by Rose Tremain
‘Monsieur!’ I cried, reaching yet again for my Letter, and holding it out to him, ‘I am counting upon you to help me.’
‘Who are you?’ said the man, extricating himself deftly from my hold upon his arm.
I told him my name as calmly as I could, styling myself Chevalier Robert Merivel in the case that ‘Sir’ had no meaning for him, and drew his attention to the Great Seal on the Letter, which, to my vast consternation, he immediately broke.
‘Ah, non!’ I cried out. ‘Non, Monsieur! That Letter is intended for the King alone!’
The Surintendent paid no heed whatever to my distress, but only brought the Letter close to his face in order to read it. The Letter is brief, but his reading of it seemed to take him many long minutes. The he looked up and regarded me with a disbelieving air. ‘A Doctor?’ he said. ‘You are a Doctor?’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and it has been my good fortune to be of service to my most Beloved Majesty, King Charles. Thus, he recommends me for some service here …’
‘You do not appear like a Doctor.’
‘Nevertheless, that is what I am. I have held this profession for many years. I trained in Anatomy at Cambridge …’
At that moment a distant bell chimed the hour of five o’clock and the Surintendent hastily thrust my Letter back into my hands, with no apology for having broken its seal, and made as if to depart. But I reached out and again held fast to his arm. ‘Please, Monsieur,’ I said, ‘I beg of you, tell me where I am to lodge. My journey has been a long one and I am very tired.’
‘I am sorry,’ said the Surintendent, ‘but I must leave you, Sir. I am needed elsewhere. Indeed, I am already late, as I know by the five o’clock bell. As to logements, you will have to take your chance on the upper floors. Versailles is very crowded at the moment, as you can see. Your best chance is to offer to pay money to someone willing to share some little corner with you.’
‘What? What do you mean, “some little corner”?’
The man shrugged his thin shoulders. ‘It’s the best you will come by,’ he said. ‘Here, even a Marquis must sometimes sleep in a passageway.’
It is night now.
I am lying on a tilting cot in a cold upper room. A screen made of linen gives me a little privacy, but the rest of the room is occupied by a Dutch Clockmaker, to whom I have given three English shillings to share his room and his pisspot. He lies in a narrow bed, snoring like a hog.
I have opened my Valises – found at last where I had left them – so far as to procure a nightshirt and a nightcap, which I have put on, but there is nowhere to hang my clothes or set out my few possessions, but only this Portion of space in a very small room under the leads of the Grand Commun.
I fall into a shifting kind of sleep and am awoken almost immediately, or so it seems to me, by the gnawing hunger in my belly, which has passed from a State of Longing to a State of Agony so fierce as to make me cry out. And I think, on the sudden, that this is the kind of hunger Will Gates would suffer, were I to cast him out of Bidnold and I know that – at all or any cost to myself – I must never do this. And I swear that I will not.
My mind returns once more to the kitchens down beneath me. The Clockmaker has informed me that the food prepared there goes all to the Grands Appartements, where the King and his entourage consume it in great quantities. Nobody, I am told, who inhabits the Grand Commun is ever fed, for the reason that the King believes the expense of this to be too great.
‘How are we to survive?’ I ask.
For answer, the Dutchman (whose skin is very pink and healthy but whose jaw appears occupied perpetually by the grinding of his Lower Molars upon the Upper) opens a wooden box he has brought with him and shows me what it contains, which is a quantity of pots of Jam and bags of Oatmeal. On this, he tells me, he lives. He drinks water from the garden fountains. For ten successive days he has attempted to procure an audience with Madame de Maintenon, the King’s Mistress and Confidante, for that he is a distant cousin of her dead husband, the poet Scarron, and she, allegedly, a great admirer of Dutch Clocks, but so far she has not been ‘at leisure’ to see him.
‘I will try again tomorrow,’ he says. ‘And the day after that.’
I have no Jam or Oatmeal and I really cannot steal from the Dutchman. But added to my hunger, now, is a terrible thirst and I know that I cannot lie here a moment longer. I must attempt to find some sustenance and some water.
I take off my nightcap and put on my wig. I tug on my stained breeches and my dusty coat and my shoes, much worn down by trying to hold my feet on the ground in the jolting and tilting coach.
Taking a Tallow candle, I go out into the passage, which is blocked, here and there, by men asleep on pallets of straw, such as those upon which the mad people used to rest at Whittlesea. I step over these and, by long searching and some wrong turnings, find myself once again on the ground floor opposite the door to the kitchens.
I turn the handle. A delicious odour of roasted meat still lingers here and I feel sure that, within moments, I will have procured some cold limb of rabbit to plug the pain in my stomach. But the kitchen door is locked.
I sit down where I am, in the cold stone passage. I rub my eyes. I reflect that only at Whittlesea did I ever feel a comparable hunger and, even there, it was usually possible to procure a bowl of gruel or Frumenty on which to make a poor feast.
Thoughts of Whittlesea bring to my mind images of my dead friend. Though, from childhood, I was always greedy, Pearce lived his short life on so little food that I often wondered how his flesh held itself to his bones. I once asked him, indeed, in a mocking vein, how it did so and he replied simply: ‘Do not be so stupid, Merivel.’
As ever, this Memory of Pearce calms me a little and I whisper to him: ‘What am I to do, Pearce? Surely, I shall be dead by morning …’
I hear in my mind his croaking laugh. He frequently scolded me for being a Great Exaggerator and for pretending my lot to be always and ever worse than it was. Now, I imagine him saying: ‘Consider the people at the outer gate, Merivel. Consider the man who fell from his Stilts as your coach came rampaging in. For perhaps he broke his arm or his collar bone, and who is to give him help and where is he to lay his head? You have a room and a cot, but where will he sleep tonight but out on the cold earth?’
And then I see that this thought has done me a great Favour. For I remember that, among this gathering of the poor, were sellers of bread and Peas bottled in Brine. And I tell myself that perhaps, even though it is the dead of night, they are still there and can be roused from sleep to sell me some meagre victuals.
But the great Expanse that is the Place des Armes lies between me and this one hope of sustenance, and the thought of traversing this in the cold and dark, only to find that the Hawkers have all vanished away, fills me with misery. ‘I am wretched,’ say I to myself, ‘and I will have to stay this way till morning, and that is that.’
Unexpectedly, however, as though urged on by the ghost of Pearce, I rise up and go out. Lines of Swiss Guards, motionless in the moonlight, with their serried shadows falling upon the flints of the Place, like fallen statues, endure their freezing Watch. And I wonder, as I make my shivering way towards the gate, how much of life is endurance and nothing more. And I think of Margaret in Cornwall and pray that she is asleep in a warm bed.
At the gate, all is deserted and silent. I take hold of the railings and peer out, wondering if there is somebody asleep on the ground that I cannot see. I call softly and jingle the few coins I have found in my coat pocket. But nothing stirs.
I am about to turn and make my way back to my cot – if, indeed, I am able to locate the room where it is – when I hear the rattle of wheels and the snort of a horse. I wait and watch. At length appears a slow cart, pulled by a big mare and I see two huddled female figures, wrapped in shawls, riding in the cart.
And then I recognise what this is, the heavy conveyance that comes long before dawn to the Palace gates: it is a Milk Cart.
&
nbsp; Never did I imagine that Milk could become such a thing of Beauty and Wonder to me. I pay for a brimming tankard from the hands of the Milkmaids. The milk is creamy and fresh, cooled by the night air, and I drink it down with all the joy and satisfaction of a baby suckling from its mother’s breast. Then, I buy a second tankard and gulp this too, and the Milkmaids in their woollen cloaks stare at me and smile.
6
I HAVE ARRANGED my portion of the Dutchman’s room sufficiently well, by moving my cot six inches to the left, so that some of my clothes can be hung on makeshift wooden pegs and my boots laid out to air.
I live on Peas in Brine, bread and milk, got from the poor Tradesmen at the gate and, like the Dutchman, whose name is Jan Hollers, drink water from the fountains. Hollers has generously loaned to me a wooden plate and spoon, and we sit side by side on Hollers’s bed, spooning Peas and Oatmeal into our ravening mouths.
And I reflect that, in the middle of the richest Court in the world (and despite a Letter from the King of England in my possession) I am living like a Pauper, which paradox both weighs me down and makes me laugh. And I try to hold to this laughter, as a weapon against melancholy. For I do not see any imminent chance of my fortunes being turned round and the thought of returning to Norfolk with a terrible burden of Failure upon me feels somewhat difficult to contemplate.
I have been advised by Hollers as to the Only Means of presenting my Letter to King Louis. It seems there are but three:
I am to seek out, if I can, one Monsieur Bontemps, who is the King’s chief Valet de Chambre. ‘If,’ says Hollers, ‘you have the Ear of Bontemps, then you will get the Ear of the King.’ But though I have been told what Bontemps looks like and that he stands out in the crush of people surrounding the Monarch because that his wig is small and fluffy, I have never yet managed to set my eyes definitively upon him.
At eight in the morning, when the King leaves his Appartements to attend Mass in the Chapel, I am to contrive to position myself in the corner of the Salle des Gardes nearest to the Appartements doors. For here, King Louis is in the habit of pausing and, from among the press of Courtiers, receiving one or two Petitions.
‘I have heard,’ says Hollers, ‘that he is gracious. And whatsoever thing he promises, this will he do, or cause to be done.’
I told Hollers I would attempt this and he ground his molars in approval. However, on the first morning that I was due to do so I overslept. And on subsequent mornings, after endeavouring to brush my wig and shake the creases from my Best Coat and shine with spit the Buckles of my shoes and hasten to the Salle des Gardes, all before the striking of the Eight o’clock bell, what did I find already there but a vast crush of People, all pressed like animals in a cage into the corner and pushing vilely at each other the moment the doors opened and the King stepped forth. He then walked on, without glancing in my direction.
I was, however, able to observe him at last. He is not as tall nor as handsome as my Master, King Charles. Yet his bearing has great dignity and he holds himself straight and composed, as though about to begin upon a formal Gavotte. His nose is very long.
Near to Dinner Time, which is to say at about eleven-thirty in the morning, King Louis very often (but not invariably) likes to walk up and down in the Galerie des Glaces, one of the most sumptuous rooms at Versailles, having within it seventeen windows and more than one hundred Mirrors. Here, it seems, he may sometimes be approached. So, in due time, I will try this. Yet it seems that, for the moment, I lack the courage. For if I were to be rebuffed here, this rejection would be a most public and horrible thing, and I would have no alternative but to pack my Valises and take the road back to Dieppe.
Many days have now passed. I myself have made no Progress in my attempts to catch the attention of King Louis, but I am happy to relate that today Madame de Maintenon sent for Mr Hollers.
Hollers dressed himself in his best Cambric coat and, in his hands, held tenderly like a child, wrapped in a cloth of baize, was the small but very beautiful clock he had brought out from Holland as a Sampling of his work.
I asked him if I might examine this object before he left on his Great Errand. I am no connoisseur of clocks, but I could nevertheless judge that the Facework was extremely delicate and the Brass Pointers fabricated with great simplicity and beauty. Yet I could not prevent images of Hollers, snoring on his bed, gobbling Jam, delousing his wig, grinding his teeth and farting and shitting into our shared pisspot, from coming into my mind and obliterating the lovely symmetry of the clock.
And I reflected upon how one should strive to avoid judging a man’s sensibility by his daily habits, or the state of his clothes. To atone for my grosser thoughts I said to Hollers: ‘I do not understand, my good Friend, why, with work of this quality, you had any need to come into France. Do not your Countrymen command sufficient clocks from you already?’
Hollers began to wrap the Timepiece once more in the baize, folding it over and over countless times. ‘It is perhaps,’ he said, ‘the Curse of our Age, but to get a little Name in Holland has not felt sufficient to me. I seem to live to desire more. If Madame de Maintenon will be my Patron, then I will move my Enterprise to Paris and I will become famous.’
I wished him well and he went off, and my heart began suddenly to be afraid for him. To endure a life of Jam and Oatmeal for so long and then, at the end of it, to come away with nothing did strike me as a lamentable thing and I found myself praying that this would not happen.
In my mind I followed Hollers as he made his anxious way to Madame de Maintenon’s Rooms. I had caught sight of her only once: a stout woman of mature years, of no particular beauty, dressed all in black Velvet. But Reputation told me that she was extremely clever and full of Wit, and it was these things that held the King to her. Nothing indicated to me whether or not she might be moved by a delicate Dutch clock.
I sat down on Hollers’s bed, where I could still see the impress of his body. I tried to imagine his dreams become reality: the sign above his Premises in Paris, situated near the Seine, with the light from the river flickering in upon the shining brass of innumerable Pointers and Pendulums.
And as the seconds and minutes moved on, I pondered Man’s efforts at the representation or ‘capture’ of Time, and I thought how, for Clockmakers like Hollers, the very Commodity with which they were trying to work was a heartless and capricious Enemy, who stole from them all the while and never rested.
When Hollers returned it was almost dark in our little room. He came in, and sat down upon my cot and rubbed his eyes.
‘Well, Hollers?’ said I, rising up, ‘how did it unfold? Did Madame take the Clock to her bosom? Is your future assured?’
Hollers let escape a long sigh and reached for the box that contained the Oatmeal and the Jam. He began spooning jam into his mouth, shaking his head as he did so. ‘I do not know if I shall survive, Merivel,’ he said at length.
‘What d’you mean?’ said I.
‘Look at this Jam. It is running low.’
‘That is my fault. I have eaten too much of it.’
‘No, no. You have shared your Peas with me. But how long can either of us survive?’
‘So Madame de Maintenon did not admire the Clock?’
‘She said she considered the Facework of the Clock “very pretty”. But she insisted that she judged nothing on earth by its Face and that I should wait out a period of Time (she did not say how long) during which she would see whether the Workings of the Clock were accurate. She wishes the Time shown by it to deviate by no more than one minute per day, whether fast or slow, from the time told by the Great Clock of the Chapel. She said, if it did not keep “God’s Time” it was no use to her.’
‘I see,’ said I, ‘but surely I see some flaw here, my friend. For supposing your Timepiece is more accurate than the cumbersome Chapel Clock, with all its mighty Cogs and Escapements? How would she be able to ascertain this?’
‘She would not be able to ascertain it. She believes the Chapel
Clock to be the infallible Arbiter of Time and would never admit to any fault in its workings. My Clock must chime with it, or I am lost.’
We had no choice but to let yet more days go by, during which Hollers’s agitation grew into a very palpable thing, only relieved a little by our fortunate discovery, early one morning, of a Bathhouse behind the Swiss Guards’ Pavillon, into whose steaming waters we plunged our filthy and stinking bodies, and lathered and rinsed them with childlike joy.
I tried to persuade Hollers that this sudden cleanliness would signal a change in our fortunes, but the Dutchman’s anguish diminished only as long as our bath lasted and, as we came out into the cold air, he hunched himself over in an attitude of despair.
I, by contrast, chose this as my moment to dress myself in the finest Suit I had brought with me (of a flatteringly soft Taupe colour, ornamented with expensive silver Frogging) and try my luck walking up and down in the Galerie des Glaces. I gave my wig a sincere and tender brushing (as though it might have been a pet Spaniel returned from a truffling expedition in Bidnold park), pressed a little discreet Rouge into my cheeks, took my Cane and set forth.
In the Galerie des Glaces the sun was shining through every one of the seventeen windows and bouncing off the hundred mirrors, so that one had the impression of being imprisoned inside a colossal Diamond, whose brightness made my eyes drip. I attempted to walk with elegance, mimicking the long stride of King Charles (albeit with somewhat shorter legs and a fatter stomach) but only getting for myself successive mirthful glances from the other Courtiers promenading there.
Holding my stomach in, and alert at every moment for any Commotion that might herald the appearance of King Louis, I sauntered on, but in due course found my way definitively barred by a gaggle of Fops, who surrounded me and, in complex harmony with each other, began laughing at me.