by Jean Teulé
‘’Tis all the more exasperating,’ nodded the lovely blond head, ‘that when they brought the news to me, on Rue Saint-Honoré, I was trying on my wedding gown, for next Sunday. I do not know what I shall do with it.’
‘’Twould be a great pity, were it to go to ruin…’
A street performer took a swallow of water and spat it back out in a spray of various colours and scents.
‘What I mean, that is,’ stammered the marquis, ‘it is because of the moths. ’Tis true, sometimes one puts away new garments in a chest and then later, when one unfolds them again, they are ruined, consumed by grubs and full of holes … And then one regrets one did not wear them …’
The demoiselle in her pointed high-heeled slippers contemplated the fumbling Gascon. He amused her, and was not without charm. ‘Might you be implying that you …?’
‘Well, one doesn’t fall in love only once in a lifetime.’
A pâtissier stood in his doorway, proudly adjusting his appearance: a ribbon for a cravat, a beret with a large knot, and a sprig of flowers to attract the ladies. The abandoned fiancée placed her head on the marquis’s shoulder in an intimate gesture. And the marquis, an assiduous devotee of the lansquenet circles and reversi tables in the hôtels particuliers of the Marais, now thought he was playing the finest game on earth. Astonished and adrift, on a square teeming with horse carts and ecclesiastics, he scratched his periwig.
‘Is it not paradise here?’
‘Ah, no, Monsieur, in paradise there wouldn’t be so many bishops!’
They burst out laughing. For his part, the marquis was certain that an angel had blessed him, and he raised his eyes to heaven.
The vaults of the church of Saint-Sulpice, forming a lofty sky of stone, resounded with laughter. After the reading of the Gospel, the blonde in the red pearl-embroidered dress had knelt before the altar alongside the marquis in lavender grey, then exploded with laughter, murmuring in his ear, ‘You know what we’re kneeling on, you know how we forgot the embroidered silk cushions and had them sent for from Rue des Rosiers, at the Hôtel Mortemart …’
‘Yes?’ asked the young Gascon.
‘The servant made a mistake. She brought the dogs’ cushions.’
‘No!’
They laughed and dusted off the dog hairs like mischievous little children dressed up in garments of embroidered silk. Their guests were seated behind them at the heart of the vast church, which was still under construction. The Gascon, in a fine light-coloured horsehair wig, radiated happiness. His bride, graceful and glowing in the gentle brilliance of her twenty-two years, was still full of the candour of childhood.
Near the entrance to the church, sitting on a prie-dieu, a chubby-cheeked duc with protuberant green eyes and a small, full-lipped mouth exclaimed ecstatically to his neighbour, ‘My daughter is extremely amusing! One is never bored when she is present. Do you see that obese boy in the first row? That is my eldest, Vivonne. The other day, when I was reproaching my daughter for not taking enough exercise, she replied, “How can you say that? Not a day goes by that I do not walk four times round my brother!”’
The man to whom he was speaking, an elderly man with a great hooked nose that seemed to take up his entire face, enquired, ‘Is that your wife next to your son? She seems most exceedingly pious …’
‘Oh, indeed,’ said the husband, ‘where adultery is concerned, I believe I am safe before mankind, but before God, I surely wear my horns!’
‘Look at my wife, then: she prefers to live away from me, the great Chrestienne de Zamet there on the right – she’s the same,’ grumbled the man with the hooked nose. ‘She knows perfectly how to season a mother’s tenderness with that of a bride of Jesus Christ! Ha-ha-ha!’
The two fathers of the wedded couple guffawed; they were witty and cheerfully debauched. Someone in front of them turned round with a frown, then whispered to his neighbour, ‘Those two have found perfect company in each other …’
And the young couple had found perfect company, too, now married only eight days after meeting. They pledged their troth on a wintry Sunday before the priest and four trusty witnesses. The cleric inscribed the date – 28 January 1663 – in the parish register, then the names of the turtledoves, proclaiming them out loud: ‘Françoise de Rochechouart de Mortemart, also known as Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente, and …’
The voluptuous blonde Françoise took up the goose quill as it was handed to her and, as the priest pronounced the name of her spouse – ‘Louis-Henri de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Marquis de …’ – for the first time she signed her new name:
2.
An apple-green gilded carriage arrived at Rue Saint-Benoît, its doors adorned with the coat of arms of the Marquis de Montespan. The vehicle rattled along the rutted street, its body supported by thick leather straps on a four-wheel axle.
Dustmen, collecting the city’s waste that would be tipped from their carts into the Seine, blocked the vehicle’s progress. Through their windows, Françoise and Louis-Henri contemplated the world outside. The quartier teemed with life, full of craftsmen with their displays and workshops and noise. The dustmen’s rags were hardly different from those of the beggars they passed. Françoise told Louis-Henri, ‘When I was a little girl, one holy-day my mother wanted me to wash the feet of the poor outside a church. I went up to the first pauper and could not bring myself to bend down. I stepped back, in tears. Poverty was there before me, inescapable, and it filled the child I was with revulsion. I did not wash the feet of the poor.’
Suddenly the way was clear, the carriage moved on and turned into Rue Taranne, stopping almost immediately on the left beneath a wooden sign depicting a wig. Louis-Henri climbed down from the carriage, saying, ‘The misfortunes of the people are the will of God, and do not warrant that we should waste our feelings upon them.’
He went round the vehicle to open the door for Françoise. ‘All my feelings are for you.’
He gazed on her admiringly and bit his lip.
‘I do feel I love you more than anyone on earth is wont to love, but I only know how to tell you so in the way that everyone on earth would tell you. I despair that all declarations of love so resemble one another.’
The marquise, lovely in her flowered hat, stepped down, reaching for the hand he was holding out to her.
‘That’s sweet …’ But then she began to poke fun, mincing and simpering in exaggerated fashion. ‘It is the greatest honour to be shown such admiration! Oh, I do love such heady stuff; I do love to be loved!’
Louis-Henri adored the way she used jest to hide emotion. While the carriage was manoeuvring – the coachman gripping the mare’s bit – to pull in beneath the roof of the stables beyond the well in the courtyard, Françoise went through the wigmaker’s door and exclaimed, ‘Monsieur Joseph Abraham, our de-lightful landlord! We have mislaid our key yet again. May we come through the shop?’
‘Ten o’clock in the morning and ’tis only now that you two are coming home? Did you spend the night in the Marais again, playing bassette and bagatelle! I hope you won a few écus withal, this time.’
‘Nay, we lost everything!’
Louis-Henri came into the shop. It was a clean place, all of beige and ochre, where long bunches of hair hung from the ceiling, almost touching the floor. A ‘red-heel’, his shaved crown covered with lard to avoid irritation and parasites, stood waiting for the periwig that an employee had nearly finished curling. An ecclesiastic stepped back to admire his platinum-blond tonsured wig in a mirror he was holding. Next to him, jovial and good-natured, Joseph Abraham saw his wife turn to Françoise and say, ‘But ’tis open, my dear! The cook, Madame Larivière, has been waiting with your new servant to serve dinner since yesterday evening. I do believe she prepared a squab bisque and minced capon.’
‘Ah, I know she did, but one card game led to another … We thought we might win back our losses, but … We’ll go through the door at the back of the shop, shall we, Madame Abraham? Farewell, gentlemen! We�
��re off to bed!’
Six apprentices on the wigmaker’s mezzanine, leaning over the railing, admired the departure of Françoise’s deep décolletage from above. They were rooted to the spot. The wigmaker clapped his hands: ‘Now then!’
Françoise’s bodice gaped open, possibly accidentally, then she entered the dark stairwell. Louis-Henri smiled. ‘As lovely as the day, with a devilish-fine spirit!’
Her proud rounded breasts gave off the only true perfume: her very own scent. Louis-Henri extended a hand towards the radiant bosom.
‘Oh, my! Take heed, Monsieur!’ The marquise pretended to be offended. ‘Do not forget it is scarcely two years since I left the convent.’
‘And so?’
‘Let me see, first of all, what your face is like: your chin is too long, your nose is too big, your eyelids droop, you have freckles. Taken separately, all of that is hardly handsome, but all together rather pleasing. All right. You may go up …’
Her moiré skirt flowed like a tide over the first steps of the stairway. Louis-Henri, standing by the copper ball of the newel post, played the sulking husband.
‘I’m not sure now … With a wife who is from the noblesse de robe, I don’t know … I could have found many others who would have better suited my position, in the matter of the dowry, for I am from the old nobility! Montespan … my noble family goes back to the Crusades, to the battles between the Comtes de Bigorre and the Comtes de Foix, or against Simon de Monfort! Whereas a Mortemart … a mistress made for moonlight, a woman of secret trysts and borrowed beds … Yes, really I hesitate …’
‘You’re right,’ laughed Françoise. ‘To marry for love means to marry disadvantageously, carried away by a blind passion. Let us speak of it no more,’ she concluded, climbing a few more steps with an exaggerated sway of her hips.
The marquis’s pupils dilated at the thought of the beauty of her body beneath the silk of her deep-pleated dress. Like a horse, he began to breathe through his nose whilst the fair woman began a recital of her attractions.
‘Do you know that I am wearing three petticoats? Observe the first one, this pale-blue thing, it is known as the modesty,’ she said, lightly lifting the back of her dress to reveal a skirt that she then raised in turn. ‘The second, dark blue, is called the saucy…’
Louis-Henri would have liked to seize his wife round the waist but she slipped through his fingers. Her flexibility, her agility, were admirable. The newlyweds’ apartments had been divided up vertically over three storeys – a nonsensical distribution due to the narrow plots allotted in Paris, which obliged the inhabitants to build upwards. Such comings and goings in the stairway! The firewood stored in the cellar had to be carried up, as had the water, in buckets drawn from the well in the courtyard. The marquis was suddenly lustful, and ogled his wife, roaring comically and rolling his eyes.
‘I have done all I can not to offend God and not to succumb to my passion,’ he explained, climbing a few steps. ‘But I am forced to confess that it has become stronger than my reason. I can no longer resist its violence, and I do not even feel inclined to do so … Raah!’
‘Help!’ Madame de Montespan fled up the stairs, pursued by her husband who galloped after her traitorous petticoats, which she raised too high, offering the tempting vision of the fruit. All her petticoats were very light indeed and lifted at the slightest breeze, wafting a perfume of tuberose and waxed wood inside the dark stairwell.
On the first floor, to the left, a door opened onto a salon modestly furnished with folding seats made of webbing and heavy canvas, a mirror from Venice and a gaming table with several drawers. On a green-painted wall hung a framed tapestry from Rouen, mere cotton threads now, but representing the story of Moses. Louis-Henri chased after Françoise in a clattering of steps. There was a bulge in the front of his grey satin breeches. The marquise turned round, saw it and cried, ‘Dear Lord!’
On the second floor was the kitchen with a brick oven, cast-iron spits and frying pans, pitchers, pots and stone-ware terrines. Food was stored inside boxes covered in wire netting to protect it from mice and flies. Salt meat hung from the ceiling above Madame Larivière and the new servant. Sitting side by side on a little bench, they were eating soup from earthenware bowls on their laps using wooden spoons. They watched as their masters scurried by, but their masters did not notice them, so intent were they on their celebration of the senses.
‘As for the third petticoat,’ said Françoise with a peal of laughter, ‘it is the secret. Mine is sea blue!’
Her dress and petticoats were now over her head revealing that, like all the women of her era, she wore no undergarments. Louis-Henri hurried behind her naked rump, bathed in the light from the window in the stairway as it turned right towards the servants’ garret beneath the roof, but then the naked rump veered to the left, into a room boasting an enormous bed. Its four twisting columns supported loosely tied curtains of green and red serge. The two bodies flung themselves on top of one another on the mattress, jostling the frame, whilst the curtains swayed open beneath the canopy then closed again, a barrier against the cold but also a shield for their conjugal intimacy.
‘What is this finger that has no nail?’
That was what was heard by the new servant, a girl of eight, for the Montespans had not closed the door to their room. In the kitchen, standing by Madame Larivière, she looked at the ceiling as she heard the legs of a bed creaking, which annoyed the cook: ‘Ah, the marquise is a flame all too easy to ignite. I like to call her “the Cascade”, for she has a voracious appetite for pleasure. She knows how to make love and burn the besom.’
For ’twas true that above their heads the masters were all a-tangle. Françoise breathed happiness from a time of fairy-tales, into her husband’s mouth, indulging the ever-delightful little gestures that titillated, the hundred thousand little moves that preceded the conclusion. Words and discourse complemented her actions.
‘Ah … Mmm … Oh!’
On the floor below, Madame Larivière – frizzy black hair, olive complexion and spindly legs, not exactly kin with Venus – emptied the ashes from the stove into a jug she handed to the servant child.
‘Here, Dorothée, rather than listen to them at their game of tousing and mousing, go and sell this ash to the launderer at the end of the street. You may keep the money for yourself, and save it to buy yourself a blanket, for the servants’ rooms are never heated. And then, so as not to come back empty-handed, take this bucket and fill it at the well in the courtyard. The water fountain is nearly empty,’ she said, tapping her nails against a hollow-sounding copper basin with a lid and a spigot.
Dorothée, to her distress, discovered on the steps the large chestnut wig that the marquis had torn from his head. It lay there, a mass of curls, like a dead animal.
The lodgings, which were always dark, were not in fact a very pleasant place to live, but up there, under the sheets, the exquisite line of Françoise’s back undulated and, in the shadow of the curtains, their breathing rose, rhythmic and light. The marquise’s senses sought, everywhere, endlessly, the bliss of knowing her husband’s lip, his hand, all of him. How divine, too, Louis-Henri’s pleasure as he pushed aside his wife’s shift, and her honour. To elicit a saucy shiver, she extended her neck in a vaguely unseemly manner. And then there was a prolonged kiss. What would happen next? Gad! All reason and morality would take flight. Now for nuptials without restraint, a merriment of vice and cruelty.
3.
‘Ah, the young must do as the young will do …’
On a starry June night the Montespans’ carriage rattled to a halt at the top of a hill in the gently rolling countryside around the chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The coachman sitting on the outside seat resigned himself philosophically to the shaking: ‘I don’t know where they find the energy.’
He was jostled and shaken, by the jostling and shaking inside the carriage. The marquis was taking the marquise doggy style (more canino). Kneeling the length of the seat, with h
er cheek flat against the window in the door, Françoise could watch the avenues lit with countless torches and the slow meandering of gondolas on tranquil waters that were part of the royal celebration taking place far in the distance below them. A troupe of musicians lent graceful strains to the charm of the summer night. At each meeting of the pathways, there were symphonies and banquets offered by servants disguised as fauns, satyrs and sylvan gods. An orchestra was playing Lully’s most recent composition, whilst nymphs rose from the fountains to recite poetry. Lions, tigers and elephants were promenaded on leads.
‘How lovely …’
‘Ah, indeed, how lovely. Françoise, your bottom shames the very stars.’
It was true that the marquise’s posterior was very lovely, and all that was lacking in its gaiety was speech. It was there that Louis-Henri found the most exquisite pleasure, and now he melted into her like snow in fire: ‘Charming miracle, divine paradise for the eyes, unique masterwork of the gods!’
She turned all the way round. Now he loved her mouth and the gracious play of her lips and teeth, which sometimes nibbled his tongue and sometimes did something even better that was almost as good as being inside her. This woman, dear God, made him lose his head, whilst the rest of him luxuriated in fucking; zounds, his blood was on fire. The happy man exploded with pleasure on every side.
After that was done, and each of them had known that little death – and such a death! – Françoise was reborn amidst a new tumult, only to die again more loudly and splendidly. Sprawling on the leather horsehair seat, her curves, her you know what, all said to the marquis, ‘Come!’ And the heat rose. ‘Stay!’ And he stayed in her voracious body (the god of love required good lungs). Legs in the air and breasts bared – ‘Breasts that loved to be on display, worthy of a god,’ noted her husband – Françoise naughtily wriggled her bewitching calves.
‘Here we go again!’ sighed the coachman, once again swaying and slipping on his seat.