by Jean Teulé
The fabulist seemed overcome, and spoke in a little voice, quavering and trembling with emotion. The courtiers exploded with exclamations of ‘Jesus and Mary, how beautiful, how true, how well put! Please continue, Master, we beg you!’ The poet, who drew a pension from His Majesty, needed no further urging:
‘Marsal did boast of taking you to war
But from the first bedazzling bolt of thunder
It lowered its bold brow as you drew near
And now surrenders ere you raise your fist.’
They all applauded frenetically with the tips of their powdered fingers. The inspired native of Château-Thierry continued:
‘Had its rebellious pride inspir’d your wrath
Had it found glory in extraordinary combat
How sweet ’twould then have been to sing its praises …
But e’en now my muse begins to dread
Too rarely might your victory banner be raised
For lack of enemies who dare resist you.’
Ah … All were on the verge of swooning with ecstasy over a short person whom Montespan could not see, other than the top of a black wig bobbing with satisfaction. It must have been the monarch himself, whom Louis-Henri had imagined to be much taller, as on his paintings. At that very instant, the artist Charles Le Brun went up to the King: ‘Sire, allow me to submit to you this cartoon for a tapestry celebrating the surrender of Marsal. You see, you are portrayed here on horseback, your head in profile, at the top of the wooded plateau overlooking the plain. The Duc de Lorraine is at your feet and begs you to accept the keys to the city of Marsal, which you can see in the distance.’
Behind the picture, cautious courtiers awaited His Majesty’s remarks, to determine whether they were to continue sighing in rapture. And when the King’s calm voice, level with their shoulders, declared, ‘Monsieur, have the Gobelins weave it,’ the ducs and princes and marquis shouted themselves hoarse. ‘Ah, how lovely, how well designed!’ Louis-Henri heard the monarch calling his playwrights, musicians and sculptors to him: ‘I entrust you with the most important thing on earth: my fame.’
Once back in Paris, his horse’s tail between its hind legs, the poor disappointed Marquis de Montespan arrived at Rue Taranne. His staff (Madame Larivière and Dorothée) were waiting on the pavement to greet their master. Françoise rushed to embrace him.
‘Louis-Henri, you are alive!’
She led him back to their home with its massive, cumbersome old furnishings. The marquis told the tale of his expedition – a bottomless pit – and said, ‘And it all stopped there. ’Twas enough for the King to show his face. So here I am again, with nothing else to tell you, nothing to show you, no medal or title, more penniless than ever. Twelve thousand livres further in debt, lent me by my father, who in turn was forced to borrow. And did I not promise you, “Athénaïs, when I return, our finances shall be on the mend …”?’
In the dark salon, in front of the tapestry depicting Moses, Dorothée was spraying perfume using a pair of bellows, filling the room with scent, whilst Françoise sought to console her husband.
‘Louis-Henri, put your hands here.’
He placed them on her belly. His eyes opened wide. ‘Athénaïs!’
‘I went to consult a soothsayer.’
‘You believe in such folk?’
‘And you do not?’
‘I believe in you alone.’
‘It will be a boy!’
5.
‘Marie-Christine, don’t lean towards your mother like that! You’ll fall out of your cradle and injure yourself.’
In the salon on the first floor, sitting face to face across a gaming table, the destitute young Montespans were playing reversi as they dined. Between each course Athénaïs dealt the cards with dexterity whilst Louis-Henri put his dried beans in as stakes and watched over their baby beside them.
‘She looks at you the way I gaze at you.’
‘It is true that she has your eyes, your rather big nose, and your lovely mouth. She’s the picture of her father…’
‘She’s always reaching out for you. Perhaps she would like you to nurse her.’
The marquise slipped a comforter shaped like a fleur-de-lis between her daughter’s lips; the baby immediately spat it out, and Athénaïs called out towards the stairwell, ‘Madame Larivière! Chew up some porridge for Marie-Christine – she’s hungry!’
Her husband was astonished. ‘She no longer feeds at the breast? You want to wean her so young? Is she not too small? She is not yet—’
‘It all depends on the child,’ said la Montespan, looking at her playing cards. ‘They are all different. The King, for example, nibbled his ladies heartily from infancy, for he was born, most exceptionally, with a full set of teeth. The first women he caused to suffer were his wet nurses, bruising their breasts and wounding their nipples – he had the appetite of a lion cub.’
‘How do you know that?’ asked Louis-Henri, raising his wager by three pretend écus (three dried beans).
Wedged into a candlestick on the table, a mutton-suet candle began to smoke. The flame flickered over Athénaïs’s face, glowing on her hands as she reached out to lay down her cards. ‘Lost again. Your écu-beans are for me.’
The cook, Madame Larivière, came into the dark salon. She was wearing a bonnet with flaps and holding a bowl into which she spat what she had chewed up. She rolled tiny nuggets between her thumb and index finger and slipped them between the infant’s lips, whilst the marquise told a story.
‘One day, whilst you were in Lorraine, my father and brother Vivonne and I went to see the construction of the new palace at Versailles. At the ministry of war, which has already been built, my fat brother bought a military commission for the campaign against the Barbary corsairs. They will embark from Marseilles on 13 July 1664. It will be the King’s first maritime war, but he won’t go. His cousin Beaufort will be in command.’
The dinner the loving Montespans were taking on the gaming table was a charming concoction of ground meat and stew of the sort even God did not enjoy. The wine had no name, but they were not proud. Should they not drink it, since it had been opened? Louis-Henri tilted the flat-bottomed bottle with its wicker covering. The cork had been left by the cards, a piece of wood wrapped with a weave of hemp and dipped in suet. The wine flowed into Athénaïs’s glass and she pretended that she was not eager to drink.
‘Tsk-tsk, husband! Women are advised not to drink wine, because it might inflame and excite them and cause them to lose their honour!’
Madame Larivière raised her eyes to the ceiling as she left the room, whilst Dorothée came in to rock sleepy little Marie-Christine in her cradle. From the bottom of the stairs came a sudden sharp rapping. The cook, who was accustomed to this, stopped on the landing.
‘Oh, these creditors, they come every day and now in the evening …’ grumbled Louis-Henri in a hushed voice.
The Montespans heard Joseph Abraham – wigmaker and sympathetic landlord – out in the street, declaring (probably hand on heart), ‘But I swear to you that they are not home and I do not know when they will return. What? No, that cannot be a light you see in the window on the first floor. It must be the reflection of the moon against the glass.’
Athénaïs blew out the candle. In the silence and darkness, there was an unpleasant smell of mutton-suet smoke. Fine candles of pure beeswax were rare and very costly.
‘In Versailles, they burn only wax,’ murmured the marquise.
Her husband whispered, ‘I, too, will set sail, like your brother, on board one of His Majesty’s vessels. And if the King is absent, the expedition against the pirates will not be as easy as in Marsal. Athénaïs, our fortune may lie on the other side of the ocean, in the region of Algiers … The most difficult part will be to find the eighteen thousand livres required for the equipage.’
‘I forbid you, Louis-Henri!’ said his wife angrily, in a low voice. ‘Do you hear me? I forbid you to go off and risk your life again. I’d rather die
than be three months without seeing you.’
The marquis placed his lips against hers. ‘All you need to do is go with your father to Versailles for some amusement…’
They could hear the sound of the wheels from the creditors’ carriage growing fainter down Rue Taranne, and so Marie-Christine’s mother relit the candle with an ember.
‘I met Louise de La Vallière at the new palace. You know, the King’s favourite … She found me very pretty, and has invited me to come and dance before the court in a ballet by Benserade: Hercules in Love. The performances will be held this autumn. And since he will not be in Algeria, perhaps the King will attend …’
She stood up and led her husband in a dance around the cradle. Dorothée went back up to the kitchen. The marquise whispered to her husband’s mouth, ‘’Tis in the dance that one appears as one truly is. In the eyes of the spectators, all your steps, all your gestures are telling, and display the good and bad with which art and nature have favoured or disgraced your person …’
But her tall marquis with his heavy wig was clumsy. He stepped on her toes, could not keep the rhythm she tried to impose. She laughed and flung her arms about him. Caressed him with her hands. Her fingers fluttered over his brow. He received caresses beyond those prescribed by conjugal duty, and received them also in the daytime, not a usual hour for husbands.
She had entwined her legs around the Gascon’s hips and, once he had pulled up Marie-Christine’s blanket, he carried his wife back to the landing, then upstairs to their bedroom. And the moon, in the little window of the stairway, could attest without lying that they loved each other. The marquis found his bounty in her pleas for more. Athénaïs was charming with her lover, probably her last, one supposed.
On their bed, they abandoned modesty and succumbed to their nature with delight. Over his wife’s body, whilst undressing her, he justified the war he had to wage.
‘His Majesty has decided to do battle with those Barbary corsairs. He’s planning a brilliant campaign. Apparently, insolent Turkish pirates, protected by the Ottoman Empire, are plying the Algerian coast, pillaging and sowing terror throughout the Mediterranean, which the King now claims to control. They attack the merchant ships, steal their cargos, reduce the Christians on board to slavery, and take the women for their harems.’
‘For their harems?! Aaah … So they become whores in the sun?’
The blonde voluptuous marquise, her hair loose, was now totally naked. Louis-Henri was surprised by an odd sphere dangling from a chain around her neck.
‘What is this?’
‘A cat’s eye worn against the chest improves vision.’
‘You believe overmuch in witchcraft.’
Her husband licked the tip of her breast, only to withdraw immediately, making a face. Athénaïs laughed at his surprise.
‘I have anointed my nipples with an extract of pulp of bitter-apple to force Marie-Christine to prefer another source of food.’
Le Montespan caressed la Montespan’s breasts. Her proud globes filled his hands.
‘His Majesty’s armies must capture and fortify a little Kabyle port: Gigeri. It looks just like your belly. Behind, like your breasts, the arid peaks of the Montagne Sèche descend gently in terraces to the sea.’
Beneath his fair lady’s breastbone he drew with his thumb the round outline of her floating ribs.
‘Gigeri is at the entrance to a small but deep gulf, the Anse aux Galères.’
Louis-Henri slipped between his wife’s legs then, starting with his head between her knees, moved up along her thighs.
‘We shall arrive through here. A fleet consisting of fifteen war vessels and ten transport ships carrying six thousand soldiers.’
‘Of whom many will die…’
‘If the life of a man lasted a thousand years, there would be cause for regret. But as it is so short, it matters little whether they lose it twenty years earlier or later.’
The marquis’s lips brushed against a blond curly fleece.
‘The aim will be to establish and fortify a permanent military base in this strategic region and to overcome the formidable enemies who covet it. I read all of this in last week’s Gazette.’
The marquise felt her husband’s warm breath, so close to her. He had stopped moving. She closed her eyes.
‘’Tis said that France has no more navy, or, at least, that it is in a most pitiful state.’
‘The departure will not take place before two months have passed, and by that time the ships shall be made seaworthy. We must trust His Majesty.’
The husband, with a jerk of his neck, gathered momentum to plant a deep kiss within his wife’s sex, but she stopped his brow with her palms and warned him that she had her menses: ‘The cardinal is in residence.’
6.
His face was covered in blood and splattered with fragments of brain; it was a rout. On the beach of this legendary city and pirate stronghold which smelt of spices, Officer Montespan was kneeling in the sand beneath the stars. Nearby, swirls of light bounced off the corners of a building. As he encouraged his men in their regalia, he felt punch-drunk. A first line moved ahead fearlessly, fired and withdrew. A second line took its place, and so on. The sound of cannons added to the shooting, but the enemy were legion. Bullets and cannonballs were fired blindly and Louis-Henri’s men fell, the ranks growing thinner. Bombardments and exchanges of musket fire doubled in intensity. A burst of flames signalled the explosion, under heavy fire, of one of their defences. Their blackened chests now exposed, the marquis’s soldiers, once held close by fair demoiselles, fell together on the sand in a hideous parody of the act of love. And all around the thunder howled. The fire was fierce; nature unleashed death. The vaguely indecent strangeness of it all would haunt his dreams. The enemy slavered at the walls. They climbed and swarmed. All the disastrous sounds arced through the air over the glow of the battlefield: this was hell. The fire was everywhere, city walls were attacked, weapons were fired. Since eleven o’clock in the morning the situation had been untenable. After three months occupying the city of Gigeri, His Majesty’s army was suddenly pushed back to the sea, this evening of All Saints’ Day, 1664.
Two days earlier, Montespan had attended the deliberations of the council of war, where he had stood off to one side. There had been much discussion about how to finish the wall built from west to east, from the sea at the foot of the Montagne Sèche to the Pointe du Marabout, forming a broken semicircle. Clerville, who was in charge of the fortifications, had called out plaintively to Gadagne, the commander of the troops on the ground: ‘It has suddenly become impossible to obtain the supplies of wood and limestone we need to manufacture lime! Why is this? Furthermore, you promised me that the natives would supply the materials to me. Where are they?’
The commander of the ground troops, in his armour, did not know how to reply, so Beaufort had ordered, ‘If we need stones, take them from the cemetery; the wall must go through there.’
Montespan, leaning against a wall, had ventured to voice his doubts out loud: ‘Are you sure? The Kabyles have already vehemently insisted that we stop the work before we reach the rocky headland at the end of the beach. The place is sacred to them; it is home to the mausoleum of a marabout and the graves of Muslim dignitaries. Sidi Mohamed, who hitherto supported our efforts to fight against the pirates, will proclaim a holy war…’
‘Who is this captain who dares to interfere!’ said the King’s cousin, head of the expedition, much irritated. ‘Monsieur, the presence of men such as yourself in the navy, men with poorly defined powers, is not to everyone’s liking. Know that His Majesty’s true warriors despise such opportunistic captains and mock them as “curly-haired marquis”, or, worse yet, “petticoat bastards”!’
Montespan, contrite, fell silent and did not intervene again. He had not gone deep into debt yet again and come here just to have the monarch’s cousin turn against him. He had only been trying to … But almost all the officers – La Châtre, Martel, Charuel, Le
stancourt, etc. – had sniggered servilely as they stood round Beaufort. Only the Chevalier de Saint-Germain had observed the marquis attentively. Fat Vivonne had also doubled up with laughter (seeming to forget that he himself had bought a naval commission without hitherto ever having set his red heels on board even a riverboat). The King’s cousin, very sure of himself, then said derisively, as he smoothed his perfumed moustache, ‘Is the world’s greatest power to fear a band of goatherds wearing cloaks? Come now, even the army’s launderesses could hold the forts at Gigeri and the redoubts in the jebel of El-Korn. Go and take what you need from the cemetery.’
The soldiers had then hastened away to remove the stones from the mausoleums to finish building their wall. The following night, in the desert, a voice had chanted in Arabic, ‘The dead who have been deprived of their tombs have obtained permission from heaven to take their revenge. The Prophet has appeared before them, and has promised to make the Frenchmen’s cannonballs melt like wax!’
Montespan had looked worriedly upon the fires the Kabyles had lit on the hills, calling upon the faraway Turkish gunners and encampments to attack the Christian position. Which is precisely what they had done.
*
’Twas the rebellion of the Koran, driven by the sirocco! Stars pierced the walls. Everywhere the fortifications were embellished with blazing flowers and, in the sky, science forged haphazard moments of magic. Stores of powder and ammunition exploded, reducing a thousand Frenchmen all around to a smoking heap. The order to evacuate this spicy country had been given. The first boats fled, drifting with the fogbanks. Standing next to the golden drums and red cannons abandoned on the sand, Montespan, the last captain still on land, tried with his musketeers to slow the enemy’s progress just long enough to allow the boats to reach the ships waiting off shore. But the Turkish army was formidable; it roared with strength, howled like a dog and crashed like the sea, with lances and iron pikes, drums and market vendors’ cries. Montespan’s eyes rolled in their sockets. Over his left shoulder, slung both to the front and behind, was a double saddlebag, of the type used on the back of a horse. The open leather pouches were overflowing with jewels, bars of gold, fistfuls of diamonds, fine porcelain and pearls, that he in turn had pillaged, hurriedly, from the pirates’ den. He had not wanted to leave behind all the riches stolen by the Barbary corsairs, which filled the port. This would serve to compensate him for the disastrous expedition, pay all his debts and cover Athénaïs in jewels. Even at that moment, in the blinding light of cannon fire, he was thinking of her. His vision faltered. She was everything to him, and thanks be! Then he ran to the sea, but the soldiers were trying in vain to free a grounded launch where a hundred or more wounded lay. So, with Saint-Germain and three of his men, he returned to the beach. Saint-Germain had been wounded in the thigh, and collapsed in the water. Followed by his three companions, Louis-Henri hurled himself in fury at the first Kabyles and killed two of them with his sword (without even knowing how he did it), breaking the enemy’s momentum. When he saw that at last the launch was moving away from the shore, he fell back and threw himself into the water with the last remaining soldiers. The Turks were now lined up on the beach and used the bobbing figures in the shallows for target practice. Two men were killed, but the third was saved from drowning. Saint-Germain was wounded twice more. His strength was failing. In a final burst he managed to reach up to the outstretched arms on the launch. Louis-Henri, already on board, clutched his hand and hoisted him slowly out of the sea. Saint-Germain, streaming with water, promised, ‘I am very close to the King and will convey your perspicacity and heroism to him. His Majesty shall reward…’