The Hurlyburly's Husband (17 page)

Now the little girl was sleeping sadly in her bed – it would have seemed, to look at her, that she was crying in her sleep, her eyes were so swollen and her breathing so laboured. Little girls have a sensitive heart. Oh, how sad her birthday had been! Pensively, whilst a tear fell silently from her big eyes, she murmured, ‘When will Maman return?’ Her father, the angel of cradles, dried her tears. In the child’s heavy sleep he whispered a dream so joyful that Marie-Christine’s smiling half-closed lips seemed to murmur, ‘Maman, there you are!’ Louis-Henri left the child’s room. He, too, could not banish Françoise’s image: it filled all the space in his life. It was a terrible absence, as it was for his daughter. ‘When is she coming back?’ was the obsessive question. All along the gallery, its walls illuminated by the soft glow of his candle, the light was reflected in the mirrors and created a poetic still life. Louis-Henri put out the flame with a cone-shaped candle snuffer. In the huge fireplace in his room oak from his forests was burning. He tossed a log onto the embers and rekindled the fire. His bed consisted of a bedstead and three fustian mattresses. He slipped under the down-filled bolster. Outside, rats fleeing from owls scurried to the depths of the moat’s green water in a rustling of leaves. The flames in the hearth reminded him of Françoise’s thick curls. The marquis bit the lace on his pillow.

The crowd entered the church in Bonnefont, anointing themselves with holy water. A little bell was ringing and the priests were kneeling at the altar.

‘The Lord sayeth …’

Above an open coffin placed on trestles, the priest Destival, who was over eighty, had difficulty hearing or speaking because of his advanced age. The
Pater
and
Ave
were read in Latin, ‘I believe in God’ in French ... Incredibly gentle, he drooled faith from his toothless mouth. In the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost, he said that the person in the open coffin had died a good Christian and a good Catholic.

Louis-Antoine looked all round the church.

‘Who died?’

Beneath his cap, the little Marquis d’Antin looked somewhat haughty. He had a shock of curly locks. His mobile nostrils resembled his mother’s. But who had died? It was not his grandmother – this tall, pious woman who was removing his cap. So who had died? wondered the little boy. Not his sister with her very thick eyebrows. He saw her, next to Dorothée, weeping, turning in her fingers a cap with two bells. Louis-Antoine did not understand why. When he asked her, she burst into tears. His father had not died – he was there, at the front, the country marquis who lived meagrely on his land and was proud of his pew at church. He wore full mourning and black silk stockings, and had replaced the decorative buckles on his shoes with simple iron buckles. Madame Larivière had not snuffed it, either: she was singing next to Cartet, who grumbled on observing Montespan’s back: ‘That whore will kill him yet.’ Of whom was he speaking? Louis-Antoine’s mother must still have been alive, else they would have told him and then, this morning, before the ceremony, everyone had been speaking of Françoise in the present tense, so it was not she. Who had passed away? A bumpkin from Aquitaine? No, there would not have been so many handsomely dressed people. With the whiff of incense came an overwhelming languor. Then there was the invocation beneath the cross. The old priest reached his lips towards Christ’s nailed feet and once he had kissed them to see Paradise, he turned round, spreading his arms. Gentlemen in official livery, carrying a heavy candle engraved with the Montespan crest (with the horns added), went up to the coffin. One after the other they waved a holy-water sprinkler over the open box, a half-smile on their lips that Louis-Antoine did not miss. It must have been his father who had invited them. He remembered hearing him declare that they would have to send a notice regarding the burial to all the lords in the region.

Now Montespan motioned to his children to follow him down the central aisle. Marie-Christine went first, on tiptoe, and lifted the sprinkler above the coffin, then handed it to her brother, whom Louis-Henri was holding in his arms to help him. The little boy leant over the coffin.

‘What? There is nothing in the box!’

There was nothing for him, nor for anyone else in the church, no doubt, but for Montespan there was everything. When the undertakers had placed the lid back on the box and were preparing to nail it down, the marquis’s sighs and tears became cries mingled with kisses and embraces; Louis-Henri clung so desperately to the empty coffin that they could not close it. It took several persuasive lords to pull him away.

Outside, he took his two children by the hand and, with his hat under his arm, was followed by a bevy of stunned friends. People were walking in silence, disconcerted by the tragicomical spectacle of the marquis’s sorrow as he followed the empty coffin behind his horned carriage. Even the black horses pulling the vehicle wore stag’s horns.

This was a land of stone and blazing summer sun, where tempers easily became heated, and moustaches were twirled: the local people had come out in defence of their marquis and his extravagant behaviour – he was a marvellously exemplary Gascon! A cuckold who did not meekly bow his head. They praised his escapades, embellished them in their numerous lively retellings. The coffin, followed by the assembly from the parish, was taken with great pomp to the top of a hill for burial. Louis-Henri leant over the whirling void of an abyss.

‘So what are we burying?’ asked Louis-Antoine of his traumatised sister.

The bells of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges were ringing the death knell of the marquis’s disastrous marriage.

‘I have often been invited to funerals,’ sighed the Seigneur de Gramont in the ear of the Seigneur de Biron, as they walked back to the village, ‘but I have never before been invited to attend the funeral of a love.’

‘Of what did it die? I have heard tell of abuse.’

‘I fear it was also from a fit of undue vanity and ambition.’

To the sound of a little bell, the death crier announced that for one month mourning would be worn as far as the banks of the Baïse.

‘He’s a decent, polite sort, the best marquis on earth,’ continued Biron. ‘He has but one failing: a stubborn love.’

Montespan, alone on the hill, crouched down and planted before the grave a simple wooden cross where two dates were carved: 1663–1667.

‘’Tis young to die at the age of four.’

He stood back up, facing into the tramontana blowing above the valley.

‘May the wind carry you away from your terrace at Versailles, Françoise. If I thought it might bring you here upon a whirlwind, God knows I would keep all my windows open and welcome you!’

But the sky was growing darker. Night fell early in winter, darkness reigned for long hours. Nocturnal shadows were the domain of fear – ghosts, wolves, evil spells were the accomplices of the night.

Louis-Henri left his message on the wind and headed back down to the chateau, that isolated refuge for crows. In his bed, Louis-Antoine was crying, ‘Oh, my God, where am I?’ They ran to him. ‘Oh, I do not know where I am.’ His blankets had all fallen off; his father tucked him in again. Montespan’s mother said, ‘The little girl also woke with a fright, she woke several times … Her imagination is greatly overwrought by the ceremony. She complained to me of a headache and told me it was from weeping. Life is hard, and short. It quickly forces children to behave as adults, does it not?’

Louis-Henri did not reply, as if he had not heard.

The day after the funeral of his love, Montespan found himself wishing he could believe in resurrection. After all, had Françoise not been born of a dead woman? When they had finished supper and he was still sitting with his elbows on the long oak table in the kitchen, he drummed his fingers against his glass and listened to the whistling of the water being boiled for the washing up. His short-necked steward, who was wearing a beaver cap adorned with feathers, observed him and said to the cook, who was scrubbing a cauldron, ‘We must make him eat beef.’

Madame Larivière did not share his opinion.

‘Beef may be solid food for the body, but it makes the blood thick and melancholic. Chicken is better; it revives even the weakest of natures.’

Cartet smoothed his moustache then took hold of a varnished potbellied jug full of Muscat wine from Frontignan, and poured a plentiful glass for Louis-Henri.

‘Come now! To keep your head above water, don’t let despair get the better of you. A spot of wine can awaken and delight an entire soul. Let’s make the best of things …’

The marquis took up his glass and swallowed it down in one gulp. The steward refilled his glass with the nectar.

‘And then, like the children and your mother, you must away to bed, Captain.’

‘To bed … In wrinkled sheets, where my body lies heavy with painful dreams and my muscles ache. I have the vapours when night falls, my mouth hurts, my hands clench.’

The cook and the steward exchanged furtive glances; Cartet walked across the creaking floor to fetch an instrument and tried to string together a few true notes. ‘It takes longer to tune a lute than to play it. It’s tricky to play, unlike the guitar from Spain.’

The marquis was bored in the rustic solitude of Bonnefont. He was assailed by bitter thoughts. On his lips he still had the taste of Françoise’s kisses. He reached for a wicker-covered bottle of rose-flavoured ratafia, grabbed it, pushed back his bench and left the room. Outside, snowflakes fluttered like feathers.

He was mired in the uselessness of his days and nights, and there was nothing left for him but to be patient and drink rhubarb tea in the evening for as long as his loving, faithful wife was caught up in the dizzy whirl of royal favour. All he wanted was for her to return to him – the memory of her voice tore his heart to shreds.

As he sat on the low wall by the moat, facing the chateau, remembered images paraded in front of him … Françoise’s face haunted him, obsessed him, and he was wretched. Madame Larivière ordered Cartet to stop his dissonant scratching on the lute and to put it away in the old guardroom. Louis-Henri saw his love reappear before his eyes, but it was the steward inside the chateau walking past a window with a candlestick in his hand. The marquis took a long swallow of ratafia (there were not only roses in this potion) and would have liked to believe it was Françoise he could see. He rushed to the guardroom, flung open the door and cried, ‘Cartet, go quickly and fetch my wife’s wedding gown and put it on.’

‘What?’

‘Then you’ll walk past the window with the candle, several times. During that time I’ll sit on the wall and watch you.
Hic
.’

‘But, Captain, I’m too fat, specially in my bearskin breeches; the gown won’t fit me.’

‘Then strip off your breeches and leave the gown unlaced at the back.’

‘Oh, Monsieur le marquis!’

‘Take off that hat, too, Cartet, that beaver thing with the feathers. I must believe you are Françoise.’

Sitting by the moat with his rose ratafia liqueur bottle to his lips, Montespan raised the bottom of the bottle and gazed at the windows. He prepared to enjoy the sight of Cartet imitating his wife. In the beginning he was disappointed, for Cartet galumphed round-shouldered in front of the windows, looking like an old-time brigand.

‘Better than that!’ shouted the marquis. ‘You must strike a pose, affect an attitude, be plausible! Pretend you are powdering your face or something like that.’

The erstwhile sergeant did as he was asked. He walked along, swaying his hips; he twirled on the spot and gracefully lifted his paws to his face. In the snow and the dark, Madame Larivière observed him from the shadow of the horned carriage, near a tall wisteria. Montespan,
hic
, hugged the empty bottle to his chest and opened his eyes wide. His darkness lifted a little. He found himself pursued by illusions and ghosts. He got up, drifted for a moment, incredulous and wandering, then rushed towards the old guardroom. Madame Larivière followed him. On entering the room, the marquis cried out, ‘The days have gone by so slowly; it seems like centuries since you left me, Françoise!’

‘Hey, Captain, it’s me,’ said Cartet on finding himself entwined in the marquis’s over-eager embrace, at the mercy of his groping hands. ‘Monsieur de Montespan, I am your steward!’

‘Ah, how soft your lips are, my sweet,’ said the cuckold, trying to kiss his former sergeant. ‘How I love your ringlets …’

‘That’s my moustache!’

‘Turn round. I see you have already undone your gown, you saucy wench…’

Madame Larivière came closer and stood in the doorway whilst Montespan tried desperately to make love to the steward, who resisted as best he could, tangled up in the wedding gown.

‘Monsieur de Montespan, this is the second time you’ve confused me with somebody else! The first time was at Puigcerdá, when you were wounded…’

‘The second time? I did not know, Cartet, that you indulged in the Italian vice!’ exclaimed the cook, amidst the swirling snow.

The bare-bottomed steward in his pearl-embroidered red gown turned round. ‘No, no, Madame Lariri, it’s a terrible misunderstanding!’

‘Indeed, so I see … Make the best of things then,’ said she, leaving the room with great dignity.

In a wedding gown, and with his soldier’s honour wounded, Cartet protested in the name of all the armies. ‘I will not let you insinuate that …’ But he collapsed among his pearls and tore off the incriminating gown.

‘Madame Larivière, Madame Lariri!’

Naked and hairy, his fat thighs jiggling, he hurried after the cook in the falling snow to explain to her that …

Dawn broke over the murky water in the chateau moat at Bonnefont. The fire in the hearth in the marquis’s bedchamber was slowly dying. Weary, Montespan got up from his bed: he had a headache, and went over to a basin covered by a fine crust of ice. He pressed it with his fingers and the water seeped up from the frozen film, forming a mirror where the cuckold could gaze at his drawn features and the circles under his eyes. He pressed harder and the ice broke. The water was glacial. He pulled on a rope hanging along the wall to ring the bell in the kitchen.