Philippe tugged Natalie away from conversation with the duchesse to search out his uncle, who was in actuality his mother’s cousin. Since Philippe’s grandfather had died before Philippe turned thirteen, the intimidating knight had acted briefly as executor for the Marchesseau estates. Even after Philippe reached his majority, he still leaned on his uncle for advice.
The man was not difficult for Natalie to spot despite the crush of masked guests. Claude Fabreville continued to wear the black robes of the knights of Malta. A well-curled wig covered his close- cropped hair, which was now thin and gray as was his waxed moustache. She pitied his frumpish wife, whom he had married for her modest fortune. He openly acknowledged the deed, having needed the king’s dispensation to marry. For years, he had neglected his wife, leaving her to wilt at her family’s country estate.
Perhaps there was something in the smothered rumor that he had once been an “intimate” friend of the late Monsieur.
Still, he was the only relative Philippe had left and, as attorney general, had procured tax rebates and other privileges for the Marchesseau silk industry. “Uncle,” Philippe said, “I have the best of news for you.”
“You took my advice?” Claude asked. “You purchased the Compagnie des Indes stock?”
Natalie slanted her husband a worried glance. He hadn’t told her of the purchase, perhaps because he believed her ignorant in matters of finance.
“Oui, but that is not my good news,” Philippe said, his arm encircling her waist tenderly as if already protective of her new condition. “We are finally to be blessed with a child!”
When there was no immediate response from his kin, Philippe covered the awkward silence. “Now that I’m to be a father, I thought I’d do something really worthwhile—perhaps purchase a seat in Parlement to pass on to my son.”
At that Natalie had to smile. “You are so certain it is a son?” she asked in a lowered voice.
“Let me offer my congratulations,” Claude said at last. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, the duc is desirous of my attendance.”
Once the old knight was gone, she asked, “How many shares of the Compagnie des Indes did you buy?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “A thousand. But the return will be ten times that much.”
With the paper value of the shares more than eighty times the total value of all the gold and silver known to be in France’s Banque Royale, it seemed to Natalie that the outcome of such a venture should be obvious. Still, she told herself, they could easily afford to lose the money. Before his death, Philippe’s grandfather had increased the family’s silk fortune through wise investments, and upon the death of Philippe’s father, Philippe had inherited the Canadian fur company, almost doubling the Marchesseau fortune.
Philippe caught her chin and tilted it upward. “Come, you must not worry, chérie,” he said, searching her face, his eyes tender.
How could she be annoyed when he looked at her like that? After the first blush of romance had worn off, she found to her surprise that she still loved her gentle and tender husband. He possessed the absorption in the moment without the tiresome prudence that always has to be looking ahead. She was constantly caught up in his spurts of joyous enthusiasm, his contentment with life.
“Will you dance with me now, my love, before your horde of admirers descends on us?” he asked, teasing her out of her pensive mood.
He led her out to join the gavotte that was forming. For a while, she enjoyed herself in the lively dance, was even able to ignore the lascivious leers of the male guests and the visually thrown daggers of les femmes débauchés. By midnight, the two sexes would be pairing off in search of the nearest unoccupied rooms— some even uncaring if the room was already inhabited.
The Palais Royal—indeed, all of Paris—was a virtual Sodom and Gomorrah. Natalie would not have been surprised had lightning struck and the entire city sent up in fiery smoke. The city of Paris had more mistresses than wives, and the Prince Regent, the Duc d’Orléans, was the Prince of Libertines.
Born bored, and accustomed to debauchery, the fat, myopic Duc d’Orléans, nearing forty-seven, worked conscientiously enough during the day, but night meant retirement to more diverting tasks. When the doors of his rose-silk-upholstered private apartment were closed, he was no longer a regent, not even if Paris were on fire.
That did not mean that one ever underestimated the duc. The great-grandson of Louis XIV was not quite eleven, and until the good-looking boy reached his legal majority, the duc ruled France as regent. He was highly intelligent and very subtle.
However, he was seduced more by pleasure than by power. He consorted with ladies of quality and ladies of the street. His intimates or companions he called his roués, men ordinarily broken on the roué, or wheel, for their blasphemous behavior. He was more an onlooker than a participant as life leaked away, and night after night repeated itself. Nothing was sacred, especially love.
Now he was annoyed at being drawn away from the gaming tables, but the shrewd old man who awaited him in the rear cabinet was usually a worthwhile diversion. The old knight had procured for him quite a few of the most delectable teenage danseurs of the opera. The duc’s late father, Monsieur, had had a hand in giving the reins of attorney general to Fabreville. As such, Fabreville had the power to cut off parliamentary investigations of a financial nature that the duc might find embarrassing.
In the arrière-cabinet, the regent retired to write his instructions to his secret agents abroad or to study their reports. Here, his private diplomacy was carried out without anyone else’s knowledge. Fabreville waited beside a gilded, thin-legged, rolltop writing desk. The old knight laid a paper on the desk where a candle was kept burning for the sealing of documents with wax.
“Your grace, I find I must preserve the honor of the Marchesseau name. Unfortunately, I have discovered that my late cousin’s son, Philippe du Plessis, is guilty of fraud involving black-market wheat. A lettre de cachet will be necessary.”
With only a passing glance at the paper, the duc dipped the quill in the inkwell. “You are a cunning one, Claude.”
Watching the regent affix his name, Fabreville’s mouth slitted into a sneering smile. A husband might obtain a lettre de cachet, or sealed letter, to imprison a suspected wife; a father, to prevent the marriage of a daughter to someone beneath her station; or, in this case, a concerned relative, to prevent the succession of an estate to an as yet unborn child. The accused would never be tried; the accuser, if he could prevail upon the monarch, secured the right of administration of whatever property was involved.
Fabreville had hoped that France’s largest estate would naturally pass to him, and his son Robert, since for years Hélène’s son had seemed bent on leading the gay life of a bachelor. When Philippe finally took a wife, Fabreville was relieved to find that the woman apparently was barren. Such was not the case, after all.
He scanned the letter with satisfaction. The order was a simple one:
On behalf of the king: the Marquis de Marchesseau, Philippe du Plessis, and his wife, Natalie, are ordered to take themselves to the Bastille and the Salpêtriére, respectively, His Grace forbidding the said husband and wife to depart until further orders on his part, under pain of disobedience.
Signed this the 13th day of February 1720, the Duc d’Orléans, Regent.
Natalie was with her wardrobe mistress, Emilie, when Philippe rushed into the petit appartement. His face was waxen; his lips taut. “The Royal Musketeers,” he said, shutting the door behind him. “They are waiting below with a lettre de cachet for us both.” The wardrobe mistress put her hands to her mouth in a smothered scream. Natalie blanched. The large folio containing fabric swatches of her gowns dropped from her suddenly inert fingers.
Philippe caught her clammy hands in his and said, “You must escape while I delay them!”
She shivered uncontrollably but said in a raw whisper, “No, I’m staying with you.”
He shook her shoulders with fearful impat
ience. “Listen, Natalie. With you free, there is the hope of discovering our accuser and clearing my name.”
When she opened her mouth to argue, he pressed, “For the love of God, Natalie, consider our child!”
Reluctantly, she nodded in compliance, too stunned to disagree. Quickly, he laid plans for the loyal Emilie to don one of Natalie’s cloaks and to descend on his arm to meet the waiting guards. The ruse would be discovered all too soon, within minutes, but with luck Natalie would have a chance to get away.
Her husband had to pull himself from her grasp. “Philippe!” she cried when he turned to leave. Her lips quivered, and tears brimmed unchecked over her lids. For too long a moment, she stood in the suddenly empty room, trying to find the strength to will herself to move. Her body seemed to have grown too heavy for her legs. The child! She grabbed another cloak from the immense armoire, any cloak—it was an ermine and velvet one— and hurried through the servants’ corridor.
Fearing that the coach’s crest of arms might attract unwanted notice, she took a chaise à porteurs. As the porters carried her through the crowded rue de Sevres, she was assailed by the ghastly recollection of a man rumored to have been imprisoned under a lettre de cachet by Louis XIV for forty years until the man’s death— his identity concealed behind an iron mask. Could that really happen?
With grief choking her breath, she urged the porters faster toward the Hotel de Soubise, the residence of Claude Fabreville. Surely, he, if anyone, would have the power to have the regent revoke the letter!
The old knight received her in his petit cabinet with the calmness she lacked. She babbled out her story, ending it with, “You must help Philippe!”
He removed her hands from where they clutched his robe, distorting the eight-point cross. “I will do everything that I can, Natalie. I will go at once to the duc and petition him for clemency. In the meantime, you must rest and conserve your strength. All this excitement cannot be good for the child you carry.”
Feeling some measure of relief, Natalie obediently accepted the warmed wine brought by a servant. She paced the room, little noticing the art collected with discrimination: Poussin, Titian, Raphael, Veronese, del Sarto. Her steps slowed, her lids blinked away the sudden weariness. Then, with sudden suspicion, she flung the stemmed glass from her. It shattered in one corner of the marbled floor. The realization that she had been drugged came too late, and her body sagged, then collapsed onto the Aubusson carpet.
§ CHAPTER SIX §
La Salpêtrière was a vast, gray-brick enclosure on the Seine that had first been a saltpeter-powder magazine. Louis XIV had converted it into a home for beggars, the aged, and mentally afflicted men and women. Soon a prison for incorrigible and undisciplined women and girls was added.
Now it was a prison for women criminals only, as well as for the debauched and the insane. Seven thousand women were crowded inside it, two thousand of whom were prostitutes. Natalie found herself confined to the better section known simply as the Prison, reserved for those women interned by royal order.
Those first few days, she sat listlessly in her ten-foot-square, cell-like room, part of the outer western wall of the dungeon. When she stirred herself, it was to curse Claude Fabreville quietly with a venom of which she had not suspected she was capable.
At least, she consoled herself, Philippe was still alive and not far away in the Bastille. She told herself that she could be worse off. The governor of La Salpêtrière was a portly old gentleman, who, for a slight commission, permitted the prisoners certain comforts of home.
With the jewels she had been wearing when she was incarcerated, she was able to have her own books, furniture, and linen in a private cell. However, the windows were mere apertures, and within days she became obsessed with the need for light, particularly sunlight. Come sunset, a smidgen of wintry, bleak light slid rapidly down the wall and soon vanished.
No provision had been provided for heating, and she suffered greatly from the cold. So she did not trade her velvet and ermine cloak for superfluous items. She often wondered how many times she had worn the luxurious cloak and taken its warm ermine trimming for granted.
Warmth and sunlight, those things she would never again take for granted. When she and the other seventy-eight women interned by royal order went for their afternoon exercise in the bare courtyard once a day, she would toss back the cloak’s hood and turn her face up toward the gray, winter sunlight.
Closing her eyes, she would pretend that she was at Maison Bellecour, walking through the maze of the boxed gardens or among its classic statues . . . feeling the cool breeze off the Loire that played with the loose tendrils of her hair . . . trailing her fingers in one of the mirror ponds . . . wandering through the orangerie, smelling the sweet, sultry scent of cape jasmine, her favorite flower.
“The sun is bad for your skin, ma petite."
Natalie’s eyes snapped open. She recognized the woman from her first year at court. Madame Madeleine Remoneaux had been sent to La Salpétrière by royal letter after the duc had tired of her. The middle-aged woman had a natural redhead’s sallow complexion. She now resorted to henna to cover the gray strands that had invaded her hair.
“On the contrary, I shall shrivel and die without the sunlight,” Natalie replied, politely but sadly. She really didn’t want to establish any relationships. It would be an acknowledgment of a permanency there at La Salpétrière.
By the second month, loneliness drove her to talk to the others, most of whom were courtesans like Madeleine Remoneaux, though a few unfortunate daughters, sisters, and wives also occupied the private cells. Natalie sought out Madeleine more often than the others, for the woman seemed the least bitter about her circumstances.
“I try to look at the worst that could happen,” Natalie said one evening. The two were having dinner together in Madeleine’s cell, which was elegantly swathed with heavy red drapes to keep out the insidious cold drafts. “I judge I’ll be imprisoned here two years at the most. By that time, Louis will turn thirteen and come into his majority, and the duc’s reign as regent will end. Surely then the lettre de cachet will be revoked.” She sighed and rubbed her slender hands together for warmth. “But that seems like a long time.”
She noticed the middle-aged woman, who continued to paint her face each morning, lower her lids, seeming to concentrate on chewing the cold salmis.
“What is it?” Natalie asked her.
The courtesan shrugged her shoulders and took a sip of the sparkling wine. “The time will pass quickly enough—with the comforts of home to sustain you.”
Natalie laid down her fork. Her appetite had dwindled such that she had to force herself to eat for the sake of the unborn child. “If I’m careful, I think I can stretch the money I’ve received for my jewelry.”
“Expenditures here can eat up the money rapidly, ma petite. More rapidly than you realize.”
“How have you managed after four years in this—this place?” Natalie looked about her. Despair choked at her throat. “Four years!” she whispered. “Ma foi!”
Madame Remoneaux’s eyes twinkled, and she smiled. Her teeth were terrible. “I write pornography.”
“What?”
“Oui. When I realized that I might be here for many years— and that the little money I had wouldn’t keep me in the style to which I was accustomed, I bought pen and ink and paper. I sell my stories to a press in Amsterdam.”
A smile wormed its way onto Natalie’s tightly pressed lips, then she laughed merrily. “If I could, I would, but I fear my imagination is sadly lacking.”
“Ah,” the older woman said, “you’ve only had one man?”
Natalie blushed. “Oui.”
The woman looked pointedly in the direction of Natalie’s midsection, which was gently straining the limits of the satin-covered buttons. “You are enceinte?”
Natalie nodded.
The woman set down her wine glass. “Do you know what happens to the bebés born at La Salpêtriére?”
The tone in the courtesan’s voice, the pity . . . Natalie couldn’t force herself to ask. The cbocolat à triple à vanille she had just consumed suddenly weighed heavily in her stomach. Eyes wide with dread, she simply waited for the revelation.
“The child is taken from you and reared in the portion of the prison reserved for indigents—the Great Prison.”
A mother’s protective instinct came to life in Natalie with a mighty force. She was an awakened feline, ready to defend her cub. She sprang to her feet. “Then I will go with my child.” Madeleine shook her head, her orange-red curls quivering with the movement, and looked up at the bow-taut woman. “You do not know what you are saying. The Great Prison is a living nightmare. The habitual women criminals are also kept there: prostitutes infected with disease, poisoners, thieves, counterfeiters, the insane. You would be one against many. Your child— should it survive infancy—will become a plaything for the more depraved.”
Slowly, Natalie sank into her chair. For the first time since her arrest, she buried her face in her hands and truly cried, great, heaving sobs that wracked her body. “Dear God, dear God, what am I to do?”
Madeleine rose and, coming to the younger woman’s side, knelt and put her arm about Natalie’s shoulder. “I have no words of comfort—except that life is better than death. Always. You must try to fortify yourself to withstand whatever happens.”
Natalie gritted her teeth. The chocolate dessert threatened to thrust its way up past her esophagus. “I will find a way before I let them take Philippe’s child from me. This baby is all we have left of each other.”
As the weeks passed and Natalie’s condition became more obvious, no solution to her predicament presented itself. The apparent laxity of surveillance in that part of the prison was an illusion. Should she make her way past the heavy patrols to the large courtyard, where the females held under royal order were permitted to exercise, there were still the portcullis, which was always guarded, and the moat to negotiate.
BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis Page 6