The Hurlyburly's Husband

by Jean Teulé

  ‘His Majesty is always on time,’ said the physician appreciatively, looking at his watch. ‘From east to west, the way in which the rooms of the palace are laid out corresponds to the rhythm of a typical day in the life of the Sun King. At four o’clock, like a mechanical puppet, he stops in the antechamber where his mistress awaits him on her knees, with her mouth open.’

  The monarch stood with one hand out to the side, majestically holding the knob of his walking stick, and looked straight ahead with his chin raised whilst the marquise sucked him. Although Louis-Henri was hopping mad, he pulled out the seven sections of the spyglass to have a better view.

  ‘Go to,’ the physician said encouragingly. ‘It enlarges up to fifty-four times. I am referring to the telescope, obviously,’ he added maliciously.

  ‘A man who has bathed only once in his entire life … It would be hard not to be disgusted.’

  ‘I do not believe your wife is.’

  Beside himself, the cuckold had blurred the view through the eyepiece; now he focused again. Françoise was wearing a low-cut gown with six layers of fine lace on her sleeves, and in her blond hair were woven ribbons and rubies. Louis-Henri recognised her well-formed, attractive mouth, which he knew to be voracious, then he noticed something white and sparkling dangling above his wife’s lips.

  ‘What is that? A pearl necklace? Does he wear a pearl necklace around his—’

  ‘Precisely! Now watch what happens. You’ll see how the King, who hates to be asked for jewels, will offer them to your wife.’

  The mother of the deceased Marie-Christine released the streaming genitalia – what a wash! (but her kisses, henceforth, must have a different taste). A magnificent pearl necklace encircled the King’s arrogant little penis at its base and tapped against his balls. Françoise gave a few flicks of her tongue then took in the whole length.

  ‘And off they go again,’ said the cuckold sorrowfully.

  ‘Ah, she makes a good whore, does Madame Quatorze!’ The marquise’s head, facing the King’s crotch, moved rhythmically backwards and forwards until His Majesty stiffened and his fingers opened convulsively on the knob of his walking stick. A few seconds of immobility, then Françoise swallowed. Her husband’s knees were shaking above his too-short pink hose. The mother of his children now placed her upturned palms beneath the Bourbon member as it went soft and drooped. The pearl necklace slid downhill and fell into Françoise’s outstretched hands; she straightened up and fastened the pearls around her neck whilst the King, doing up his breeches, walked away and opened a door.

  ‘He is leaving the antechamber,’ announced Montespan.

  ‘… to go into the council chamber where his ministers are waiting for a brief interview,’ surmised the doctor from the Charonne convent. ‘Someone must be opening a window.’

  ‘Indeed,’ confirmed the Gascon, adjusting the telescope’s field of vision to the left, along the façade of the King’s wing.

  ‘His Majesty cannot bear to be in an enclosed space. Summer and winter alike, the moment he enters a room a window must be opened, and too bad for anyone who feels chilly or unwell.’

  Louis XIV sat in an armchair, striking a theatrical pose, playing with the knob of his walking stick, whilst three ministers came up behind him waving their arms, certainly with some important events to relate. The monarch heard them out without interrupting, then turned his bewigged head to each one of the three, undoubtedly giving orders, and then he got up.

  ‘Look! He’s on his feet again,’ said Louis-Henri.

  ‘And now, still heading west, the window in the next room must have been opened in turn …’

  ‘So it has,’ said the marquis, ‘and … oh! There is a golden four-poster bed with floating curtains, and a woman is on all fours on the edge of the bed. She has just pulled her skirts up over her back and her head. Such a big bottom!’

  ‘’Tis yet again your wife.’

  ‘Really? But how did she get there?’

  ‘Through a secret passage. The palace is full of them.’

  ‘She has gained weight,’ said Montespan.

  ‘Nine times with child and an excessive fondness for victuals have got the better of her figure, which had a natural tendency to plumpness to begin with,’ diagnosed the physician.

  ‘It suits her rather well … Nine times with child? Since our marriage my wife has had nine children? That I did not know,’ said the cuckold, astounded, whilst the King entered Athénaïs’s many-mirrored chamber.

  Louis XIV continued on his solar trajectory, again opening his breeches embroidered with scenes of battles he had won. Hard once more, he headed straight for Françoise’s vast bare bottom. Montespan slapped his left palm over the end of the spyglass. He had seen enough.

  44.

  On the rocky hill with its cross overlooking the chateau of Bonnefont, the lavender that Marie-Christine had sown had taken root. It had spread along the slope, but it looked as if fate had dealt a blow upon the marquis’s lands, bruising the landscape. Louis-Henri, stretched out on the wall of the moat, closed his eyes and dozed off or, rather, pretended to.

  When in the early hours of a baking summer afternoon the cicadas had paused in their song, because they had heard the sound of approaching hooves, Montespan had felt the cool shadow of a horse gliding over him, but he had not even deigned to sit up.

  Madame Larivière had come out of her kitchen and crossed the courtyard, waving her arms and stirring the air. ‘Sshh, he’s asleep…’

  The horseman dismounted and asked in a hushed voice and an English accent, ‘Is … Is this Monsieur de Montespan, this bare-headed man?’

  ‘Now what do they want from him?’ whispered the cook. ‘What disaster this time?’

  ‘I bring good news.’

  ‘Ah, then if it’s good news… He’s in great need of it. For months, since he brought his daughter’s body home to be buried next to his mother, he has been … as if stricken. And not long after that came the news of the death of his uncle, the Archbishop of Sens. It was also as if he saw something he ought not to have seen during his journey to Paris …’

  ‘He dared to come out of exile without the King’s permission,’ asked the visitor, surprised, ‘despite the risk of beheading or being sentenced to the galleys?’

  ‘What?’ asked the cook, annoyed. ‘Of course not, you’d make me say anything!’

  ‘What did he see?’

  ‘That I don’t know, but it was the final straw for him. Nothing interests him any more. The steward of the chateau even has to keep the books and do the rounds to collect the rents … which grow fewer and fewer, moreover, since he renounced both his parents’ inheritance. Now you’re very smartly attired, have you come from the court, is that it?’ she asked suspiciously. ‘I hope you’ve not come to harass him?’

  ‘No, indeed, ’tis to offer …’

  ‘If it’s écus you’re offering, you may leave again with them. He has already said that his wife was not for sale.’ ‘That is not my business.’

  ‘Ah?’

  And so reluctantly Madame Larivière gently nudged the cuckold’s shoulder.

  ‘Monsieur le cuck—Monsieur le marquis …’

  Louis-Henri was breathing deeply and regularly, his eyelids closed. Flies buzzed all around him, and finally he opened his eyes and sat up on the edge of the wall. He yawned and stretched whilst the visitor introduced himself.

  ‘Chancellor Hyde, originally from the court of England, now in the service of the King of France …’

  ‘A chancellor now?’ said Montespan, dumbstruck, rubbing his hair, which was completely dishevelled. ‘It would seem I’m entitled to increasingly prestigious emissaries. Does Louis XIV plan to come in person? Tell him I am ready to challenge him to a duel, there, on the planks of my drawbridge and beneath the horns of stone I have added to my coat of arms on the gate.’

  ‘Here we go,’ said the cook, annoyed with the chancellor. ‘You haven’t come to harass him, but you make him spout su
ch gibberish. Ah, if the steward were here, he’d already have taken you by the scruff of your neck with one hand and shoved you back on your horse, and gee up! With one hand. That’s how he is, Cartet, he’s strong, he—’

  ‘That’s enough, Madame Larivière,’ interrupted Montespan.

  ‘Oh, you’re right! And I’d rather go back to my kitchen than hear … And what are you doing here?’ she shouted at Dorothée (now twenty-one), as she bumped into her. ‘Are there no rooms to be cleaned? Why have you got hay in your hair? And why is your skirt inside out? Where have you been? You think we don’t have enough to do already in this house without a certain “slut”?’

  The Englishman with the blond eyebrows was calm and elegant. He gently pressed a lace handkerchief to his forehead, throat and neck; his white skin was sensitive to the sun. Without animosity, Montespan suggested they go and sit somewhat further along, in the shadow of the gate. Dorothée came out with a jug of cool water from the well, and two glasses each containing a slice of Spanish lemon. She served them, then left again, removing a few more blades of straw from her poorly refastened bodice. The chancellor took short, refreshing sips of cool water whilst Louis-Henri held his glass in both hands, gazing dreamily at the thin slice of lemon floating in the water.

  ‘Is my wife happy?’

  The visitor sat with his back to the lotus flowers rotting in the stagnant waters of the moat, and surveyed the tumbledown courtyard of this wretched, crumbling chateau. There, to the right, was the famous horned carriage, abandoned against the wall, next to an enormous wisteria. All dusty, with traces of bird droppings everywhere, the door hanging off its hinges, windows broken, the coach had become a hen house, and the fowl laid their eggs on the cracked leather seats. An arrogant little cockerel, perched on the stag’s antlers above the black vehicle, crowed in the dazzling summer heat.

  ‘In any event, she is very demanding,’ said the Englishman. ‘Some courtiers have begun to call her “Quanto”, because of the Italian card game, quantova, which means “how much”. Athénaïs wanted her own chateau in Clagny. She had the inhabitants expelled, the church demolished, the village razed and the cemetery moved, but when the King showed her his plans for the palace, she was so brazen as to remark scornfully that it was a residence fit for “an opera girl”. So now it is Mansart who is building her a little fairy-tale chateau. It will cost a quarter of the budget for the navy. At the court of Versailles, known as the “Gambling Den”, the King systematically pays all the debts that your spouse incurs. She burdens the treasury of the realm with tremendous expenses. Every evening she gets drunk, gambles, loses enormous amounts and throws her pearl necklaces onto the green baize, as many as seven in a week.’

  The Gascon watched as a bee rose drunkenly in the air in the path of an awkward, fluttering butterfly.

  ‘So she’s not happy, it would seem.’

  ‘Marquis,’ said the chancellor, a note of finality in his voice, ‘His Majesty has ordered me to come to Guyenne to give you an excellent piece of news: “Inform Monsieur de Montespan that his marquisate shall be raised to a duchy-peerage, and that I will add the appropriate number of privileges, not wishing to depart from what is customary.”’

  Louis-Henri, who was wearing a vast white shirt, loosened over a bare shoulder, was still staring at the glass between his long legs, spread wide in his worn boots. The Englishman, seeing that the squire had failed to react, feared he had not made himself understood and explained, ‘The King is not asking for anything in return for offering to make you a duke. The duchy of Bellegarde has just reverted to the crown.’

  ‘Is she ever known to sigh, as if she were regretting a past happiness … or perhaps even weep in private?’

  ‘Ah yes, she weeps exceedingly … since the widow Scarron was made Marquise de Maintenon. Your wife has been demanding to be made a duchesse, in order to be higher in rank than the governess of her royal children. You may appreciate how her pride is suffering; she is outraged by the fact that in public she must remain standing in the King’s presence, although she is the most important person at court. To have the right to a stool, one must be a duchesse, but Athénaïs cannot be a duchesse unless her husband is made a duc, whence the purpose of my visit…’

  Montespan remained silent and put down his glass, then got up and went to sit again on the sunny part of the wall. Hyde walked along the moat to the marquis, who raised his head and declared, ‘I am sensitive, my lord, as is my duty, to the great honour you bestow upon me by your visit; however, allow me to find it strange that a man of your importance would agree to become embroiled in a negotiation of this nature. The King of France did not consult me when he wanted to make my wife his mistress; it is quite extraordinary that a prince of his rank should defer to my intervention to reward a behaviour that I condemned, and still condemn, and will condemn until my last mortal sigh. His Majesty has given eight or ten children to my spouse without a word to me; he may equally present her with a duchy without calling upon me for help. Let him make her a princess or even a highness if he so desires. He is all-powerful. I am but a reed; he is an oak. Madame de Montespan may still have ambitions but my own ambition was satisfied forty years ago. I was born a marquis, and I shall die a marquis, barring some unforeseen disaster…’

  And Louis-Henri lay down on the little wall once again. His forearm over his eyes, he fell asleep. He did not even hear the hooves of the chancellor’s mount ringing on the cobbles as he rode away. The song of the cicadas resumed.

  45.

  ‘“What? How can that be!” she is said to have lost her temper when she saw Hyde. “He would deprive me of being a duchesse? Well, I will complete his ruin, I will strip him to the bone – that gooseherd, that vulgar little good-for-nothing arse-wipe!”’

  ‘But who was she talking about?’

  ‘About you, of course, Marquis.’

  ‘About me?’

  Louis-Henri, climbing the stairway at Rue Taranne, could not believe what he had heard. That was what the love of his life said about him? Standing next to the Gascon, Monsieur and Madame Abraham winced, embarrassed and puzzled.

  ‘How that young woman has changed,’ sighed Constance.

  ‘The poor thing has completely lost all sense of reality at the Gambling Den,’ said the cuckold, trying to excuse her. ‘She warned me, Versailles is a dreadful place; there is not a single person whose head is not turned by it. The court changes even the best of souls.” I must get her out of that hell,’ he continued.

  As he said this, a guard on the first-floor landing was listening and a bailiff was drawing up an inventory of the salon. Next to the bailiff a secretary wrote down, ‘One Rouen tapestry representing the story of Moses, eight folding chairs, two cabled chairs with horsehair stuffing, one Venetian mirror … thirty inches high, one little table …’

  Once the man of law had added each piece of furniture to the list, the guards took it down to the street and loaded it onto a police cart. The bailiff recognised the marquis and introduced himself. ‘François Rhurin. And the kitchen is upstairs? May I?’ He went past Montespan and on the second floor began to dictate, ‘Iron spits and frying pans, stewpans and casseroles in tinned copper…’

  Joseph Abraham, the wigmaker, looked truly sorrowful and turned to his tenant.

  ‘When they placed the seals and informed us of the day of the seizure, we wrote to you immediately. Oh, if only you had accepted the title His Majesty offered you ...’

  ‘I want nothing to do with a ducal crown for the purposes of my wife.’

  ‘… Larding-needles, rolling pins, a marble mortar with its pestle.’

  The bailiff made his tally and climbed up to the room on the third floor. He was followed by the ageing Abraham couple, to whom Montespan – making no effort to conceal his gibes from spiteful ears – explained, ‘The King’s lawmen are attacking me in my weak spot: money. In Françoise’s name, they demand I reimburse her dowry, something I have never touched! I received only the interest. But
by striking me so low, they leave themselves open to my scathing reply. The moment I arrived in Paris this morning, I went to see my father-in-law and, at the risk of provoking the total collapse of the house of Mortemart, I demanded immediate payment of the sixty thousand écus his daughter’s lawyers require. In the light of this attack, I hope the plaintiffs will curtail their fees and temper their unreasonable claims!’

  ‘One walnut bed, one blanket … Monsieur le marquis, I estimate the entirety of your property at a total of nine hundred and fifty livres, which shall be paid to your wife.’

  ‘Nine hundred and fifty livres,’ echoed Louis-Henri. ‘She has my furniture seized for nine hundred and fifty livres, when the King is building her a palace in Chinese mosaics for three million écus.’

  He burst out laughing. ‘She has lost touch with reality.’

  The bailiff informed him that Parliament would no doubt decide to do the same with the marquis’s remaining property in Guyenne, unless he paid the dowry forthwith, along with four thousand livres, annually, of alimony which the favourite demanded, by virtue of their physical separation.

  ‘How could I possibly do that? I haven’t a pistole to my name and I don’t even know where I shall sleep tonight.’

  And if the squire found himself tossed out onto the cobblestones of Paris, in danger of losing even the last clod of earth on his Gascon estate, this did not seem to be Rhurin’s problem.

  Montespan felt as if the Pyrenees had fallen on his wig. He reminded the bailiff, to no avail, that according to the law in force, whatsoever her reasons might be, a woman could not leave the conjugal home, on pain of being deprived of her rights and, if caught in flagrante delicto in an act of adultery, she could be sentenced to the iron collar, the pillory or banishment, forfeiting her dowry to her husband – provided he had not already murdered her, for there was no punishment prescribed in that case.

  ‘D-do you intend to kill the King’s mistress?’ stammered François Rhurin.