. I slept with a chair jammed under my door handle. I woke often at night, all my senses preternaturally acute, afraid I had heard someone standing over me, breathing. If someone touched me unexpectedly, I’d flinch. Worst of all, I no longer stole time to write my stories. My quill was stuck hard in the dried ink of my inkpot. I did not even write to my sister.

All summer, the tortures and executions continued. The
Paris Gazette
was full of hideous details. One witch had her right hand amputated before she was hanged. Another was strangled before being broken on the wheel. Yet another was tortured cruelly before being hanged. Meanwhile, La Voisin remained in prison, interrogated again and again and again. The royal spymaster Louvois brought reports to the council, but none of us could tell anything by the King’s face. He remained as impassive as ever. Only the sight of the beautiful Angélique seemed to soften his adamantine expression.

On New Year’s Eve, at the beginning of 1680, Angélique arrived at mass dressed in a billowing gown of gold and blue brocade, trimmed with blue velvet ribbons. When the King arrived a few moments later, a buzz rose through the crowded chapel. He was wearing a coat of exactly the same material, embellished with blue velvet ribbons. The Queen uttered a distressed squeak and pressed her hand to her forehead. Athénaïs stood
motionless, clutching her prayer-book so tightly her knuckles turned white. Françoise folded her hands in prayer, turning her eyes heavenwards.

Angélique smiled and sat down.

Normally, such a breach of etiquette would have enraged the King – a mere
mademoiselle
to sit in the presence of the Queen! But he only smiled and gestured for the mass to proceed.

Two weeks later, Princesse Marie-Anne – the thirteen-year-old bastard daughter of the King’s first mistress, Louise de la Vallière – was married to her cousin, Louis Armand de Bourbon, the Prince de Conti.

A grand ball was held at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye after the wedding. There were so many hundreds of guests that the royal carpenters built four new staircases from the terrace to the first-floor windows so everyone could mount to the ballroom without causing too great a crush. A long table was set up in the gallery, lined with golden baskets filled with sweet-scented hyacinths, jasmine and tulips, as if it was spring instead of the dead of winter. Outside, snow swirled down; inside was golden light and warmth and laughter and music. The King moved about the crowd, nodding with immense dignity and condescension to his guests. The Queen sat in her chair, a tiny dog on her lap, trying to pretend she did not care about all the thousands of
livres
being spent on the King’s illegitimate daughter. Princesse Marie-Anne herself danced as wildly as anyone else there, gulping down glass after glass of champagne and enduring much teasing about the wedding night to come. I wondered if she was afraid, but there was no sign of it on her face or in her bearing. She simply tossed her fair curls, so like her mother’s, and looked as stiff and pretty as a doll in a huge white dress glittering with diamonds.

‘He had best do as well by my daughters when it comes time for them to marry,’ Athénaïs said to me, sotto voce. ‘I swear I am about to expire with the heat! Charlotte-Rose, would you be a darling and go and find me another fan? These ostrich feathers look divine but just do not cool me down.’

Indeed, her chubby cheeks were scarlet and her ringlets hung limply on her neck.

‘Of course,’ I said and made my way through the crowd. I saw Françoise standing with a few other devotees along the wall, looking like a line of owls with their drab clothes and disapproving faces. I smiled at her, but she did not smile back, just regarded me coolly. I did not let my smile fade but swept ahead, taking another glass of champagne as I went. I saw the King standing in a cluster of courtiers, all bowing and smiling and uttering fawning compliments. He was frowning and looking about him, and I wondered where his lovely young mistress was. Angélique was never normally found more than a few paces away from him.

Ten minutes later, I was hurrying along one of the wide corridors, carrying Athénaïs’s fan, when I heard a low moan. I stopped and listened. Whimpering came from behind a half-closed door. I pushed open the door and saw the shape of a woman crouched on a low divan. I dropped the fan on a side table, took a candelabra and tiptoed in, my throat constricted. The light fell upon a golden head hanging low and a bowed back covered with oyster-coloured satin.

‘
Mademoiselle
?’ I asked.

Angélique turned an anguished face towards me and lifted her hands. They were drenched with blood.

‘What is it? What’s happened?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve been feeling so sick … I had such bad cramps I thought I was going to die. Then all this blood gushed out.’

I suddenly understood. My hand shook so much that the candelabra tilted and hot wax ran onto my skin. I put it down on a side table.

‘And there’s … there’s this thing … this monster …’ Angélique pointed at the ground. A blood-soaked shawl was all bundled up. My pulse banging, I unwrapped the shawl. Within lay a red naked creature, blind and mute like a newborn kitten. A tiny penis, scarlet in colour, was coiled like a snail between the floppy red legs. His bald head was much bigger than his spindly body, and a long, thin, slack cord hung from his stomach, its end ragged and torn and leaking blood. His foot was no bigger than my fingernail.

‘It’s a little boy,’ I managed to say. ‘You’ve had a baby.’

‘That’s not a baby. It’s all red and black. It’s an imp from hell. I’m being
punished for my sin.’ She began to sob again. I saw that her satin dress was saturated with red from her lap to her knees.

‘Ssssh, don’t weep. You’ve had a miscarriage. That’s all it is.’ I wrapped the poor little limp thing back up again, my hands trembling.

She shook her head, the tips of her loose golden curls stained with blood. ‘I don’t understand.’ She began to rock, clenching her hands together, pushing at her lap. ‘Aah, it hurts.’

‘We need to get you a doctor. Sit still. Please don’t cry any more.’ I looked around for some wine, but the room was empty of anything but paintings and statues and vases and silly little couches on legs so delicate they looked as if they would break if you sat on them. ‘Wait here, I’ll—’

‘Don’t leave me!’

‘I must. Just for a moment.’

As I ran to the door, she screamed, ‘Don’t go, don’t leave me with that thing.’

I found a footman and sent him for wine, for hot water, for napkins, for a doctor. ‘Find the King,’ I babbled, then thought better of it. ‘No, no, call Athénaïs, call the Marquise de Montespan.’

Athénaïs did not let me down. Sweeping into the room, she understood the situation at a glance. She took Angélique’s hands in her own, chafing them gently. ‘There, there, all will be well. Were you all alone, you poor child? What an ordeal. Never mind, it’s over now.’

I showed her the dead baby in the shawl.

‘How … how terrible. The poor little thing.’ I did not know if she meant the dead baby or her hated rival, the nineteen-year-old girl now weeping on her shoulder, ruining the priceless cloth with snot and blood and tears. Athénaïs looked up at me. ‘The King will be furious. He must not know, at least not until the wedding is over. We must get her to her bedchamber without a whiff of gossip. Will you help me?’

I helped her lift Angélique to her feet. The couch beneath her was horribly stained. Athénaïs wrapped her in her own silver-embroidered shawl, I took up the dead baby and together we helped the King’s mistress stumble to her room.

‘I cannot stay here,’ Athénaïs said. ‘There will be a terrible scandal. It’ll be seen as a dreadful omen on the night of the King’s daughter’s wedding. If Mademoiselle de Fontanges were to die too …’

Although Athénaïs spoke in an undertone, Angélique must have been listening, for she cried out now in terror. ‘Will I die? I don’t want to die.’

‘You’ll be fine. The doctor will be here soon.’ I did my best to soothe her but her fresh nightgown was already stained with a slow creeping red tide.

‘I must go. My absence will be remarked upon. Charlotte-Rose, you must not stay either. You can afford no more scandal.’

I looked at Angélique, who clung to my hand. ‘Don’t leave me!’

Athénaïs went out, biting her lip. I took a deep breath and sat down beside Angélique, murmuring, ‘It’s all right, I won’t leave you. Rest easy now, the doctor will soon be here.’

When the King’s chief physician, Antoine Daquin, at last arrived, his face and fingers shone with grease, and he carried a half-full glass of wine. His heavy wig was slightly askew, framing a pockmarked face with drooping jowls.

He lifted the coverlet, glanced at the red pool in which Angélique lay and frowned at the sight of the tiny naked corpse.

‘What did you do to her,
mademoiselle
, to induce the bleeding?’ he demanded of me.

‘Nothing! I found her like this. All I did was help her to bed.’

‘If a child is aborted after its quickening, it is considered murder.’

I steadied myself with one hand on the bedside table. ‘Mademoiselle de Fontanges did not seem to even know she was with child. I certainly did not know! Nor did I do anything except help her to bed and call for you. She has lost a lot of blood. Her gown was soaked in it.’

He bent over Angélique. ‘
Mademoiselle!
What have you done? Did you not want your baby? To murder your own child is a grave sin on your conscience. What did you do? Did you drink a potion? Or insert a metal tool of some kind? Who helped you?’

Angélique was so white even her lips were pale. ‘No! I didn’t hurt the baby. I didn’t know … I just felt sick … then there was all this blood … I thought I was being torn apart by demons.’

‘It’s all right,’ I murmured, gently stroking back her tumbled hair.

Daquin cast me a suspicious look but pressed Angélique back down into her pillows. ‘Very well. We’ll need to bleed you, to drain out the bad humours in your body.
Mademoiselle
, since you are here you may make yourself useful and hold the bowl.’

‘But she has already lost so much blood.’

‘Are you a physician,
mademoiselle
? I think not. Kindly hold the bowl and do not attempt to advise your betters.’

I held the bowl and did my best to catch the spurt of blood as Daquin cut a small incision in the delicate blue vein of her wrist. The bowl filled quickly, and Angélique swooned back against her pillows. The doctor held his greasy thumb over the cut and instructed me to wrap it in a bandage. I did as he asked, feeling rather faint. The doctor emptied the bowl into the chamber pot, packed it and the bloodstained lancet away in his bag, and then drained his wine glass. ‘Call a servant to dispose of the foetus. If I am quick, I might get back to the feast before all the food is gone.’

Without another word, he went out, and I was left standing by the limp figure of the King’s young mistress and her dead baby. Distantly, I heard the swing of dance music and the high hum of chatter and laughter. In the shadowy bedchamber, there was no sound at all. I looked down at myself and saw that my hands were red with blood. I held them away from my body, unable to breathe or move for the horror of it all.

A week later, I was arrested on suspicion of black magic and taken to the Bastille.

I was locked in a stone cell. A barred window, high in the wall, let in a shaft of light, enough for me to see a low wooden bench, a reeking bucket, a scatter of sodden straw on the paving, a streak of green slime in the corner.

I sat, clutching my shawl about me. It was silk and did nothing to ward off the cold. My teeth chattered and my limbs trembled. I stared at the iron door, willing someone to come in and bow, saying, ‘Pardon,
mademoiselle
. Our mistake.’

No one came. Slowly, the shaft of light faded. All was dark. The cold was so intense my bones hurt. I curled up on the wooden bench, my shawl wrapped around me, my stockinged feet tucked under me. At some point, I must have slept, for I woke from a dream in which my mother had been calling me. Tears were brittle on my cheeks.

Dawn slithered in like a fat grey slug. I put on my frivolous high-heeled slippers and began to pace the cell. My skin was crawling. Lifting away my shawl, I saw my arms and breast were peppered with fleas. Frantically, I began trying to catch them, crushing them beneath my fingernails. Soon, the nails of my thumb and forefinger were black with blood, but there was no cessation to the onslaught of the hopping biting insects. At regular intervals, a bell tolled out.

The wedge of light moved slowly across the wall of the cell, showing
the scribbled names of countless former prisoners. Still, nobody came. It must have been past noon when at last the iron door scraped open. A fat man came in, a basket in his hand. He wore a stained jerkin over rusty chain mail and had not shaved in a week.

‘Provisions for you.’ He put the basket down.

‘What am I doing here? I demand to see someone in charge,
tout de suite!
’ My voice shook.

‘No
tout de suite
around here, sweetheart. You’ll be taken to the Chambre Ardente when they’re good and ready for you, and not a second before. And my guess is it’ll be a while. This place is bursting at the seams and so is every prison for miles.’

‘I am Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force, cousin to the Duc de la Force!’

He snorted. ‘I’ve got dukes and countesses and marquises coming out my bung-hole! Half the bloody court’s here!’ He went out, clanging the door behind him.

Swallowing hard, I picked up the basket and looked inside. Wrapped up in a napkin were a fresh baguette, some ripe white cheese and two roasted pigeon legs. All rested upon a thick woollen shawl.

Blessing Athénaïs, I pulled the shawl out and wrapped it around me. A small note fell to the floor. I opened it.

I read this letter many times over the following few hours, having nothing else to read. It was clear to me that Athénaïs was warning me to keep my mouth shut. I was also most intrigued to know I was not the only one arrested, and that those accused included such old friends of the King as the Comtesse de Soissons and her sister, the Duchesse de Bouillon. These two were the last of the Mazarinettes left in France, those bold and beautiful nieces of Cardinal Mazarin, who had been among the King’s only playmates and, later, his mistresses. If the King had allowed the chief of police to accuse the Mazarinettes, there was no hope for me.

The long hours passed. Once, I heard an iron door grating open and boots marching past. I ran to my door and pressed my ear against it, but the footsteps faded away and I heard nothing more. Slowly, my intense fear faded and was replaced by something almost as difficult to endure: boredom. As the light was fading, my own door scraped open and a tall, thin, scrawny gaoler came in with a bowl of pottage and a jug of dirty-looking water.

‘Some supper for you,’ he said, putting it on the bench.

‘You’re a Gascon,’ I cried, hearing his southern accent. ‘Oh, how lovely to hear a voice from home.’

He stared at me. ‘You a Gascon too? I thought you a fine court lady. Where you from?’

He spoke not only in the Gascon dialect but in Garonnais, the language of my home valley. Only those who grew up in the Garonne Valley would know this particular vernacular. I replied rapidly, and we worked out exactly where we had both grown up, and how many acquaintances we shared, and what had brought each of us to this peculiar (and, I hoped, fortuitous) meeting in a prison cell in the Bastille. His name was Bertrand Ladouceur, he had grown up near Bazas and had come to Paris looking for work after the failure of the harvest in southern France a few years earlier. But Paris had not been kind to Bertrand.

‘Parisians …’ He hawked and spat at the floor. ‘They think we Gascons imbeciles. Give us all the dirtiest jobs, like cleaning out the cesspits or collecting dead bodies from plague-houses. Best job I could find, this.’

‘You must find it hard.’

‘I do, I do.’

‘We Gascons are independent souls. We don’t like being ordered about or locked away from the sky.’

‘That’s right.’

‘I fear I’ll end up in the Asylum de Bicêtre if I am kept locked up in this foul place much longer. I suppose you couldn’t tell me when I am to be brought before the court?’

He looked wary. ‘I couldn’t say.’

‘We Gascons need to stick together. If you carry a message from me to a friend of mine, I’ll make sure you’re well paid. And I need something to do in here if I’m not to go crazy. Will you not bring me the
Gazette
? I need to know what’s going on.’

He thought about this for a moment, then decided that carrying messages and bringing me the newspaper would not do any harm. I did not write my message; a note could be too easily discovered. What I did instead was make a mental list of things I needed – a clean pillow, a blanket, some rue water to try to kill the fleas, some books, a candle to light the long dark hours of the night, some fur-lined boots to keep my icy feet warm, some more food, some clean handkerchiefs – and then asked Bertrand to repeat the list till he had remembered it off by heart. Then I told him how to find Athénaïs. He went out, locking the door behind him. I sat and killed fleas, telling myself stories to keep myself amused.

Some time later, Bertrand returned with a thin fold of newspaper and a jug of small ale, which I drank eagerly, having determined not to drink the water no matter how thirsty I was. The newspaper was full of
L’affaire des poisons
, as the scandal was being called. I discovered that the Vicomtesse de Polignac had made a dramatic escape from her country house only minutes before the royal guards arrived, and that the Comtesse de Soissons, the King’s former mistress Olympe Mancini, had arrived safely in Flanders but that the people of Antwerp had closed the city gates against her and pelted her carriage with squalling cats.

Bertrand returned the next day with a heavy basket. I fell upon it with
joy, finding everything I had asked for plus a few other small thoughtful gifts, such as a pomander of dried orange studded with cloves. Included was a heavy tome of La Fontaine’s
Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon
. Once again, I blessed Athénaïs. She had obviously paid Bertrand well, because he asked me eagerly if there were any other messages to be carried.

‘Soon, perhaps. If I had any news I could give her … but I don’t know what is happening! If only I could listen to the trials.’

‘I don’t think they’d allow that,’ Bertrand said, screwing up his face.

‘It could do no harm … and I would then have news to send to the Marquise de Montespan.’

He shook his head. ‘You don’t want to be watching the interrogations,
mademoiselle
, not a gently bred young thing like you. But if you like I will bring you what news I can.’

‘Bertrand, you’re wonderful! I’ll get you a job at court!’

‘I’d rather you got me a job at the Château de Cazeneuve. I miss the country.’

‘I’ll write to my sister,’ I promised. ‘She is the Baronne de Cazeneuve. She’ll find you a job you like.’

He nodded in pleased thanks and went out, leaving me alone to douse my room and my mattress with rue water. It smelt foul. I lifted my pomander to my nose but it did little to disguise the stench. I sat and read through the newspapers but found it hard to concentrate on the text. Were those faint screams I heard? Was that distant sobbing? Or was it just the wind wailing about the towers of the Bastille? As soon as it began to grow dim, I lit my candle with shaking fingers and lay curled in my damp and stinking bed, sick with fear.

Every day, my Gascon gaoler brought me a basket of simple provisions and a few scraps of news. The Duc de Luxembourg was being questioned first, Bertrand told me. No one knew what he was accused of, but it was said he had made a pact with the devil to be invulnerable on the battlefield, to be as wealthy and loved as the King, and to have many women fall in love with him. People were saying he had taken part in black masses
and orgies, but I found this hard to believe, given what a stiff-necked old aristocrat he was.

The next day, Bertrand told me the guards were all sniggering about the interrogation of the Duchesse de Foix. A letter from her had been found at La Voisin’s house, questioning the power of a breast-enhancing potion the Duchesse had bought. She had written to the witch, ‘The more I rub, the less they grow!’

‘She was surely not charged for that,’ I said.

Bertrand shrugged. ‘They let her go. They asked her all sorts of other questions about what she had bought from the witch, but she was adamant that was the only thing.’

A few days later, the Princesse de Tingry was questioned. She came out of the interrogation room in tears, Bertrand told me, after they had accused her of aborting the Duc de Luxembourg’s children three times, their bodies dried and powdered for use in spells.

‘It seems impossible. She’s a princess!’

‘A great many fine court ladies being brought before the court,’ Bertrand said darkly. ‘You’re up this afternoon, I heard.’

I clutched his arm in sudden anxiety. ‘Bertrand, they won’t … they won’t torture me, will they?’

He shrugged, looking uncomfortable. ‘I can’t say. A sweet-faced thing like you? I wouldn’t think so. Not unless they find you guilty.’

I tidied myself with trembling hands, wishing I could wash and put on a fresh dress. The stink of the rue water hung about me, seeming to smell of fear and despair. All I could do was shake out my crumpled skirt, paint my face and try to tidy my rat’s nest hair, combing it with my fingers and pinning it up as best as I could without a mirror.

I was taken out of my cell and down into the centre of the Bastille by Bertrand. As I stumbled along the corridors, I heard sobbing and pleading from various cells, and then, from deep in the bowels of the building, a blood-curdling scream.