The Oracle Glass

by Judith Merkle Riley

  “Sit down over there—not the armchair, the stool,” the cracked voice said. One thing about Mother was still unchanged: her snobbery. I took the armchair.

  “I did not hear you move the stool,” the voice said suspiciously.

  “Madame, I am the Marquise de Morville; I have taken the armchair.”

  “Morville? I have not heard of that family. By blood or marriage?”

  “By marriage. I am, however, a widow.”

  “Only a widow? What was your maiden name?”

  I recited the false genealogy prepared by Monsieur Bouchet. I had become, through my experience at court, an expert in battles of precedence.

  “I am a Matignon by birth. A great family among the noblesse de l’epée.”

  “I, however, hold a title. Also noblesse de l’epée. Your armchair is most comfortable and well appointed.”

  “My dear Marquise, it is such a pleasure to hold a conversation with a woman of rank once more. So much greater delicacy of sentiment can be expressed by those of gentle birth.” She tilted her head and rolled her eyes sideways in a mockery of her old flirtatious gesture. Her silver “company” laugh, now cracked and tarnished, clattered through the room.

  “I believe you wished to consult with me about the gifts that fate has in store…”

  “Oh. Oh, yes. That’s it.” She looked confused. “You read the future in cards, do you not?”

  “No, Madame Pasquier. God has granted me the gift of seeing images in water.”

  “Suzette, leave us now,” ordered Mother, as she smiled a nervous half smile of anticipation. Her eyes shifted conspiratorially, and she ran her tongue around her lips. Just as well. Suzette might recognize my voice if she were there any longer.

  “I was not always as you see me now,” said Mother, “…this old gown, these reduced circumstances.” She ran her hand across her ravaged cheek. “See how white my skin is? I was always a beauty. I might have been a duchess. A gypsy woman read it in the cards for me. But before my good fortune came, my parents arranged a match with a man of no rank, for money. This dreadful house”—she gestured scornfully around her—“I brought it light, culture, style. One does what one can, even with a nobody. Tell me, is that your glass you are putting on the dressing table?”

  “Yes. I have several things to prepare. Can you see them here?”

  “Oh, yes. I see very well. Light and shadow. I see you as a dark silhouette. There’s a glint of light from your glass. But I can’t distinguish small things anymore. Like letters. Do you know what my son did? Shut me up here with a lot of books. Prayer books. ‘You little bastard! You know I can’t read a word!’ ‘Then pray for the edification of your soul, Madame,’ he said. But I fixed him. Oh yes, I did. ‘Uphold the honor of the Pasquiers,’ he said, ‘…an important juridical family,’ he said. ‘And just because your name is Étienne Pasquier, what makes you think you were got by that fool husband of mine?’ said I. ‘You’re made of better blood than that. Act like what you are. Put on a sword and go gain favor at court.’ Ah, he was shaken. But now, now he’s worse than ever. He won’t even let me meet his fiancée. But I know, I know what he’s saying.” Mother looked sly. Her head turned toward the door as if she were listening.

  “He says I’m mad,” she whispered. “Mad. His own mother. Can you imagine? Ungrateful monster. I should have strangled him in the cradle.”

  “Many things are regretted in hindsight, Madame.”

  “Your voice sounds familiar. Marie-Angélique, have you brought me money? I’m sadly lacking in money. Now that I’ve established you so well, you should think of me.”

  “Your fortune, Madame. I have come to give you a reading.”

  “Oh, yes. The Chevalier de la Rivière is coming for me. How much longer must I wait? He swore he would marry me once I was a widow. Tell me, is that he I hear in the street? Is that his carriage? I need to refresh my complexion, I want to be at my best. He is coming with a carriage and six. I sit in the window every day and watch. If I only knew the day! Tell me—you fortune-tellers always have a little something—have you brought me something? Something to set off my beauty? He always said he loved me in yellow silk. But now I need something, something…”

  It was now. I could give her the little vial. Drink it for a youthful complexion. Your eyes will sparkle. My father lay in his grave because she had planned to marry her lover. It’s fair, Geneviève, it’s justice. Give her the vial. The vacant, mad eyes searched my face. Her lip trembled expectantly.

  “I only read fortunes, Madame. You must send to someone else for beauty aids. There is an excellent parfumeuse on the Pont Notre-Dame.”

  “It is fortunate I still retain my beauty after all my sufferings. But he is surely coming. I have waited here at the window a very long time, you know. He’ll be here shortly now. That’s what he said. Just a bit of time to wind up his affairs in Poitiers. That’s not far. Oh, yes, it’s an excellent fortune you’ve told.” Her confused mind seemed to think she had already heard her fortune. Just what did she imagine it was? Your lover is coming to take you away at last. How clever it was of you to poison a nobody husband for a somebody lover. She looked around slyly, as if evading some invisible watcher, then rose and went to the corner, bumping into the stool on her way. “You know,” she whispered, “my son doesn’t give me any money. I’ve already spent enough, he says. But when did I ever spend anything that wasn’t for the good of this house? Money. Oh, yes, money. I can’t offer you anything. I’m poor now, so poor. Ah, it is the lot of women to be poor. I cashed my annuity. What sacrifices I made for him—all in secret, all in secret. But I had to, you see. Étienne is such a naughty boy! I’ll tell La Reynie he’s a bad boy. La Reynie knows who’s good and bad. The old lady wrote to him. Wicked old thing—but she won’t write anymore. See these books? You’ll have to take them instead of money. They’re very valuable, I’m sure. I can’t read them anyway. Read and pray, he said. What does he know? A dried-up little stick at twenty—maybe he is his father’s after all. Prig! What does he know of how things are done at court. We know—don’t we, Marquise?”

  “We certainly do.” I had covered my glass. I had no desire to see what was in it.

  “Those are the books. Can you reach them?” She put her hand out toward the cabinet shelf, and a china cupid crashed to the floor. “Yes, I have them. Here. There are six of them.” They made my heart freeze. Grandmother’s Bible. A theological tract called La mystique cité de Dieu. Three odd volumes from Father’s library, all bound in identical calfskin with gold tooling: Aristotle’s Ethics. Seneca. Descartes. And my Petronius. An odd set of books for a blind woman locked up to meditate upon. They smelled of dust and mildew. I put them in my satchel, along with my glass.

  “It is me the chevalier is coming for, not Marie-Angélique,” announced Mother. “I am still a beautiful woman, don’t you think?” She glanced coquettishly from the corners of her ruined eyes. The whites shone yellowish, the watery color of a frog’s belly. An old gesture, once charming, now terrifying.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Of course. Yes, you’re right. Marie-Angélique’s hair is not the color of mine. Pure gold. And blue eyes are much more common than green. But she’s younger, you know. Men of rank like them younger. But then they see me and are dazzled. But my husband punished me, you know. He complained of having them in the house.” I felt I was smothering. I had to escape. But she grabbed my sleeve and whispered confidentially in my ear. “That is how these little bourgeois husbands are. ‘No matter how you dress a monkey in silk, he’s still a monkey—and you are still a bourgeois,’ I told him. And then he went and gave the ugly little one everything in revenge. Revenge, I say. How did he know she was the only one that was his? The Devil must have told him. He gave her everything. Bastard. But she was dead, so it didn’t do him any good. They read the will, and I laughed. ‘To my daughter G
eneviève,’ he said, and I laughed. The lawyers tell me a man cannot leave anything to his wife, only to his children. Ha! Nothing to nobody. A joke, a joke, Madame. The hand from the grave—foiled.” She laughed uproariously. Then she lowered her voice conspiratorially. “So the lawyers got it all for my son. And what has he done? Ungrateful.” She shook her head. “Ungrateful.” Her wandering mind horrified me. She was insane.

  Shifting images of my childhood formed in my mind, like the pictures in the oracle glass. Mother’s strange glances, her curious cruelties, the theft and sale of little things, the attempts to purchase the notice of persons of rank. Then the calculated poisonings, at the hospital, in the family, without remorse. Could the worm of insanity have begun eating out her mind long ago? Perhaps Father had always known. Perhaps that is why he did nothing. Father. Dead at her hand. Waves of nausea and hatred washed over me. I started to shake uncontrollably.

  “I must go now, Madame,” I said, with every ounce of control that was in me. The old woman bumped about the room again, feeling for something. She was blocking the door.

  “You have come. I know your voice well. Marie-Angélique, have you brought the money?” She felt her way about the room, toward the sound of my voice, whimpering.

  I turned back. “Yes, Mother, I’ve brought the money.” I turned out the contents of my purse and pressed them into the yellow-stained, cracked palm. Five louis d’or. She felt them carefully and held them up to the light from the window.

  “What’s this? Only five louis? Marie-Angélique, I found you a wealthy lover; I have made you rich. You are a wicked ungrateful daughter. You were a good girl once. Where is your gratitude? You are a wicked, wicked girl to bring your mother only five louis! After all she’s done for you…ah, it’s fortunate that I am still beautiful. I’ll make my own way without you…”

  I fled to the waiting carriage. On the Pont Neuf, I had the coachman halt. Shaking all over, I pressed between a sweet seller and a beggar woman to the bridge rail and flung the vial of poison into the rushing green waters of the Seine.

  I stood there watching the swirling waters long after the bottle had disappeared. In the midst of a crowd of beggars and vendors, a psalm singer loudly proclaimed the Lord’s way before a display of holy pictures. There was a clink as someone dropped a coin into his cup. The shouts of the bearers and coachmen crowding past seemed to fade and I stood as if in utter solitude, imagining the progress of the little green vial to the river’s bottom. Had I done right? What was Right, anyway, or Justice? How much does Revenge weigh against Pity in the scales of logic? Monsieur Descartes, you have given me no answers.

  “Madame, it is a crime to jump, and a waste to merely stand still in the cold. Send away your carriage, and I will see you home.” I turned. A man in a crimson wool coat cut in the new style and a heavy mantle faced with gold embroidery stood behind me, studying me. Beneath a blazingly new plumed hat, a dark wig fell to his shoulders. Familiar dark eyes were looking at me with a mixture of distaste, pity, and some hidden grief. It was d’Urbec.

  “Monsieur d’Urbec, I cannot walk that far in these clothes,” I said.

  “I have an equipage these days—hired by the month from the same establishment yours comes from.” His voice was ironic as he swept off his hat in formal greeting.

  “Did you follow me here?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Follow you? No. But admit that a woman dressed in widow’s weeds of the period of Henri Quatre does draw the eyes of the curious. Especially when she looks to be throwing a rather expensive perfume bottle to the fishes and then stands staring morosely at the water for rather longer than is decent. Tell me, had you planned to drink it yourself?” His voice was quiet.

  “No, the scent was too vulgar to bear, that’s all.”

  “There are better ways to escape the contract of the Queen of the Shadows.”

  “The Shadow Queen? Then you call her that, too?”

  “It’s a term that occurs naturally to the intelligent observer. The Goddess of the Underworld. The Empress of the Witches. The Queen of the Sorceresses. This realm of the Sun King has its dark places, and I am well acquainted with them. How many years did she demand of you for this…ah…prosperity?” He gestured to my black silk dress, the waiting carriage. “Twenty? Seven?”

  “Only five, and it’s fair, considering what she’s done for me.”

  “Five? And what happens at the end of five?”

  “You think, perhaps, that she collects my soul, like Beelzebub? No—this is a business relationship. We’re done, and we go our own ways.”

  “Are you so sure? All over town parfumeuses, hairdressers, fortune-tellers, and even less-savory occupations are tied to one or another of the powerful ladies of the underworld, of whom yours appears to be the chief. And they give every sign of being tied for life.”

  “That’s just friendship and mutual assistance. These are business friendships, no different than that of the King’s pastry maker. Powerful patronage is a convenience in business just as it is at court.”

  “Hey, there—move that carriage. You are blocking the equipage of Cardinal Altieri.”

  “So,” he said, handing me into his carriage and turning to offer a tip to my driver for returning home without me, “we must continue our discourse on business methods elsewhere or risk dismemberment for the convenience of the cardinal.” In very little time we were entangled in a mass of drays, laborers, and market women near the Quai de Gèvres.

  “Tell me, now that we are alone, while you look me in the face, that that vial was not poison.” He leaned back on the carriage seat to look at me, where I sat opposite him, through half-closed eyes.

  “It was,” I said simply. He looked quiet and grim. “I didn’t want to have it anymore,” I added. Seeing the look on his face, I tried to be light. “It’s simply not the appropriate thing for philosophers.”

  “Just how much of you is still philosopher, and how much is witch, these days?” he asked, in a deceptively lazy tone of voice.

  “Too much philosopher, too little witch,” I answered.

  “In short, small witch, nothing has changed.”

  “I suppose you could say so.”

  “Except that you are having an affair with Lamotte.” I must have looked surprised. “Come now, you didn’t expect me not to know immediately the secret that half of Paris is trying to guess? How flattered you must be to be such a Muse of inspiration, and how pleased he must be when applying his moustache wax in the morning to look in the mirror and exclaim, ‘Who’s cleverest now, d’Urbec? Even philosophy pays homage to charm.’” His bitterness frightened me.

  “But you…you’ve changed too. You’re so…so prosperous.”

  “Merely an application of science to the art of card playing. Having suddenly seen the necessity of becoming extremely rich, I decided to apply a geometric formula I once devised concerning the likelihood of a given card coming into play. I bet accordingly. Sometimes I lose, mostly I win. The ignorant think I have made a pact with the Devil.”

  “So your Devil is Reason. How disappointed they would be if they knew.”

  “Even if I were to publish the formula on the front page of the Gazette de France, there are only a half dozen men in Europe intelligent enough to use it, and the majority of them are not interested in cards.”

  “You still set a rather high value on intelligence, Monsieur d’Urbec.”

  “As well I ought to. The world, society, all are amenable to geometric analysis. I now climb high in society by the simplest of formulae: high-stakes gamblers are welcome everywhere. When I have accumulated enough I shall purchase a couple of tax-farming offices and then enter the greatest gambling salon of all: high finance.”

  “I thought you hated people like that.”

  “Hate or love will not change the fate of this nation. In the meantime, I
know every low byway where the quick money hides. That seems to be the chief advantage of the study of political economy.” He sounded so hard and bitter that even I was shocked.

  “Something is wrong with you, Florent. Has something happened to you? What has become of your brother Olivier?”

  “As perceptive as ever, Mademoiselle.” His face looked hard. “Olivier is dead. The cleverest of us all. Executed in Marseilles this week past despite every appeal I could mount. His legacy, a cabinet full of plans for new inventions in clockwork, including a new self-lighting fuse for infernal machines. They hanged him like a peasant.” I put my hand to my mouth.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” I could understand now the circles under his eyes, the new gauntness in his face. He sat silently for the rest of the trip, his thoughts in some faraway place, while I looked at my knotted hands. As the carriage drew to a halt before my door, I asked, “Will you come in? Is there something you’d like?” His calculating eyes fixed on me for what seemed like an eternity. His gaze seemed to go straight through me and bite into my backbone.

  “There is something I’d like, and you’ve made up my mind for me. I’ll not come in. I’m off to the south for a while. Mother needs me. Father has become useless, work flounders without Olivier to direct it, and the entire family is in turmoil. Enjoy Lamotte—at least until you become bored with that turnip he calls a mind.” With cold certainty, I knew that once d’Urbec was gone, Lamotte’s interest in me would vanish. Vain, selfish, changeable, charming Lamotte. He had cut his friend to the bone to avenge a slight, and he had used me to do it. My weakness, my foolishness, my illusions. And d’Urbec saw it all.

  Silently, he handed me out of the carriage. “Please…please don’t think ill of me…” As I looked up at his grim face, I could feel my eyes pricking.

  “Surely, Mademoiselle, you who have known so much despair could not fail to recognize it in another.” He ducked his head away from me without a farewell. I stood a long time at the doorstep, watching while his carriage slowly vanished down the rue Chariot.