Bitter Greens (54 page)

Sœur Seraphina gave that faint enigmatic smile of hers. ‘I was once a very wealthy woman. When I sold all I owned in Venice, I had a trust fund set up that pays me an income each quarter. I pay that to the convent. It is almost the only income they have now. Mère Notre allows me a few indulgences in thanks, though none that can be seen by the other nuns. The painting is one of them. It is all I have left of my own life, and it reminds me of why I am here.’

Bells began to ring out. Sœur Seraphina smiled. ‘Come, my dear. It’s time for matins. There’s plenty of time for me to tell you my story. I’ll tell you while we work in the garden.’

I nodded and felt a sudden sunburst of joy at the idea.

All through the long morning service, I thought and wondered and made plans. ‘By good grace or ill grace,’ Sœur Seraphina had said to me, but I had struggled against my fate, choosing ill grace at every step. I remembered now a favourite saying of Athénaïs’s. ‘We must play with the cards God has dealt us,’ she used to say. Her cards had been beauty and wit and breeding; all I had were words.

At chapter, I begged permission from Mère Notre to speak. Looking surprised, she granted it to me.

‘I am ready now to take my vows,’ I said. ‘As a gesture of my good faith, I beg you to take the golden gown and sell it, using the funds to mend the church roof.’

Small cries of pleasure and astonishment rang out. The bursar, Sœur Theresa, clasped her hands together and raised her eyes to heaven.

‘I have jewels that may be sold too. I have no need of them any more. And soon I will be receiving my pension from the King. I would like to turn it over to your hands, Mère Notre, to do as you see fit.’

‘Thank you,
ma fille
,’ she answered rather breathlessly.

‘In return, I’d like to request one or two small things for myself. I would like a cell of my own, if you permit, Mère Notre,’ I went on, hands folded demurely. ‘With my little writing desk in it, and some quills and an inkpot. I have learnt so much working with Sœur Seraphina these past few days, I wish to make a record of it so the knowledge may be passed down to future generations.’

‘A worthy ambition,’ Mère Notre answered. ‘We have cells to spare, now that our number has dwindled so much. I see no reason why you should not have one if you wish.’

I thanked her and made arrangements to meet with Sœur Theresa and go through my chest. All this time, Sœur Seraphina sat quietly, the corners of her mouth compressed with amusement.

In a few days, it was done. My court clothes and jewels were all packed up and sold to the ecstatic daughters of the local nobility, raising more than enough money to fix the church roof. I kept only one small bee brooch from my favourite dress, which I set on my writing desk next to my inkpot and my jar of quills.

My cell was bare and austere, but it had its own window, which looked onto the garden, and I convinced Mère Notre to spend most of my first pension from the King on sheep fleeces for all the nuns, to spread on the cold damp stone floors, and on thick eiderdowns for our beds. ‘I’m sure God does not want us all to die from pneumonia,’ I’d said. My eiderdown was not rose-pink silk, as I secretly desired, but it was at least soft and deliciously warm.

I sat at my desk, sweet-scented air from the garden wafting across my face, and carefully chose a quill and sharpened it. I drew a piece of my best smooth white paper towards me and wrote across the top, with a most beautiful flourish:

Each word was shaped with certainty, and I felt, more strongly than ever before in my life, that I had at last found my true path. I knew the story would change as I told it. No one can tell a story without transforming it in some way; it is part of the magic of storytelling. Like the troubadours of the past, who hid their message in poems and songs and fairy tales, I too would hide my true purpose: to beg pardon from the King and persuade him, as subtly as I knew how, to release me from my imprisonment.

It was by telling stories that I would save myself.

AFTERWORD

Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force wrote the fairy tale ‘Persinette’ while banished from court to the Abbey of Gercy-en-Brie. It was published in her collection of fairy tales,
Les Contes des Contes
, in 1698, under the pseudonym Mademoiselle X. It was one of the first collections of French literary fairy tales.

While imprisoned in the convent, Mademoiselle de la Force also wrote several more historical novels and her memoirs. With the money earned from her writing, she was permitted to move to a wealthier convent in Paris in 1703 and, a few years later, allowed to live in retirement at the Château de la Force.

In 1713, she was at last granted her full freedom. She moved to Paris, where she became a celebrated member of the salons and was named a member of the Accademico dé Ricrovati di Padova. She also joined a secret society set up by the Duchesse de Maine, wife of one of Athénaïs’s royal bastards. Called La Mouche à Miel, or the Order of the Honey Bee, the thirty-nine members all wore a dark-red satin dress embroidered with silver bees and a wig shaped like a beehive.

The Abbot Lambert wrote of her, ‘We admire the purity and the elegance of her style, her imagination is vivacious and brilliant, she is a genius, a flame, an elevation, a force.’

Charlotte-Rose died in 1724, at the age of seventy-four.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Bitter Greens
is, of course, a work of imagination. As Charlotte-Rose de la Force herself wrote, ‘
Bien souvent les plaisirs de l’imagination, valent mieux que les plaisirs réels
’, which translates as ‘Often the pleasures of the imagination are better than real pleasures’.

Help in writing
Bitter Greens
came from many quarters. I first read about Charlotte-Rose de la Force in an essay by the writer and editor Terri Windling called ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair’, published in the Endicott Studio’s Spring 2006
Journal of Mythic Arts
, in the early stages of my research for
Bitter Greens
. I was immediately smitten with Charlotte-Rose’s character. Someone who disguised herself as a dancing bear to free her lover was exactly my kind of woman! I wanted to know more about her and so began my long journey to discover the life of this virtually unknown writer.

After long months of detective work, I found a biography of her life,
Mademoiselle de la Force: Un Auteur Mèconnu du XVII Siècle
, by the French academic Michel Souloumiac. However, it was only published in French. So I enlisted the help of a translator, Sylvie Poupard-Gould, who not only translated Michel Souloumiac’s work but also translated an autobiographical sketch by Charlotte-Rose and a number of her fairy tales. Since the first was written in dense academic terminology and the second in Old French, complete with the letter ‘f’ looking like the letter ‘s’, this was
no easy task, and I am incredibly grateful to Sylvie for all her hard work and the strain upon her back and eyesight.

I read many other books in the making of this novel, far too many to list here, though you can find them on my website. A few helped me so much, however, that I’d like to mention them here. Martin Calder’s memoir,
A Summer in Gascony
, helped me enormously in understanding the Gascon personality and allowed me to first hear Charlotte-Rose’s voice.
Love and Louis XIV
by Antonia Fraser and
Athénaïs: The Real Queen of France
by Lisa Hilton illuminated the Sun King and his mistresses.
The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV
by W. H. Lewis brought the world of the French court to life, while I cannot recommend
The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide, and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV
by Anne Somerset enough for anyone interested in discovering more about this extraordinary chapter in French history.
A Social History of the Cloisters
by Elizabeth Rapley helped me to recreate the daily life of cloistered nuns in the seventeenth century, plus I’d like to thank Robert Nash, secretary of the Huguenot Society of Australia, for helping me to understand the beliefs and practices of seventeenth-century French Protestants.

Thank you also to Gabrielle Doucinet and Catlin Jeangrand from the Agence de Guides-Interprètes in Pau for all their help in setting up my research trip to Gascony; to Dr Jean-Pierre Constant for all his help in illuminating the literary world of seventeenth-century Paris; and to the Comte de Sabran-Pontevès for showing me around the Château de Cazeneuve, where Charlotte-Rose was born and lived till she was sixteen.

I am also greatly indebted to my wonderful guides in Venice: Dottore Alvise Zanchi, who took me on a tour and answered endless questions about life in Renaissance Venice; Loredano Giaomini, who showed me through the many hidden gardens that once belonged to convents and palaces and perhaps even witches; and Cristina Pigozzo, who led me and my children through the spooky alleyways of Venice at night and told us riveting ghost stories, some of which worked their way into this book.

Thanks also to my doctoral advisors at the University of Technology,
Debra Adelaide and Sarah Gibson, to my lovely agents – Tara Wynne at Curtis Brown Australia, and Robert Kirby at United Agents in the UK – and a very big, heartfelt thank you to my wonderful publisher Susie Dunlop at Allison & Busby, who has shown such faith in my novel and has worked so hard to bring it to a whole new audience. Thank you to Christina Griffiths, for designing the gorgeous cover, and also my heartfelt gratitude to Lesley Crooks, Sara Magness, Chiara Priorelli and Sophie Robinson at Allison & Busby – I’m very proud to be published by you!

I am also very grateful to the gifted poets whose Rapunzel poems have been quoted throughout the book: Arlene Ang, G. K. Chesterton, Nicole Cooley, Adelaide Crapsey, William Morris, Anne Sexton, Lisa Russ Spaar, Gwen Strauss and Louis Untermeyer. I do hope you’ll go on to read more of their amazing work.

I could not have written this book without my research trip to Paris, Venice, Gascony and the Italian lakes. Thank you to my three amazing children, who came adventuring with me, and to my husband, Greg, who stayed behind to pay the bills.

I love you all!

K
ATE
F
ORSYTH
is the bestselling author of more than twenty books, ranging from picture books to poetry to novels for both children and adults. She has won numerous awards and been published in fourteen countries around the world. She is a direct descendant of Charlotte Waring, the author of
A Mother’s Offering to her Children,
the first book for children ever published in Australia. She lives by the sea in Sydney with her husband, three children, a rambunctious Rhodesian Ridgeback, a bad-tempered black cat, and many thousands of books.

www.kateforsyth.com.au