Before Versailles

by Karleen Koen

  “Having just signed orders for payments, I say, all of them.” Louis’s wry answer surprised everyone, and there was a burst of laughter, as Louis made a motion for the secretary to allow someone else into the meeting.

  The man who entered was dressed all in black and carried a large velvet pouch under one arm. He did not attempt to sit down with the others but kept his eyes lowered, as if he were well aware that he was not in the same league as these men, who had been secretary of state, secretary of war, and superintendent of finance for years.

  “I’ll request Madame write to her brother, to ask him specifically about his marriage negotiations. He and she are very close,” said Louis. He kept himself from smiling at his own guile. This gave him an excuse to spend even more time with Henriette.

  Nicolas, who was on alert now, didn’t miss the gleam that came into Louis’s eyes when he said the word “Madame.” At once he began to draw conclusions that were slightly different from Olympe’s.

  “We are all agreed on the importance of commerce to the kingdom. I wish to speak again of a commercial fleet,” said Louis, “and so I have summoned Monsieur Colbert.”

  Known to them all, since Mazarin’s death he sat on a lesser council that concentrated upon trade. With a dry cough, Colbert opened his velvet pouch—as black as the coat he wore—and pulled out papers upon which could be seen figures drawn in a tiny, cramped hand. He began to reel off numbers for the building of a merchant fleet, even though Nicolas had explained only yesterday that there was no money in the treasury for ships.

  “It is therefore my suggestion that we import Dutch shipbuilders,” finished Colbert, as the others sat in silence, a little stunned with his facts and figures.

  “I can always find funds if this is what his majesty truly desires,” Nicolas finally said. He threw out the names of several financiers and gold merchants in Paris, eloquent and smooth in his knowledge of them. “My credit is good with them, and if need be, your majesty, I’ll put my own funds into shipbuilding.”

  “I don’t wish your credit to be good with them, Viscount.” Louis was sharp. “I wish my kingdom’s credit to be good with them.”

  “But of course, your majesty, such goes without saying.” Nicolas bit his tongue on the words that they were already two years in arrears. He’d said it yesterday.

  “Excellent. Monsieur Colbert will assist you in finding funds somewhere, so that we can begin.”

  “I look forward to working with him,” said Nicolas.

  Colbert had moved back toward the tapestried walls. He didn’t raise his eyes to meet the viscount’s, did not make a move to draw any attention to himself. But Nicolas could feel triumph radiating from the man. There was enmity between them, bad blood. Does his majesty do this deliberately to test me? thought Nicholas, but he doubted Louis knew the old struggles between him and Colbert. Was it fate, then, throwing up a wry twist when all was going his way? Whatever it was, nothing and no one were going to keep him from his destiny. Time and finances were on his side, no one else’s.

  THE LIEUTENANT OF his majesty’s musketeers, Charles d’Artagnan, wandered through the huge square that was the kitchen and entrance courtyard. It was a habit of his to keep watch on the pulses of the palace. This was where servants and soldiers lived and worked. This was where any coach from the outside must enter and discharge its occupants. The bustle here reminded him of a Paris marketplace, farmers in with baskets of tiny lettuces or potatoes, the Italian troupe practicing its acrobatics and pratfalls by jumping in and out of a ground-floor window, women’s voices rising among the men’s, to quarrel or order someone about or call a child, girls with bare arms washing clothes in big tubs of water, musketeers off duty enjoying a pipe of tobacco and a peep at anything female. A dog chased one of the royal peacocks that had somehow wandered out of the queen’s garden. Cats sat on the ledge of the wall by the moat sunning themselves or seeing what mischief they’d find next. Merchants, sellers of fans and gloves and fabric, sat on leather trunks of inventory awaiting some noblewoman or nobleman’s pleasure to view their wares.

  One of his majesty’s cousins had arrived with her carriage and her servants’ carriages and her guard. Once she, her family, had been his majesty’s enemies. Were they still? He’d go down to the stable later, talk with her chief groom, find out what was the princess’s latest whim, who she was seeing in Paris, ask what servants and companions she’d brought with her. In a far corner was a new acting troupe, squatting like gypsies around their wagon. This particular set of vagabonds—that’s what actors were; the Holy Church would not even allow them the sacraments—had made his majesty laugh like a boy last spring with a play that made fun of what had been fashionable for years, women and the men who admired them setting themselves as too refined to have natural urges and emotions and using an absurd, affected language to describe the world at large.

  D’Artagnan had seen the king throw back his head and yelp at certain lines in the play. What was the line that had amused his majesty so much? Oh, yes, an actress, over-powdered and purse-mouthed, looking just like more than one older countess at court, waving her fan like a windmill, announcing, marriage is awful—how can one endure the thought of lying by a man who’s really naked?

  D’Artagnan had thought his majesty was going to fall out of his chair laughing. That and the actors calling a looking glass a “counselor of the graces” and a chair “a commodity of conversation.” Sweet blue heaven, it warmed an old soldier’s heart to see a play so plain and so damned funny when the style was for tragedy with actors marching around in togas and declaiming in deep, serious voices. Of course, the court and Paris society, full of people who talked exactly like the over-powdered actresses, hadn’t known what to do.

  But since the king laughed, they did also. And the fashion of over-sensibility was erased overnight by the yelping amusement of a young king who for days afterward had advised his brother to go back at once to his counselor of the graces or offered his wife a commodity of conversation whenever he saw her. And here in the kitchen courtyard of Fontainebleau was the ringleader of the laughter, an actor in the play and the playwright. Word was his father had a shop somewhere in Paris, was a prosperous merchant, but his son had kicked over the traces, choosing another life entirely.

  “Molière, how are you?” asked d’Artagnan. “Working on something that pokes fun at my soldiers?”

  The actor bowed. “What an excellent idea.”

  “Don’t do it. I’d hate to have to arrest you. What brings you here?”

  “We’ve been asked by his majesty to perform our little nothing again. And the Viscount Nicolas has expressed interest in my writing a small farce, and we help the incomparable Madame with her upcoming ballet.”

  “His majesty? The viscount? Madame? Well, well. You do move in high circles.”

  “We’re the hors d’oeuvres of the theater, not the entrée.”

  “Keep making his majesty laugh, and you’ll become the entrée. Where’s the tall man wrapped in the cloak I saw the other night?”

  “Not one of ours,” answered Molière. “Just a vagabond who joined us for supper one night.”

  “One of yours,” piped up an actress, a saucy, plump thing. “I saw his uniform.”

  “What color was it?” asked d’Artagnan.

  “Green.”

  “For true love,” said Molière.

  Green had been the color the cardinal’s musketeers had worn, thought D’Artagnan. “Did you catch his name?”

  “He didn’t give one.”

  “You’ll let me know if you see him again?” He walked his circuit around the rest of the courtyard, thinking about the man he had half-noticed out of the corner of his eye the other day. He’d assumed he was one of Molière’s troupe. Who was he? Why was he at Fontainebleau? Doing something he shouldn’t for someone who paid well? But then again, it might be the newly arrived princess who had once been their enemy. This morning, without saying a word, his majesty had handed him anot
her Mazarinade. Same handwriting, same note paper. It had been placed with stinging mockery in the brim of a hat. A wind from the Fronde is blowing, blowing, blowing, it said.

  The Fronde had been the name given to the civil wars.

  Chapter 8

  AY BEGAN TO WHILE ITS WAY TOWARD JUNE. THE MAIDS OF honor’s Mary gardens—created in honor of the Holy Mother—bloomed with monkshood and our-lady’s-fingers and mother’s-heart and Christ’s-eyes. Roses on courtyard walls unfurled crimson buds to bask in warmer, longer days.

  Louise rode with a groom to the nearby convent to see Choisy’s waif. A nun led the girl into a cool, dim chamber, where Louise waited.

  “Do you remember me?” Louise asked. Bruises were healing, but the child’s hands were red and chapped. The nuns must have her washing clothes. The Carmelites were known for their vows of poverty and toil. Not all orders were as strict.

  The girl nodded her head.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Julie.”

  “I came to see how you do.”

  A tear appeared. “I miss them.”

  Of course you do, thought Louise. “Come outside and see my horse. Perhaps you’d like to ride him?”

  Later, back at Fontainebleau, as she changed her gown for evening, Louise thought more about the girl. If there were tears the next time she visited, she’d take her to see her family. She went to a window, unable to withstand the lure of the setting sun. Dusk was here, a long May’s dusk. Someone was singing an old ballad:

  I send you here a wreath of blossoms blown,

  and woven flowers at sunset gathered.

  Time is flying, be therefore kind, my love,

  whilst thou art fair.

  Whoever sang had a tender voice. Summer was almost here, thought Louise. It was one of her favorite seasons. All of nature unfolded and stretched. Each morning, she eagerly rode in the forest, each night she gratefully watched the moon. It was in its waning phase this night, but romance at court, especially between the king and Madame, did not wane, but like a new moon, opened and grew.

  SEVERAL HOURS BEFORE the dawn in a bedchamber with blue draperies and bed hangings and solid silver chairs, Catherine brushed out Henriette’s hair. Henriette was in her night robe, but Philippe was off somewhere with Guy and wouldn’t be calling this night.

  “He says he loves me.”

  Bubbling, as wide awake as if it were noon, Henriette spoke into the looking glass set up for her at her dressing table. Hers was an amazing story, a civil war begun before she was born, a father dead by the time she was five, a mother a beggar at the court in which she’d been reared as a princess, a brother who was offered back his throne by the same people who’d fought him, and as her brother’s star had brightened the sky, so had hers. It was intoxicating and heady, like strong wine, to know how much she was admired at the moment when a little more than a year ago, she and her mother hadn’t the funds—for horses, for servants, for new gowns, for jewels, for gifts—to journey with the court across France to witness the king’s wedding. It was as if she’d unknowingly drunk a magic elixir.

  She tossed two priceless rings into a silver dish on her dressing table as if they were baubles. “What have you done to my court? he asks. He says he needs me to begin his day. The rest is shadow, he says. You are my light, he says.” She laughed, her face, small and pointed, gamine, a changeable tableau upon which expressions and moods flitted like lightning, part of her charm to her admirers. She was restless and sensitive and very aware of the impression she made upon others. “Once he wouldn’t even dance with me. Do you remember it? Oh, I wish we could stay like this forever, adoring one another, living off kisses.”

  “You can charm the birds from the trees,” said Catherine. “They’re saying that and a hundred other things.”

  “What things?” Henriette couldn’t get enough of the compliments about herself. All the admiration she’d received had gone to her head, as the young roosters at court continued to preen and screech before her.

  “They call you a sprite. They call you a fairy. They call you a nymph, and there is a disagreement about whether you’re a moon nymph or a sun one. They say that you’ve brought a life and vitality to the court that has been missing for years, that even the queen mother didn’t provide when she was younger. They say he should have married you.”

  Henriette gasped in pleasure. “They don’t—”

  “They do. They say you are all that is best of we French, that you are truly one of us, that your charm and liveliness have changed things forever. They say you’ve changed Monsieur, that before you, women never held him.”

  Henriette turned in her chair to face Catherine. Her blossoming vanity turned anxious. “I don’t want to hurt him, you know. I adore Monsieur. He’s been so good to me.”

  Catherine leaned over to whisper in Henriette’s ear. “But you have more, far more than Monsieur. The king is your slave. You have him in the palm of your hand.”

  Henriette looked down at her hand on the dressing table’s top and turned it to gaze at her palm.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Catherine. They both knew exactly what she referred to.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Has he asked you to—”

  “No!” Henriette interrupted, shaking her head, beginning to flush.

  “He will.” Catherine kissed her cheek. “Don’t be uneasy. I’ll help you. Did you see the viscount’s gift?”

  On a table in the antechamber lay a beautiful book with purple velvet for its cover, and inside were pages edged in gold, and Henriette’s crest was woven into the velvet cover in silver thread. Monks at the university in Paris had illuminated in colored inks the stories of three old folk tales written down by a courtier and court official gifted at such things. There was a story of the girl whose foot fit in a glass slipper, the story of a girl who was made to sleep by a jealous fairy, and the story of a girl who wore a red riding hood. I found it amusing to ask him to make his knowledge into a book, the viscount had said, and of course, I thought of you. Please count me as one of your many admirers and champions. The viscount patronized many writers and artists. La Fontaine, Corneille, Saint-Évremond were under his wing. Henriette wished to do the same.

  “It’s very beautiful,” answered Catherine. “He wishes you to know his regard for you.”

  “He has offered me Vaux-le-Vicomte any time I desire,” confided Henriette. Vaux-le-Vicomte was a château the viscount was building several hours distant by carriage, closer on horseback. “For my rest, privacy, and contemplation, he said.”

  “How thoughtful,” answered Catherine, thinking, Vaux-le-Vicomte would be the perfect meeting place for Madame and the king, away from prying eyes.

  “I’ve told his majesty,” said Henriette, her china-blue eyes wide and innocent as if she hadn’t suggested a place where her romance with Louis might become much more serious.

  Catherine turned her by the shoulders to face the mirror again and resumed her task of brushing her hair, thinking all the while of what was unfolding. This princess she served danced on a precipice, adoring the admiration thrown at her, and playing as yet with being unfaithful. But there came a moment when play turned physical. Wiser in the ways of the world than Henriette, Catherine thought of the summer days stretching out endlessly before them, the long summer nights when the breeze died and the lace-edged sheets were too heavy and perspiration beaded under arms and breast, behind knees, while the heart beat like a drum at the thought of a desired one, and the forest with its cool mocking green seemed to offer refuge and a hundred bowers.

  She remembered her first infidelity, the guilt mixed with unbearable excitement, when passion could be set alight by nothing more open than a meeting of the eyes, simmering until lovers could finally touch each other, explore naked flesh, exploding, made almost violent by the wait. Those thoughts led her to think of the Viscount Nicolas. Discretion, he advised. He’d met with Catherine in a grotto in one of the gardens sever
al days earlier, to assure her of his loyalty to both Madame and his majesty. Discretion would be wise, he’d said, meeting Catherine’s eyes in a way that had made her heart beat faster, something stern and yet tender about him, something appealing and worldly. Assure Madame I am her friend in this, he’d said.

  Your implications insult everyone, Catherine had replied, but without anger, playing the court game wherein the truth lay always behind the words. A thousand apologies, the viscount had replied. How may I make up my clumsiness to you? And she’d remembered that word was he was a wonderful lover, and generous, and they had looked in each other’s eyes, the attraction between them neither denied nor spoken aloud, better that way.

  The viscount was correct to advise discretion, thought Catherine now. She put down the brush. It seemed to her the king was beginning to show the strain of keeping his passion leashed. He wouldn’t be able to hold it inside forever. He and Henriette were like two comets blazing in parallel paths. Sparks were beginning to shower out into the surrounding darkness. They must all make certain nothing was destroyed, or, at the very least, Catherine must make certain that she herself wasn’t singed.

  CHOISY WAS DRUNK, so that when a tall man loomed suddenly before him just outside the palace walls in the dark, he broke into helpless laughter, the idea of being robbed hilarious. He hadn’t a feather to fly with; Monsieur had just plucked them all in a game of cards.

  “If you’re going to rob me, someone has all my coins,” he announced. He bowed and almost fell over but straightened himself with a liquid, drunken grace. Then he found himself being pushed by a strong hand until he staggered against the hard, round rim of a fountain and fell back into the water. Flame in a nearby wall lantern pierced a little of the night around them. He stared up at the man who’d pushed him, trying to collect his wits.

  A gaunt, forbidding face looked back at him. Choisy thought, this man doesn’t want money. The man held out a hand, and, dripping, Choisy stepped out of the fountain. “Who are you?” he asked.