by Jean Teulé
‘Captain, a military postilion has just brought news. The King’s campaign in Flanders is like a stroll in the fresh air. Turenne is nimbly seizing the entire region from the regent of Spain. Theirs is a triumphal journey. Entire cities are crumbling like houses of cards. Whenever he takes a city, His Majesty gives a masked ball. The fair Flemish ladies come and visit the court that conquers with singing and dancing.’
‘Well, confounded vassal, ’tis not the same here in the Pyrenees!’
All around Louis-Henri lyrical scenes were accompanied by fife and drum, on steep land hot with the sun and red with blood. Cannonballs flew in a crash of colours. A cruel lead missile shone as it whistled and clove through the air. Cartet ducked his head and said, ‘His Majesty is having a rousing good time, capturing Flanders from his royal coach. He sits opposite the Queen, with his favourite, Louise de La Vallière, on his right, and on his left your wife.’
‘Oh, is my wife there? I did not know. Excellent, Sergeant! Let us not take root here on this mountainside!’
The marquis, with his musket in his hand, jumped on his mount and rode off, bare-headed. Boldness, despair, such pathetic grandeur … He was wounded ten or twelve times in his arms, shoulders and legs. And still he resisted, but his wounded animal died beneath him. On his feet again, without a horse and greatly weakened by the loss of blood from his wounds, he thought of this war on the border of the Pyrenees – a pitiful tale that had lasted for nearly six months now.
The region of Catalonia, given to the Crown of France by the treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, had to pay more taxes now than when it had been Spanish, including the gabelle salt tax, and this had greatly incensed the populace. There had been uprisings. The peasants had summoned the Angelets to the sound of the tocsin; they were financed by Spain and there was no fighting by the rules. The French soldiers, poorly prepared for guerrilla warfare, for ambushes in the heart of hostile, extreme wilderness, had been decimated. The marquis had lost many of his light cavalry. The others had been forced to flee and Montespan, covered in blood, was delirious. He saw his wife everywhere. There she was, behind the rose bushes. With its captain injured, the company sounded the retreat. The marquis felt the weight of a terrible solitude overcome him. He was on the ground, injured, among all those whose backs were burning, but Cartet, on his knees and laughing, put his large arms around him: ‘Captain, Captain, stay alive! Spain and France are to sign a peace treaty in Aix-la-Chapelle. Louis has revoked the gabelle in Roussillon …’
Louis-Henri stared at the sergeant’s face, confusing it with his wife’s.
‘What strange teeth you show me when you smile, Athénaïs! Those that are whole are scarcely white, and the others are mere black fragments. They hardly hold to your gums. If you cough you might find them loose and bloody at your feet. Ah, do not indulge any thoughts of laughing for a livelihood, my fair one,’ he said to an astonished Cartet. ‘Hide those stumps, dearest, and frequent funeral processions instead; make yourself a mourner.’
The sergeant also informed him that the military postilion had brought a letter from Louvois. Cartet read the missive: ‘“Monsieur de Montespan, having considered that your presence in the service of His Majesty is no longer required in the place where you are, I am writing this letter to inform you that the King now finds it meet that you should make your way hence and go wherever your own affairs might lead you”,’ but Louis-Henri did not hear, for he had fainted away.
Rough Cartet, with his dagger-hilt moustache, and his hands more deadly than a machine and stronger than an ox (he who had sung during the journey in his thick voice that he had a lovely mate), delicately lifted Athénaïs’s husband.
‘As we head north, I will leave him at his chateau in Bonnefont.’
16.
‘Ah, you have a limp now, Monsieur le marquis?’ asked Madame Larivière, astonished, as she emerged from the kitchen on the second floor in Rue Taranne.
On the landing, she wiped her hands on her apron whilst Montespan began to climb the dark stairs, clinging to the banister.
‘And your shoulders, your arms, have the strangest shape, there …’ said the cook worriedly, coming down a few steps.
‘I’ve been to war, Madame Larivière … These lumps in my sleeves are bits of shredded linen placed on my wounds, and they make my clothes misshapen.’
‘Did your company win the battle this time?’
‘Is my wife not here?’ asked the husband, limping into the salon on the first floor.
‘I thought it was her when I heard the door open downstairs. She sent word that she would stop by quickly this morning.’
By the fireplace, the servant Dorothée, who had been putting logs on the fire, for it was November, turned round and seemed to be looking for someone other than the marquis.
‘You haven’t brought Marie-Christine back with you?’
‘No, I left her in Bonnefont with my mother and the sergeant of my company, whom I’ve hired as a steward. He will have his work cut out, for the chateau is in a pitiful—’
Suddenly there came the sound of a key opening a downstairs door and a voice boomed, ‘Cook, servant! Are my things ready? Come, bring them down from my bedroom! A royal carriage is waiting to take me back to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Make haste, quickly!’
They heard Athénaïs clap her hands to hurry everyone along as she climbed the stairs rapidly, her stylish shoes clicking on the steps. She came into the salon, removing her coat.
Thus her astonished husband found her in a very original gown of ample and flowing green silk muslin that he had never seen before.
‘Madame invented this robe and has called it “The Innocent”… ’Tis the latest fashion in the Marais and also at court, so it seems,’ mocked the cook, as the marquise frowned at her.
The loving husband walked round his fair lady in her new-style ‘innocent’ gown: it hung loosely like a large man’s shirt, ballooning below the waist, and it hid the belly where Montespan now placed his palms. Her belly was rounded.
‘Oh, dear Lord, Athénaïs, are you again…’
Louis-Henri quickly did some calculations. He had left for the Pyrenees eleven months previously: this advanced pregnancy therefore had nothing to do with a husband’s labours.
‘How is this possible?’
‘’Tis the hand of God, the work of the Holy Ghost,’ sniggered the cook, as the marquis asked his wife, ‘Who is the father?’
‘Louis-Henri, I told you not to leave me near the King … one can refuse His Majesty nothing.’
Dorothée squeezed the bellows whilst Montespan felt unsteady on his feet.
‘In Bonnefont I received an anonymous letter informing me that the King had left his favourite to become your lover. I dared not believe it.’
‘Husbands are the last to open their eyes to the reality of their misfortune,’ explained the cook from under her bonnet.
‘I said to myself, this country is full of gossips and braggarts only too eager to sully the most honest of wives, and I am not about to confer the glory of History upon such boudoir tittle-tattle …’
‘The brilliant manner in which she deceived the Queen shows that she has a pretty gift for treachery,’ Madame Larivière said boldly, looking right at Athénaïs, who replied, ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘Aye, I believe so, Madame. Are you not the woman who bought Mademoiselle de La Vallière’s commission?’
‘Leave this salon!’
The cook motioned to Dorothée, then leant towards her mistress’s ear. She told her that she was a liar, a rascally wench, a strumpet and a dog’s harlot.
‘Leave this house!’ exclaimed La Montespan.
The two servants closed the door behind them. Tears came to the marquis’s eyes which spoke far more eloquently than any words he could have said.
‘My God, how your belly weighs upon me! And you are not the only one it oppresses,’ he sighed, contemplating the pregnant lady-in-waiting (‘wounded in service’).
‘One does not abandon one’s spouse to fêtes and the dangers of the court, Louis-Henri; it is impossible to extricate oneself from the King’s pressing advances,’ murmured Athénaïs.
‘He can only obtain that which you consent to give him.’
‘No one can hide from the King’s desires. And from women he demands immediate submission. To refuse would have irrevocable consequences for me, for you, and for the children. Both our families, all of us, would have been banished from France.’
Horns sprouted on the marquis’s head. Mourning of all mournings, misfortune of all misfortunes, all this triumph buried, sheer madness.
‘I have never felt a pain more piercing than that which I feel today, my dear.’
He suffered so greatly that he would fain have poisoned himself with the quicksilver in the mirror.
‘And I would do anything on earth to take my revenge.’
‘What shall you do, Louis-Henri?’
His reply was that of an oracle, of the sort that men are wont to make when first they love. ‘I will love you all my life.’
He went over to the fair woman and placed his palms on the green silk muslin of her shoulders, but she pushed his arms away.
‘I do not have the right to belong to another man, even my own husband! And you must dismiss the cook! Her arrogance and ill humour towards me are unbearable, and the very sight of her is unpleasant. She has a face like a rear end. She is quite deformed, and her head wobbles incessantly from the moment she sees me. You see the trouble the old hag causes. She—’
The marquis slapped his wife’s left cheek with the flat of his hand so violently that she would bear the mark on her white skin for at least three months.
17.
At the Montausiers’ hôtel particulier, all the women had adopted the hurluberlu. In addition to wearing ‘innocent’ gowns they bore, on their left cheek, a five-fingered mauve and blue mark like a star on their skin. Louis-Henri was dumbfounded. On seeing the loose muslin floating over the bellies of all these ladies of rank, he wondered whether the King had not impregnated them as well.
For weeks Louis-Henri had spent sleepless nights, and he had lost all semblance of a man who was happy in his marriage. His face was like that of a skinned cat, with bloodshot eyes. His periwig sat askew when he bolted like a fury into the first-floor gaming circle, spewing insults and outrage. He shouted that the King was a second David, a vile seducer and a thief. He raged and spouted every insolence imaginable against His Majesty. From the billiards to the trou-madame table, the courtiers were terrorised and, fearful of seeing their position at court compromised should they chance to hear the marquis’s imprecations, they fled.
There had been joy and abundance. They had been eating well and wagering high (’twas rolling in money there) – and then suddenly Montespan came and spoilt it all. He provoked a dreadful row. He condemned and castigated the attitude of a monarch who, for his own good pleasure, trampled all principles of family and of love! His tirades were tiresome and embarrassing; and when people were not yawning, they scoffed at this husband who had the poor taste to complain that the King had seduced his wife.
‘The conceited man doth protest, whilst the fool laments and tears his hair. The honourable man the King betrays goes hence; to speak he does not dare.’
But Montespan continued his vehement criticism, unwisely showering a thousand biblical curses upon the sovereign’s august head. One lady said to him, ‘You are mad, you must not continue with all your fairy tales.’ Blinded by rage, Montespan paid no attention to her warning. His eyes darted everywhere, he was looking for someone, and at last he saw the old duchesse Julie de Montausier.
Poised on a chair pierced with a hole above a pewter basin, the duchesse was defecating in public, whilst the nobles around her held a wind-passing contest they found wildly entertaining. The duchesse herself let out a few farts. Montespan swooped down upon her.
‘Give my Françoise back to me!’
‘Who is Françoise?’
‘My wife, whom I will never again call by any other name than that with which she was baptised. Athénaïs– ’tis too …Versailles. You took my wife from me to hand her to the King. Give her back! I love her.’
La Montausier was most astonished.
‘You were joined in holy matrimony four years ago and you still love your wife? If I may be so bold, your fishmonger feels the same penchant for his wife. But you, Monsieur, are a marquis. Do you believe that my husband loves me? Monsieur le duc,’ she asked, turning her head to the right, ‘do you love me?’
‘Of course not,’ replied her husband.
Montespan was flabbergasted.
‘And yet,’ he said to the duc, ‘were you not the finest wit of the time, did you not write La Guirlande de Julie? That unique collection of madrigals, composed for her name-day, a more delicate and enduring bouquet than any real flowers could make?’
‘’Tis true … each poem compared Julie to a different flower: a rose, a tulip … but above all it was the dowry of Mademoiselle de Rambouillet that I coveted.’
And she had gone on to become his wife; now she was not in the least offended, unlike Louis-Henri, who continued, ‘But when I saw the two of you, I thought that—’
‘If you judge by appearances in this place, Monsieur de Montespan, you will often be led astray. What appears to be is almost never what is chez nous.’
The Gascon stood there open-mouthed.
‘As for the King,’ continued the white-haired old woman, ‘if he deems it his duty to take your wife as his mistress – the most beautiful woman in France, the most desirable in the kingdom – and to flaunt her like a treasure, there is no cause for anger and for coming to bore us with some petty quarrel of the kind a German might make. You would do better to invoke Saint Leonard, the patron saint of childbirth, for the successful arrival of the bastard!’
Montespan could not believe his ears. He had been a captain of the light cavalry and had become so forgetful of good form that he addressed the duchesse in the language of the barracks. She would have another flower that she could add to her Guirlande de Julie.
‘You are nothing but a flower of priggish pedantry and vileness, perfumed with lucre and servility, cultivated in a soil of hypocrisy!’
‘Oooooh!’
‘Rag-bag, harpy, hog’s tripe, old maggot-pie! Dislodge your buttocks from there and go and fetch me my wife or I’ll blow your backside to kingdom come!’
‘Oooooh!’
The duchesse began to tremble beneath the parasol held by the black slave. So shocked by the Gascon’s cruel words was the Princesse d’Harcourt that she defecated in her gown. Thick-lipped, with white hair, she often had an urge to shit and was prompt to find relief when on her feet, which drove all those she visited to despair. She moved off into the glow of the flames from the grand fireplace, where they flickered against the golden interior; she dirtied the parquet floor with a ghastly smear. Lauzun went up to Montespan, chuckled and told him, ‘One time, a count put a firecracker under her seat in a salon where she was playing piquet. Just as he was about to light it, being a charitable soul I advised him that the firecracker would maim her, and thereby I stayed his hand. Then there was an evening at Saint-Germain-en-Laye when the courtiers introduced twenty or more Swiss guards with drums into her chambers and roused her from her sleep. They assailed her with snowballs. She sat up, her hair all dishevelled, shouting at the top of her lungs and wriggling like an eel, not knowing where to hide. The nymph was afloat, and with water pouring from her bed, the room was awash. Enough to finish her off!’
Louis-Henri took his leave. In the street, a singer was bellowing a fashionable refrain.
‘’Tis said that fair Montespan
Hey nelly nelly, hey nelly
’Tis said that fair Montespan
Hides a round belly.’
On Rue des Rosiers, at the Hôtel Mortemart, the Gascon was greeted by Françoise’s moon-faced father. The marquis immediately asked hi
s father-in-law what he thought of the disaster.
‘God be praised, good fortune has entered our house!’ he responded.
The son-in-law failed to understand. ‘What do you mean?’
The Duc de Mortemart with his big green protruding eyes and jovial little mouth explained.
‘I was three hundred thousand livres in debt, and the King paid them for me, simply because I am the father of his new mistress … He also offered me the title of governor of Paris and Île-de-France. And to compensate him for having appropriated his sister’s virtue, His Majesty appointed my son Vivonne (that imbecile) general of the galleys and vice-admiral of the Levant! Therefore you, the husband, can well imagine the glories you may hope for!’
‘I hope only for Françoise …’
‘Louis-Henri, you are a fool. Every favour, every honour is about to rain upon you, if you will only hold your tongue and close your eyes. But there you go, shouting out loud, even when you know you stand to suffer cruelly from what is arbitrary. That is why many will not forgive you. You disturb them by daring as you do to put a great king in a regrettable position.’
‘I place him in a regrettable position?’
‘You ought to be shut away in the Petites-Maisons like a madman. Cast off that grey hat. His Majesty despises grey hats and one must never displease His Majesty.’
Montespan was finding that the air here, too, was rotten. His father-in-law was getting carried away, flapping his lace. ‘Ah, why can you not be like the others! You would have made your existence a fine one, and died a marshal of France and governor of a good province, instead of trailing a pack of creditors in your wake.’
‘I am in love with your daughter…’
‘The Prince de Soubise was certainly more elegant than you are and yet he, too, in the beginning, baulked when Louis laid eyes upon his wife. He even attempted to make His Majesty believe that she was scrofulous: “She’s a fine apple, sire, but she is rotten within.” “Indeed?” replied the King. “I will see for myself by venturing therein.” Then the husband bowed his head and had the tact to stay out of sight for the duration of the liaison. In compensation he received a considerable sum of money and one of the finest houses in Paris. He transformed his horns of shame into horns of plenty.’