by Jean Teulé
‘Pray do so,’ replied Montespan, relieved.
The intendant of Guyenne addressed Dorothée first of all.
‘Has the marquis always behaved well towards you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Has he ever made any inappropriate gestures towards your person, or said anything of a somewhat…’
‘Oh, no, sir!’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I am.’
‘If anything has happened, or you have seen anything that seemed a bit suspicious, you must tell me. You know it is a mortal sin to lie to a man of the law?’
‘I am not lying, Monsieur.’
The intendant’s gaze circled slowly around the group, passing like a veil over the steward with his dagger-hilt moustache and his air of a forest brigand, and came to rest upon the marquis’s mother. ‘Have you nothing to reveal to me, Madame?’
‘From the moment my son met the woman who would become his wife, he has adored none but her. All other female forms are invisible to him. A mother knows such things.’
Macqueron’s gaze narrowed upon Madame Larivière, who bowed her head before the man of law. This aroused his concern. ‘Might Monsieur le marquis not be as virtuous as his mother claims? For example, with yourself, perhaps …?’
‘No, not with me, but with the steward – sometimes they have a romp together.’
‘What?!’
Cartet’s very moustache lost its curl. Montespan could not believe his ears. Chrestienne de Zamet staggered as if she had been struck in the head. Dorothée rushed to bring her over a chair. Arrogantly, the cook stood tall before her master.
‘Begging your pardon, Monsieur, but I did see you one night wanting to have your way with Cartet. And, Marquis, I can’t get it out of my head! When you know full well what ties there be binding me to him!’
The intendant was enthralled. ‘Go on …’
‘The steward was here in a wedding gown, open at the back, his buttocks to the four winds, and behind him was the marquis, his breeches round his knees, wanting to … you know, like the Chevalier de Lorraine with Monsieur, the King’s brother…’
‘The Italian vice …’
‘Exactly!’
Macqueron turned to a crestfallen Montespan.
‘Thus, you were giving lessons in conjugal fidelity to His Majesty … Pope Innocent XI was determined to defend your cause and not yield – the matter was leading to a schism. But if you were sodomising your steward, that changes everything.’
‘And not just once!’ said Madame Larivière, reiterating her attack. ‘As far as I can tell, it happened before, outside Puigcerdá, when Cartet was a sergeant, and that is why I reckon this business about an abducted girl and a nun, I don’t know … but it would not surprise me in the least!’
The cuckold felt as if he were falling into an abyss. He had not expected such a thing! His mother was paler than ever, as if she had been bled of two pints of blood, and now she ordered him to explain. ‘Is it true? Is it true, Louis-Henri?’
The marquis hardly knew what to reply, stammering, ‘I … I was drunk, but otherwise, never, never…’
‘Never what?’ said the cook hotly. ‘You lived for at least a month in a brothel behind Place de Grève! Were you drunk then, too?’
‘Frequenting prostitutes!’ said Macqueron, astonished.
Chrestienne de Zamet was about to swoon. Dorothée ran to the kitchen to fetch some drops of essence of urine and crayfish powder, and slapped white wine compresses on her brow. They concluded that perhaps no medicine could help her, nor would prayers be any better. Shattered, Cartet shook his large head this way and that as he faced Madame Larivière, who took offence.
‘What is the matter with you, Steward? What has put you in such a pitiful state? Do I disgust you?’
‘You should not have spoken of the past, Madame Lariri …’
‘Stop calling me by that stupid name! There is no more Madame Lariri, it’s finished, basta! Madame Lariri doesn’t exist any more!’
‘And why should she not have spoken of the past?’ enquired Macqueron.
‘Madame Lariri, you have just given my captain a life sentence…’
‘How? What? What are you saying? Oh, my God!’
The cook ran out, tearing her hair. Leaning against the bare stone wall, Montespan grazed his hands in vexation without realising it, whilst the intendant came over to him.
‘Well, what say you, was it not time for a confession? In extremis! When I think I was prepared to take your side, that I thought, what a rare thing, this marquis’s constant love, in a society where conjugal indifference is a sign of good manners! Which goes to show that there is some truth in proverbs: ’tis in preaching a lie that one discovers the truth. But I did not expect it. I did not even think to bring the stamp with the official seal in order to make the arrest in due form. I’ll come back with it on the morrow. You have this afternoon and all night to put your affairs in order, for I am consigning you to residence in your chateau. The dragoons posted all round shall be your gaolers. Till tomorrow. Come, clerk!’
Macqueron departed, leaving Montespan dazed and distraught. Outside, Louis-Antoine was playing with toy soldiers and miniature rifles on Cartet’s enormous thighs as the steward sat despondently on a little wall by the dragoons, who stared at him. Louis-Henri understood what was at risk if he submitted to the decision of justice. If he was taken, he would never again be able to plead his cause; he would be imprisoned in Pignerol, near Fouquet. He sighed and said, ‘I am lost.’ He gazed at his chateau as if for the last time – the rampart walk, the drawbridge, the large, wide-bottomed moat with its sloping crenellated wall and its entrances to underground passages and … escape?
Madame Larivière, her face crushed with shame and remorse, went up to him. ‘What am I to do? Shall I throw myself into the mud of the moat, prepare my things and go?’
‘No, because Marie-Christine needs Dorothée, and I am in a good position to know that when one is vexed in love, one is sometimes driven to say or do certain things …’
‘… that I regret, Monsieur.’
‘I do not! Go back and patch things up with that unhappy Cartet who loves you so, Madame Larivière. Ask him, too, to go to the dovecote and fetch the pigeon belonging to the Seigneur de Teulé.’
‘That wretched nobleman – a ruffian and a counterfeiter, to whom all the marquis in the region send a small pension so that he will not fall too low among the riffraff?’
‘The very same.’
Teulé,
Before nightfall, pray tie a mount to a tree near the large rock at the place where the two lanes cross in my forest.
Montespan
Louis-Henri attached the message to the carrier pigeon’s leg. The bird took flight on its short wings and, carried on the wind, headed directly south.
After dark, the marquis tiptoed into his daughter’s chamber where she slept with Dorothée. He then went into Louis-Antoine’s room, took him in his arms and said, ‘Come, we are going for a ride.’
Carrying his son and some old clothes, but with no candle, Montespan went out into the courtyard through a door hidden from view, but his mother, who had heard the floor creaking a little while before, now saw him from her window.
‘My poor boy, if you escape now, you risk being sentenced in absentia and all your property will be confiscated and you’ll lose all your titles of nobility. You will only fulfil Louvois’s deepest desires, and look well and truly like a criminal …’
She dried her tears and said many a prayer on seeing her son and grandson disappearing beneath the slab at the entrance to a tunnel. They vanished from sight. She was not sure if she would ever see them again.
Stooping, Montespan groped his way along the narrow underground passage, which had surely not been used for over a century, clambering over glowing tree roots, hearing animals squeaking as they fled – large field rats, no doubt. Spider’s webs and scurrying insects caught in his hair.
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nbsp; They reached the end of the tunnel. Louis-Henri came up against the rungs of a rusty ladder fixed to a vertical clay wall and he climbed up. At the top, he struggled to open the grate that blocked the entrance to the underground passage. Holding his child in one arm, the marquis shoved several times with his shoulder and bent head, and finally the grate lifted with a tearing of grass, pushing aside clumps of icy soil.
They emerged from the ground near a large rock. Next to it, a horse stood tethered to a tree trunk. Louis-Henri wanted to leave on the sly, passing through the sleeping villages without making a sound. He wrapped the horse’s hooves with what he had thought were rags, snatched up at random in the gloom of the chateau, but he had been mistaken: it was Françoise’s wedding gown. Never mind. His son yawned and shivered with cold. The father lifted the boy onto the back of the horse and mounted pillion behind him. Below them, in the valley, the Château de Bonnefont seemed to be snoring, inside a circle of light made by the glowing pipes of the watching dragoons.
‘Where are we going, Papa?’
‘To Madrid.’
The child was somewhat frightened by the enormity of the journey, but his father gave him courage and wrapped him in a heavy buffalo cloak. Montespan, in his felt riding-cloak, put an arm around his son’s waist and held him close to keep him warm.
‘Gee up!’
The horse made its way along a path glazed with black ice. Louis-Antoine, one cheek against his father’s biceps, gazed ahead at the Pyrenees, blue and white in the clear night. The swaying motion of the horse’s gait lulled the child and he slept. Beneath the horse’s trotting hooves, the pearls on Françoise’s red dress shattered like little stars.
39.
‘Monsieur de Montespan, how is Louis XIV?’
At the court of Spain, Louis-Henri wondered if the ten-year-old dauphin – the future Charles II – had a sense of humour and was mocking him outrageously, or if he was a complete and utter idiot.
‘I enquire,’ continued the Habsburg heir to the throne, ‘because as for myself, I am not very well …’
The frail child, a virtual invalid, had to hold on to the mantelpiece to keep from falling.
His adult features were already discernible, those of a degenerate not destined to live long.
‘Does the King of France suffer from toothache, Monsieur de Montespan?’
‘I really don’t know,’ replied the marquis.
‘And nightmares, does he have nightmares?’
‘I have no idea. In any event, I often have nightmares because of him.’
‘The other night,’ said the dauphin, ‘I dreamt that I had become an oyster, and Indians were opening me to steal the pearl I had inside me. Then they left me to close up again all by myself and departed with my treasure. I awoke to find myself curiously … dry.’
‘Really?’
‘There are times, too, when I dream that I have no arms, only hands attached directly to my shoulders, wiggling like fins.’
‘Well then, tell me …’
‘Monsieur de Montespan, do you believe that I am a marine animal?’
‘Of course not, Your Highness.’
‘Ha-ha-ha! El hechizado! El hechizado! …’ (There’s a spell on him!) In the gloomy official salon of the Spanish palace, the dauphin’s half-sisters, a bevy of sickly, dwarfed infantas, giggled and ran off to the hall of mirrors to see their reflection multiplied a thousandfold. Dressed in skirts that looked like enormous lampshades, they circled round and round and squeaked like wooden dolls on wheels. Louis-Henri told himself that it was not only in the court of France that there was something rotten.
‘Would you like some fruit?’ The future monarch’s words emerged from his mouth in fits and starts, as if he had had to search for each one individually.
A voice explained to the French marquis: ‘The heir to the throne did not walk or begin to talk until he was five years old.’ The voice, with an Austrian accent, was that of Cardinal Nidhart – an inquisitor who during the regency had been entrusted with the post of prime minister by the queen mother; he was her confessor. Dressed in red robes with a thin white collar, he wore a little beard and moustache, and his eyes were immensely sad. On his head, dominating his scalp, was something that looked like the little boats that children make by folding a sheet of paper. Montespan politely chose an apricot from the porcelain bowl the sickly prince was holding out to him. The fruit was so ripe and spoilt around the stone that it tasted like cheese.
‘Another apricot!’
‘No, thank you.’
‘I would like very much to see you again, Monsieur de Montespan!’
‘It’s just that…’ said Louis-Henri, ‘in fact I’d come to take my leave and thank Spain for the asylum granted me this year and more. As soon as I crossed over the Pyrenees, the populace came to their windows and blessed my journey all the way to Madrid. Wherever I went, I was greeted with manifestations of joy. My son and I have been lodged by the palace, with liveried footmen at our disposition. One of your coaches was always at my door to serve me … with four mules and a royal coachman. I have been greatly touched to receive such treatment and hospitality normally reserved for extraordinary ambassadors, but now that I am able to return to my home …’
‘You have been here for nigh on a year? And why did no one inform me?’ asked the little prince angrily, addressing Cardinal Nidhart, who replied, ‘Because you were asleep, Don Carlos.’
‘Ah,’tis true, I sleep a great deal! Sometimes for months. They call me “the sleeping corpse”. Have I already told you my dreams, Monsieur de Montespan?’
‘Yes, Your Highness.’
‘Would you like an apricot?’
‘No, thank you.’
There was an air of awkwardness in the salon that Louis-Henri was eager to leave behind. He was about to make a deep bow when the unsteady heir asked him, ‘Why could you not go home before?’
The cuckold tried to explain his situation as a husband betrayed by the King of France. ‘I suspected that if I came for protection to the very devout kingdom of Spain, I might be making an excellent move, that Louis XIV would not risk damaging his reputation by going too far. Your obvious decline, Don Carlos – for you will most probably die without an heir – opens the succession of your throne to claimants from all over Europe. Marie-Thérèse’s French husband is duty-bound to explore all diplomatic measures, therefore he must handle me with tact. He has yielded, with a letter of remission!’ Louis-Henri waved a sheet of paper, and read: ‘“We hereby pardon said Marquis de Montespan, to this end annulling all direct summonses and other judicial proceedings that have been made.” I have won! I am free, and glad to return to Bonnefont!’
‘The King of France wrote to you?’ exclaimed the young dauphin delightedly. ‘May I see his letter? I am very fond of Louis XIV and of France … although I’m not very sure where it is.’
‘Don Carlos,’ interrupted Nidhart, trying not to become annoyed, ‘we are at war with France, and Louis XIV is our enemy…’
‘Indeed? How so?’
There was a sense of hesitancy in the air.
‘When will he be king?’ murmured Montespan in the cardinal’s ear.
‘In four years,’ sighed Nidhart.
Louis-Henri nodded, thinking, well, that bodes well for Spain; what sport they will have, the Madrileños …
‘As for myself,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘the moment he becomes monarch, I will return to Austria.’
The frail invalid looked at Montespan.
‘Will you find your wife at home?’
‘I should like to …’
‘It must be very pleasant to be married, no?’
‘That depends …’
‘And Louis XIV, is he married?’
‘Yes, and to a Spanish woman, moreover.’
‘Really? But I thought he was the King of France!’
A certain weariness had become apparent on the faces of both Nidhart and the French marquis, whom the dauphin now asked,
‘How are children made, Monsieur de Montespan?’
‘Well now, Your Highness … Look, I do not really have the time to—’
‘Would you like an apricot?’
‘No!’
The Gascon would end up stuffing those rotten apricots in his face, the Spanish dunderhead! The latter was now trembling, his legs quaking. The confessor scarcely had time to catch him in his arms.
‘It is because you shouted, Monsieur de Montespan. When people shout, it puts him to sleep. There we are, he is off again for another eight months in bed.’
The marquis turned round and took his leave, whilst the dauphin, yawning, his head drooping on his shoulder, had just enough time to utter, ‘Embrace Louis XIV for me…’
The Gascon had formed his opinion. The future Charles II had no sense of humour and was not mocking him. He was a complete and utter idiot.
40.
Montespan drove his white steed through the blue landscape of the Pyrenees. Louis-Antoine, sitting between his father’s legs, clung to the horse’s mane. It was the return of the hero. Outside the brick gate to the chateau, peasants who had come to bake their bread cried out, ‘Here he is! Here they are!’
Cartet and Dorothée came running. The cook called out, ‘Madame Chrestienne de Zamet! Madame Chrestienne de Zamet, it’s your son with the little Marquis d’Antin!’
Louis-Henri dismounted and embraced his mother.
‘Oh, dear Lord! How is everyone here?’
‘Well, just consider this: the horses are thin, my tooth is loose, the tutor has scrofula, but I am exceeding happy to see you again before I die!’
The Gascon’s mother had become all skin and bone since he had left, and Louis-Henri was worried. Her back was twisted owing to a cruel attack of rheumatism and her knuckles were swollen.
‘She is pitifully thin because of the dryness of her lungs, which are beginning to waste away,’ whispered the cook, ‘and your daughter, too, was very ill. I made her drink vipers’ broth, which revives the soul. People might think that when you tear the vipers’ hearts out, it’s all over with them. Not a bit. They are still alive, and in a broth they provide strength. They’ve invigorated the little girl.’