Emilie's Voice (22 page)

Twenty-two

Madame de Maintenon was alone in her sitting room writing letters when the footman announced St. Paul. She was still extremely vexed with him for his part in the disastrous events following the performance, and would have preferred not to see him. But as yet she was uncertain how much the count really knew about her initial plan, and thought it unwise to risk alienating him. The girl had died; that was too bad, especially since the manner of her death did not have the dramatic force she had hoped it would. At least her own hands were clean.

Madame de Maintenon had just finished folding and sealing a letter to Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld when St. Paul entered.

She stood and curtseyed deeply. “I am delighted to see you, Monsieur le Comte.”

“Madame,” St. Paul said. “There is some paperwork, for the authorities. As a self-murderer, Mademoiselle Émilie must be accounted for. What do you wish me to do?”

“I beg your pardon, but I was under the impression that François had taken care of all the legalities.”

“If a burial dispensation was to be given, it required the signature of the king.”

Madame de Maintenon rose and turned away from St. Paul. “I think you should leave the authorities to me. I don’t want to trouble the king if it is not necessary. He is much occupied at present. There is trouble once again in the Low Countries. Ask François to attend me here, and I shall discuss the matter with him.”

“As you wish, Madame,” said St. Paul, who bowed and left. As soon as he was on the other side of the door, he smiled broadly.

“What do you know about this business of the singer?” the king asked one morning when he was closeted with Colbert, going over the accounts. “St. Paul has been running around suggesting that all was not as it appeared.”

“I know little about the matter, but I don’t advise an investigation,” said the canny finance minister, not looking up from the ledger.

“Oh?”

“It doesn’t do to go turning over rocks. You never know what will crawl out.” At that, Colbert made a hand gesture that was their silent code for Madame de Montespan. One could never be too careful. The king’s mistress was not known for her forgiving nature, and if the singer’s death just happened to remove a potential rival from court, then there was always the chance that something suspicious was going on.

“I see. Shame, really.”

Louis intended that to be his final word on the subject. He had long ago learned to choose his battles, and he did not want to upset his pregnant paramour. There were many other pretty maidens at court who were all too eager to amuse him, although none, he had to admit, had such a voice.

But the matter of Émilie’s death refused to stay sealed shut. One cold winter’s day, Marcel Jolicoeur took it upon himself to deliver two violins to Monsieur Lully, who had ordered them months ago.

“What can this accomplish?” asked Madeleine, as she brushed off Marcel’s best coat while the maid waxed his new leather boots.

“The violins must go to Versailles in any case. And I must do this, for myself. I cannot believe—” Marcel could not continue his thought.

Madeleine sighed. “Going there will not bring her back. And now, how do we know the commissions will continue? What about the money?”

“The fiacre will cost less than the silk for your dresses,” said Marcel.

Madeleine said nothing more.

The luthier had never been so far away from his home before. The trip seemed momentous, despite the fact that he planned to be home in time for dinner. He watched the houses and churches become more sparse and finally give way to rolling fields and forests, dotted only by the occasional farmhouse or inn. After a time the village of Versailles appeared, and then, like a monstrous growth from the landscape, the immense château loomed ahead. Out here, stuck in the middle of nowhere, it looked more imposing than the Louvre.

Marcel instructed the fiacre to wait for him, and a footman led him to Lully’s apartment on the lower floor of the château.

Lully was a little surprised to see Marcel but just as glad that he would have to take one less trip to the luthier’s squalid little workshop to collect the violins for his ensemble. Still, he had to admit Jolicoeur’s work was very fine. Almost as fine as the Italians’. They concluded their business quickly, but Marcel stood in Lully’s study, curling the edge of his hat nervously in his fingers.

“I wonder, Monsieur Lully, would it be too much to ask—would you be so kind—”

Lully waited impatiently for him to finish his sentence.

“Could I see where she is buried? My daughter, I mean?”

“Of course, this is a natural desire,” he said. “It was a terrible, terrible loss to art. Unfortunately, I am unacquainted with the exact location, you understand …” He paused, letting Marcel fill in the gap however he pleased, but with the knowledge that as a player, as someone who had dared to step upon the stage and perform for an audience, Émilie had fallen permanently from grace and could not be buried in consecrated ground. The fact that she was a suicide simply gilded the lily. “Pierre will fetch someone who may be able to help you, however. If you would be so kind?”

Lully sent his page off to find François while he tried to carry on a polite conversation with Marcel. He did not know what to say to the luthier, who did indeed look very sad. He himself was mystified by Émilie’s actions. It made no sense for her to have done such a thing when she was clearly poised for great success—which was precisely what he told the widow Scarron when she asked to see him. Lully believed that Émilie’s suicide was one unfortunate incident that Madame de Maintenon had had nothing to do with. She had sent for him and quizzed him about the singer’s state of mind on the night of the performance. Lully was a little worried that she would try to blame him for the girl’s rash step, although he did not know why she would think it necessary.

It really was a pity. Émilie had even surprised Lully with her ability to rise to the demands of the role. He was prepared to put Mademoiselle St. Christophle aside for good after the other evening. His one consolation about the whole thing was that Charpentier didn’t have Émilie’s voice at his disposal either.

Within a short while Pierre returned with François, who asked Marcel to accompany him for a walk in the deserted, winter garden.

Marcel let loose a torrent of recollections about his daughter. The memory of her was still fresh in his mind. Every time he looked around at their new comfort and prosperity, knowing that it had been bought at the price of Émilie’s life, he felt as if there were bands wrapped around his heart that were being squeezed. At first he thought of giving up making violins. If it were not for the Amati copy he had crafted for Monsieur Charpentier, none of this would have happened. Émilie would have stayed at home singing for him, perhaps one day for a husband, and eventually for her children. But making violins was like breathing to Marcel, and so instead he lavished even more love and care on every one he produced.

“Were you with her at the end? Why did she do it?” Marcel’s words were labored, squeezed out, as if it hurt him to speak.

“She was unhappy with her performance. She felt the king was displeased with her, and could not bear the disgrace.” François looked away. He wondered if the luthier could tell he was lying.

Marcel nodded, working his mouth a little as if he wanted to say something else, but he simply shook his head. François led Marcel to a corner of the garden, not far from the village of Trianon, the same distant corner where Émilie often strayed when she tried to steal a few moments unobserved. The two men sat for a while on a rustic bench, each absorbed in his own thoughts. Marcel tried as hard as he could to imagine his daughter sitting by him on the bench. He almost felt like reaching for her hand, or stroking her golden hair, and when he closed his eyes, he could see the expression on her face. Marcel always imagined Émilie smiling.

François, on the other hand, could see much more than just the specter of the young girl he had helped to disappear from life. He could see that his action had only complicated what was already a very murky situation. Although he did not know it for a fact, François suspected that Madame de Montespan was involved in Émilie’s disappearance and that Madame de Maintenon was not taken in by his story of her suicide. The entire tale would unravel with the slightest tug at a dangling thread, and yet everyone left it there in plain view. This was a very bad sign indeed.

The image of Émilie’s father trudging slowly off to the main gate of the château, his strong shoulders bowed with almost unbearable grief, haunted François for the rest of the day and refused to go away when he tried to sleep that night. That and the thought of himself being carted off to prison conspired to make it impossible for the normally sanguine servant to have any repose. He shifted and fidgeted, punching the bed’s lumps of straw into different shapes, but to no avail. At about three in the morning, François rose from his bed, lit a candle with an ember from the fire, and then sat down at his desk.

For the next two hours, François composed a letter and figured out a way to get it to its destination without its being discovered. Writing was the simplest action to take, and it would cut short the train of lies. Although there was no way to fix everything that had happened, it was entirely within his power to amend one part of the whole mess, and so that is what he did. He had to trust that the luthier would understand the necessity to maintain the secrecy concerning what had happened, to allow his daughter to remain dead to the rest of the world. Just before daybreak, when the movement of only a few menial servants broke the stillness of the enormous palace, François crept down to the kitchens to have a word with a certain scullery maid whose discretion he trusted, and the letter began its journey that very morning.

“Monsieur le Comte, if I may beg a word with you.” Lully stopped St. Paul on his way back from Mass the morning after Marcel visited Versailles.

“If it is brief. I have much to do.”

“Its brevity will depend upon you, Monsieur.” Lully gestured in the direction of his study, and the two men walked there in silence. When the door closed behind them, Lully spoke. “I have one or two questions, about Mademoiselle Émilie’s … demise.”

Lully told St. Paul of Marcel’s visit, and his own curiosity about how a young girl with such a bright future ahead of her could have taken so rash a step. “And then, there is the matter of the legalities surrounding a suicide. How is it that the servant François could simply dispose of the girl’s body somewhere in the garden, like a beloved lapdog? And that no one, not even Madame de Maintenon, raised any objections to it? I was wondering, Monsieur le Comte, if you had any insight about these matters—as you seem at present to be so intimate with the widow Scarron. You see, she called for me, and I do not want her to be under any misapprehension about my role in the affair.”

St. Paul was silent for a moment. It occurred to him that here was a potential ally in his new quest to get Émilie back to Versailles. He knew there was no love lost between Lully and Madame de Maintenon, and the composer would certainly be delighted once more to thwart his rival, Monsieur Charpentier. Added to that, St. Paul was in possession of secrets about Lully and his illegal proclivities that might act as security against any possible treachery on the composer’s part. “Monsieur Lully, what would it be worth to you to have a voice like Mademoiselle Émilie’s at your disposal again?”

“There was only one such voice. You were fortunate to find her in the first place. I doubt such good luck will be yours again.”

“Ah, but I think you are mistaken. I have it in my power to bring Émilie Jolicoeur back from the dead.”

Lully’s eyes opened wide, then narrowed. “I think you must tell me what you know.”

“I shall tell you, not because I want to gratify your wishes, but because I need an ally here at court.” And, St. Paul thought, Lully’s famously extensive personal resources would not go amiss either.

“I thought the widow Scarron occupied that position,” Lully said.

“So did I, until recently.”

Lully looked at the ceiling and thought for a moment, then turned his eyes back to St. Paul. “But there could be great risks. And what makes you think that you can trust me?”

“Shall we say,” St. Paul answered, “that there are aspects of your life that would not withstand scrutiny.” At that St. Paul let his gaze wander over to Pierre, who made a show of polishing Lully’s perfectly immaculate boots. “Therefore I know that I may rely upon you to maintain absolute secrecy. We both have much to gain, I believe, and also much to lose.”

Lully made a sucking sound with his lips and then let out a low whistle. “What do you want me to do?”

“I am never short of ideas, but I fear I am quite short of capital. And there are expenses …”

“All right, Monsieur de St. Paul. Perhaps you had better tell me your plan.”