The Dream Maker (40 page)

I tried to calm her down, telling her that the incident would be short-lived, and that the king would come back to her.

“Short-lived? You do not know Antoinette! She is ambitious, and a schemer. She has come this far, and will be determined to stay there.”

Now that I know the rest of the story, I have to admit that she was right. Not three months would go by before Antoinette de Maignelay officially became the king's mistress. But at the time I thought Agnès was exaggerating. When I told her as much, she reacted angrily. Then, very quickly, her anger subsided and gave way to a sorrowful weariness that was infinitely sad to see.

She looked at her belly, already swollen with the pregnancy, which for once she had desired. Her hands were swollen. She played nervously with an amethyst ring the king had given her and which now would not slide onto her thickened finger.

“I am confined here—heavy, ugly, weak, and far from him. Whereas she is there, sharing the finest moments of his life, and being with him in his pleasure.”

I held her in my arms. She placed her head on my chest and began weeping quietly. I could feel her tears trickle onto my right hand. She was shivering. I had never seen her so weak and disarmed. She had always shown such extraordinary energy in every circumstance, and particularly in adversity, but now she was despondent, all her strength gone. No doubt it was also the effect of her condition and probably, already, of illness. I felt immense tenderness for her and a desire to do everything I could do attenuate her suffering, or, at least, not to make it any worse. I felt no pity, because I knew that pity was something she despised, and she would not have liked to arouse it at any cost. For the first time, however, I consciously felt a veritable hatred for the king. The way he had taken possession of Agnès, compromising her by displaying his favor, keeping her in the hopes of a shared love—only to humiliate her publicly and expose her to general scorn: it was despicable. My judgment on his behavior was all the more harsh—although the circumstances were different—in that it resembled the attitude he had adopted with me.

Our shared experiences seemed to reinforce each other—although I still had the means to escape from the king, and sufficient fortune to find support and protection from others in high places, if I could no longer rely on his patronage. Agnès had nothing. She had been handed over to him, had forced her nature in order to form a sincere attachment to him. He could take everything she owned away from her again. Judging from his behavior toward those he had repudiated or banished, one could not expect him to behave generously toward her if she was disgraced, and particularly now that he might be under the influence of a rival who would set about erasing the very memory of the woman who had preceded her.

These turbulent feelings tormented my mind, and led me to seek a way to escape their violence. Agnès lay abandoned at my side, and our bodies were closely entwined. We both knew how vulnerable we were despite the protection of the warm sheets enfolding us: all of this conspired to bring us closer than we had ever been. Physical desire overwhelmed the modesty of our usual friendship. I reached for her throat and began to untie the delicate veil of satin covering her. She protested, and this token refusal was all that was needed to convince me that my passion was not coercion. Had she not opposed my gesture I would have been reluctant to take advantage of her weakness. Whereas by showing me her will, even if it was contrary, she proved to me that her lucidity was intact: her consent, should she show it, would be fully valid. And indeed, before long I felt that the gestures with which she opposed my caresses merely served to prolong them. By acting as if she were pushing my hands aside, she guided them. I had often held her body, but chastely, so that this time I felt as if I were discovering it. I was surprised to find how fragile she seemed. At the same time, however delicate her limbs might be, her breasts and belly were full, bursting with life, more burning than I had expected. In such close proximity, the familiar smell of flowers and spices no longer veiled the slightly tangy perfume of her fair skin, but brought my desire to a peak. She could no longer ignore the proof of this, and if this time she refrained from crying out it was because her desire was equal to mine. It was pointless trying to hide it. She stared at me, squeezing my hands tightly, then with a delicious slowness she placed her lips on mine. After this long kiss, she pulled up the covers and, in the darkness of the linen sheets, as they formed a wild and gentle cave, we united our bodies and our pain, our caresses and our rebellion. In a brazier of sensual delight, for the time that love lasts, all our wounds and rancor, our disappointments and disillusions blazed together, melting our souls, uniting them.

I would like to make one thing clear: the inestimable value of this moment had nothing to do with the satisfaction of conquest or any other form of male vanity. If for me this instant, even with the distance of time and perhaps all the more so because of it, constitutes the turning point of my entire life, it is because it was caught, or should I say crushed, between two contrary forces with an intensity I could never have imagined. On the one hand, our affinity, even to the extremes of carnal union, turned out to be perfect. Everything we had ever imagined turned out to be true, and our mutual attraction was neither an illusion nor a mistake, but indeed the sign that we had been destined for each other from all eternity. But the moment it became reality, our union was soiled by its original sin. We had just destroyed the distance that had allowed us to remain close. Once we crossed that line, everything could come crashing down upon us: the king's anger, Agnès's remorse, the fact of my age, and the precariousness of my present situation. It was as if we had broken a vial filled with blood, and our bodies were suddenly splattered and stained by imminent punishment.

We should have fled. We should have left everything behind at that very moment. But love only gives the strength to maintain its own fire, and the delight of the senses left no energy for anything other than renewing our carnal embrace. The proof of the danger surrounding us engendered only one desire, that of loving again. The more we felt that this beginning was an end, the greater the grip of a desperate desire to prolong its life.

In a moment when pleasure gave me respite, the only thing I was conscious of was the thought that, until then, I had never loved, and that Providence had bestowed a great favor on me by allowing me to know, even just once, such happiness.

We stayed like that until nightfall. A serving woman knocked on the door to bring the candles and Agnès called out to her to come back later. The pale remnants of the day filtered through the thick glass windows. Agnès opened the curtains wide and went quickly to wrap herself in a nightgown. I dressed hastily, searching awkwardly for my clothing, scattered on either side of the bed. We were suddenly overcome by embarrassment. Like Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden, terrified to discover their nudity, we were suddenly both aware of what we had done. A strong sense of remorse ordered us to erase any trace of those moments when we had freed ourselves from all restraint and the laws of modesty.

Either because the act of love had revived the energy she had been lacking, or because she wanted to be active and put her moment of abandon behind her as quickly as possible, as soon as we were dressed and groomed once again Agnès began to speak in a determined manner, and set before me the principles of her future conduct.

“I will not allow them to trample on me,” she said as we went down to the salons. “I am going to fight. I will go shortly to find the king. He must yield to me, or explain himself.”

I was happy to see she had regained her firmness and confidence. But I did not really believe she would act on her words. Beyond the excitement of the moment I could still see the fatigue in her features, and even that which I did not yet know I must call her illness. In the rooms which Marc, at my request, had kept warm with a continuous blaze of elm and birch logs, it was easy to talk of traveling and riding off to see the king. But winter had come to stay, and promised to be harsh. I hoped that Agnès, when it came time to act, would think about the dangers of the climate and the bad roads.

After supper, she kissed me chastely and went back up to her apartments. I made arrangements with Marc for my departure the next day, and I went to sleep in the room I normally occupied at Loches. I left the castle midmorning. Agnès had risen early. She was wearing a red velvet gown with a collar of marten fur. She wished me a safe journey, and showed every consideration, making sure we had enough food and drink with us. Unbeknownst to me, she slipped into one of my pockets an ivory statue representing St. James. It is an item that the richest pilgrims take with them, hoping for the saint's protection. I have often wanted to take the way to Compostela and, in consolation for never finding the time to go, I have offered help to many penitents asking for my support. It is not that I believed in these so-called relics. But it has always seemed to me that my fate had a secret and powerful bond with the pilgrimage to Compostela. Was it not St. James who started the movement of peoples all across Europe, instigating trade, forcing the peasants to leave their glebes, and those from the North to discover the South, or from the East to discover the West? Along with war, pilgrimages are the most ancient cause of human migration. I have devoted my life to the movement, everywhere, on land and on sea, of merchandise and merchants, and so I feel I am his heir and, so to speak, the successor to the labors of a saint for whom I am named. Perhaps Agnès sensed this. In any case, I felt her choice of gift was not fortuitous. Of all the things I would lose, later in life, the statue is the only thing I sincerely regret.

The sky that morning was heavy with cloud, yellow beneath an invisible sun. The freezing air smelled of plowed fields, and crows circled above the castle walls. Agnès stood slightly back from the door, no doubt so that the faint shadow would hide her face and not show her lingering discomfiture. Our transgression had broken something and we both knew it. I was even more upset than she was. Unlike me, she must have known that this misunderstanding would be without consequence, for the simple reason that another event would soon come to occult it and remove all its substance. She waved goodbye and before my horse had left the courtyard she had already gone back inside. The door closed behind her. I would never see her again.

What came thereafter is a matter of record. It belongs to History. The king regarded Agnès's death as an event of considerable importance, almost equal to his victories. But the mausoleums and royal endowments, the low masses said twice a week for the salvation of her soul, and even the ducal crown which Charles granted to her posthumously perpetuate the image of a woman who was not the one I had known. For me that woman vanished the moment the door at Loches closed behind her: who will ever know what her last feelings were? Her last thoughts? What we know of her is her path through life and a few dates. We know that she left Touraine not long after my own departure, at the beginning of January, in wintry weather. She braved the cold and the danger of the roads, which were still not safe from lurking rowdy soldiers formerly allied with England and now left to their own resources. The king was again at war, and the women who had joined him to celebrate his triumph in Rouen had departed. The few fortifications that remained to be reconquered put up very little resistance. Charles could parade in full regalia and even lead the attack without great risk to his person.

Agnès had faced greater peril, and yet she was the one who admired him. He enjoyed having her near him. All the witnesses have told me that these few days were happy. Did she complain to him about his infidelity, or was she content merely to have her place again, for everyone to see? I think she was too clever to risk resorting to reprimands. And she must not have felt sufficiently irreproachable, given what we had experienced together, to pose as the virtuous one. Those who were close to Charles and Agnès during these last days insist on the harmony that seemed to reign between them. I have every reason to believe they are telling the truth. Agnès was sincerely happy to be with the king again and to share his glory, so much so that she would be blind to his vainglorious posing as a great leader, and above all she would ignore the fact that he had complacently received tributes from another woman.

Agnès and I shared the same paradoxical feelings regarding this strange individual. We knew that he was capable of betraying us or even surrendering us without a qualm to our worst enemies, that he could contemplate our annihilation without lifting a finger, as he had done with Joan of Arc; and yet, at the very thought that we had been unfaithful to him, we were crushed with the fear of making him suffer even the slightest bit.

In any event, there were those days of happiness. Her ladies-in-waiting later told me that, after the hardships of the journey, and surely already weakened by illness, Agnès had used up every ounce of strength remaining to respond to the king's enthusiasm, to stay up late and laugh with him. When he left again on a new campaign at the beginning of February, the moment he was out of sight Agnès collapsed.

People have often described her dying days, in terms destined to honor her piety. Among the various other gifts the pope had given me for her there was a plenary indulgence, which assured her of absolution in her final hours. The document had stayed behind in Loches, but her confessor took her at her word. Now in this time where I myself have need of such a viaticum for the hereafter, I realize how great the gulf between myself and my religion has grown. However, it is with infinite tenderness that I think of the deep, naïve trust which Agnès placed in such promises, made by men in the name of a God whose very existence—and, above all, desires—they knew nothing of.

Everything happened so quickly that I did not hear of this apotheosis or of her death. On February 15 a messenger came to inform me, in Montpellier, where I had come on business, that Agnès had died and that she had designated me, along with Étienne Chevalier and her doctor, Robert Poitevin, as one of the three executors of her will.