Before Versailles

by Karleen Koen

AS HE RODE through the woods beside the carriages, his despair quieted a bit. It was a beautiful afternoon. The forest smelled green and moist. He filled his lungs with cool, clean air. If only half his blood were royal, did that make him any less equal to the task ahead? He could feel the sense of destiny that had always driven him. You were born for this, his beloved cardinal had told him. A piece of the past was gone, as dead as Cinq Mars, as the boy. Any question of his birth would be a sometimes faint rumor, as old as the Mazarinades, until the question faded to a whisper that no one could hear. He was king, he, Louis the fourteenth of that name, he and no one else, and he would make a mark in this time and space of his so large that all else was forgotten.

  Their caravan of coaches and riders and musketeers and household troops stopped so that Maria Teresa might stretch her legs. He left his wife and her ladies fluttering around the carriages and walked to his mother, who had abandoned her carriage to stand alone, under a magnificent oak whose thick arms grew low to the ground and spread their length out as if they would amble on forever. He saw that she had been weeping.

  “Are you well?” he asked.

  “I have a pain. It’s nothing.” Her eyes met his. “I am going to say this once more, for both our sakes, then you are never to ask me again for I will never answer again. Your father was Louis, the thirteenth of that name. He sired you. No other.”

  They stared at each other, the will of each enormous, emotion between them flickering the way Louis’s eyes did when he was at his most dangerous. He bowed and turned away. So be it. Her words would be the truth he held to his heart. Her truth would be the strength from which he struck. As he returned to his wife, Olympe sauntered up, Athénaïs a little distance away.

  “Is it true,” Olympe whispered, “that a musketeer attacked the queen mother?”

  “It’s true that there was a lover’s quarrel between a musketeer and Madame de Motteville in the queen mother’s presence,” said Louis.

  “I heard someone was shot with a pistol.”

  “Someone was hurt and may die,” said Louis. He spoke very gently, and Athénaïs, seeing the expression on his face, lowered her eyes and cursed herself for being anywhere near Olympe. “I tell you this as a friend. I would ask your discretion and kindness in seeing that gossip about this goes no farther.”

  “Of course. I’m yours to command.”

  But he knew she’d talk. He depended on it, and thus truth would become intermingled with lie, and in time, no one would know the difference.

  THEY WERE QUITE late, but carriages were still arriving, and people were everywhere. The last time Louis had seen this many people in one place had been on a battlefield. He’d visited Vaux-le-Vicomte on his return from his wedding. There had been crowds of workmen and piles of building debris, and so he wasn’t prepared for the breathtaking, completed beauty of the place, beginning with the row of towering pillars, their double-sided heads gazing with stone eyes far over the head of any visitor. Philippe had told him; he’d said, you’re going to be amazed at what’s been created; but he’d believed his brother exaggerated, the way Philippe was prone to, loving or hating with equal intensity. Riding down the château’s long entrance lane had been like approaching a shrine to beauty; the château was a jewel sitting high in its jewel box of garden, terrace, and woods.

  He dismounted at the edge of the moat, went to help his wife and mother from their carriages. God, the number of people, everywhere he looked, all along the lawns of the neat outbuildings, everywhere on the entrance terraces, at every window of the château. How could the viscount accommodate this many? It was more splendid than any entertainment he or his mother before him had ever given, and that was enough to spark anger. The viscount flaunted his spoils for all the world to admire. And they did.

  Nicolas walked forward, his wife beside him. Behind him Louis saw his brother, Henriette, his cousins, among them the formidable Condé, with his prince’s blood and warrior’s heart, who’d made war on the kingdom for years, fleeing to Spain and fighting on its side, until Louis’s marriage had sealed a peace, healed a war. Condé was a great general brought to heel, allowed back to France, among his beloved cardinal’s last frenzied acts, to patch up the breaks in the kingdom, trying to give his precious young king something united over which to rule.

  All the great families were represented, clustered in the huge entrance courtyard or on the terrace steps, waiting to bow to him and Maria Teresa, but were their hearts vanquished? He very much doubted it. Where was Louise? Ah, there she was. He felt more in command at the sight of her. She wore a new gown of a soft summer green because he’d given it, telling her it was the color of true love and that she must wear it for his sake. He took a deep breath and smiled at the viscount when what he really wished to do was order his immediate arrest. There were two kings at this fête, and they met each other in the entrance courtyard. The viscount’s motto was cut into stone on the porch above him. What heights might he not reach, so the words said. Or fall from, thought Louis.

  All through the rest of the afternoon and into the long night, through all the pomp and ceremony and walking in the garden and having supper served to him on bended knee and admiring one thing after another because everywhere the eye looked there was something to admire and making his way among courtiers, financiers, judges, lawyers, priests, nuns, bishops, archbishops, governors of provinces, he couldn’t stop the sense that Nicolas challenged him directly with this fête, saying, see, boy, my power, my prestige, are enormous. You tread dangerously, boy, to threaten me in any way at all.

  Chapter 38

  E FELL IN LOVE WITH THE FOUNTAINS, AS DID ALL THE court. Never had so many been assembled in one place, dancing points of water in the long and magnificent gardens that framed this exquisite château. They spewed their drops upward in a continuous symphony of water and sunlight, and he was dazzled. He fell in love with the visual trick of the long landscape canal, set lower than the plane of the gardens, so that one walked toward a gushing set of water spouts and their grottoes, unknowingly for a time, and then there was the unforeseen edge, and below one was a long, long canal of water, fed by water that played over the most magnificent collection of stone statues he’d seen in an age, each set back in a private grotto behind the million droplets of water that sprayed everywhere, and above them rose a hill, higher than the château, and atop the hill stood an enormous statue of the ancient hero Hercules, and from this Hercules, one looked back to a vista of garden and château that was breathtaking in its beauty and orderliness. He listened with real interest to Nicolas’s brother, who told of searching artists’ studios and collectors’ private galleries and even the Vatican in Rome for the statues displayed in and around the château.

  He fell in love with the grand salon, an oval eighteen meters long and eighteen meters high that was the center of the château and rose two stories above one’s head. Its arched openings were closed by no doors, but led directly onto a terrace and the sweeping gardens beyond, so that one felt every breeze from the outside. There wasn’t another house in France with this feature, Nicolas told him. Late-evening light was pouring through the arches and upper-story windows, playing on the white and black marble of the floor with its center medallion reflecting the center of the salon’s dome above.

  He fell in love with the artistry of the tapestries on every wall, tapestries woven right here in a workshop the viscount had created. He fell in love with the bedchamber created specifically for him—no one else had slept in it, no one would, not even the viscount—the most expensive velvet attainable on the bed covers, the bed curtains, and the walls, wood gilded everywhere, twin crystal chandeliers hanging down from a coved ceiling.

  He’s a thief, pure and simple, Colbert had said earlier, in a moment when he and Louis gazed at the vista of the château and gardens from the statue of Hercules. Your architect, your painter, your gardener created this. Your workers worked upon it. Yes, so they had, but what splendor had been created, thought Louis, his h
eart soothed by the beauty everywhere. What profusion. What hospitality.

  “Here she is,” D’Artagnan called out, and his girl in summer green, only the bracelets on her wrists and the pearls in her ears and the lavender roses near her breasts for ornament, walked into the bedchamber and into his arms. He buried his face into her neck, breathing in the smell of the roses and her. He wanted to tell her about the boy he would never know, about Cinq Mars’s death, about his rage at the viscount, but all he said was, “Tell me that you love me. Tell me that you always will.”

  “I love you more than my own life. I always will.”

  D’Artagnan coughed.

  Yes, she must go. “Stay where I can see you,” Louis told her.

  “If I can, you know I will, majesty.”

  He must keep Henriette near to see his beloved, and if he kept Henriette near, Maria Teresa became fretful and irritable. He hadn’t meant to create these quarrels among the women he loved, and yet he had, and he didn’t know how to mend them. A performance in the gardens was planned. He must rise and walk back into the gardens with Nicolas, make certain the swallowed fury in him didn’t show.

  “HE’S HERE. I’VE seen him,” Fanny whispered excitedly to Louise as they settled themselves for the performance. “He says he is staying out of sight of his majesty, and that he has a treat planned. Oh, I’m so happy.”

  “I’m glad he was kind.”

  “May I sit by you? I can’t find my friends.” The woman who spoke looked both motherly and anxious. It was Madame du Plessis-Bellièvre, Nicolas’s best spy, but Louise had no idea of that, and she nodded in answer as courtiers rustled and whispered and looked expectantly toward the sets of stone steps. Musicians were assembled, violins in hand. On the lawn, set close to a tier of steps, was an enormous shell.

  As everyone watched, the actor Molière appeared at the top of the steps. He was dressed not in costume, but as he dressed every day, as if he were in the common courtyard of Fontainebleau. He ran down the steps and walked straight up to Louis, sitting in the first row. Molière made a huge, sweeping burlesque of a bow that made his audience laugh out loud.

  “Alas, I’m all alone. Alas, there wasn’t time to prepare. Alas, I am desolate. Alas, I am abandoned. Alas, I must have aid.” Molière declaimed like a tragic actor would, pronouncing each word in a loud, slow tongue-roll of syllables. He held a dramatic pause long enough to give the most restless courtier a chance to still, and then he said, “Most august majesty, will you aid me?”

  “What can I do?”

  “Snap your fingers. For you, the gods will obey.” Molière leaned forward and whispered loudly, playing every action to exaggeration, “Stand, sire, and say, ‘Let the play begin.’ ”

  Obediently Louis stood, and understanding the value of drama himself, turned to face his courtiers. Every face was expectant. Every face was smiling. It was theater at its best.

  “Let the play begin.” To the audience’s delight, he declaimed the way Molière had, that long, loud rolling out of syllables that was the standard for a tragedy.

  Fanny grabbed Louise’s arm. “Look at the shell.”

  The shell at the top of the tier of steps was opening, and a woman unfolded from its depths, shells in her hair and hanging at the hem of her diaphanous gown.

  “Mortals, I visit you,” she began to sing, walking slowly and gracefully down the steps, singing that for the king, nothing could be difficult, and so nature was obeying his command.

  “Sage, young, victorious, valiant, and august, mild as severe, and powerful as he’s just,” she sang. “Nothing will be refused him,” she sang, “trees will talk, nymphs and demi-gods will come forth.”

  To the audience’s delight, trees behind the top tier of steps began to sway as actors dressed as fawns and satyrs danced into sight. The premise of the play was slight, nothing more than simple scenes that then led to dancing, which was what the court was most interested in. The premise was that of a man attempting to meet his lady love interrupted by bores, a musician who insists on singing his tune, a card player who must describe in detail his latest game, and lastly, the one that had both Louis and his brother laughing out loud, a man determined to reform the signs of all Paris inns. When it was over, Louis stood to lead the applause.

  “Did you like it?” he asked his brother. He was doing everything in his power to charm Philippe back. He owed him that courtesy.

  “Wonderful,” said Philippe. “What wit Molière possesses.”

  While they had been watching the play, which ended as dusk began, servants had lit hundreds of lanterns to outline garden paths, to outline the house itself. The many statues in the garden, the dome of the house, its cupola, stood out in bold relief. It was like standing in a fairy world. Courtiers stood in clusters discussing all that surrounded them.

  “Well, it makes Fontainebleau seem positively rustic, doesn’t it?” said the Chevalier de Lorraine to Philippe.

  “He’s here,” Philippe answered.

  “He doesn’t dare!”

  “He dares anything.” Philippe smiled, his face so happy that Lorraine stepped backward into Fanny.

  “Clumsy troll,” he said to her.

  “Someone wishes to see you,” Fanny said to Philippe.

  “Where is he?”

  “Follow me.” Fanny was merry, almost dancing in place.

  “Such a play, so fanciful, the music so splendid,” Madame du Plessis-Bellièvre held Louise in a conversation, as if they were old friends. “Are not these lanterns entrancing? My dear girl, walk a moment with me? I have a message from your mother.”

  Louise walked with her toward the grand central garden path that led to the château’s big salon.

  “I told a small lie,” said Madame du Plessis-Bellièvre. She smiled kindly, to assure Louise. “I have no acquaintance of your mother, though it would be an honor to meet her. Perhaps some day you’ll introduce me? Ah, did my lie disappoint you? Little dear. Do you miss your mother? Doubtless her duties keep her engaged. We’re going to be fast friends, I can feel it. There are some people I meet, and I just know that I will adore them. I enjoyed the performance, didn’t you? That Molière is quite droll.”

  “My sides hurt from laughing. And the dancing was beautiful.”

  “You yourself are a lovely dancer. I’ve often noted it at court.”

  “Thank you.” Louise glanced back toward her friends, clustered with Madame, who was walking with the king and queen toward the house. It was easy to walk in the garden with lanterns everywhere, not quite day, but certainly not dark night either, but rather something enchanting, the soft light glimmering everywhere. She had promised Louis she would stay near, and yet she strayed.

  “I can see you wish to join your friends,” said Madame du Plessis-Bellièvre. “I’ll take but a moment more. I asked you to walk with me because there’s someone here who very much wants your favor, and I am, oh, what shall we call me? An ambassador of sorts.”

  “My favor?”

  “Someone very high.” She waved her fan back and forth. “He owns all this.”

  “The vi—”

  “Hush,” she interrupted with a kind smile. “Don’t say his name. Just know he wishes your regard and congratulates you on your standing with his majesty.”

  Louise felt rooted to the ground with shock. The viscount knew of her and the king? “There’s some mistake.”

  “How discreet you are. He will like that, as it would be his honor to make you a quiet gift to show his admiration. No one need know.” Madame du Plessis-Bellièvre’s smile grew wider. “Say, perhaps twenty thousand.” She waited, quite certain of the effect the sum she’d just named would have. It could buy most anything.

  “You’ve made a mistake. You must excuse me.” Louise gathered the wide skirts of her gown in each hand, trying not to look as if she was running for her life as she walked away, but all the same, she half-ran, half-walked back toward her friends, toward their laughter and pointless chatter and the pla
ce she had among them, simple Louise de la Baume le Blanc, no more, no less than they.

  PHILIPPE STOPPED. They were on the edge of the gardens before a long arbor hidden deep in one of the side gardens. “Where is he?” he asked Fanny.

  “Go in if you would, Monsieur.”

  Philippe walked under the vines. He could see a figure sitting before a small table covered with candles, and as he walked toward their light, he saw it was an old woman, covered in shawls, a great feathered hat on her head.

  “Tell your fortune, my lord?” she asked.

  “Where is he?” Philippe demanded.

  The woman grinned at him.

  “Is that you?” Philippe began to laugh.

  “None other,” said Guy. “Molière spent all afternoon on this. I intend to amuse myself telling fortunes to a very select crowd tonight.”

  “You’re mad.”

  “Very likely. How are you?”

  “I miss you. Come back to court.”

  “I’m banished from court, and it seems you’ve forgiven his majesty.”

  “No.”

  “I saw you together tonight. You’re friends again. You’ve forgiven him.”

  “He’s asked my pardon. Belle died, and we both cried, and he told me he would always love me. He has sent to Spain for a horse for me like his—”

  “My kingdom for a horse.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, a play an Englishman and I once talked about. So you forgive that he gave the governorship of a province that was yours by inheritance to someone else. You’ve let that go completely, haven’t you? And there’s no place on his council yet, is there?”

  “The viscount has my best interests at heart—” Philippe began.

  “The viscount has his own best interests at heart. I just wished to see if anything had changed. I’d heard you threw quite a tantrum. I’d heard you weren’t going to his risings or going-to-bed ceremony, but I would imagine you are now.”