The Hurlyburly's Husband (9 page)

‘And that is not all!’ declared the marquise to her husband. ‘The King is also offering me the succession to all the butcher shops in Paris!’

‘The what?’ asked Louis-Henri, astounded.

‘The tax which the butchers pay when they pass on their produce. Before, the aristocrat who owned this privilege received an
aboivrement
from the butchers – a feast and a cake made with eggs – but now it’s gold coins.’

‘And the King has made you such a gift? What a curious idea.’

‘It is to help us.’

‘But why should he do so?’

‘I believe His Majesty appreciates me. I cheer him by imitating the expressions and simpering ways of the girls who seek to capture his royal heart. Ever since I arrived at Versailles, Louis has been attending the Queen’s going-to-bed ceremony. He comes to hear me chronicle the day’s events: no one escapes the gibes of my wit. He has deserted his mistress La Vallière to come and listen to me. The Queen is most pleased with me and has heaped her thanks upon me.’

‘This is wonderful!’ said Montespan, sitting down at the table, whilst the cook served the marquise and she joined him.

‘What do you make of—’

‘Have you inadvertently dropped a lemon in the soup? How different from the delicacies prepared by the master chefs at Versailles,’ remarked Athénaïs, putting her spoon down and pushing her dish away in front of Madame Larivière, who registered the affront.

‘For this evening I had planned some cauliflower steamed in a nutmeg bouillon. But perhaps Madame would prefer a sole – the partridge of the sea – or some woodcocks with buttered toast.’

‘I won’t be dining here. I merely came to fetch some gowns before returning to court. Tell the servant to prepare them for me.’

‘You’re leaving already?’ asked her husband.

His spouse, her elbows on the table, interlaced her fingers and rested her chin on them. ‘You know that His Majesty also appreciates you, Louis-Henri.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you, and with regard to your company of light cavalry and miquelets, for which you are lacking funds, the King has ordered the State to pay the difference.’

‘You jest! He never does anything of the like for anyone, so for ...’

‘This message from Louvois is addressed to you,’ Athénaïs said with a smile, taking a letter from beneath her bodice.

‘The Secretary of State for War would write to me?’

The Gascon could not get over what he had just learnt, and he read the letter out loud.

‘Monsieur de Montespan,

Notwithstanding His Majesty’s resolution to abstain from lending any support to cavalry companies, he did nevertheless order me to inform you that he is willing to support your company considering the expense you have incurred in order to equip it.

‘Well, I never …

‘I am presently informing the Duc de Noailles of His Majesty’s decision in your favour, in order that he may expedite your company to a district of Roussillon, where there will be greater opportunity to serve the King—

‘On the Spanish border? I would have preferred to follow him to Flanders, but …

‘—so that you shall thereby be worthy of a regiment at the first opportunity that arises.

‘What? A regiment, for me?

‘I am most pleased for your sake about the consideration His Majesty has shown you, and assure you that I shall always facilitate further such consideration as may come your way.

François Michel Le Tellier

Marquis de Louvois

‘Further consideration? But why?’

Athénaïs avoided raising her eyes from the edge of the table.

‘I don’t know…’

Madame Larivière watched her for a moment, then picked up the dishes, which no one seemed to be interested in. She left the salon and on the landing she called out, ‘Dorothée!’ Louis-Henri was touched to see the way Marie-Christine, standing by the chair, wrapped her arms around one of her mother’s as she sat with her palms face down on her lap.

The little girl rubbed her cheek against her mother’s elbow. Eyes closed, she seemed to be breathing again, as if all the time that this maternal warmth had been in Versailles she had been living in a state of breathlessness. Her father understood. He, too, loved to caress Athénaïs. She was so gracious, the most beautiful woman in all of France – as perfect as the idealised stone statues seen only in the royal parks. And this creature was his wife! He could have wept for happiness. The perfect oval of Athénaïs’s face; her high blond eyebrows; her mouth that puckered comically whenever she was astonished or thoughtful; all this belonged to him.

Her mind no doubt still full of gondola processions along the Grand Canal, her bored gaze now lingered on her shabby home in Rue Taranne. She despaired of the peeling grey-green walls; the broken skirting boards the colour of crushed raspberry saddened her; the worn leather strap chairs seemed to bind her hand and foot; the threadbare Moses tapestry dispirited her and the sight of the black tannin of the old-fashioned furniture was like a long-forgotten nightmare. Her daughter bored her, clinging to her like that. She pushed her away: ‘Stop it now!’ then declared to her husband, ‘We must find a solution. You will be at the Spanish border and I will be at court; I shan’t be able to look after two children.’

‘Would you like me to take Marie-Christine to Bonnefont on my way to Roussillon? My mother can look after her.’

Athénaïs did not reply. She felt, stirring within her, aspirations towards another existence; she was already impatient to be going from fête to fête in His Majesty’s wake. She murmured, ‘One day there were gusts of rain and the Sun King removed his hat and placed it on my head before the astonished courtiers and led me back to the Palais.’

‘What spell have you cast on the monarch?’

Louis-Henri watched as his blonde became paler than the pearls around her neck.

‘Are you wearing a new necklace? Is it also the King who…’

Happy, he struck the table with his two large paws.

‘Such consideration! A title as lady-in-waiting, a Parisian succession, a helping hat in a shower, a string of pearls … And presently I shall have my colonel’s brevet! At last His Majesty has given up his hostility towards my family and has restored it to its former favour.’

He stood up; a ray of sun left a broad swathe of light on the uneven grey tiles. He went and opened the window, and in the beam of light he exalted the diurnal star. His wife watched as he called out,
Vive le roi!
’

Athénaïs found herself staying for longer and longer periods in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, at the Château de Marly, or at Versailles, returning later and later to her marital home. Her husband did not take offence. He sat patiently through the succession of grey days in the little apartment, now virtually deserted by his spouse. He was waiting for the War of Devolution against Spain and philosophically whiled away his ennui without his wife: she was off in an orbit circling ever nearer to the Sun King. One evening when she returned displaying a dizzying décolletage, Madame Larivière was watching from the landing and, as Athénaïs went by in the stairway, she grumbled to Dorothée, ‘Making such a display of her breast merely broadcasts the fact that the creature is for hire.’

Louis-Henri was in the salon standing over the maps of the Pyrenees he had unrolled on the gaming table, holding a glass of water. Just as he was lifting the glass to his lips, his wife entered the room. He saw her eyes were lowered. She had not changed colour, but he who knew her well found her discomfited all the same.

‘Louis-Henri, I have a favour to request of you, but you must grant it me. Should you fail to, I confess I should be most vexed.’

Athénaïs wanted to leave the court behind, and she asked her husband to take her away to Bonnefont. ‘It is all too much – being lady-in-waiting, and receiving gold from the butchers’ shops, and the King’s contribution to your company – it is all too much, living at court. Let us go and live with your mother and our children in Guyenne.’

Montespan refused to consider it. ‘In an uncomfortable old chateau in the wilderness of the far reaches of the realm, surrounded by country bumpkins? You will be bored.’

She begged Louis-Henri to forgo his military aspirations and take her away. He laughed at her distress and made fun of her when she insisted.

‘Versailles is a dreadful place,’ she lamented; ‘there is not a single person whose head is not turned by it. The court changes even the best of souls.’

‘It shall not change you. I have greater trust in you than you have yourself.’

*

Then one day Athénaïs arrived red and embarrassed, with a new pearl necklace. She hid her face on her husband’s chest, with his scent of liquorice and orange-flower water. ‘There is still time to leave.’

Louis-Henri, in his Indian dressing gown, smiled and spoke to her quite formally. ‘Pray explain yourself, Madame!’

‘Explain myself? Then you should know that this fête everyone is talking about, entitled “Disguised Love”, where I shall figure as the water nymph and His Majesty as Neptune brandishing a trident in gilded wood – the King is giving this fête in my honour.’

‘Well, are you not lovely enough to deserve a fête in your honour?’

‘Louis-Henri, since I must spell it out, the King is in love with me.’

‘Well then! A King’s love is no insult.’

‘Louis-Henri, I am afraid.’

‘What can you be afraid of?’

‘Last night, at Versailles, I had a dream. In the dream, I was climbing a mountain. When I reached the peak, I was dazzled by a brilliant cloud, before plunging into a darkness so deep that my fear awoke me.’

‘Louis-Henri, do you think I am the devil?’

‘Of course not, why do you say such a thing? Do you think I am Marie-Christine? Are you going to growl at me? Grrr … oh, oh, oh! … Frrr.’

On a clear night, in their bed of twisted columns in Rue Taranne, the marquise had raised her husband’s lids and roused him from sleep. An infinitely pale glow of moonlight hovered and shimmered over her face. Her eyes were two large holes. She told her husband a story she had never told him before.

‘During my childhood in Lussac, I often shivered with fear listening to my nurse at night, when she would tell me the family legend about an ancestor in the sixteenth century. Renée Taveau, the daughter of the Baron de Mortemart, had married my great-grandfather, François de Rochechouart. But the young bride quickly fell ill and was dying. She was no longer breathing, had no pulse, and they buried her, not yet twenty years of age, with her flawless diamond ring. This gem is too brilliant to be left in the obscurity of a tomb, thought a covetous valet. He waited until nightfall to raid the burial place and steal the jewel. But it was impossible to slide the ring from her stiff, bent finger. So he decided to cut it off by biting the joint. When he dug his teeth into the icy flesh, the “dead” woman suddenly awoke with a scream. Naturally, the word spread quickly that Renée was a diabolical creature with supernatural powers. However, the husband was so glad to be with his wife again that he gave her a child – my grandfather.’

The naked Montespans found warmth under a woven blanket from Holland, mingling their souls. As the walnut bed creaked, Athénaïs declared to her husband, ‘I am the resurrection of a dead body …’

‘Do you mean a miracle? That I knew, that you are a miracle.’

‘Do you think that I am a demon?’

Louis-Henri paused above his blonde: her sex was voracious, man-eating, avid for the milk of his flesh. As for other women – fie upon them! He never thought of them.
She
was here, supple and refreshing; the dreams she offered him were boundless. He became a saint, it seemed. A prayer was chanted in a voice so hushed it could have been mistaken for a flight of angels. Then … Hush your murmuring, Morality, you could not control their intimate bond.

‘In my father’s garden the lilacs are in bloom

In my father’s garden the lilacs are in bloom

And all the birds in all the world come here to make their nest

My little blonde lassie

Let me sleep beside you now

My little blonde lassie

Sleep beside me now

All the birds in all the world come here to make their nest

All the birds in all the world come here to make their nest

Quails and turtledoves and pretty partridges too’

On the great royal highway leading to Bordeaux, a uniformed miquelet, on foot at the head of the column, was singing at the top of his lungs, bellowing the couplets of a song that the other soldiers would soon drum out with their heels behind him, as they picked up the refrain:

‘My little blonde lassie

Let me sleep beside you now

My little blonde lassie

Sleep beside me now’

This miquelet, a Sergeant Cartet by name, was a thick brutish fellow, fond of his blade. He wore his moustache as if it were the hilt of a dagger, curled back with a curling iron, and he sang, his mouth open wide on his black, crumbling teeth;