The Hurlyburly's Husband (2 page)

At noon, the vertical shadows were sharp, and fell in triangles on the crowd from the roofs all around Place de Grève. The silence was impressive; windows had been rented at auction. Guards stood neatly in order around a platform.

‘That makes six!’

The hooded executioner’s axe fell so swiftly and cleanly that Saint-Aignan’s head remained poised on the block. For a moment the executioner believed he had missed and would have to strike a second time, but then the head collapsed onto the other five scattered on the floor of the platform, like a pile of cabbages. It looked as if, reconciled at last, they were kissing one another – on the forehead, the ears, the lips (and that is what they should have done in the first place, in their lifetime). The executioner wiped his forehead and turned to speak to someone just below the platform.

‘Monsieur de La Reynie, six in a row, that’s too much! I am not the
Machine du monde
, after all…’

‘Don’t complain. There should have been eight,’ sniggered the lieutenant of the Paris police, the prosecutor in cases of duelling, as he walked away towards the Châtelet.

*

‘Monsieur le marquis, there is no greater violation, no greater sacrilege of the laws of heaven than the frenzied rage of a duel. Do they not teach you that in your native land of Guyenne?!’

The young Gascon thus roundly admonished in the courtroom at the Châtelet gazed through the window at the late-afternoon sun … The only person seated in one of the courtroom’s chairs, he sighed, ‘You may say that to me, yet I am not involved, for I am not of a quarrelsome nature. Nor was my brother, for that matter—’

‘And yet he took part in a duel!’ La Reynie interrupted, brutally. ‘The nobility must cease, absolutely, from drawing their swords at the slightest provocation! These duels are decimating the French aristocracy, and since 1651 a royal edict has outlawed this bloody manner of avenging one’s honour. Duels are, first of all, in defiance of His Majesty’s authority, for his authority alone can decide who must die, and how we must live!’

Solemn and erect, La Reynie had reached this point in his sermon when, at the back of the room, behind the young marquis’s back, a door creaked, and he heard footsteps on the tiles. The disheartened Gascon looked down at his red-heeled shoes and caught a glimpse of a rustling cloak and petticoats as they sat down to his right.

‘Forgive me for being late, Monsieur de La Reynie,’ she said; ‘I but lately heard the news.’

Her voice was soft and even. The prosecutor declared, ‘Mademoiselle, if your future husband, Louis-Alexandre de La Trémoille, Marquis de Noirmoutier, returns to France, he shall be beheaded.’

The Gascon heard his neighbour unclasp her cloak and lower her hood onto her shoulders, then he looked up at La Reynie and saw he was speechless, his mouth agape; on either side of his aquiline nose, his eyes were transfixed. Who could she be, this young woman able to so discomfit such a prosecutor? Was she a Medusa who transformed men into stone? But La Reynie gathered his wits about him and came to stand opposite the Gascon, who was wiping his damp palms against his white satin breeches.

‘Monsieur,’ declared the prosecutor, ‘His Majesty’s investigation will be merciless, and will go so far as to rule
in absentia
against the memory of your brother, the late lord of Antin.’

The marquis replied docilely, ‘With all due respect and all imaginable zeal, I am the very humble, very obedient and most indebted servant of His Serene Highness…’

His neighbour enquired of the prosecutor, ‘How were you informed of the duel?’

‘The lantern-bearers who wait outside the spectacles and balls are our best informers,’ smiled the chief of police.

The crestfallen marquis sadly lifted his plumed hat from the chair to his left, stood up and turned at last to face his neighbour, who had also stood up. Zounds! It was all he could do not to sit down again. She was not merely beauteous, she was beauty personified. The twenty-two-year-old Gascon’s breath was taken away. He had always had a preference for plump blondes, and he was utterly captivated by this voluptuous marvel, who must have been his own age. A milky complexion, the green eyes of the Southern Seas, blond hair curled in the peasant style … Her gown was cut low in a deep décolletage from her shoulders, the sleeves stopping at the elbows in a cascade of lace. She was wearing gloves. The marquis could barely contain himself. He set his white hat on top of his enormous wig shaped like a horse’s mane (which weighed more than two pounds and was terribly hot), only to find that he had put it on backwards: the ostrich feather now hung in front of his face. In his effort to swivel his headpiece he dislodged his wig, which now covered one eye. The girl had a charming laugh, of the sort to rouse tenderness deep in any heart. He bid farewell to La Reynie and then – ‘Goodbye, Madame! Oh …’ – he excused himself as the amused young lady strode and bounced to keep pace with his gangling figure loping, knock-kneed, towards the far end of the hall. He tried to open the door for her but only just managed not to thump her, decided to let her go out first, then went ahead himself. She was immediately charmed by such gauche thoughtfulness – not to mention the adoring gazes he bestowed upon her.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked, with a smile.

‘That way, um, this way, and you?’

‘Straight ahead.’

On leaving the Palais de Justice at the Châtelet, they were immediately caught up in the noise, mud and stench, the extraordinary bustle, the permanent commotion of the city. Open sewers, mounds of excrement and pigs foraging in the rubbish meant that the perfumed gloves or bouquets of violets placed beneath one’s nose were indispensable as a remedy for nausea. But the marquis was oblivious to all that.

‘I have no more brothers. The eldest, Roger, succumbed during the siege of Mardyck. Just de Pardaillan died in the army, and now the Marquis d’Antin has been killed in a duel …’

‘And I have no more future husband,’ echoed the fair lady. The air she breathed out was purer than the air she breathed in. ‘Noirmoutier clearly cares more about his own skin than about me.’ Her profile was proud and noble. Rebellious blond strands escaped from beneath the hood of her cloak. Her nostrils quivered like the wings of a bird. Her laughing mouth, not a little scheming, had a delightful effect on the marquis, as the sun dipped behind the trees …

Their double loss had brought them together. While they made their way past song merchants – selling drinking songs, dining songs, songs for dancing or hailing the news – the two young people spoke of the deceased man and the exiled fiancé, finding ways to compliment, to please, to console. A group of Savoyard street minstrels proclaimed ‘Bring me back my sparrow, fair redhead’ and ‘Ah, how vast is the world’.

‘’Tis all the more exasperating,’ nodded the lovely blond head, ‘that when they brought the news to me, on Rue Saint-Honoré, I was trying on my wedding gown, for next Sunday. I do not know what I shall do with it.’

‘’Twould be a great pity, were it to go to ruin…’

A street performer took a swallow of water and spat it back out in a spray of various colours and scents.

‘What I mean, that is,’ stammered the marquis, ‘it is because of the moths. ’Tis true, sometimes one puts away new garments in a chest and then later, when one unfolds them again, they are ruined, consumed by grubs and full of holes … And then one regrets one did not wear them …’

The demoiselle in her pointed high-heeled slippers contemplated the fumbling Gascon. He amused her, and was not without charm. ‘Might you be implying that you …?’

‘Well, one doesn’t fall in love only once in a lifetime.’

A
pâtissier
stood in his doorway, proudly adjusting his appearance: a ribbon for a cravat, a beret with a large knot, and a sprig of flowers to attract the ladies. The abandoned fiancée placed her head on the marquis’s shoulder in an intimate gesture. And the marquis, an assiduous devotee of the lansquenet circles and reversi tables in the
hôtels particuliers
of the Marais, now thought he was playing the finest game on earth. Astonished and adrift, on a square teeming with horse carts and ecclesiastics, he scratched his periwig.

‘Is it not paradise here?’

‘Ah, no, Monsieur, in paradise there wouldn’t be so many bishops!’

They burst out laughing. For his part, the marquis was certain that an angel had blessed him, and he raised his eyes to heaven.

The vaults of the church of Saint-Sulpice, forming a lofty sky of stone, resounded with laughter. After the reading of the Gospel, the blonde in the red pearl-embroidered dress had knelt before the altar alongside the marquis in lavender grey, then exploded with laughter, murmuring in his ear, ‘You know what we’re kneeling on, you know how we forgot the embroidered silk cushions and had them sent for from Rue des Rosiers, at the Hôtel Mortemart …’

‘Yes?’ asked the young Gascon.

‘The servant made a mistake. She brought the dogs’ cushions.’

‘No!’

They laughed and dusted off the dog hairs like mischievous little children dressed up in garments of embroidered silk. Their guests were seated behind them at the heart of the vast church, which was still under construction. The Gascon, in a fine light-coloured horsehair wig, radiated happiness. His bride, graceful and glowing in the gentle brilliance of her twenty-two years, was still full of the candour of childhood.

Near the entrance to the church, sitting on a prie-dieu, a chubby-cheeked duc with protuberant green eyes and a small, full-lipped mouth exclaimed ecstatically to his neighbour, ‘My daughter is extremely amusing! One is never bored when she is present. Do you see that obese boy in the first row? That is my eldest, Vivonne. The other day, when I was reproaching my daughter for not taking enough exercise, she replied, “How can you say that? Not a day goes by that I do not walk four times round my brother!”’

The man to whom he was speaking, an elderly man with a great hooked nose that seemed to take up his entire face, enquired, ‘Is that your wife next to your son? She seems most exceedingly pious …’

‘Oh, indeed,’ said the husband, ‘where adultery is concerned, I believe I am safe before mankind, but before God, I surely wear my horns!’

‘Look at my wife, then: she prefers to live away from me, the great Chrestienne de Zamet there on the right – she’s the same,’ grumbled the man with the hooked nose. ‘She knows perfectly how to season a mother’s tenderness with that of a bride of Jesus Christ! Ha-ha-ha!’

The two fathers of the wedded couple guffawed; they were witty and cheerfully debauched. Someone in front of them turned round with a frown, then whispered to his neighbour, ‘Those two have found perfect company in each other …’

And the young couple had found perfect company, too, now married only eight days after meeting. They pledged their troth on a wintry Sunday before the priest and four trusty witnesses. The cleric inscribed the date – 28 January 1663 – in the parish register, then the names of the turtledoves, proclaiming them out loud: ‘Françoise de Rochechouart de Mortemart, also known as Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente, and …’

The voluptuous blonde Françoise took up the goose quill as it was handed to her and, as the priest pronounced the name of her spouse – ‘Louis-Henri de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Marquis de …’ – for the first time she signed her new name:

An apple-green gilded carriage arrived at Rue Saint-Benoît, its doors adorned with the coat of arms of the Marquis de Montespan. The vehicle rattled along the rutted street, its body supported by thick leather straps on a four-wheel axle.

Dustmen, collecting the city’s waste that would be tipped from their carts into the Seine, blocked the vehicle’s progress. Through their windows, Françoise and Louis-Henri contemplated the world outside. The
quartier
teemed with life, full of craftsmen with their displays and workshops and noise. The dustmen’s rags were hardly different from those of the beggars they passed. Françoise told Louis-Henri, ‘When I was a little girl, one holy-day my mother wanted me to wash the feet of the poor outside a church. I went up to the first pauper and could not bring myself to bend down. I stepped back, in tears. Poverty was there before me, inescapable, and it filled the child I was with revulsion. I did not wash the feet of the poor.’