“My friend, I have tried everything I can think of, but I can do nothing. I have gone to light a candle for you at the cathedral. May God relieve your troubles with all speed.”
“Oh, that wretched André!” exclaimed Florent, crumpling up the letter and throwing it into the fire. “Everything his minuscule brain could think of! In short, nothing at all!” He paced ragefully up and down on the bedroom carpet. “Geneviève,” he announced at last, “there is only one way out. We must pass out of Paris separately, in disguise, and meet again in Calais.”
“But what about my servants, Florent?”
“You have to leave them behind, I’m afraid. They would identify you.” Then he saw my face and paused. “Or perhaps they could leave later, in disguise, too,” he added to mollify me.
“Florent, it’s very hard to disguise Mustapha—or Gilles, for that matter. And Sylvie’s always spouting off in that demon’s voice at unexpected moments. She’d give herself away. You know if I leave them behind they are as good as dead.” Florent looked ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s selfish, but it has to be done. I can’t bear to lose you.”
I thought, and I thought again. I remembered the basement of the Châtelet. Betray them to that for my own convenience? It would make me no better than La Voisin. At last I said, “I think I have an idea, Florent, but it’s not very honest.” I went to the little desk in my ruelle and wrote a letter. “How soon can you get to Versailles to deliver this to Madame de Montespan?” I asked.
“I can take a horse tonight and ride by moonlight,” answered Florent. “But what makes you think that Madame de Montespan will assist you?”
“Oh, she will be assisting herself,” I said, somewhat evasively. “I tell her of La Voisin’s arrest in this letter and offer the assistance of my oracle glass. Once I see her in person, I am sure I can convince her.” Florent called for his hat and cloak and vanished into the gathering dusk.
By the next morning he had returned and fallen fully clothed across the bed, where he went to sleep instantly. He was still asleep when Mademoiselle des Oeillets, dressed in traveling clothes, was shown in to my downstairs reception room. She removed her mask as Sylvie took her cloak. “Madame de Montespan has just returned from court to her house in Vaugirard. We traveled at full speed, as soon as she heard the news of La Voisin’s arrest.” I acted calm, though I didn’t feel that way at all.
“And how may I serve her?”
“She needs a reading.” Sylvie vanished from the room.
“Her future?”
“That—and she needs to find something that is lost.”
“What sort of thing? I don’t have good luck with all lost things. Jewelry, corpses, I do better at those.” I feigned ignorance to draw her out.
“This would be well, ah, papers. A book, perhaps. Madame needs to know where they are.” Ah, good. The fish had taken the bait. Madame de Montespan wanted La Voisin’s records of her ghastly commerce in poison and witchcraft. She had to know if the police had them.
“I will return with you immediately,” I answered. “Just let me retrieve my cloak from upstairs.” Upstairs, I found Florent lying on the bed, still only partially awake.
“Florent, Florent. Listen.” He groaned. “I will need your help in a deception.” His eyes flicked open. “Madame de Montespan has arrived from Versailles just this morning. I am going to promise to retrieve the M ledger from the police for her in return for smuggling us all out of Paris in her carriage. I want you to go ahead of us, so that in case anything happens, you will not be lost. I’ll tell her I have bribed the police through one of La Voisin’s contacts and have stolen it out of Paris. That way she won’t have me waylaid and searched.”
“The M ledger?” said Florent, rubbing his head and sitting up. “But I have it, Geneviève.” He looked puzzled, the way people do when they are still half asleep.
“You have it, Florent? However did you get it?”
“When I broke into La Voisin’s cupboard, I not only brought away the P volume, I took the M as well.”
“What on earth made you think of it, because only now did I think of asking for her help?” I fastened my cloak and pulled my hat on over my house cap.
“It was Astaroth’s idea,” he said simply.
“Astaroth?” D’Urbec looked amused at my amazement. He seemed fully awake now and was rebuttoning his shirt.
“That Astaroth is one smart devil—smarter even than Sylvie, who guessed where I was going yesterday morning, and who never lets a chance go by for getting money. Once he had spoken, I saw his point immediately.” He got up and went to the mirror to inspect the stubble on his jaw. He poured a bit of water into the basin and then splashed it on his face.
“How should we do this, then?”
“Tell Madame de Montespan to send a trusted agent with you, or better, come herself to the Inn at the Sign of Saint Peter, which is two leagues out of Paris on the Calais road. There you will meet a man who has her papers, and she can burn them with her own hand, if she wishes.” Florent’s mind was so swift and sure, I admired him utterly. His eye caught mine, and a look of appreciation passed between us, as quick as thought. Two halves of the same mind, working at full speed, in perfect coordination. “Remember,” he said, “don’t let her think that you have them on you.” I took the key from my neck and opened the secret compartment behind the bookshelf in my ruelle.
“Of course not. But I’m sure I’ll sound much more convincing now that I know it’s true.” I stuffed my collection of little notebooks into the bag that I carried my oracle glass in. Last of all, I put in Father’s little brown leather one.
“Good. I’ll take my valet, the chest with your dresses, and the trunk with the silver out right away. Remember, Sign of Saint Peter. I’ll expect you there with your people. I’ll be waiting for as long as it takes.” I nodded, locked the cupboard, replaced the bookshelf, and headed for the stairs.
I returned with Mademoiselle des Oeillets to the mansion in Vaugirard and was shown into Madame de Montespan’s presence immediately. She was pacing beneath an immense tapestry of Joseph and his Brothers in her green salle, wringing her hands. Strands of her usually flawless coiffure were flying loose about her forehead. Her clothes were dusty with travel. So tightly did she clasp her hands together that I feared her rings would cut her fingers.
“Madame,” I said, bowing low, “I believe I can help alleviate your troubles. You seek, ah, lost papers?”
“Yes, very special ones. They say you can find lost things. I need to know…where something lost is—”
“Could these papers be La Voisin’s account books?”
She came close to me and grabbed my shoulders fiercely with a clawlike grip. “Yes,” she whispered.
“I can get them for you on certain conditions,” I said softly, so that we would not be overheard.
***
“I’ll go myself,” she whispered, having heard me out. “I can’t risk anyone else getting their hands on them.”
Her eyes looked calmer now, calculating.
“You are shrewd, Madame de Morville.”
“No, just fortunate in my, ah, connections. And I have now a powerful desire to retire peacefully in the country. I am planning to buy a little cottage and raise bees.” Let her think my connections were with the magistrates who kept the evidence sealed. They sold the stuff often enough. Why not let them take the blame this time? She laughed—a short, sharp little sound.
“I think you love beekeeping as much as I do, Madame de Morville. But, at any rate, I wish you good luck in your true plans—whatever they are. And…I want one more thing.”
“Your future?”
“My death, Madame. How will it be?”
“I always charge in advance for that.”
I seated myself before the water
vase with some fear, for if her death were grievous enough, she might not want the papers anymore. But I needn’t have worried. She appeared very old in the image that arose.
“You will live a long life,” I said. Her famous complexion was in ruins: it looked like crumpled paper that children have played with and discarded. She appeared to be dozing on a great, canopied bed.
“You are in a bed with rich hangings in the great room of a château that I do not recognize. A portrait of the King hangs opposite the bed.” A château of exile.
“Ah!” she exclaimed. “Then he is still mine!”
“You have plenty of company: ladies are playing music and singing. There are others—yes, sewing and talking.” It was a strange scene, late at night. The room was full of blazing candles, as if Madame de Montespan was afraid of the dark. The ladies’ heads were nodding. Suddenly Madame’s ancient eyes opened with a look of panic—she shrieked soundlessly at the women, who resumed their singing. Paid companions, to frighten off the night with cheerful noise.
“Then I am beloved,” said Madame de Montespan.
“Evidently so,” I agreed.
“Then your plan must work. I’ll waste no time. Mademoiselle des Oeillets, call my great carriage. I want four footmen, three postillions, in the blue and silver livery. And my mounted guard—quickly! And dress in your best. I have an important errand in the country, and I will need your company.”
“Tell me,” she said as we mounted into her carriage and settled into the heavy velvet cushions, “how did you know what I wanted and prepare to have it so soon?”
“The glass,” I said. “It showed your salvation and mine.” She nodded as if she believed every word.
We stopped briefly before my house in the rue Chariot and were immediately surrounded by little boys, shouting to see the grand equipage and attendants in their bright silver and blue. The postillions warned them away from the immense, vicious carriage horses as the lackeys helped Gilles bring out my trunks. Sylvie, clutching a satchel, handed the bird cage in to me while Mustapha, in full Turkish regalia, turned the key in the front-door lock. As the carriage rattled toward the ramparts, Madame de Montespan overcame her distaste of the bird enough to ask, “Tell me…does that…creature…talk?”
“Hellfire and damnation!” announced the bird, as we were waved past the customs barrier and into the suburbs.
“Unusual vocabulary,” observed Madame de Montespan. She pulled back the carriage curtains to let in the light and air. The carriage swayed and rattled as the horses broke into the fast trot that took us into open country.
“What else would you expect of a bird that knew La Voisin personally?” I answered. But inside, my heart was singing He’s waiting for you, and my mind was fixed on the remembrance of his dark eyes.
A HISTORICAL NOTE
La Voisin and the witches of Paris were real historical figures, whose lives and deeds are preserved in the testimony they gave, under torture, during the celebrated “Affaire des poisons.” These records have generated a great deal of controversy, as various historians have sought to prove the participation or nonparticipation of some favorite figure in the web of poison, conspiracy, and witchcraft. Evidence of classic coven structure is found by some authors; others disagree. To me, the organization looked more like a cross between the “corporations” that organized the trades of the day and a sort of franchise structure, and so this is how I have depicted it.
The evidence against Madame de Montespan, along with that implicating other persons of quality, was kept in a separate sealed coffer and burned by the King himself. Madame de Montespan did, however, definitively lose favor after the Affair of the Poisons and died in exile from the court. Madame de Maintenon, the new favorite who succeeded her, is thought to have been secretly married to the King after the death of the Queen. Her rise to favor inaugurated a reign of piety, conformity, and vicious religious persecution.
Mademoiselle de Fontanges died shortly after giving birth to a child who also died. To still the rumors arising from the accusations of the witnesses before the commission that Madame de Montespan had engaged Romani to poison her, the King reluctantly agreed to an autopsy. The doctors, who had no effective means of detecting poison anyway, declared her death to be from natural causes, thus saving a great deal of trouble.
The Comtesse de Soissons was warned by the King of her coming arrest and fled in the night. Thereafter she wandered across the face of Europe, leaving a trail of mysterious deaths in her wake.
The Duchesse de Bouillon brought twenty carriages full of aristocratic supporters to her trial. Having been accused of wanting to poison her husband to marry her lover, she appeared with her husband on one arm and her lover on the other, to announce that she had indeed seen the Devil, and he looked exactly like La Reynie. The King exiled her with a lettre de cachet.
Primi Visconti survived the scandal to write gossipy memoirs of the court.
La Voisin was burned alive on February 22, 1680, in the Place de Grève. She did not confess under torture, refused to make the amende honorable at Notre Dame, and was said to have shoved aside the priest before being fastened to the stake with iron bands.
La Trianon and La Dodée committed suicide in prison.
La Bosse was burned alive, but La Vigoreux died during torture.
Marie-Marguerite Montvoisin, the Abbé Guibourg, Le Sage, Romani, and others who were witnesses to the activities of Madame de Montespan were not brought to trial, where their evidence might become public, but were imprisoned for life, incommunicado. Also imprisoned in this fashion were all those unlucky enough to have temporarily shared a cell with them.
Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie is considered to be the founder of the first modern police force.
William of Orange and the Princess Mary were brought to the throne of England after the Catholic monarch, James II, was driven into exile in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
King Louis XIV died in 1715, having outlived three throne heirs. He was succeeded by his great-grandson, who became Louis XV.
The fiscal collapse of the state, projected by the great patriot, soldier, and administrator Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban in 1709, was complete before the end of the century.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Judith Merkle Riley (1942–2010) held a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, and she taught in the department of government at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. From 1988 to 2007, she wrote six historical novels: The Oracle Glass, The Master of All Desires, A Vision of Light, In Pursuit of the Green Lion, The Water Devil, and The Serpent Garden. www.judith.com
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