The Hurlyburly's Husband (20 page)

Chrestienne de Zamet was about to swoon. Dorothée ran to the kitchen to fetch some drops of essence of urine and crayfish powder, and slapped white wine compresses on her brow. They concluded that perhaps no medicine could help her, nor would prayers be any better. Shattered, Cartet shook his large head this way and that as he faced Madame Larivière, who took offence.

‘What is the matter with you, Steward? What has put you in such a pitiful state? Do I disgust you?’

‘You should not have spoken of the past, Madame Lariri …’

‘Stop calling me by that stupid name! There is no more Madame Lariri, it’s finished,
basta
! Madame Lariri doesn’t exist any more!’

‘And why should she not have spoken of the past?’ enquired Macqueron.

‘Madame Lariri, you have just given my captain a life sentence…’

‘How? What? What are you saying? Oh, my God!’

The cook ran out, tearing her hair. Leaning against the bare stone wall, Montespan grazed his hands in vexation without realising it, whilst the intendant came over to him.

‘Well, what say you, was it not time for a confession?
In extremis!
When I think I was prepared to take your side, that I thought, what a rare thing, this marquis’s constant love, in a society where conjugal indifference is a sign of good manners! Which goes to show that there is some truth in proverbs: ’tis in preaching a lie that one discovers the truth. But I did not expect it. I did not even think to bring the stamp with the official seal in order to make the arrest in due form. I’ll come back with it on the morrow. You have this afternoon and all night to put your affairs in order, for I am consigning you to residence in your chateau. The dragoons posted all round shall be your gaolers. Till tomorrow. Come, clerk!’

Macqueron departed, leaving Montespan dazed and distraught. Outside, Louis-Antoine was playing with toy soldiers and miniature rifles on Cartet’s enormous thighs as the steward sat despondently on a little wall by the dragoons, who stared at him. Louis-Henri understood what was at risk if he submitted to the decision of justice. If he was taken, he would never again be able to plead his cause; he would be imprisoned in Pignerol, near Fouquet. He sighed and said, ‘I am lost.’ He gazed at his chateau as if for the last time – the rampart walk, the drawbridge, the large, wide-bottomed moat with its sloping crenellated wall and its entrances to underground passages and … escape?

Madame Larivière, her face crushed with shame and remorse, went up to him. ‘What am I to do? Shall I throw myself into the mud of the moat, prepare my things and go?’

‘No, because Marie-Christine needs Dorothée, and I am in a good position to know that when one is vexed in love, one is sometimes driven to say or do certain things …’

‘… that I regret, Monsieur.’

‘I do not! Go back and patch things up with that unhappy Cartet who loves you so, Madame Larivière. Ask him, too, to go to the dovecote and fetch the pigeon belonging to the Seigneur de Teulé.’

‘That wretched nobleman – a ruffian and a counterfeiter, to whom all the marquis in the region send a small pension so that he will not fall too low among the riffraff?’

‘The very same.’

Teulé,

Before nightfall, pray tie a mount to a tree near the large rock at the place where the two lanes cross in my forest.

Montespan

Louis-Henri attached the message to the carrier pigeon’s leg. The bird took flight on its short wings and, carried on the wind, headed directly south.

After dark, the marquis tiptoed into his daughter’s chamber where she slept with Dorothée. He then went into Louis-Antoine’s room, took him in his arms and said, ‘Come, we are going for a ride.’

Carrying his son and some old clothes, but with no candle, Montespan went out into the courtyard through a door hidden from view, but his mother, who had heard the floor creaking a little while before, now saw him from her window.

‘My poor boy, if you escape now, you risk being sentenced
in absentia
and all your property will be confiscated and you’ll lose all your titles of nobility. You will only fulfil Louvois’s deepest desires, and look well and truly like a criminal …’

She dried her tears and said many a prayer on seeing her son and grandson disappearing beneath the slab at the entrance to a tunnel. They vanished from sight. She was not sure if she would ever see them again.

Stooping, Montespan groped his way along the narrow underground passage, which had surely not been used for over a century, clambering over glowing tree roots, hearing animals squeaking as they fled – large field rats, no doubt. Spider’s webs and scurrying insects caught in his hair.

They reached the end of the tunnel. Louis-Henri came up against the rungs of a rusty ladder fixed to a vertical clay wall and he climbed up. At the top, he struggled to open the grate that blocked the entrance to the underground passage. Holding his child in one arm, the marquis shoved several times with his shoulder and bent head, and finally the grate lifted with a tearing of grass, pushing aside clumps of icy soil.

They emerged from the ground near a large rock. Next to it, a horse stood tethered to a tree trunk. Louis-Henri wanted to leave on the sly, passing through the sleeping villages without making a sound. He wrapped the horse’s hooves with what he had thought were rags, snatched up at random in the gloom of the chateau, but he had been mistaken: it was Françoise’s wedding gown. Never mind. His son yawned and shivered with cold. The father lifted the boy onto the back of the horse and mounted pillion behind him. Below them, in the valley, the Château de Bonnefont seemed to be snoring, inside a circle of light made by the glowing pipes of the watching dragoons.

‘Where are we going, Papa?’

‘To Madrid.’

The child was somewhat frightened by the enormity of the journey, but his father gave him courage and wrapped him in a heavy buffalo cloak. Montespan, in his felt riding-cloak, put an arm around his son’s waist and held him close to keep him warm.

‘Gee up!’

The horse made its way along a path glazed with black ice. Louis-Antoine, one cheek against his father’s biceps, gazed ahead at the Pyrenees, blue and white in the clear night. The swaying motion of the horse’s gait lulled the child and he slept. Beneath the horse’s trotting hooves, the pearls on Françoise’s red dress shattered like little stars.

‘Monsieur de Montespan, how is Louis XIV?’

At the court of Spain, Louis-Henri wondered if the ten-year-old dauphin – the future Charles II – had a sense of humour and was mocking him outrageously, or if he was a complete and utter idiot.

‘I enquire,’ continued the Habsburg heir to the throne, ‘because as for myself, I am not very well …’

The frail child, a virtual invalid, had to hold on to the mantelpiece to keep from falling.

His adult features were already discernible, those of a degenerate not destined to live long.

‘Does the King of France suffer from toothache, Monsieur de Montespan?’

‘I really don’t know,’ replied the marquis.

‘And nightmares, does he have nightmares?’

‘I have no idea. In any event, I often have nightmares because of him.’

‘The other night,’ said the dauphin, ‘I dreamt that I had become an oyster, and Indians were opening me to steal the pearl I had inside me. Then they left me to close up again all by myself and departed with my treasure. I awoke to find myself curiously … dry.’

‘Really?’

‘There are times, too, when I dream that I have no arms, only hands attached directly to my shoulders, wiggling like fins.’

‘Well then, tell me …’

‘Monsieur de Montespan, do you believe that I am a marine animal?’

‘Of course not, Your Highness.’

‘
Ha-ha-ha! El hechizado! El hechizado!
…’ (There’s a spell on him!) In the gloomy official salon of the Spanish palace, the dauphin’s half-sisters, a bevy of sickly, dwarfed infantas, giggled and ran off to the hall of mirrors to see their reflection multiplied a thousandfold. Dressed in skirts that looked like enormous lampshades, they circled round and round and squeaked like wooden dolls on wheels. Louis-Henri told himself that it was not only in the court of France that there was something rotten.

‘Would you like some fruit?’ The future monarch’s words emerged from his mouth in fits and starts, as if he had had to search for each one individually.

A voice explained to the French marquis: ‘The heir to the throne did not walk or begin to talk until he was five years old.’ The voice, with an Austrian accent, was that of Cardinal Nidhart – an inquisitor who during the regency had been entrusted with the post of prime minister by the queen mother; he was her confessor. Dressed in red robes with a thin white collar, he wore a little beard and moustache, and his eyes were immensely sad. On his head, dominating his scalp, was something that looked like the little boats that children make by folding a sheet of paper. Montespan politely chose an apricot from the porcelain bowl the sickly prince was holding out to him. The fruit was so ripe and spoilt around the stone that it tasted like cheese.

‘Another apricot!’

‘No, thank you.’

‘I would like very much to see you again, Monsieur de Montespan!’

‘It’s just that…’ said Louis-Henri, ‘in fact I’d come to take my leave and thank Spain for the asylum granted me this year and more. As soon as I crossed over the Pyrenees, the populace came to their windows and blessed my journey all the way to Madrid. Wherever I went, I was greeted with manifestations of joy. My son and I have been lodged by the palace, with liveried footmen at our disposition. One of your coaches was always at my door to serve me … with four mules and a royal coachman. I have been greatly touched to receive such treatment and hospitality normally reserved for extraordinary ambassadors, but now that I am able to return to my home …’

‘You have been here for nigh on a year? And why did no one inform me?’ asked the little prince angrily, addressing Cardinal Nidhart, who replied, ‘Because you were asleep, Don Carlos.’

‘Ah,’tis true, I sleep a great deal! Sometimes for months. They call me “the sleeping corpse”. Have I already told you my dreams, Monsieur de Montespan?’

‘Yes, Your Highness.’

‘Would you like an apricot?’

‘No, thank you.’

There was an air of awkwardness in the salon that Louis-Henri was eager to leave behind. He was about to make a deep bow when the unsteady heir asked him, ‘Why could you not go home before?’

The cuckold tried to explain his situation as a husband betrayed by the King of France. ‘I suspected that if I came for protection to the very devout kingdom of Spain, I might be making an excellent move, that Louis XIV would not risk damaging his reputation by going too far. Your obvious decline, Don Carlos – for you will most probably die without an heir – opens the succession of your throne to claimants from all over Europe. Marie-Thérèse’s French husband is duty-bound to explore all diplomatic measures, therefore he must handle me with tact. He has yielded, with a letter of remission!’ Louis-Henri waved a sheet of paper, and read: ‘“We hereby pardon said Marquis de Montespan, to this end annulling all direct summonses and other judicial proceedings that have been made.” I have won! I am free, and glad to return to Bonnefont!’

‘The King of France wrote to you?’ exclaimed the young dauphin delightedly. ‘May I see his letter? I am very fond of Louis XIV and of France … although I’m not very sure where it is.’

‘Don Carlos,’ interrupted Nidhart, trying not to become annoyed, ‘we are
at war
with France, and Louis XIV is our
enemy
…’

‘Indeed? How so?’

There was a sense of hesitancy in the air.

‘When will he be king?’ murmured Montespan in the cardinal’s ear.

‘In four years,’ sighed Nidhart.

Louis-Henri nodded, thinking, well, that bodes well for Spain; what sport they will have, the Madrileños …

‘As for myself,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘the moment he becomes monarch, I will return to Austria.’

The frail invalid looked at Montespan.

‘Will you find your wife at home?’

‘I should like to …’

‘It must be very pleasant to be married, no?’

‘That depends …’

‘And Louis XIV, is he married?’

‘Yes, and to a Spanish woman, moreover.’

‘Really? But I thought he was the King of France!’

A certain weariness had become apparent on the faces of both Nidhart and the French marquis, whom the dauphin now asked, ‘How are children made, Monsieur de Montespan?’

‘Well now, Your Highness … Look, I do not really have the time to—’

‘Would you like an apricot?’

‘No!’

The Gascon would end up stuffing those rotten apricots in his face, the Spanish dunderhead! The latter was now trembling, his legs quaking. The confessor scarcely had time to catch him in his arms.

‘It is because you shouted, Monsieur de Montespan. When people shout, it puts him to sleep. There we are, he is off again for another eight months in bed.’

The marquis turned round and took his leave, whilst the dauphin, yawning, his head drooping on his shoulder, had just enough time to utter, ‘Embrace Louis XIV for me…’