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A
ll his life, the King had measured out his days with music. When he rose, when he walked, when he ate, his twenty violinists accompanied him; the strains of his composers Lully and Quinault rendered a permanent ballet of his existence. Only at the end did the old man call for silence.
The King was dying. His bed was placed in the center of the room, his room was in the center of his house. For nearly fifty years, he awakened there, facing east; every morning the two monarchs of the sun saluted one another. If Louis were to have forced his senses, projected his hearing around the great labyrinth that surrounded him, complex as the whorls of a shell, he could have felt his people waiting. The stifling August rooms shuddered and sighed with the breath of their suppressed impatience. He had been the heart of his house, but now its gorgeous prisoners were bleeding away, reconfiguring themselves around a fresh nucleus. As the King rallied and relapsed, they surged back and forth from his chamber, the shuffle of kid on marble, the ebb and flow of a great tide of ambition. The little boy was carried in to say good-bye; the courtiers swarmed, somewhere in the distance, around his uncle. Did the King remember another child, perched on cushions in his coach and six, rattling through Paris on a bright May morning, the cacophony of bells and cries, the gaiety of the tired streets made bright for their tiny monarch? Were things still as they should be, as he had always ensured they had been?
Perhaps the King dreamed an old dream. As he twisted and murmured, the watchers drew near, no longer troubling to conceal their anticipation beneath a grieving countenance. A dark room, an altar of a mattress propped on chairs, a woman splayed naked in faltering candlelight. The hideous priest lays a cloth on the delicious convexity of her belly, arranges a chalice. Her face is masked, a glint of brazen hair beneath her mantle, as somewhere an infant begins to wail, its cries the crescendo of his frantic desire to see, to know, her face, where is her face? The crying is hideously abbreviated, the priest raises the dark, sticky chalice, and the old man writhes down the alleys of his memory, contorting the sheets in a sinuous mockery of sweeter battles, laboring after this enigma of nightmare.
Something, though, something yet that was still unpredictable. The King struggled to breathe, all his legendary energy diminished to this one quotidian action. Tiring, Louis looked up, and there she was, as radiant, as proud, as beautiful as when she first danced with him at the Louvre. Athénaïs as Venus, waiting for him. Someone overlooked the bed, the painted canopy where his old love hovered above him, eternally seductive, beckoning. Her face, then, was the last thing. Did he smile, the King, as his triumphant beauty closed his eyes?
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