The Hurlyburly's Husband (21 page)

The Gascon had formed his opinion. The future Charles II had no sense of humour and was not mocking him. He was a complete and utter idiot.

Montespan drove his white steed through the blue landscape of the Pyrenees. Louis-Antoine, sitting between his father’s legs, clung to the horse’s mane. It was the return of the hero. Outside the brick gate to the chateau, peasants who had come to bake their bread cried out, ‘Here he is! Here they are!’

Cartet and Dorothée came running. The cook called out, ‘Madame Chrestienne de Zamet! Madame Chrestienne de Zamet, it’s your son with the little Marquis d’Antin!’

Louis-Henri dismounted and embraced his mother.

‘Oh, dear Lord! How is everyone here?’

‘Well, just consider this: the horses are thin, my tooth is loose, the tutor has scrofula, but I am exceeding happy to see you again before I die!’

The Gascon’s mother had become all skin and bone since he had left, and Louis-Henri was worried. Her back was twisted owing to a cruel attack of rheumatism and her knuckles were swollen.

‘She is pitifully thin because of the dryness of her lungs, which are beginning to waste away,’ whispered the cook, ‘and your daughter, too, was very ill. I made her drink vipers’ broth, which revives the soul. People might think that when you tear the vipers’ hearts out, it’s all over with them. Not a bit. They are still alive, and in a broth they provide strength. They’ve invigorated the little girl.’

Montespan crouched down next to his daughter.

‘Marie-Christine, from the depths of my heart I rejoice in your recovery. But why do you pine so, and fill your father with such terrible fear?’

‘I believe it is because I am waiting for Mam—’

‘And I believe in chicory!’ interrupted the cook. ‘With fricassee of nightingales’ hearts and, every three months, a pilgrimage to the basilica of Notre-Dame-de-la-Daurade in Toulouse!’

‘Madame Larivière takes me there, too, in Père Destival’s cart,’smiled the marquis’s mother. ‘She purges me, and over-looks nothing, so I go to mass with an honest pallor.’

‘What shall we do?’ the cook asked the old lady. ‘Shall we have a banquet this evening to mark the marquis’s return to the chateau, a feast to celebrate the loyalty of his friends?’

‘Then we must invite the villagers,’ suggested Cartet, ‘for last summer, when the surrounding wall on the chateau side threatened to fall down, they came to shore it up and, aware of the state of your finances, Captain, they asked for no wages.’

‘Well then, go to!’ decided the marquis.

The energetic Madame Larivière clapped her hands.

‘Ring the bell at the gate so the farmers’ wives come quickly to help me! Cartet! Go and draw water from the cistern, and take down the game hanging to cure in the shed. The yokels are not allowed to hunt, so they never eat any! I will prepare some haunches of venison and a roast from the wild boar that you caught with the spear, and
croustades
with a
sauce Robert
of mustard and onion. That should make enough for a revel! Will you also have a bite to eat this evening, Madame de Zamet?’

‘A bit of boiled chicken, perhaps half a wing … Louis-Henri, your wife has sent you eight outfits, but without any accompanying letter.’

The cook raised her eyes to heaven and walked away, exclaiming, ‘That woman! If she thinks that by doing a little bit of good and a great deal of wickedness … The best one can say is that if you average the two, she was a decent woman.’

After ringing the bell Cartet took hold of the long dagger he always kept in his boot, and with the tip of the blade he traced a cross on top of a loaf of bread. He sliced into the loaf and put a large piece in his mouth.

‘Don’t throw yourself upon the food, you’ll have huge pouches in your cheeks like a monkey!’ scolded Louis-Antoine, then he turned to his father. ‘Are we going to sup with commoners again? Is that the custom here? From what I can see, ’tis the servants who run the house!’

The six-year-old headed furiously to his bedchamber upstairs in the chateau. Looking out, he saw a flight of wild geese. The devoted inhabitants of Bonnefont were starting to arrive bearing bouquets. The high prairie grasses gave off a pleasant scent and the river sang over polished pebbles. Musicians brought a harp and a few violas da gamba. In the courtyard of the chateau they were now dancing a few Bohemian steps with a delicacy and precision that were charming. Some exhausted, malnourished men also arrived. They had come down from the mountain, goading the oxen carrying the wood for the royal navy. The villagers were busy inside the chateau walls. Women sliced vegetables that they tossed into pots of boiling water. The men blew on the embers, preparing a huge fire to grill the pieces of game. Sitting on a chair in the middle of the courtyard, Chrestienne de Zamet was overwhelmed by the joyous activity, which was producing lots of steam and smoke. She asked, ‘Where is my son?’ and someone replied, ‘There above you, on the hill.’

Marie-Christine crossed the drawbridge to join her father. Dorothée was about to go after her but Madame Larivière held her back. ‘Stay.’

‘Come and help me put some planks on trestles instead,’ Cartet suggested kindly.

The marquis’s mother watched as Marie-Christine climbed the hill, and sighed sadly.

‘Who will look after that poor little girl after I die?’

‘I will, gladly,’ said the cook’s daughter, as she set out plates on the tables arranged in a U shape.

As for the … ‘Marquis d’Antin’, he stood at the open window of his chamber with his arms crossed, looking haughtily at the people busy below him, and said, ‘In any case, I refuse to help! I am not a servant. I was received at the court of Spaahn!’

At the top of the hill facing the chateau, Montespan placed flowers on the grave of his love: a few roses lying on a clump of earth surrounded by lavender bushes. The cuckold sat with his back to the tomb and gazed out at the landscape. Outside the chateau, the villagers were dancing some country jigs, bold figures that made their bodies quiver all over. Their heads followed their feet, then their shoulders and all the other parts of their body. They danced towards each other, met, moved apart, then came together again in a way that so affronted the priest of Bonnefont that he promised to excommunicate those who persisted in dancing this diabolical dance.

‘So, Père Destival,’ exclaimed an iron craftsman, ‘eighty-eight and still with us?’

‘The Good Lord hath forgotten me,’ apologised the priest, whilst everyone danced more furiously than ever.

Louis-Henri saw his daughter climbing up the path. She sat between her father’s knees. Behind them was a wooden cross with two dates. The marquis’s arms encircled Marie-Christine. The child picked a sprig of lavender, pulled off the tiny buds one by one. She scattered them over the slope.

‘The mountain will be all blue now…’ said Montespan, smiling into the child’s neck and hair.

Marie-Christine said nothing and continued to blow the seeds from her hand.

On the morning of 2 April 1674, despite heavy spring rain, Montespan and Cartet took the little Marquis d’Antin hunting in the mountains. The former captain of the light cavalry and his sergeant enjoyed going into these dense forests which were plentiful with wild boar, or climbing up to the passes to chase bears or the izards that sprang from rock to rock.

Louis-Henri would have liked to teach his son how to kill hares, partridges and game. He wanted to train him for this rough sport that the young boy seemed unwilling to try.

Louis-Antoine preferred to follow his tutor, who took him out into the garden on long walks conducive to lessons of Latin, philosophy and French.

‘Father, may I not go to see Abbé Anselme instead and catch up on my instruction? I’ve fallen behind, you see, because of our stay in Spain …’

‘No, you may not! Here, hold this spear, today no doubt you’ll kill your first young wild boar.’

In the torrential rain, d’Antin, who had not worn children’s clothing since the age of seven, was dressed in a doublet and hose. His muddy feet and wet legs could not get warm, and the black brambles scratched at him and terrified him: he was a marquis better destined to hunt for social promotion in the alcoves of gilded salons.

The father observed his son’s incredible cowardice; at the same time, the boy could be barbarically cruel to the poor village children. When they played hide and seek, he cheated, peering out from under the blindfold. He hit the children, using his noble title as a pretext, for he knew that the little urchins, under orders from their parents, would not dare answer back, and this greatly saddened Louis-Henri. Louis-Antoine displayed a natural inclination to obsequiousness and seemed already to have a talent for cunning. Montespan had a foreboding that his own son, in sharp contrast to himself, would become a model courtier for the very same Louis XIV who persecuted his father and who, from the boy’s earliest childhood, had deprived him of the caresses of a mother … a mother who, it must be said, was anything but sensitive to this wrenching separation.

As they approached the hills swathed with thick forest, Cartet and Montespan could smell the hunt: they breathed it in, heard the sounds, experienced the violence, the necessary cruelty, and Louis-Antoine, trembling, held his little spear in both hands. Suddenly the steward motioned them to be silent and whispered, ‘There’s a female up ahead with her young … I’ll go off to the right to send one of the young ones in your direction …’

This news was greeted by the chattering of Louis-Antoine’s teeth; his father explained to him in a hushed voice, ‘You hold your spear like this … One hand in front, palm turned up, and the other hand behind, palm facing down. When the little wild boar heads straight for you, and is only about two
toises
away, you take a step forward, bending your knees, and you aim below the head, to strike right at the animal’s chest. You have to make an upward thrust, as if you were tossing hay onto a cart with a pitchfork. You always strike from the bottom up, never the other way round, otherwise you might hurt yourself. And hold your spear firmly so that the beast doesn’t run away with it.’

D’Antin’s knees quivered and knocked together like castanets. When the child heard something rushing towards him amidst the sound of crushed foliage and the cracking of flying twigs, he thought longingly of his history, geography and mathematics lessons with Abbé Anselme.

But now a little fawn wild boar with a black stripe down its back was heading for Louis-Antoine. The animal was about four
toises
away, and the Gascon’s son took a step back, closed his eyes, and stabbed his spear from top to bottom at random. He felt a violent shock in his shoulders that knocked him over, and when he opened his eyes, he saw that the animal was dragging him along on his stomach whilst he clung desperately to the spear he had rammed through the beast’s cheeks, shouting all the while. There seemed to be an echo in the valley. Louis-Antoine was sliding and crashing about through grasses and brambles and splashing rain, and he screamed at the beast in his little imp’s voice, ‘Stop! Stop!’ His shouts only excited the young wild boar, making it go faster than ever, which in turn made the boy shout even louder. Cartet came running on his bear-like legs, laughing. Astonishingly quick and agile despite weighing nearly a quintal, he soon caught up with the boar and pulled his dagger from his boot. As he was cutting the little boar’s throat, he heard a voice calling.

It was the cook from the chateau wearing only a lace cap in the torrential rain. As she held up her skirt, revealing her ugly stork legs, her entire body steamed with sweat from her mad dash up the steep path, and now she called out, ‘Monsieur de Montespan! Monsieur de Montespan! It’s your mother, Chrestienne de Zamet. She is! She is…’

A year later, almost to the day, on 5 April 1675, Louis-Henri was weeping at the foot of Marie-Christine’s bed in the convent of Charonne in Paris. His dying daughter looked at him and said, ‘Your clothes do not fit you, Papa.’

‘When the news of your poor health reached me in the Pyrenees, I quickly shoved a change of clothes into my saddlebags, the ones your mother sent me. She had them made too small. I don’t know who she was thinking about …’

Montespan went up to the head of the bed: his silk breeches were indeed too short, and his pink hose not long enough, so his knees were exposed. As he sat down, his doublet, which was several sizes too small, pulled at his shoulders, and his sleeves reached no further than the middle of his forearms.

‘Would you like to play hide and seek? The kind where you have to guess the object hidden in someone’s clothes?’

‘Papa, your shirt is so tight that I can see it. It’s a book.’

‘Yes, but not just any book,’ said her father, unbuttoning his shirt to pull out the book. ‘It’s a tale for young girls entitled,
The Sigh of a Flea Kept in a Currant Seed.
It’s the story of the sigh of a flea … kept in … a currant seed …’

Montespan burst into tears. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, trying to pull himself together. ‘Marie-Christine, for days I have been trembling from head to toe, I am losing my reason, I cannot sleep; and if I sleep, I awake with a start that is worse than not sleeping at all. You must live, my child!’

It was the end of the day, and the candles on the bedside table illuminated the stained-glass windows of the convent room where Marie-Christine’s regular breathing gently lifted her nightgown with its collar of Valenciennes lace.

It was like seeing the Virgin Mary herself, on the straw of a stable among the animals, waiting to give birth. As if the ass and the ox were breathing gently on her nightgown.

‘But what’s the matter with her?’ her father asked a doctor standing on the other side of the bed.

‘I describe the pain in her head as a rheumatism of the membranes. Since she came here, she has not complained, or cried, but she has been getting thinner, and is gently leaving the world, despite the life-giving syrup, the holy water, the healthful herbal teas and the clysters to refresh her stomach with water and milk. Of late she has been stunned, afflicted, vomiting; these are all signs.’