Aside from that, the evening went perfectly. Father Davot ate second helpings of everything, and Le Sage drank too much wine and began to sing. As the guest of honor in my new persona, I picked at the capons stuffed with oysters in caper sauce and pronounced the dish “too modern,” comparing it unfavorably to the simple and healthful dishes served in the time of Henri IV, when everything was boiled in the same pot. I deplored modern manners and the decay of the times with a fervor that would have delighted my grandmother. I tried out antique gestures and turns of phrase, to be met with awe and applause at the table. I found it infinitely gratifying to be the object of admiration. How interesting and amusing the witches are, I thought as I let them fill my glass again. How much more delightful and variegated their lives than those of ordinary women! And as I spoke, I remembered Grandmother. In fact, I became Grandmother. I took her inside of me, as it were, and she consoled me by her presence. It was lovely. I shall buy myself a parrot at the first opportunity, I thought to myself.
That night was the first of many triumphs for me. The candles were not burned down, the last song sung, or the last bottle emptied until the hour before dawn. The last of the stars had faded, and rosy light was chasing the black from above the Porte Saint-Denis when I departed in a chair. A new day. I felt content beyond words when a stray passerby, still drunk beyond words from the night that had just passed, stopped to stare with awe at the mysterious veiled woman in black.
TWELVE
The following week, all eager to try out my new self, I dove into the society of impecunious nobles and shady foreigners that infested Paris, clung to the fringes of the court, and jostled unceasingly in competition for favor. In this world, everything was for sale, nothing incapable of being traded on the market for personal advantage. The luckiest farmed taxes or courted heiresses, the less fortunate sold their possessions or informed to the police for money while awaiting the coming of better times. Gentility of manners and the ability to put up a good front were one’s ticket of entrance, but to advance in the game more was necessary. A nice figure or pretty profile, in either a man or a woman, was counted an advantage, but a small one; rumors of an inheritance or a lucky streak at the gaming tables were better. A connection with the King, no matter how tenuous, was best of all. In this struggle to be seen, to have something about oneself worthy of gossip for at least five minutes, it was a great advantage to be a hundred-and-fifty-year-old woman who read the future in water glasses and could be persuaded to part with a jar of her youth ointment for the skin.
“It’s a terrible curse, eternal youth. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody,” I told the Comtesse de Bachimont over the remains of the ragoût, as her maid, who was also her cook, housekeeper, and go-between to the pawnbroker, cleared the dishes for the next course. “Besides, the formula was made up over a hundred years ago. I have no idea whether it will work anymore.”
“But your skin—so unlined, so pale…” She couldn’t resist passing her hand across my cheek.
“It is but the pallor of the tomb, Madame. I have lived beyond my time. But it is well my dear husband, the Marquis, never lived to see the corruption of this age.” I dabbed at my eyes, but carefully so as not to disturb the sooty stain that made them look so interestingly sunken. She bought a jar.
“You read the future in water glasses, I hear,” rumbled the Comte de Bachimont as the candles burned low and the last of the supper was taken away. The dim light concealed the oddly barren look of their rented rooms. At the rate the furniture was being sold, I calculated they’d be back in Lyons before the turn of the new year. I’d need to work fast. Monsieur le Comte tried to put his hand beneath my skirt at the table. I didn’t need to move that fast.
“My dear Marquise”—another guest, the physician Dr. Rabel, leaned forward across the table—“isn’t this gift, ah, usually confined to young girls?”
“Dear Doctor Rabel, after the age of ninety one loses all interest in sex…entirely…” I pushed away the count’s hand. “…and, as it were…um, re-virginizes. It was after that that the talent appeared.”
“Hmm,” he said in a learned voice, “yes, definitely. That would account for it. But tell me, the formula didn’t work uniformly…that is to say, you are not fully youthful, um, all over? That is to say, when the abbé purchased the formula from Nicolas Flamel, didn’t you then drink it, once it was made up?”
“It is a grief to me to lay open a sin for which I so long ago obtained absolution, but the formula was an ointment. The abbé used up most of it on himself, being too selfish to think of me first, even though I had sacrificed my hope of Paradise for him. When he applied the remainder of the formula to me, he started at the top, but there wasn’t enough”—I dabbed at my eyes again—“and the second batch, you understand, was never as strong as the first…” I was pleased with my artistic embellishment of the skin-cream story. Creativity is, after all, the greatest satisfaction of the human mind. I composed my face in a distant, tragic look.
The company clucked in sympathy. What a selfish fellow, to leave a nice girl like me only half eternally youthful! I was planning how to expand the tale in the most interesting fashion, when Rabel broke in with a request for a reading. I was in my element. “I must have absolute quiet,” I pronounced in an oracular voice. “The candles must be placed at equal distances around the vase, so as not to disturb the image.” I sent them hustling about on little errands, adjusting the cloth, fetching the strange black bag in which I kept my round glass vase and its stand. I knew I required no picture at all to give a lovely reading. La Voisin’s intelligence network, and the training she had given me in the science of physiognomy, or the reading of features, was quite sufficient. If the pictures came up, it was a bonus; something to embellish my creation.
I spread a blood-red cloth, covered with cabalistic designs, under the globular vase. I demanded “absolutely pure” water to fill it, and the cook, in awe, filtered the water through five layers of cheesecloth before I poured it through a decorated funnel that looked like solid silver into the magic vessel. I spent a long time selecting the correct stirring rod. The glass? The dragon’s head? The serpent? I could feel the intensity of their gazes all directed at me, me. At last, I was popular and admired, just as the witch had promised. I was intoxicated with it.
I chanted, I stirred, and then, odd as it always was, I felt the eerie relaxation, the strange feeling of the nerves of the body vanishing, and a picture started to come up.
“How interesting, Monsieur Vanens. You are in the image with Monsieur de Bachimont. You are selling something…ah, it looks like an ingot of silver…to an officer of the crown. Hmm, now he is signing a paper.” Is it alchemist’s false silver, being sold to the mint as real, or is it real silver, and stolen? I couldn’t tell what kind of transaction it was, so I left the interpretation of the image to my watchers.
“It worked,” breathed the countess, leaning so close that she fogged the glass.
“Success. By God, the formula worked. The mint,” said the Chevalier de Vanens. Well, well, false coiners after all. And probably going to jail for a nice long time, too. But they didn’t want another reading, and I didn’t want to offer to look for bad news. That was the problem with the little reflections. Their meaning was never completely clear. It was like looking through a window into a room where people came, went, and spoke unheard by the watcher. What were they saying? What had gone on before? What did it mean? Interpretation was everything. People think it’s easy, seeing the future; you’ll know everything, win bets, move before your house burns down, speculate in land. Well, it’s not that way at all. Most people don’t even understand the present. Why should they understand glimpses of the future?
That evening I sat up alone with a candle, cataloguing the latest images according to the date seen, persons involved, and estimated time of fulfillment. Even visions require rational analysis.
The images pose
an interesting problem, I wrote. Precisely how are they related to the future? Either
(I) they represent the actual future, which is absolute and immutable, or
(II) they represent a probable future, if events continue as they are now going. If (I), then God has determined the future of the world at its beginning, and there is no free will. I stopped and looked at what I had written. It looked handsome there on the paper, all laid out with rational structure, like Euclid’s geometry. Order and logic, taming the unknown.
Subconclusion (I.A): God may have created the world and abandoned it to its own workings, like a piece of clockwork.
(I.A.i): If God cannot interfere in the world, then God is not all-powerful. But God is by definition all-powerful, and so therefore if (I) is true, then (I.A.i. a) there is no God according to our current understanding and definition of the term. If God exists but chooses never to intervene (I.A.ii), then effectively (I.A.i.a) is also true. The position of the libertines, I thought. Do as you wish. It makes no difference.
Now I turned to the analysis of position number (II): If (II) then God allows free will, or human choice, to reshape the future. This occurs either because God is not all-powerful (I.A.i) and the rest follows, or because (II.B): Grace exists, and so does God. This conclusion was a great puzzlement to me, because rationality should lead us to arrive at truth. I decided on the only reasonable test that I could observe and catalogue:
Test:
1. Bring up image of my personal future.
2. Create through free will actions that will change the image.
3. See if the image is modified.
But try as I might, I could not bring up an image relating to my own future.
THIRTEEN
Inspector Moreau was taken aback when he saw the cluster of carriages and chairs crowded in the street around the widow Bailly’s modest establishment. He had spent the morning checking the new residents of the boardinghouses and rented rooms of his quarter for escaped criminals, soldiers absent without leave, and foreigners of dubious occupation. But interviewing this new resident would obviously take much longer. The respectable widow had notified him immediately of her mysterious new resident. Inquiries of the neighbors and of the widow’s sullen, spotty-faced younger daughter had assured him that the mysterious woman was not a prostitute. In fact, she had no after-hours male visitors at all, and those who did consult her were confined to the parlor, their privacy barely assured by a screen that concealed two chairs and a large, ornate water vase that the widow referred to with great respect as “Madame’s oracle glass.”
As long as it was only fortune-telling she was doing, it was legal. But Inspector Moreau carried concealed in his coat a half dozen spoons ornamented with the crest of a prominent family and had omitted to wear the blue suit and white plumed hat of his police livery.
After a long wait, during which he occupied himself by inspecting the ghastly colored tumors on the screen, which some amateur artist had obviously considered to resemble flowers, he finally was able to take a seat beside the table with the oracle glass. The woman opposite him was tiny, neat, and expensively clad in a black silk mourning gown.
“You, too, have experienced a tragic loss?” he began, taking out his handkerchief.
“My dear husband, the marquis, in a hunting accident. It seems like only yesterday, but it was, in fact, August sixth. The day is burned into my grief-stricken memory.” Her accent was refined, her mode of speech, educated. She could only be from the upper classes. But it was impossible to have been both married and a convent boarder this past August. Moreau felt it was time to make subtle inquiries.
“So recently? How stricken you must be to lose your beloved life partner only this past August.” The marquise looked at him from behind her long dark lashes. Her face was quite white with heavy makeup. It was hard to tell how old she was. Her gray eyes glittered.
“Monsieur Moreau, my profound sensitivity leads me to feel as if it were only yesterday,” she sighed. “But my poor, dear Louis met his unfortunate end on August 6, 1548.” She dabbed at her eyes delicately with a lace-embroidered handkerchief. Moreau was impassive, but inside he had a powerful desire to chuckle with appreciation. A magnificent charlatan, this fortune-teller. He unfolded a lengthy false tale of woe, pausing at those places where the more sinister sort of fortune-teller might offer a quack potion, an illicit and criminal Mass, or, possibly, worse. Madame de Morville heard him out, her eyes sympathetic, and then went into an odd sort of semitrance, staring into the depths of the glass. She seemed to be amused at what she saw, then looked at him with the oddest smile and said,
“Monsieur Moreau, all these troubles you are burdened with will soon vanish as if you had only imagined them. You will receive a commendation from one you respect and experience an increase in your income.”
“But I need the money now,” insisted Moreau, feigning a desperate tone. “If I can’t repay the loan, I’ll be imprisoned. Tell me, can you recommend someone to pawn these?”
Madame de Morville looked over the obviously stolen spoons.
“You are required by fate to take them back to where they came from,” she said in a quiet voice. “If you succeed in pawning them, your fortune will take a very negative turn.”
True enough, thought Moreau. So far, her advice has been eminently sensible and quite within the law. He paid her fee and departed to write up his day’s report.
Marquise de Morville, rue du Pont-aux-Choux at the house of the widow Bailly. The marquise is a woman of indeterminate age and good understanding, who dispenses intelligent advice to the besotted and the silly for a modest fee. She does not sell love powders, deal in substances passed under the chalice, or provide referrals for other illegal activities. Safe. As he poured sand across the paper to dry it, he couldn’t help wondering, even though he knew it was foolish, just when he would receive that commendation from Monsieur de La Reynie.
FOURTEEN
I was, at this time of my first prosperity, living in a furnished room in a boardinghouse in the rue du Pont-aux-Choux. The mistress of this modest but eminently respectable abode was convinced that I had come fresh from boarding at the rather too austere Convent of the Ursulines upon the receipt of a small inheritance. The splendors of her cook and her excellent feather-beds accounted for the change. My rank and a fortuitous reading concerning her elder daughter’s marriage had filled her with awe; thenceforth I ranked above her previous star boarder, a snuff-taking abbé with mournful, brown, spaniel eyes, who supplemented his tiny income by doing translations of Italian pornographic works.
For a small consideration, I was additionally allowed to receive visitors and clients in her little parlor behind the clumsily hand-painted screen produced by her second daughter, the unmarriageable one. My landlady acquired yet another small sum by reporting my presence to the police, who investigated my business and found it honest, at least insofar as deceiving the gullible is legal, though not meritorious.
The greater sorts of clients I visited in their houses, tipping the widow’s little kitchen boy to retrieve a chair or fiacre from the hiring stands, depending on the distance and the weather. Within scarcely a week I had been to three unimportant salons and referred two ladies with unfaithful lovers to La Voisin as well as a man in search of a buried treasure hidden by his great-uncle during the Fronde. I was beginning to be able to compare the merits of the kitchens of several great houses. I felt like quite the woman-about-town. Yet though my life was in many ways mending, I still avoided public places where I might encounter my uncle or brother, who could unmask me and, as my male relatives, claim everything I had, even my freedom.
By the end of January, I found I had cleared the substantial sum of thirty-eight écus, which was not bad for a beginner. And so on a chill, misty morning in the beginning of February, I went to meet La Voisin on a Sunday after Mass to give her the proceeds
of my first real work and my accounting.
***
The cold sun had just broken through the heavy morning mist, and the bells were still reverberating through the narrow streets of Villeneuve as the modest portals of Notre Dame de Bonne Nouvelle swung open to disgorge a stream of jostling, gossiping Mass goers. Pushing my way through the dispersing crowd, I found I was following in the wake of a large, hunched old woman dressed in a flowing black cloak and an extravagantly overdecorated hat, who cleared her way by prodding the slow or unwary with an immense, gold-trimmed staff. Her face was heavily painted, and there was a malign glitter in her eye. Another witch, I thought; I’m getting to recognize them. Who could this one be?
My patroness, elegant in a fur-trimmed hood and well-cut, narrow waisted jacket, had flung back her handsome embroidered mantle while she paused before the church door to pull on a pair of scented kid gloves. She looked up to see the gaudy old thing approaching her like a galleon in full sail; an expression of intense annoyance crossed her face. The old woman’s heavily painted face broke into a knowing grin.
“And how is La Voisin today?” I heard the old woman ask. “Well, I trust? And how is the husband? Still alive?” She cackled uproariously at her own joke as La Voisin pursed her lips with disgust and walked quickly away without answering. The old woman continued to push her way into the church, where she evidently had business. My patroness, still icy with distaste at the encounter, spied me at a distance of several paces and made a hurried little gesture that I should meet her around the corner, away from the strolling, chattering crowd of Mass goers.
The Oracle Glass Page 12