The Bride

by Margaret Irwin

  An elderly lady, very richly and stiffly dressed, stepped briskly out of a coach in the courtyard of Maubuisson; her step was firm and springy, her complexion fresh, her eye clear and brightly observant, her back as straight as a sergeant-major’s. She was followed by her daughter, a plump, Germanically pretty girl whose fair skin had been turned a pale olive-green from the sea-sickening swaying of the coach, but who still held herself rigidly erect under the eye of her mother, Sophia.

  A tall thin figure in the robes of a Benedictine Abbess came hurrying across that dazzling dusty courtyard to greet them, scattering the pigeons into a sudden upward rush of fluttering wings all round her. ‘And that is my sister Louey!’ thought Sophie with a shock of surprise, though she did not know what she had expected instead. Louey had always been the tallest of the sisters, and those long loose robes made her seem taller still, though they did not disguise from Sophie that she was extremely thin. ‘A religion that makes one flat as a plank, of what use is that?’ she asked herself, unconsciously inflating her own fine bosom. But Louey had always been thin; indeed it was her very likeness to her former self that astonished her sister; Louey came sweeping across the courtyard, dark against the sunlight, not at all like an Abbess nor even like an elderly woman, but like a Northern goddess or warrior maid, so proud and fearless was her swift carriage.

  It was just how she used to come down the lawns at Rhenen with her hair flying behind her; her face, too, though thin and worn, did not look old, nor austere; her eyes were shining, she was laughing as she warmly kissed them both, and talking in the old merry inconsequent way.

  ‘Now at last you have come! Sophie, you must make thirty years pass in three days – but oh, this poor child is ready to faint. A coach in this heat – what hardships you’ve undergone for my sake! Come into the cool of the cloisters and have some very cold light wine, and then you will dine and tell me all the compliments King Louis has paid you, and Monsieur too, – whose do you prefer? How pretty she is, Sophie, though she is not like you – an unsisterly remark! She is like her father – oh yes, I can remember Duke Ernest Augustus’ brown eyes and beautiful hands very well; does he still play the guitar? Corbetti’s guitar music, do you remember, Sophie, how he kept on sending it to you – that tactful fellow Corbetti to compose so much!’

  ‘My dear, you are just the same, and not nearly as much of an Abbess as Eliza, for all she is a Lutheran one.’

  ‘Ah, but we of the old faith have had more practice, so can afford to take it lightly.’

  So Louey still took things lightly. Had she always taken them lightly, even religion? What a mad schoolboy escapade of hers that had been, when she ran away from home one night, in disguise, quite alone, without money or any possessions, leaving a note on her dressing-table to say she had gone to France to become a Catholic and enter a convent. What a way to become a nun! – she might have been Rupert as a boy running away to join the army. ‘My sister has never grown up!’ Sophie had exclaimed indignantly to her husband.

  It had caused a great deal of scandal; the Hohenzollerns spread it about that Louise had fled because she was about to have a child, though no suggestion was made as to its possible father. Elizabeth had had to make a formal denial of the statements against her daughter, and did not forgive her for a long time.

  ‘Of all the daughters of Elizabeth of Bohemia, Louise is the only true Bohemian.’

  Sophie had heard that more than once, and felt self-congratulation that she did not resemble her odd, artistic, disreputable, although so surprisingly pious sister.

  They had begun to move towards the cloisters but were checked by a sudden remarkable spectacle: a coach-and-six of magnificent appearance, attended by outriders amounting almost to a bodyguard, drove at a rattling pace into the courtyard, swung smartly round the corner to a flourish of trumpets, and promptly overturned.

  Out rushed a fluttering black-and-white host of nuns to the rescue like a flock of chattering magpies, the outriders in blue and scarlet and gold leapt from their saddles and joined the throng, there were cries and exclamations, inquiries, assurances, all at the same moment. Nobody was hurt but everybody was dusty and somebody had a sore elbow, but the upset of a coach was far too frequent for anybody to think much of it.

  From the mêlée emerged a little man almost as round as he was tall, with an enormous blond wig somewhat awry at one end of him and a pair of thin scarlet heels six inches high at the other, both of which extremities gave him so top-heavy an appearance that it seemed scarcely possible he should be advancing jauntily towards the Abbess of Maubuisson, wagging that huge unwieldy head archly as he exclaimed:

  ‘Aha! So we have taken you by surprise! Now what have you got for dinner for us? I said to your sister, “You go to Maubuisson? Then you will dine well.” And then I had an inspiration. I said to my wife, your niece, and to my daughter, “Why should not we too dine well at Maubuisson?” So here we all are, to prove your Christian charity. Is it equal to the occasion?’

  ‘No, Monsieur. Only my pleasure that you should wish to visit me, and your daughter, too, when she has so few hours left in France.’

  ‘Ah, don’t talk to her of that. I tell her she will lose all her eyelashes if she cries any more before she gets to Spain. Holy Virgin, is it such bad fortune to marry the King of the greatest country in Europe,’

  ‘To do that, Monsieur, she must marry your brother King Louis, and that she cannot do, being his niece.’

  ‘True, true, France is the greatest country now, but there is an ancient prestige about Spain that appeals to me infinitely, and since Louis will not give her the Dauphin we must put up with what we can get. Come, Marie Louise, stop shaking the dust out of your skirts and for heaven’s sake let us get into the cool of the cloisters!’

  They went towards the shade, a stiffly moving group, as richly and almost as cumbrously harnessed as their horses: Monsieur, brother of Louis XIV of France; his second wife, the plain, squat, remarkably intelligent daughter of Carl the Elector Palatine, known as Liselotte to her aunts Louise and Sophia. She had succeeded to this high position as Madame of France after the death ten years before, some said by poison, of Monsieur’s first wife, Henriette of England, whom her brother King Charles II and all her intimates had called Minette.

  The young girl in her teens now walking beside her father, the Princess Marie Louise, was Minette’s eldest daughter, and so like her in her graceful fleeting movements and delicate charm that Louise, who had first met Minette as a shy child in the convent of Chaillor, could scarcely believe that it was Minette’s daughter and not herself who came out of that dazzle of light into the cloisters beside her and slipped her hand into hers and whispered, ‘Oh my darling Mother Louise, how can I live if I must leave home and all who love me?’

  Yet, like Minette, she brightened instantly as soon as they were all talking together, and amused the company with her childish extravagance, telling Sophia’s rather stodgily good- looking daughter that she wished she were a young man that she could marry her, ‘And then,’ she added with a sudden sigh, ‘I could stay in France.’

  She had been brought up to believe that she would marry King Louis’ eldest son and become Queen of France, but now she was to be sacrificed to Louis’ pretended hopes of peace with Spain and to marry the almost imbecile young king of that country, whom she had never met.

  Monsieur her father had been enchanted with that former prospect, but was now equally so with this one; wedding ceremonies, presents, the necessity of planning a quantity of new dresses and resetting all their jewels, delighted him in itself. He had chosen and designed Sophia’s dresses too, and reset her jewels, although he had never seen her before, but, as he told her with engaging frankness, he did not wish to be ashamed of anyone he was to introduce at Court.

  In return she had admired all his clothes, the coat embroidered with diamonds to wear at his daughter’s wedding, and even the nightcap tied with flame-coloured ribbons in which she had caught him unawares so th
at at first he had been put out and turned his head from side to side to avoid her glances, until her tactful bonhomie had put him quite at his ease. She had made a bow for his hat and trimmed it herself, and they had settled down happily to being dress-designers together.

  It was all just the same in that ménage, so Sophia found an opportunity to whisper to Louise while the company were arranging their toilette before dinner. Monsieur’s adored friend, the Chevalier de Lorraine, who had been banished from France before Minette’s death, was now all-powerful again at Monsieur’s Court, and Sophia herself had had to embrace him on both cheeks as though he were a Prince of the Blood Royal. Her niece Liselotte went in terror of her life from him and his associates. The first Madame was believed to have been done to death by their jealous plotting – might not the second be also?

  Liselotte had seen Minette’s ghost in the corridors of their palace at Saint-Cloud, and once, when strolling in the gardens at evening, she had noticed a slight figure sitting in what had been Minette’s favourite seat at the foot of the great cascade of gleaming water that she used to call her ‘stairway into heaven’; but as Liselotte approached, it vanished.

  Sophia told this fancied experience of her niece’s to Louise, lightly and mockingly as befitted the pupil of such materialistic philosophers as Descartes and Leibniz. But her sister, she observed, had acquired the superstition inseparable from the old faith.

  ‘It is not surprising,’ Louey said, ‘that the spirit of Minette should remain. She belongs to eternity rather than to time. And her little daughter here, Marie Louise, whom they estranged from her in her lifetime, must feel it though she does not know it. She is closer to her mother now than when she was alive.’

  ‘My dear, I have no doubt you are speaking good religion, but it is not good sense. In any case, it is my darling niece Liselotte that I am concerned for, and not for “Minette”, as you call her, who has been in the grave these ten years. Yet you know one must be philosophic in all things, and if Liselotte were happy in her marriage she would not write me those long delightful letters.’

  Personally Sophia could not help rather liking Monsieur, he was so gay and officiously friendly to her; he had been shocked at a present of some bad diamonds and very poor pearls that King Louis had sent to her (‘Indeed it was a bad testimony to King Louis’ famous magnificence!’ Sophia told her sister with a prodigious sniff) and insisted on his brother substituting some better jewels.

  She described Marie Louise’s wedding ceremonies with enormous gusto; all King Louis’ bastards by Mesdames de la Vallière and de Montespan had attended at them. ‘La Grande Mademoiselle’ had looked most imposing, but the Prince de Conti positively common, although his cloak was covered with diamonds. King Louis had sworn on the Bible an ‘inviolable peace’ with Spain, which everybody knew was bound to be broken in a few years. His Queen Marie Therese cared only for eating and dressing, and had expected Sophia to kiss the hem of her robe and to sit on a mere stool in her presence instead of an armchair, such as the Empress had offered her, but Sophia had avoided both these indignities. She had seen Moliere’s players at the Comedie Franchise, but was far too busy looking at the audience of the Royal Family and Court to pay any attention to the actors.

  ‘Yes, it has all been quite entertaining, but best of all,’ she ended somewhat surprisingly, ‘is to be here and free to laugh with you at the folly of the world and all the trouble it takes over such nonsense.’

  Monsieur had been right. Visitors dined well at Maubuisson. The wine was excellent, the fruit had been picked at exactly the right moment, that stuffed carp was as fresh as if it had been caught this afternoon – which it had, though Louise did not mention it. She herself ate and drank practically nothing, but was so eager both in talking and listening that her abstinence passed unnoticed. There was nothing to suggest the ascetic in her.

  The gorgeous company dined apart in the gallery overlooking the great hall of the refectory where all the nuns sat in rows at their long tables, – ‘Nice simple country girls,’ Louise called them, ‘I won’t trouble you with their company, it is not amusing, though I like it a deal better than that of the fashionable young women I had to put up with when I was first Abbess here.’

  Sophia had heard something about that: at the French Court: Maubuisson had had a bad reputation before Louise had been appointed Abbess; its nearness to Paris had made it a convenient cloak both for lovers’ rendezvous and for women who as a result of them found it necessary to retire from the world for a time. But now that was all changed. The Bishop of Condom, Monsieur de Bossuet, who often visited the convent, had declared it to be a centre of genuine and simple piety, rare indeed in this increasingly sophisticated and atheistical age.

  Had it not been for this affidavit from so famous a Prince of the Church, Sophia would have been shocked by the worldly tone of her sister’s reference to her community, as of her hospitality. The latter proved too much for Sophia’s daughter, Charlotte (who accepted far too much of it); she said it was the stuffy coach again and not the stuffed carp. She had to be commanded quite sharply by her mother to come out into the courtyard and wave farewell to the royal visitors as they whirled off again in their coach, this time fortunately with no upset.

  Off went that bustle of glory and pettiness and inhumanity, – ‘bad diamonds and very poor pearls’ – ’she will lose all her eyelashes if she cries any more’ – ‘a stool instead of an armchair’ – echoes of that: rout were ringing in Louise’s ears in topsy-turvy travesty of all the values of life, as though its participants were wearing masks and cardboard heads not their own.

  She tinned to her sister and said, ‘Shall I show you the woods?’

  Charlotte preferred to rest again in the cloisters where she could hear the cool voices of the nuns practising their chants in the chapel, while her mother and aunt walked out into the woods and down towards the river.

  The straight paths under that high green shade were like the aisles of some vast cathedral; the level rays of the evening sun, the rich jewelled light of late August, slanted through the tree- trunks as if through windows of stained glass, and dappled the ground at their feet in patches of deep gold.

  ‘Maubuisson used to mean “the Accursed Wood”,’ said Louise; ‘there were robbers here and the marshland bred fever, but now all that remains of that are those reeds and bulrushes in the fields and these evening primroses that are just beginning to come out now it is cooler.’

  They grew everywhere, tall ragged plants whose faded-looking blossoms were opening almost as they watched into cups of pale gold, – ’sheer weeds, and very obstinate’, said Sophia, who was a great gardener, but she admitted they looked well enough in these woods.

  They came to a seat at the edge of the trees; the ground sloped away to the endless convent wall that surrounded all the estate, a wall of rough stones roofed with red brick, grown all over with a pattern of green vines neatly trained on strings – an enormous and admirable labour, as Sophia observed. Below them lay the river, a long grey snake with an oily glitter on its scales from this late sunlight, and a hazy blue line of wooded hills on the far side following its curves. Barges were passing up and down stream with loads of hay and vegetables for Paris. There were fields on the opposite shore, red-gold with uncut corn, parched white where the harvest had been made. From among them the walls and church steeples and towers of the little town of Pontoise rose in sharp grey silhouette on the opposite bank, and over the wooden bridge that crossed the river to it went country carts drawn by oxen, and men on horseback whose harness flashed back the sunlight in sudden sparks.

  They sat on the seat, still in the shade; the crickets chirped incessantly; the faint evening breeze stirred the long sun-bleached grasses at their feet with a dry rustling sound, for they were covered with tiny pointed white snails like minute fossilized fir cones which tapped against each other as the stalks waved together, clicking, clicking in an unending dance of elfin castanets.

  ‘You do v
ery well here,’ Sophia said. ‘How I wish I could join you! I am far better suited to a convent than a Court. My poor Charlotte and I have been completely worn out by these last days at Fontainebleau – we were abominably lodged, two tiny rooms for us both with our attendants, and who do you think has the best lodging in the Palace? King Louis’ Queen, Marie Thérèse? Certainly not, but King Louis’ mistress, Madame de Montespan. And the noise, the heat, the crowds crushing one to death, the endless occasions for ceremony lasting from morning till midnight!’

  ‘Did you go to them all?’

  ‘Naturally, I was not going to miss anything that might gratify my curiosity. Besides, I owe it to Charlotte. King Louis took great notice of her, and indeed she is really beautiful don’t you think? I had some hopes in bringing her here on this visit that the Dauphin might wish to marry her, but I see very little chance of it, he is the most stupid young man I ever met, can say nothing but “Yes” or “No”, if that, and still has his tutor to sleep in the same room with him. To tell the truth, I believe he is half-witted.’

  ‘In any case, Charlotte would have to change her religion to marry him, and would you approve of that?’

  ‘Oh, for that, my sons are all staunchly Protestant of course, but for my daughter it would be time enough to decide her religion when one knows whom she is going to marry.’

  ‘Dear Sophie, you have not changed either, not one bit.’

  ‘You think so really? The German women grow old so quickly, but I am always careful to walk for two hours every day in the gardens, and our English visitors tell me I am as young as ever and completely English still in every way. I wish I could say as much for my son George. He has just returned from a visit to England, but as Germanic as ever, and the visit does not seem to have been a success; Rupert took no trouble over his own nephew, and when George went to visit him at Windsor, Rupert said he was ill and would not see him.’