The Hurlyburly's Husband (10 page)

‘Quails and turtledoves and pretty partridges too

Quails and turtledoves and pretty partridges too

And my lovely dove who sings both day and night

My little blonde lassie

Let me sleep beside you now

My little blonde lassie

Sleep beside me now’

They sang the refrain in a chorus, and all the accents of France were to be heard, for the enlisted men came from many parts of the realm. They followed Cartet, who was marching them to Catalonia, and they listened as he belted out:

‘And my pretty dove who sings both day and night

And my pretty dove who sings both day and night

Who sings for all the girls who have not found a mate

My little blonde lassie

Let me sleep beside beside you now

My little blonde lassie

Sleep beside me now

Who sings for all the girls who have not found a mate

Who sings for all the girls who have not found a mate

She does not sing for me, for I’ve a lovely one’

Montespan, on horseback, smiled when he came upon the sergeant with the fearsome moustache singing of a lovely mate.

‘My little blonde lassie

Let me sleep beside you now

My little blonde lassie

Sleep beside me now

She does not sing for me, for I’ve a lovely one

She does not sing for me, for I’ve a lovely one

Tell us then, my lovely, where’s your husband dear?’

Louis-Henri looked away and thought of Athénaïs: before he had left Paris, he had signed a ‘general power of attorney granting the right to govern all their common property during his absence’, for he trusted her wholly and entirely.

‘My little blonde lassie

Let me sleep beside you now

My little blonde lassie

Sleep beside me now

Tell us then, my lovely, where’s your husband dear?

Tell us then, my lovely, where’s your husband dear?

He’s gone off to Holland, the Dutch have kept him there’

The marquis found himself humming along.

‘My little blonde lassie

Let me sleep beside you now

My little blonde lassie

Sleep beside me now’

The loving husband rode alongside the convoy, a pale, handsome cavalryman beneath the banner of the Duc de Noailles. In his saddle holsters he had slipped his fair lady’s stockings. Sometimes he lifted them out to sniff them.

The road climbed up the first hills. They went past meadows into a silent village, where not a cockerel or an anvil was to be heard; the inhabitants had bolted themselves indoors. Not a cloud, not a breath of air, nothing was stirring. Wasps flew here and there, black and yellow.

The journey was long and so was their marching song – fortunately, for it passed the time. They had left at the end of January and would not reach their destination until the beginning of March, to combat the Spanish Angelets. Away on the horizon there were peasants in the fields, who moved away when they noticed the soldiers.

‘He’s gone off to Holland, the Dutch have kept him there.

He’s gone off to Holland, the Dutch have kept him there.

What would you give, fair lady, your husband for to see?’

Following the troops was a baggage train, burdened with trunks and pulled by mules. Montespan, in his blue coat, the plumes of his hat rising into the sky, pulled on the reins and let the miquelets march ahead of him, in their outfits of red broadcloth; many of them would be killed. ‘To die, to sleep,’ says Shakespeare. If ’tis but that … thought the marquis dismissively. He pulled up next to a cart covered in a tarpaulin and lifted up the grey canvas.

‘My little blonde lassie

Let me sleep beside you now

My little blonde lassie

Sleep beside me now

What would you give, fair lady, your husband for to see?

What would you give, fair lady, your husband for to see?

I’d give all Versailles, Paris and Saint-Denis’

Beneath the tarpaulin, sheltered from the light, little Marie-Christine slept stretched out on sacks of gunpowder, dried meat and salt, among bushels of candles and jugs of vinegar. Louis-Henri would make a detour through Bonnefont and leave his daughter with Chrestienne de Zamet.

‘My little blonde lassie

Let me sleep beside you now

My little blonde lassie

Sleep beside me now

I’d give all Versailles, Paris and Saint-Denis

I’d give all Versailles, Paris and Saint-Denis

The towers of Notre-Dame and my own church bells’

Perhaps the child was dreaming of her mother as she moved her lips. Sometimes it seemed she, too, was murmuring:

‘My little blonde lassie

Let me sleep beside you now

My little blonde lassie

Sleep beside me now’

The air smelt strongly of battle here. By Puigcerdá, red bursts of grapeshot whistled through the blue sky. Wounds ruptured flesh. The air was lethal, a ghastly storm of treacherous laughter.

Sergeant Cartet was crawling forward on his stomach and elbows to join Montespan where he sheltered behind a rock, near his horse.

‘Captain, a military postilion has just brought news. The King’s campaign in Flanders is like a stroll in the fresh air. Turenne is nimbly seizing the entire region from the regent of Spain. Theirs is a triumphal journey. Entire cities are crumbling like houses of cards. Whenever he takes a city, His Majesty gives a masked ball. The fair Flemish ladies come and visit the court that conquers with singing and dancing.’

‘Well, confounded vassal, ’tis not the same here in the Pyrenees!’

All around Louis-Henri lyrical scenes were accompanied by fife and drum, on steep land hot with the sun and red with blood. Cannonballs flew in a crash of colours. A cruel lead missile shone as it whistled and clove through the air. Cartet ducked his head and said, ‘His Majesty is having a rousing good time, capturing Flanders from his royal coach. He sits opposite the Queen, with his favourite, Louise de La Vallière, on his right, and on his left your wife.’

‘Oh, is my wife there? I did not know. Excellent, Sergeant! Let us not take root here on this mountainside!’

The marquis, with his musket in his hand, jumped on his mount and rode off, bare-headed. Boldness, despair, such pathetic grandeur … He was wounded ten or twelve times in his arms, shoulders and legs. And still he resisted, but his wounded animal died beneath him. On his feet again, without a horse and greatly weakened by the loss of blood from his wounds, he thought of this war on the border of the Pyrenees – a pitiful tale that had lasted for nearly six months now.

The region of Catalonia, given to the Crown of France by the treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, had to pay more taxes now than when it had been Spanish, including the gabelle salt tax, and this had greatly incensed the populace. There had been uprisings. The peasants had summoned the Angelets to the sound of the tocsin; they were financed by Spain and there was no fighting by the rules. The French soldiers, poorly prepared for guerrilla warfare, for ambushes in the heart of hostile, extreme wilderness, had been decimated. The marquis had lost many of his light cavalry. The others had been forced to flee and Montespan, covered in blood, was delirious. He saw his wife everywhere. There she was, behind the rose bushes. With its captain injured, the company sounded the retreat. The marquis felt the weight of a terrible solitude overcome him. He was on the ground, injured, among all those whose backs were burning, but Cartet, on his knees and laughing, put his large arms around him: ‘Captain, Captain, stay alive! Spain and France are to sign a peace treaty in Aix-la-Chapelle. Louis has revoked the gabelle in Roussillon …’

Louis-Henri stared at the sergeant’s face, confusing it with his wife’s.

‘What strange teeth you show me when you smile, Athénaïs! Those that are whole are scarcely white, and the others are mere black fragments. They hardly hold to your gums. If you cough you might find them loose and bloody at your feet. Ah, do not indulge any thoughts of laughing for a livelihood, my fair one,’ he said to an astonished Cartet. ‘Hide those stumps, dearest, and frequent funeral processions instead; make yourself a mourner.’

The sergeant also informed him that the military postilion had brought a letter from Louvois. Cartet read the missive: ‘“Monsieur de Montespan, having considered that your presence in the service of His Majesty is no longer required in the place where you are, I am writing this letter to inform you that the King now finds it meet that you should make your way hence and go wherever your own affairs might lead you”,’ but Louis-Henri did not hear, for he had fainted away.

Rough Cartet, with his dagger-hilt moustache, and his hands more deadly than a machine and stronger than an ox (he who had sung during the journey in his thick voice that he had a lovely mate), delicately lifted Athénaïs’s husband.

‘As we head north, I will leave him at his chateau in Bonnefont.’

‘Ah, you have a limp now, Monsieur le marquis?’ asked Madame Larivière, astonished, as she emerged from the kitchen on the second floor in Rue Taranne.

On the landing, she wiped her hands on her apron whilst Montespan began to climb the dark stairs, clinging to the banister.

‘And your shoulders, your arms, have the strangest shape, there …’ said the cook worriedly, coming down a few steps.

‘I’ve been to war, Madame Larivière … These lumps in my sleeves are bits of shredded linen placed on my wounds, and they make my clothes misshapen.’

‘Did your company win the battle this time?’

‘Is my wife not here?’ asked the husband, limping into the salon on the first floor.

‘I thought it was her when I heard the door open downstairs. She sent word that she would stop by quickly this morning.’

By the fireplace, the servant Dorothée, who had been putting logs on the fire, for it was November, turned round and seemed to be looking for someone other than the marquis.

‘You haven’t brought Marie-Christine back with you?’

‘No, I left her in Bonnefont with my mother and the sergeant of my company, whom I’ve hired as a steward. He will have his work cut out, for the chateau is in a pitiful—’

Suddenly there came the sound of a key opening a downstairs door and a voice boomed, ‘Cook, servant! Are my things ready? Come, bring them down from my bedroom! A royal carriage is waiting to take me back to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Make haste, quickly!’

They heard Athénaïs clap her hands to hurry everyone along as she climbed the stairs rapidly, her stylish shoes clicking on the steps. She came into the salon, removing her coat.

Thus her astonished husband found her in a very original gown of ample and flowing green silk muslin that he had never seen before.

‘Madame invented this robe and has called it “The Innocent”… ’Tis the latest fashion in the Marais and also at court, so it seems,’ mocked the cook, as the marquise frowned at her.

The loving husband walked round his fair lady in her new-style ‘innocent’ gown: it hung loosely like a large man’s shirt, ballooning below the waist, and it hid the belly where Montespan now placed his palms. Her belly was rounded.

‘Oh, dear Lord, Athénaïs, are you again…’

Louis-Henri quickly did some calculations. He had left for the Pyrenees eleven months previously: this advanced pregnancy therefore had nothing to do with a husband’s labours.

‘How is this possible?’

‘’Tis the hand of God, the work of the Holy Ghost,’ sniggered the cook, as the marquis asked his wife, ‘Who is the father?’

‘Louis-Henri, I told you not to leave me near the King … one can refuse His Majesty nothing.’

Dorothée squeezed the bellows whilst Montespan felt unsteady on his feet.

‘In Bonnefont I received an anonymous letter informing me that the King had left his favourite to become your lover. I dared not believe it.’

‘Husbands are the last to open their eyes to the reality of their misfortune,’ explained the cook from under her bonnet.

‘I said to myself, this country is full of gossips and braggarts only too eager to sully the most honest of wives, and I am not about to confer the glory of History upon such boudoir tittle-tattle …’

‘The brilliant manner in which she deceived the Queen shows that she has a pretty gift for treachery,’ Madame Larivière said boldly, looking right at Athénaïs, who replied, ‘Do you know who I am?’

‘Aye, I believe so, Madame. Are you not the woman who bought Mademoiselle de La Vallière’s commission?’

‘Leave this salon!’

The cook motioned to Dorothée, then leant towards her mistress’s ear. She told her that she was a liar, a rascally wench, a strumpet and a dog’s harlot.

‘Leave this house!’ exclaimed La Montespan.

The two servants closed the door behind them. Tears came to the marquis’s eyes which spoke far more eloquently than any words he could have said.

‘My God, how your belly weighs upon me! And you are not the only one it oppresses,’ he sighed, contemplating the pregnant lady-in-waiting (‘wounded in service’).

‘One does not abandon one’s spouse to fêtes and the dangers of the court, Louis-Henri; it is impossible to extricate oneself from the King’s pressing advances,’ murmured Athénaïs.

‘He can only obtain that which you consent to give him.’

‘No one can hide from the King’s desires. And from women he demands immediate submission. To refuse would have irrevocable consequences for me, for you, and for the children. Both our families, all of us, would have been banished from France.’

Horns sprouted on the marquis’s head. Mourning of all mournings, misfortune of all misfortunes, all this triumph buried, sheer madness.

‘I have never felt a pain more piercing than that which I feel today, my dear.’