The French Mistress (11 page)

“God will give me strength, Madame,” he murmured, making the sign of the cross.

“May He guide you throughout your travels,” she answered fervently. Ready to bid him farewell, she awkwardly pushed herself from her chair, and I was quick to take her arm to steady her. She was five months gone now, and she’d weakened as the child within her grew, the heaviness making her clumsy and unbalanced.

“If you’ll permit me, Madame, I also addressed that other matter you’d requested of me.” He presented a folded sheet to Madame. “For the young lady, Madame.”

“Of course!” Madame exclaimed. “How could I have forgotten? Mademoiselle, this is for you. I asked the abbé to cast your horoscope. I thought you might be amused to learn what the starry portents say of your future.”

She passed the sheet to me, and I opened it slowly, not certain that I wished to know my life’s future, or that foretelling it in this manner was entirely proper, either.

“Come, Louise, don’t keep it to yourself,” Madame said with all the eagerness I lacked. “Tell me what predictions the stars make for you.”

With no choice, I forced myself to read it, scanning quickly first for ill tidings, then more slowly again, yet neither time did I find much sense to it.

“Forgive me, Madame, but it would seem to be more riddle than fortune,” I said, offering the most succinct portions of the horoscope. “I’m to inspire great love yet also great hatred. I’m to become a duchess and the mother of a duke, but without ever being a wedded wife, as well as a queen among kings, but without a crown of my own. I don’t begin to know what to make of that.”

“Nor do I,” Madame said, clearly disappointed. “That’s no fortune at all.”

“Such astrological contradictions are not uncommon, Madame,” the abbé said solemnly. “There are the occasional birth dates that present a seeming puzzle, only to reveal their truths over time.”

“I’m very sorry that Mademoiselle de Keroualle’s was one of those,” Madame said. “I’d wanted you to assure her she’d soon find a worthy gentleman who’d give her love and contentment in a happy marriage, not this foolishness about kings and great hatred.”

“It’s of no importance, Madame,” I said gently. “Good fortune or foolish, I wouldn’t worry overmuch on what the moon will predict for me.”

Yet I could not put aside the curious words myself, turning them over and over in my thoughts as I tried to find their meaning. Still they made no sense, and at last I ordered myself to dismiss the abbé’s horoscope as a testimony to idleness, the work of a flattering charlatan and no more.

Only later, much later, did I come to realize the truth in his words, for they were revealed in time to mean exactly what they said.

 

 

We all gave much thought to babies that spring. As Madame’s time grew closer, her mood grew more somber as she focused her dwindling energy upon the coming babe. She was often in pain, and came to rely especially on costly potions drawn from Chinese poppy flowers to ease her suffering. Never strong, she feared the ordeal of childbirth, and did more to prepare her soul than in arranging matters for the child.

Because we maids of honor were all unwed and innocent (by rule if not by practice), we were not party to Madame’s conferences with the midwives and surgeons, nor would we be included as witnesses to the actual birth. But among ourselves we spoke endlessly about whether the child would be the son everyone desired, or only another disappointing daughter.

There were other babies to discuss as well. In March Madame du Montespan had given birth to her first child by the king, a beautiful and robust daughter. It was all supposed to be a secret, of course, to preserve the dignity of the marquise’s cuckolded husband, but everyone at Court knew the truth, just as we all knew the lady had been installed in a small, elegant (and convenient) house on the rue de l’Echelle, not far from the Tuileries. Louis was delighted with his new daughter. It had been nearly ten years since his queen had presented him with the dauphin, and his open impatience with that poor lady’s efforts seemed to grow with this latest proof of his Bourbon virility.

Only his English cousin fared worse. Charles had likewise been wed for many years, but while the number of royal bastards blossomed at a rate distressing to Madame, the English queen’s womb remained barren and empty, and the king without an heir. From Lord Rochester we learned that Charles had recently taken a most unsuitable woman for his latest mistress, a tawdry low actress named Nell Gwyn. Though Rochester declared her to be the most amusing little creature alive, Madame was horrified by how willingly her brother debased himself with such amusements. What a sorry waste of the royal seed, especially if it resulted in another woeful bastard instead of a noble Stuart princeling!

There was one more baby arriving in our world, too, one of less place in the world, perhaps, but of consequence to our household, and Madame’s peace. I learned of it early one morning, that same spring.

“Do you hear that, Louise?” Gabrielle whispered to me from her bed.

It must have been soon after dawn, for I could hear the servants beginning their day in the hall outside. Our rooms were still dark: no one expected maids of honor to rise so early, especially after dancing at the Louvre the night before.

“She’s been retching like that for at least a quarter of an hour,” Gabrielle continued. “Surely she must be empty by now.”

My thoughts still thick with sleep, I lifted my head from the pillow to listen. As Gabrielle had said, someone was being ill. I could hear the distinctive sound of vomit splashing into an earthenware chamber pot.

“Too much wine, whoever it is,” I muttered, yawning. “Go back to sleep.”

“No, no,” Gabrielle insisted. “It’s Françoise, and it’s not wine that’s making her sick. It’s the bastard in her belly.”

At once I was awake. For the haughty, beautiful Mademoiselle de Fiennes to have been trapped in her intrigues like this would be news indeed. When I’d first arrived at Court, she had been the most desired, and therefore the most powerful, of our little circle of maids of honor. Now, if she truly were with child, she was ruined. “Françoise? You are certain?”

“She’s been sick like that every morning for the last week,” Gabrielle whispered eagerly. “She’s pale and poorly, too, if you’d but notice, and weeps over nothing. I’m sure of it.”

The maid who’d been ill crawled back into her bed, unable to smother a small groan of misery and despair. I heard it and understood everything it signified, as likely did all the rest of us lying there in the dark. There would be no discreet house in a fashionable neighborhood for her, as there’d been for Athenaise du Montespan, no handsome allowance settled on her and her child. Françoise was ruined, in every sense. We’d no need to speculate who the father of her child might be, or wonder how he’d acknowledge his paternity. Sadly we all knew that, too. Two days later, the rest of the Court would know as well.

We were gathered around Madame in the front hall near the door, waiting for Monsieur and the Chevalier de Lorraine to join us before we climbed into the coaches that would convey us to the other palace for the evening. Weak and fearful of falling down the palais’s many staircases, Madame had been carried down in an armchair supported by a pair of footmen. She was still swathed with her furs, too, no matter that the first sweetness of spring was in the evening air, and though she tried to be gay for our sakes, there was no mistaking the shadows of weariness beneath her eyes, or how the rosy paint sat awkwardly atop the pallor of her cheeks.

I marveled that she still found the strength for these long nights, but because Louis, with his insensitivity to others’ suffering, expected her to be there in his company, she would go, even if she needed to have her servants carry her the entire way.

“Is there any word from Monsieur, any reason for his delay?” she plaintively asked one of the footmen. “He knows I don’t like to keep the horses waiting so long. They suffer, you know, standing idle on the paving stones in their traces like that. What reason could my husband have for that?”

“I do not know, Madame,” the man answered. “His Highness has left word that he was not to be disturbed in his rooms. He is, ah, engaged with the chevalier.”

“Ah.” Madame sighed with resignation. She rubbed her fingertips across her temples, making the three dangling pearls in her earrings sway against her cheeks. “No matter. We shall wait, shan’t we?”

As soon as she’d spoken, we heard a man scream from upstairs, followed by angry, shouted words and a slammed door. We all turned as one to look up the staircase, dreading to see what manner of foul mood had captured Monsieur this time. I saw Madame’s mouth tighten, as she braced herself for however he’d vent his foul humor on her.

He charged down the hallway, stopping at the top of the white marble staircase, a furious figure in black-and-scarlet satin. Behind him, as always, was his smirking, languid follower, the Chevalier de Lorraine, followed by several gentlemen attendants and servants, all striving to calm Monsieur—who, clearly, had no intention of being calmed.

“You!”
he shouted, flinging his arm to single out one of us clustered below. “Strumpet! Whore! What you have done—what you have done!”

We maids and ladies gasped and made small frightened cries of distress, unsure what to do or say. In our midst, Madame pushed herself up from her armchair to confront him, her fury now a match for his own.

“Do not speak to me that way, sir,” she ordered. “Do you understand me?”

“I do not address you,” Monsieur said, looking past his wife. “It’s that one, there, that I mean. You, you vile little whore, you!”

With her hand pressed over her mouth in panic, Françoise de Fiennes stepped away from the rest of us, poised to flee.

Madame looked sharply from her husband to Françoise and back again. Though there was little love lost between Madame and this particular maid of honor, I expected her as our mistress to defend her maid. Of course she knew the truth; being who she was, Madame likely knew far more about the affair between her maid and Monsieur’s lover than the rest of us could even imagine.

“What can this young lady have done to you to deserve such language?” she demanded now. “What, sir?”

“What has she done?” Monsieur repeated, his voice rising shrill with his anger. “What has she not done! She has seduced this gentleman like the whore that she is, lured him to sin, debased him with her filth, and now dares claim he sired her bastard!”

“My maid of honor seduced the chevalier?” Madame repeated, incredulous. “You would believe that to be true?”

The chevalier stepped close to Monsieur, resting his hand fondly on the smaller man’s shoulder.

“It is, Madame,” he said, smirking with unabashed pleasure. “The little bitch quite raped me.”

“That is not true!” cried Françoise frantically. “My lord, my lord, tell them the truth! Tell them how you love me, and promised to wed me!”

Unmoved, the chevalier sniffed with contempt. “You delude yourself,” he said. “I could never love a creature like you.”

“No!” she wailed, tears now streaming down her cheeks as she sank to her knees. “You swore to me, my lord! Love, devotion, marriage! You promised you—”

“Silence!” roared Monsieur. “How dare you challenge the word of a gentleman? Insolent, lying whore!”

He stormed down the steps, the ribbon-tied curls of his wig flying out behind. Françoise scrambled to her feet to escape, but her heel tangled in the hem of her petticoat and she pitched forward to her knees. Monsieur was at her in an instant, slapping her face and boxing her about her neck and shoulders to drive her forward.

“Out, out, leave my house!” he screamed, his blows raining down upon her. “I won’t have a whore like you here, defiling everything you touch! Not near this gentleman, not near my wife! Out, out!”

Sobbing for mercy, Françoise staggered across the hall. As the two came closer, a porter with a dutifully impassive face opened the door and held it for Monsieur’s convenience.

“Madame, please!” wailed Françoise, her shoulders hunched and her hands over her head against Monsieur’s driving fists. “Mercy, I beg of you, oh, mercy, for the love of my innocent child!”

I looked to Madame, that lady of boundless kindness, expecting her to speak and give the order that would save Françoise. To my shock, her expression was every bit as empty as the porter’s at the door: no mercy, no reprieve, no redemption. In silence she watched Monsieur shove Françoise through the doorway and down the steps to the pavement, and in silence she let the porter close the door, and muffle the lady’s racking cries on the palais’s steps.

She turned to meet the gaze of the chevalier, who was standing just behind her, a strange, unspoken exchange I could not begin to comprehend. One had won, I guessed, and one had lost, but now I’d no notion of who was the victor, and who the vanquished, besides the poor creature who’d been cast away by them both.

“Worthless, impudent whore,” Monsieur muttered, smoothing the gold-trimmed sleeves of his coat as he came to stand before Madame. “Offal like her is not to be tolerated.”

“It’s done.” With a long sigh, Madame slowly lowered herself back into her armchair and folded her hands over her belly. “Come. We’re late, and we’ve kept the horses waiting long enough.”

Françoise’s crying outside the door had stopped. I do not know what became of her. When we returned that night, her belongings were gone as if she’d never been among us. I never saw her again. It wouldn’t have been right if I had.

Monsieur motioned for the footmen to carry Madame’s chair, and then he joined the chevalier, the two of them walking together through the door. Madame came next, with us following in her wake, a shaken, silent procession in our costly silks and lace.

In the time since I’d joined this household, I’d believed that I’d come to know and love Madame, and to trust her as my dearest friend at Court. Now I realized how little I understood, and how foolish I’d been to think otherwise. As for my trust—Ah, Court was no place for trust, nor for love, either.