by Jean Teulé
‘No, far from it…’
That very afternoon, at four thirty, surrounded by numerous mirrors, Louis XIV buttoned up his richly coloured brocade breeches again then wrote a letter.
Monsieur Colbert,
As I went through the council chamber of late I forgot to tell you that word has come to me again that Monsieur de Montespan is in Paris and has dared to make indiscreet assertions. It would be most opportune to observe his behaviour. He is a madman, capable of the most extravagant acts; it shall be your pleasure to keep me closely informed. In order that his pretexts for being in Paris should be short-lived, consult with Novion so that Parliament acts quickly. I know that Montespan has threatened to come and abduct his wife. As he is perfectly capable of it, once again I rely on you to ensure he does not appear in the environs of the palace, and that he leave Paris at the earliest opportunity.
46.
Montespan moved through the grounds of the chateau of Versailles like a wolf through the forest in Bonnefont. He prowled amongst the lawns and flower beds; head down, he followed the pools of water – like mirrors that made the sky part of a jardin à la française. He hid side on behind the statues. He crouched in the thick clumps of narcissi, hyacinths, irises and fluffy anemones, and with long easy strides made his way towards the palace …
Versailles was a permanent construction site. Thirty-six thousand men were working there: stonecutters, masons, carpenters, roofers, earthmovers and labourers. They lodged at the edge of the immense royal estate in barracks known as ‘hôtels de Limoges’, as the majority of the stone workers were from Limousin and Creuse. In summer the work continued by torchlight. There were tents that served as infirmaries, and servants of the royal pantry sold the leftovers from court in stalls alongside the chateau. Montespan had, in broad daylight, taken advantage of the teeming activity to hide under the tarpaulin of a cart transporting the pineapples and green peas that the King was mad about, along with barrels of fruit ice cream. Once the cart had gone through a service gate in the outside wall, Louis-Henri had left the cart and hidden in the bushes.
Five thousand idle courtiers, hiding their smallpox beneath layers of rouge, met on the paths where they greeted or ignored one another loftily, and the Gascon scurried, head bent, towards the rear of the palace. He wanted to abduct Françoise – ‘I have to get her out of here’ – but it was impossible. He saw her in the distance, ten times more protected than the Queen. Forty bodyguards, for her alone, were by her side – officers who stared hawk-eyed into the distance whilst she walked up the steps of the royal residence; the cuckold followed.
A young sergeant was in charge of screening people at the entrance and asked the identity of those he did not recognise. ‘Who are you?’ Ahead of Louis-Henri, vexed ducs and princes offered all sorts of replies: ‘Julius Caesar!’ ‘The Pope!’ The guard was annoyed at having to deal with such jesting – not refined enough for his taste – but he forced himself to smile deferentially as he let them go through. When the Gascon introduced himself as ‘Monsieur de Montespan’, the sergeant burst out laughing.
‘Ha-ha! That’s a good one! Pray, come in, Monsieur de … Montespan! Ha-ha-ha!’
Inside the palace there was noise all day long. Workers knocked down walls, servants ran down halls, supplicants walked back and forth along the galleries. Louis-Henri was quickly wearied by the whirl of activity.
Upstairs, the cuckold realised he would not be able to get any closer to his wife. A veritable little army stood posted outside her apartments. So be it … then he came to a halt before a painting hanging on the wall, a canvas by Mignard no doubt. It was Françoise! The Gascon’s heart began to pound as he looked at the likeness of the woman whose voice and face he could not forget. How beautiful she was, languishing on an oriental carpet, leaning on her elbow in a leafy setting. Around her neck she wore a pearl necklace … Grr! She was surrounded by four children. Were these some of the bastards she had had with the King? A copper plate plaque indicated that they were, from left to right, Mademoiselle de Nantes, the Comte de Toulouse, Mademoiselle de Blois and the Duc du Maine. They’re beautiful, thought Montespan.
*
No, they were absolutely hideous! Louis-Henri came upon them in the garden, seated more or less as they had been in the painting, without Françoise, alas. In the shade of a thick grove, he happened upon them – quite by chance – sitting on a rug, staring at him. The one standing on the right, the eldest, introduced himself.
‘The Duc du Maine…’
Montespan understood why the painter had portrayed him with a long vizir’s coat trailing on the ground. The adolescent had an atrophied leg that was much shorter than the other, and he limped in a most pathetic fashion, despite a huge wooden sole. He sat on the rug with a smile.
‘They have nicknamed me “Frisky”; but that’s exactly what I’m not. When I was three years old, and I was teething, I had such terrible convulsions that one of my legs ended up much shorter than the other. They tried to lengthen it, but ever since, it has only dragged all the more.’
Mademoiselle de Blois sat down in front of du Maine and laughed. With one shoulder higher than the other, this daughter of the King resembled a cockroach. She sang salacious songs and seemed to have an unbridled sexuality, totally abnormal for her young age.
‘She sleeps with her father, the King,’ said Mademoiselle de Nantes, who was horribly cross-eyed and very hairy. She squatted down like a female monkey and began to style and plait the long hairs on her knee. The Comte de Toulouse was a hunchback. His Majesty’s legitimate offspring were not graced with extraordinary health; now the adulterine fruit of the Sun King’s loins, conceived in full view of an open window, seemed to have been cursed as well. Ah, they were not at all like their painting, these bastards of Louis XIV! The painter had lied, misrepresented reality, and yet what a painting it would have made.
Montespan asked, ‘Do you have no other brothers and sisters?’
‘Oh yes, but they … they went off to commit buggery with the angels,’ sniggered the freakish Mademoiselle de Blois, lifting up her skirt and showing her shitty bottom to the Gascon.
‘Last June,’ sighed the low-limping duc, ‘our brother, the Comte de Vexin, left us. He lived eleven years only to show, through his infirmities, how eager he was to die. He could no longer bear the daylight. Would you like to play cards with us, Monsieur?’
‘Of course, children … Let me deal.’
The card dealer was only too aware of the comedy of his own situation, there on the rug in the grass. The Marquis de Montespan was at Versailles playing cards with his wife’s children … He played very respectfully, dealing a card to his wife’s daughter as if she were his own, kissing her hairy hand, which left long hairs between his teeth. ‘There you are, my little lass.’
From time to time he turned to one side and laughed to himself. The hunchback asked the cuckold, ‘What should we call you, Monsieur?’
‘Papa.’
An interested passer-by, some distance away, had noticed the five of them, and was approaching the rug. Montespan got to his feet.
‘Now I shall have to abandon the game. Amuse yourselves, children, and be good.’
The Gascon walked away quickly and turned a corner of the palace before the passer-by had reached the bastards to ask, ‘Who was that man?’
‘Monsieur Pâhpâh.’
*
At night, after the open-air festivities and torch-lit concerts, the crowd of courtiers returned to their apartments or to the gaming tables in some princely suite inside the palace. Montespan, who was still in the grounds, was lurking among the trees when he suddenly noticed six heads in a row popping up from behind a hedge. They wore short blond wigs in the hurluberlu style, and although their faces had aged, the Gascon recognised them – above all from their grey smocks – as the six apprentices to the wigmaker Abraham.
‘What are you doing here?’
The six heads vanished behind the hedge again and then he
heard six voices, one after the other.
‘Thanks to an accomplice we have here, we are able to infiltrate the estate, and we come on Sundays and holidays to try and see her…’
‘At dusk we climb the trees to look at her through the windows when she bathes naked in the water room, but tonight it’s impossible …’
‘The night watch has left the rest of the chateau to gather around her part of the building and prevent anyone coming near, for the King, aware that you have come out of exile, fears an abduction …’
‘But in the afternoon, at four o’clock, in front of the palace building site …’
‘We gaze at her with a telescope …’
‘And there, what we behold …’
‘Enough!’ said the marquis, vexed, as he stood up. ‘Come and help me instead.’
The six heads reappeared all together.
‘To abduct her?’
‘Nay, of course not, since it is impossible.’
Together the small group walked across the Parterre du Midi whilst the royal security were at the opposite end, and they arrived outside the Queen’s apartments. Montespan located her room one floor up where the light had just been blown out. A former captain, he waited for a few minutes then ordered, ‘Let’s do it!’
The tall thin apprentices galloped up to the façade then, with three at the bottom, two standing on their shoulders, and yet another on top, they quickly made a human pyramid that Montespan hurried to climb as if he were going up the stairs – a foot on a shoulder, then a head, then a hand – until he was just below the windowsill. With all the strength in his arms he pulled himself up and entered the bedchamber with its open window – since His Majesty would join the Queen presently.
‘The King fucks my wife, so I will fuck his.’
He heard the pyramid of apprentices quickly dismantling their human scaffolding along the façade and hurrying off to hide in silence, and then the ‘daring madman’, as the other fellow would have called him, stole like a wolf to sit at the bedside of Marie-Thérèse, whom he had never seen. She slept buried among her pillows in a faded decor overflowing with gold all the way to the astral ceiling, and Louis-Henri spoke to her in a hushed, barely audible voice.
‘Your husband, at this moment, is making love to my wife. Let us do the same so that he, too, shall know the weight of horns.’
Very delicately, inch by inch, the way one removes a bandage from a wounded man’s burning sore, Montespan lifted up the magnificent bedspread: it was embroidered with a stag hunting scene depicting in silver threads the hounds being called to the quarry. He pulled back the blanket and satin sheet together. The queen’s nightdress had corkscrewed around her legs. ‘You are rather short,’ said the marquis regretfully, slipping a palm beneath her garment and up the back of her thigh. He did not like her skin; he found it … unpleasant. As for Françoise, though, her skin was spiritual and her arse was spirited, whereas Marie-Thérèse’s, noted the Gascon, lifting up the nightdress – oh, woe! A square thing with nothing in the way of hips, which gave her a figure like that of a young wild boar.
‘You would not earn one pistole in the brothels behind Place de Grève.’
At Versailles, Montespan stared at the Queen’s bare bottom. A cough, the slightest movement, the slightest intervention of fate could have revealed the foolhardy intruder, and then what would have become of him?
‘It is said that you say a special mass whenever the King climbs upon you. With me, the priest would not see you very often.’
He parted her lace bodice to look at her breasts: ugly. With the flat of his palm, Louis-Henri slowly crushed the down in one of the pillows to reveal her profile, and discovered ruined teeth and a waxy complexion aggravated by brown spots scattered around a gigantic nose. Montespan sprang to his feet in terror and recoiled, observing the horridly dumpy Queen with her bottom exposed.
‘Goodness, how can this be! Like a lump of Auvergne sausage! I understand why your husband prefers my wife … It’s the first time I’ve actually understood the King. How can one have one’s way with you?’
Louis-Henri was at a loss to find any motivation. He searched all around him and concluded that unless he drank himself senseless from the carafe of alcohol set on the little desk, he’d never manage. He slumped into an armchair and put his feet up on the desk, his crossed red heels muddy from the gardens, then he poured himself a golden liqueur from Alicante and drank it straight down. He refilled his glass. He was tempted by an open box of chocolates. He gobbled up a few, then all of them, then knocked the box over with a chuckle. The cuckold was beginning to feel splendidly drunk. He took a pipe from his doublet, lit it and belched rings of smoke towards Le Brun’s painted ceiling. The embers in the little stove crackled and glowed red in the darkness of the bedchamber. Outside, through the open window, one could see, over the surrounding wall, the forges in action with showers of sparks from the metals that shrieked like a madman. Louis-Henri removed his periwig, which he set down next to his pipe, and got up. He drank the rest of the liqueur from the carafe, wiped his lips, and pulled down his pink silk breeches, then went up to the monumental four-poster bed but … nothing.
In her sleep the Queen had rolled over onto her back and, with her slack mouth wide open, she was snoring. Louis-Henri, standing with his cock in full view, wandered around the huge royal chamber and muttered, ‘I was so happy with Françoise … I loved her laughter, and every-thing she said to me. I am a solitary man, ’tis my inclination, but I was happier with her than alone. The moment she was there, I could breathe better, felt calmer. Above all I loved her intelligence. I miss her, if you only knew … I cannot become accustomed to her absence. The moment she opened the door to the room I was in, a smile lit up my lips: “Good day, my darling, my beloved!” Often, as I fell asleep beside her, I would join my palms together. Waking up by her side was a dream that would last the entire day and I would bite my lips with happiness. Some mornings my lips were covered in blood, and she would kiss my wounds: “You love me so.” “Too well?” I asked, and she laughed. If one night she panicked, filled with anxiety, I would console her, reassure her: “Do not be afraid, all will be well …”’
Marie-Thérèse was talking in her sleep.
‘That vitch shall ve the death of me!’
The dull, austere Queen born in Madrid had never managed to learn French properly, and the subtlety of the courtiers’ witty phrases cast her into an abyss of bewilderment. She could not distinguish a ‘v’ from a ‘b’.
‘Hey! What did you say?’
Montespan frowned and squinted, ready to smash one of those large Chinese vases in her ugly face, but he controlled himself and turned his back on the stupid woman (she was a fervent adept of games, and her participation was particularly valued because she never understood any of the rules).
‘In any case, what would be the point of waking you? You would want no part of me. The mere thought of lowering your gaze upon a man who has not been consecrated by God is inconceivable to you. He must be dressed as a Roman emperor, in a tunic of gold and diamonds, wearing a helmet with a plume! Whereas Françoise now, I know she is sweet and gentle, with simple tastes, and her sex was pink and gleamed like mother of pearl, faith, like the inside of this mollusc shell, this little font hanging from your wall. Oh aye, hers was as delicate as a shell …’
If Marie-Thérèse had awoken and sat up, she would have seen, from behind, the marquis’s right arm shaking frenetically up and down. Tears of milk suddenly spurted into the holy water, eddying in long filaments. A few more drops fell and burst like pearls, then there was the sound of doors opening and footsteps on the parquet in the corridor. Montespan, already at the window, leapt into the void. Fortunately the apprentices had immediately run over and rebuilt their human pyramid up the façade. The last boy, climbing on the two below him, felt the marquis land on his shoulders, and they quickly tumbled down together.
On the gravel, the six boys with their hurluberlu wigs shot off like
stars in a silent bomb blast. They waved their hands, fingers spread, to bid farewell to the Gascon. Louis-Henri saw a covered cart filled with orange trees in huge crates: with the arrival of autumn, they were to be transported to the shelter of the royal greenhouses outside the palace walls.
It was not known whether the King, on entering the Queen’s bedchamber, had wished to anoint himself with holy water and been surprised by what he found on his brow and lips, or whether it was because he had seen, on Marie-Thérèse’s desk, the man’s pipe still smoking next to an abandoned periwig, along with the glass, the empty carafe, the upturned chocolate box and the traces left by muddy heels on the precious wood, or his wife’s bare bottom turned towards the astral ceiling: but for whatever, or all these reasons, the Jupiterian voice had roared, booming in the Versailles night like thunder, ‘Lauzun!’
47.
‘I don’t think I like my son. He is a harpy. His ferocious ambition should make him the most perfect and refined of courtiers, despite the fact we live in a century where among many the art of vileness seems impossible to surpass. On my return journey from Paris, I stopped to visit him at his Jesuit boarding school in Moulins. I was not at all pleased with Louis-Antoine.’
‘Is it because we’ve gone hunting, Captain, that you’re thinking about him? It puts you in mind of the time when we tried to teach him—’
‘He told me that I must no longer come to visit him, for it would harm his access to the court.’
‘And … the favourite, does he see her?’
‘She has granted him a pension of six thousand écus and often has him brought to Versailles. He is very lucky at games of chance, and is suspected of contributing to her fortune. This year Françoise promised him a lieutenant’s commission in the first infantry of the King’s regiment when he turns eighteen.’
‘Eighteen years old already? How time flies…’ Cartet shook his head in disbelief as they arrived at the huge rock where the two paths crossed in the marquis’s forest.