The Oracle Glass

by Judith Merkle Riley

  “Oh, beautiful.” I pretended to sigh. I could see her calculating eye. She was whetting my appetite for the grand life.

  “Our profession is welcomed at every court on earth—providing we are not uncouth, like the vulgar La Bosse. Mind your manners and remember my lessons, and you will have a dozen gowns like this.”

  “And that? The red velvet?” I pointed to the corner of a heavy, rich robe embroidered with double-headed gold eagles that was peeping from beneath one of the muslin covers.

  “Never,” she said, carefully rearranging the muslin. I got a glimpse of sea-green lace before the gown vanished from sight. “This is an emperor’s robe. The only way you would ever have one is if you became Queen.” She tilted her head and looked at me anew with her black, black eyes. “My, what calculating gray eyes you have, my dear. You certainly have the brains to become Queen—and so few do—but you entirely lack the character to make a good witch. I think I need not stay up at night worrying, eh?” She shut the armoire door and turned the key in the lock with a click.

  I thought of the Stoics. I thought of Monsieur Descartes. Here I was offended that I’d been told I wasn’t crazy enough to be a real sorceress. Father, the lover of ironies, would have laughed.

  A knock on the bedroom door broke the moment.

  “Madame, the girl you sent for is waiting below, and your husband has returned with the package.”

  “Oh, excellent, Margot. How many did Samson give him?”

  “Four this time, Madame. Will you be drying them here, as usual?”

  “Of course. Bring the package in.” She turned to me with a cool look, as if she were assessing me. “I have no secrets from the little marquise here,” she said in an arch tone. “The coals in the oven have burned quite low enough now.” So I was right; I thought I’d noticed an unusual heat from behind the tapestry on the bedroom wall.

  As Margot left, La Voisin turned to me. “I’ve found you a lovely little maid. She’s ever so knowledgeable about the court. She can inform you about the people you meet and keep you from embarrassing yourself. Suppose, for example, you knock at a door instead of scratch—you won’t live down the disgrace. But she can tell you which doors to knock at and which to scratch at…when to open a half door to a visitor and when to open a full door. It’s a matter of precedence. Precedence and court etiquette. It’s important you don’t go wrong. Oh, yes. And you should start to grow a long fingernail on the little finger of your left hand; all the courtiers do, for scratching at doors.” She looked pleased with herself and went on: “How very fortunate I was to acquire her…she was in the household of La Grande Mademoiselle until she attracted the notice of the wrong man. A few weeks in the Sâlpetrière caused her to repent of her life and send for me. And I, out of the kindness of a too-generous heart, arranged for her departure and am giving her a new start in life.”

  Interesting. The only way a girl like that could expect to get out of prison was if she was transported for life to the colonies. So La Voisin’s reach extended into the jails and “hospitals” of the city. How had she arranged the escape? And now she had another loyal follower, and a spy to report my every movement. Ah, philanthropy. It becomes a way of life. “You are too generous,” I said, and she shot me a hard look, before turning to her husband who had entered through the bedroom door.

  “So there you are at last—I can’t imagine why you’ve been so slow! How long does it take to go only down the street? It’s not as if Samson lives across town, after all!” Antoine Montvoisin was, for once, not in his dressing gown but in a shabby gray homespun suit and a wide-brimmed, untrimmed felt hat drooping forlornly over a moth-eaten goat’s-hair wig.

  “He made me…hic…wait…for a long time,” Montvoisin said in a weak voice. His wife pulled aside the tapestry to reveal the oven door in the stone wall. Montvoisin stood, all drooping, his thin frame occasionally shaken by another silent hiccup.

  “Unwrap them and put them on the drying rack—and don’t let them drip this time. For heaven’s sake! Can’t you stop that infernal hiccupping?”

  “It’s you who…hic…caused it, so if you’re offended, it’s…hic…your own fault. Next time keep your toad powder…hic…for your clients.”

  “How dare you insult my profession when you live by it? Oh, those are dreadfully damp; they’ll take forever. Couldn’t Samson get us any older ones?” La Voisin was scurrying about like a housewife at preserve-making time. With a rising sense of nausea, I recognized the objects that her lover Samson, the executioner of Paris, had sent her. They were human hands.

  “Doesn’t the smell offend you—I mean, right here in the house?” I was trying to sound cool, offhand, as if I often saw things like that. But my voice came out smaller than usual. Maybe I really wasn’t cut out to be a witch, after all.

  “That?” answered La Voisin. “Oh, it’s no worse than curing hams. Besides, it’s the smell of prosperity. That never bothers me. Pardon, but you’re turning green. Do you need to sit down?” I sat down suddenly on the bed.

  “Don’t you stain my carpet. Use the slop jar. You? At court? You’re a weakling still.”

  “What…what are they for?”

  “Hands of glory. They attract hidden treasure to the owner. Half the court has them. Ladies keep them sewn in their skirts, men in their pockets. Guaranteed to bring luck at the gaming tables. You needn’t look so queasy. They’re quite compact and free of mess once they’re all dried out. They curl up, you see. I buy them from the executioner; the people were already dead. It’s not as if I killed them. The King did; the courts did. Why shouldn’t someone at least get a little benefit from it? I see myself as creating good from evil. I make money from something that would otherwise go to waste—that’s the advantage of understanding housewifery. Nothing should ever be wasted. Learn from me, and you will be able to turn others’ wickedness to your own advantage.”

  I wondered what the Romans did for nausea. They probably never tried vomiting wearing corsets, either.

  “Antoine, go hold her head. I won’t have her dripping down that good dress I paid for. Nerve! Hah! You haven’t got any, Mademoiselle. You? Want vengeance? You couldn’t kill a mouse. I don’t know when I’ve met a girl so lily-livered. It’s a good thing I’ve found you a maid who’s got more backbone than you, or you wouldn’t last a week among the Great Ones.”

  As she shut the oven door with a clang, Antoine Montvoisin offered me his arm to escort me downstairs.

  “She may be the powerful one, but…hic…no matter what she tries, my soul is screwed fast to my body. There’s a virtue in…hic…sticking power. But I recommend to you…hic…not to make her angry, or if you do, don’t take…hic…food or drink in this house. And where you’re going…hic…it’s useful to know a few things. Keep…hic…antipoison with you, or failing that, drink a great deal of…hic…milk if the soup tastes…hic…odd. I found it…hic…to be most efficacious, though it’s…hic…left me with these…hic…accursed hiccups. I’m telling you this because…hic…you seem to have more of decency…hic…about you.”

  That night, I had dreadful dreams. The room turned into a tall, glittering dining room, and I was seated with an elegant company around a great table with a white linen cloth. Silver candelabra stood among heavily laden silver platters, and the talk was witty. There was a lovely pâté on one of the platters. A man reached out to cut it with his knife, to offer some to his lady dining companion. The pâté groaned with a human voice.

  “Oh, how offensive!” the lady exclaimed, and as he hastily drew back his knife, I could see the horrid thing was bleeding where it had been cut.

  “They should know better than to invite things like that to dinner,” observed a lace-bedecked gentleman. A lackey filled my glass full of a rich, green cordial.

  “Oh, no more for me,” I said. “I’ve had too much already.” Too much. Too much. Whom did I kn
ow at this table? I looked to each side. The three friends of the rue des Marmousets were seated on either side of me, Lamotte in ribbons, Griffon in fawn-colored velvet, and d’Urbec, as pale as a ghost, in black silk.

  “Tell me,” said Griffon, “does the pâté publish?”

  “Isn’t it sufficient that it speaks?” asked d’Urbec in that pointed way he had. His dark eyes, somehow sunken in his head, glittered with a strange bitterness and mockery I had not seen before.

  “Monsieur Lamotte, take me from this dinner party. I am fatigued,” I begged. Somehow, he seemed to be the one who had brought me.

  “Oh, you can’t leave,” cried a man eating oysters. “You are supposed to pay for the dinner.”

  “But I can’t—” My desperate protest was interrupted by a woman’s indignant shrieks: “You have to. What do you expect?” And with that the company began to argue about who would pay, growing louder and more quarrelsome by the minute.

  “Mademoiselle Pasquier, I can’t leave just now,” Lamotte confided in a low voice. “I’m filling my pockets for tomorrow’s breakfast. Poet’s privilege.” He took more rolls, a dozen or two vanishing beneath the table. Then he folded up a huge soup tureen into a tiny napkin and slipped it beneath his shirt. But d’Urbec looked at me with that strange, intense look that seemed to see everything.

  “It offends you,” he said, throwing his napkin over the pâté. “Although if you had read the sixth chapter of my Observations on the Health of the State more carefully, you would not have been astonished at all. Come, let us leave before their quarreling sets the hall on fire.” And as the first blows sent the dishes rattling to the floor and the lighted candelabra rolling and sputtering across the fine linen cloth, he took my arm and we fled unnoticed into the night.

  Sweating and terrified, I lay frozen still, waiting for the dawn. What could they mean, these dreams? Or did they mean anything at all?

  ***

  And so it was that within the week I found myself hurtling along behind six matched grays in Madame la Maréchale’s heavy carriage on the road to Versailles. My new maid, bold and henna-haired, sat across from me on the back-facing seat, clutching my hatbox and squeezed in between the Maréchale’s personal maid and one of her poor relative lady-companions. Madame herself and Mademoiselle d’Elbeuf were on the seat beside me. Not so far from the château, where the road divides to go to Marly, we heard the sound of cries and the crack of whips behind us.

  “How many horses?” Madame asked, as her maid leaned out the window to see who was coming. We would not defer for a four-horse equipage.

  “Six, Madame,” responded the maid.

  “And what color are their liveries?”

  “Blue and silver, Madame de Montespan’s.”

  “Then by all means, tell my coachman to pull over, or we will be overturned in the ditch.” As our coach pulled to a halt on the grassy bank beside the road, a heavy carriage rolled past, the lathered horses at full canter, mud spattering from their hooves. Inside I could see three women and the pale face of a little boy. We pulled back onto the road behind them only to be halted again a mile farther on. The great coach was stopped in the center of the road, the blue-and-silver-clad postillions arguing with the coachmen, while in the road, two of the women from the carriage were weeping and exclaiming over the mangled corpse of a poor vine cutter, crushed by the carriage and horses. The huge bundle of sticks with which he had been laden was scattered all about him. Beside the road, members of his family had gathered, staring silently. A plumpish blond woman with a protruding nose and receding chin leaned out of the carriage window.

  “Get back in, I say. What good is your sentimental wailing? Pure hypocrisy! You wouldn’t carry on so if it had happened out of your sight! It’s not as if my postillions didn’t warn him. Everyone knows that a woman in my position drives fast—my equipage cleaves the wind.” One woman wiped her nose; the other started to wail even louder at this speech. “Oh, do be quiet!” the woman in the coach shouted at this new impertinence. “It was his own imprudence that he did not remove himself from my path. One has a right to continue in such circumstances.”

  “That’s Madame de Montespan,” whispered my maid. Ah, the King’s newest maîtresse en titre, promoted from her position as maîtresse en delicat by the forced retirement of the former official mistress, La Vallière, who had been driven by a thousand humiliations into a convent.

  “Your servants are at fault, and you don’t even blame them?” one of the women on the ground, the dark-clad, weeping one, said. She stood up beside the body and addressed the blue-and-silver-clad lackeys fiercely. “If you belonged to me, I would soon settle you.”

  “That’s the Duc de Maine, Madame de Montespan’s oldest son, in the carriage, and that’s Madame de Maintenon there, in the black and gray, on the ground. She’s the children’s governess. And the other woman—she’s the Marquise d’Hudicourt.” The Marquise d’Hudicourt continued to wail and wring her hands, as the growing crowd applauded Madame de Maintenon’s fierce speech.

  “Vive Madame de Maintenon!” they cried.

  “Be good enough to get in, Mesdames. Will you have me stoned?” the woman in the carriage commanded. But the weeping ladies would not be dissuaded until the King’s mistress had given them her purse to hand to the poor relations of the dead man. With that, they remounted, and the carriage clattered off in a spatter of spring mud.

  “Oh my goodness,” said the lady-companion, “the man’s eyes were entirely out of his head. I shall require a cup of chocolate when we arrive; it is simply too painful otherwise.”

  “Surely, Mademoiselle, such sentiment is misplaced on a stranger. After all, it was not a premeditated assassination,” said Madame d’Elbeuf coolly.

  I sat silently for the rest of the ride.

  ***

  At Versailles I was shown into the Queen’s presence by Mademoiselle d’Orléans, Princesse de Montpensier. “I want to know whether my coming child will be a girl or a boy,” the Queen announced in her heavy Spanish accent. I looked at her. She was seated in a large, brocade-covered armchair with gold fringes and gilt-silver legs, a fan of carved ivory half open in her hand. She was about forty, with the prematurely aged look of a weak, inbred constitution. So many lines of princes culminating in this short, sallow blond woman with the bulging eyes and strange features—almost like a gargoyle—that her flattering portraits never quite recorded. I couldn’t but marvel. She had several severe, dark-clad Spanish ladies with her, three of her favorite dwarves—two men shorter than myself but very square, with huge heads, and a perfectly formed, tiny, wrinkled woman—and a good half dozen flat-faced, hairy little lapdogs of great ugliness.

  “I pray daily for another son,” she went on. She didn’t look pregnant to me, but then, I wasn’t experienced in these matters. I’d have to trust the glass. I looked about the immense, airy room for a suitable table. Gold on gold, panels of rare inlaid wood, heavy, elaborately formed furniture of precious metals—despite every luxury, the room seemed cold and devoid of soul. At last I realized why. These were rooms through which wit and learning never passed. The Spanish queen was one of the stupidest women in the entire realm, her conversation dismal and spiritless. My eye lit on a table of solid silver that sat beneath a huge, dark Spanish tapestry. I gestured to it, and they brought a heavy little cushioned stool, made of gold inlaid on silver, for me to sit on. I’d brought one of my nicest orbs with me and requested that they fill it with water. I rolled out my little cabalistic cloth and set out a nice selection of rods. Her Majesty looked on approvingly as I chanted and stirred with the glass rod. Suddenly I understood why. The ladies that crowded around me were all wearing old-fashioned Spanish farthingales, not unlike my own. Half the people in the room were shorter than I, and the rest not much taller. I fit right in with the freaks of the Spanish court that she still kept around her after all these years
in France.

  The reflection was clear. She was not pregnant. I didn’t dare tell her. I did a second reading and had her put her hand on the glass. I saw an illness and a vase of late-spring flowers in the room. Quickly, my mind worked.

  “Your Majesty, I regret to say that in the late spring you will have a serious illness and lose the child.”

  “Lose the child? Lose the child? I must have another child. That dreadful woman, that odious La Montespan, holds him with her youth, her children. It is I who am Queen, not she, and yet she would rule in my place. Ah, God, too late I regret La Vallière, who was at least ashamed of what she was doing. But now, this sin with a married woman—this shameless harlot with the brazen tongue…I tell you, this whore will be the death of me—” She broke off into Spanish, which I did not understand, and her ladies rushed to console her. I shall never make my fortune here, I thought. I can’t give her good news. With deep curtseys I retreated from the royal presence.

  I stalked from the entrance to the Queen’s apartments in what I hoped was a dramatic manner, thumping my tall walking stick with each step. My black gown whispered and rustled about me as I descended the extraordinary staircase of multicolored inlaid marble that led from the Queen’s apartments and entered the wide marble corridor beneath it. There I met with a press of lackeys, chairs, and tourists exactly as if I were in the main street of a large town. The only difference was that at Versailles, the avenues were paved with marble and decorated with gold, like the streets of paradise.

  In fact, the palace at Versailles was exactly like a city, with the corridors serving as streets. Porters carried the courtiers in chairs from place to place, for the women, at least, were incapable of walking twenty feet in their heavily corseted court gowns and flimsy satin shoes. Besides, the corridors were not always clean enough to tread safely while wearing a gown whose cost represented the annual income of a thousand peasant families, for impatient courtiers often relieved nature in the corners or against the walls. The chairs threaded their way through a crowd of lackeys of every description, of sightseers and foreigners come to see the public rooms of the château, of petitioners, soldiers, and mountebanks. It was hard to imagine that all of it—the furniture, swarms of courtiers, curiosity seekers, servants, cooks, theatrical troupes—everything, could be packed up in the twinkling of an eye and put on the road for another of the King’s palaces whenever he had a mind to change residences. Yet for all his seasonal moving about, he did not return to Paris, the ancient capital, and he had ceded the Palais-Royal to his brother. And so the ostlers of Paris gave special feed to the new breed of vicious, heavy coach horse that could keep the carriages rumbling at top speed to Versailles, to Saint-Germain, to Marly, to Fontainebleau. Grandmother said it was a sin, and Kings should live in the Louvre, among the people of their principal city, as the monarchs of old did. It was a highly unfashionable idea that I did not borrow for the Marquise de Morville.