The Hurlyburly's Husband (26 page)

‘Why, of course I do!
In vino veritas.’

‘If you plan to write it now, Marquis, allow me then to follow the maid, that she might show me the room where I may sleep, and tomorrow I will return to Paris to have it published by the minstrels on the Pont-Neuf.’

‘Done, as good as a contract!’ said the Gascon. ‘Madame Larivière, where is that ink?’

‘Of all your foolish tricks, this is the greatest one that you could commit, Monsieur,’ scolded the cook.

‘Come now, Madame “Cartet”!’

‘What! Marry that steward drinking the way he does – do you take me for a fool? I’d rather be buried under a hundred thousand feet of shit!’

The former sergeant, after one too many, his eyes creased up with laughter, said, ‘That’s not very nice …’ The cuckold’s pen raced over the paper.

Last Will and Testament

As I cannot be glad of a wife who, entertaining herself as much as possible, had me spend my youth and my life in celibacy, I shall limit myself to bequeathing to her my great portrait painted by Sabatel, and I shall beg her to hang it in her bedchamber when the King no longer enters. Although the Marquis d’Antin bears an amazing resemblance to his mother, I no longer hesitate to call him my son. In that capacity, as the eldest, to him I bequeath and leave my property. To their Highnesses Monsieur the Duc du Maine, Monseigneur the Comte de Toulouse, Mademoiselle de Nantes, and Mademoiselle de Blois (born during my marriage to their mother and consequently presumed to be my sons and daughters) I leave that to which they are legitimately entitled on condition they call themselves by the name of Pardaillan. To the King I bequeath and give my chateau at Bonnefont, and beg him to institute there a community for penitent ladies, on condition he place my spouse at the head of this convent and appoint her the first abbess.

Louis-Henri de Pardaillan

Marquis de Montespan

Separated albeit inseparable spouse

‘Feathers, ribbons, lockets! Braids, laces, artificial flowers! Handkerchiefs, buttons, odds ’n’ ends!’

A wild-haired pedlar, shouting as he went, approached the cuckold’s chateau and entered the courtyard where the entire village had gathered that spring day.

‘Almanacs, tales and legends, stories of incidents, each one more incredible than the last! Cookery books:
The Royal Pâtissier, The School of Stews
! Holy images, last will and testament of Montespan …’

Louis-Henri turned round. ‘You’re selling my will?’

‘Are you the Marquis de Montespan? Ah, of course, I am in Bonnefont.’

Thick smoke permeated the chateau courtyard. On grills above the embers sizzled pieces of offal – ears, brains, eyes … Pigs’ trotters, boiled, grilled and minced, had been prepared by the cook. The marquis called to her, ‘Madame Lari—Cartet! Come and see!’

Dorothée’s mother came over, her head covered with a wedding veil; the church bells were still ringing.

‘I should have liked to offer you a more lavish nuptial banquet,’ apologised Montespan, ‘but since everything has become so costly, and the forests are empty of game … Alas! This wandering merchant, I hear, sells artificial flowers. Choose one for yourself and fasten it to your brow. It is late April yet we have not seen a single flower in the garden or along the paths.’

The cook chose a daisy made of white satin petals, with a pistil of yellow velvet, and pinned it to her veil. ‘I thank you, Monsieur …’ Filled with emotion, she tried to speak of something else. ‘Have you seen my daughter? I’ll ask Cartet,’ she said, going off to find her … husband, in his clean clothes, with espadrilles on his feet.

The steward, after shaking his head, moved among the guests, drinking toasts and offering food from a heavy tray. The grilled guts of chicken, turkey and rabbit were tasty morsels for these peasants whose diet consisted primarily of bread made from millet – it turned folk yellow, and so weak that most of them found it hard to work or even to stay on their feet.

‘How much do I owe you for the flower?’ Louis-Henri asked the pedlar.

‘Nothing!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thanks to you, I have some business. In these times of famine, ’tis hardly my cookbooks that sell like hot cakes … nor my holy images. What everyone wants to read is your last will and testament!’

‘Upon my word…’

The Gascon walked along the moat towards the half-open barn door, to the left of the courtyard. The merchant unbuckled the trunk he had been carrying on his back and put it down. It was his turn to be surprised.

‘Did you not know, Marquis? Your will has been the cause of immense merriment in Paris. The minstrels on the Pont-Neuf sell masses of copies, as do I in all the towns of all the provinces I visit. The text is copied out, handed round, read in the salons, and everyone laughs at the provisions and praises the wicked joke! At Versailles, too, they’re snapping up your monumental slap in the face to the King. It’s being passed round clandestinely, to the great fury of Athénaïs and the extreme displeasure of His Majesty, who now wants to have you locked up as a madman in the Petites-Maisons …’

Louis-Henri heard the cook on the drawbridge calling, ‘Dorothée! Dorothée!’ then he turned to the pedlar.

‘So, the provisions of my will … did not amuse my wife?’

‘Oh, your wife, I do not know what might amuse her now. There is talk that Louis XIV is beginning to weary of his mistress’s haughty capriciousness. They also say he has tired of the exhausting physical relations which he used to indulge in with such heady delight. This year, the favourite was even omitted from the list of guests for the springtime fêtes at court. The King is publicly renouncing her. It is scarce believable, so far has Madame de Montespan fallen. His Majesty hardly looks at her any more, and you may well imagine that the courtiers follow his example.’

‘People are cruel …’ said Montespan sorrowfully, whilst the pedlar helped himself to cockscombs, then, nibbling all the while, continued, ‘In January, she had a fit of pique: “If that is the way it is to be, if the sovereign has no more consideration for the mother of his children, then I will leave my bedchamber!” The King agreed and announced that he would give the marquise’s apartments at Versailles to his son the Duc du Maine, and the duc’s apartments would go to young Mademoiselle de Blois. Athénaïs was snared in her own trap.’

‘Poor woman …’ sighed the cuckold, drinking a glass of water. ‘Then where does she sleep?’

‘Your wife must make do with the bathroom on the ground floor, far less favoured. This is the first significant step in her fall from grace, the end of “Quanto”.’

Thud!
Behind him, the marquis heard something falling like a big sack of sand. He turned round and went through the half-open door to the barn. Dorothée was lying on her stomach on the ground, at the foot of a ladder. She got to her feet unsteadily and tried to climb the ladder again in order to throw herself into the void. Montespan stopped her, grabbing hold of her by the waist.

‘What’s going on?’ The cook in her bridal veil, with the pedlar hot on her heels, rushed up to her daughter in the barn.

‘What has happened to you?’

Cartet appeared in turn, a drink in his hand. The wedding guests had not heard anything, and continued to feast on birds’ guts, whilst the local orchestra tuned their hurdy-gurdies.

‘Maman, I’m with child!’ Dorothée confessed, sobbing in the marquis’s arms.

‘What! Is it you, Monsieur, who …’ The new bride frowned suddenly at the man with his arms around her daughter.

‘Enough, Madame Larivière!’ said Montespan, annoyed.

‘Cartet! Madame Cartet, if you please!’

‘Well, Cartet, if you insist, but you nearly had me locked up in Pignerol once before.’

‘Then who is it, Dorothée?’ The cook’s artificial daisy trembled on her veil. ‘Who has got you with child? Give me the name of that village swine! My husband shall rip his head off!’

‘Whose head, who, who?’ stammered the big steward, his eyes shining from all the toasts he had drunk with the bumpkins.

Enveloped in the fragrance of liquorice and orange-flower water that wafted from the marquis’s silky clothing, Dorothée explained. ‘I threw myself on my belly to force a miscarriage. Maman! He said to me, “Such extreme grace! Such an exquisite demeanour! Where can one find a goddess equally endowed?”’

‘But who?’

‘He had me glide over the parquet floor in the steps of a minuet, with a grace fit to stir a heart beneath a gown …’

‘But who?’

‘The gentleman with the magnificent shoes encrusted with pearls and diamonds.’

‘Lauzun?’

Montespan was flabbergasted at that.

‘Maman!’ pleaded the young pregnant woman, her skin damp in her chaste dress. ‘I would need to take a bath in a decoction of ergot of rye, root of rue, and juniper leaves to dislodge the child … But we haven’t any! Take a knitting needle and rid me of it yourself!’

‘Are you mad?’ said the Gascon indignantly. ‘Only to bleed to death? We can bring the baby up all the same! Why get rid of it?’

‘Because a girl must remain like a sealed vase until her marriage!’ said the cook sententiously.

‘And you’re the one saying this, Madame … Cartet?’ said the marquis, astonished.

‘That’s a point – do we know who the father of our daughter is?’ the steward suddenly asked his wife in a daze.

The pedlar, watching the scene, tried to reassure them that it was not only in this barn that one encountered mysteries full of suspense and sudden twists of plot. ‘At Versailles, for example, there is a parody of “Our Father” doing the rounds, something unthinkable only a few months ago, and it ends, “Deliver us from la Montespan.” Those who praised her to the skies only yesterday treat her as the lowest of the low today. Even Racine, who owes everything to her, has publicly scoffed at her in his play
Esther
– a comedy that tells of the fall of la Montespan and the rise of la Maintenon. Another fine example of ingratitude! But people are saying that the King, since the operation on his anal fistula, is now in greater need of a nurse than a whore. She’s as deaf and perfidious as an underground current, la Maintenon; they call her “Madame de Maintenant”. The widow Scarron has risen in favour whilst your wife, Monsieur le marquis, has fallen from grace before our eyes. One morning, la Maintenon met la Montespan in the stairway: “How now, Madame, you are coming down, whereas I am going up.” One evening His Majesty, heading for la Maintenon’s chambers, left his dog Malice in your wife’s rooms: “Here, Madame, some company for you, it should suffice.”’

Louis-Henri clenched his fists. ‘I will tear out the eyes of anyone who dares treat Françoise so cruelly!’

‘Ah, could you but have heard me, Master Jean Sabatel, a year and a half ago, the morning after the wedding of my steward with my cook, when I shouted out, “Françoise has fallen from grace. She shall return! Let us undertake some repair work to welcome her home!” Is that not true, Madame Cartet?’

The cook, carrying a heavy basin of laundry, walked past Montespan. ‘I will not say a word, Monsieur, about these accounts and calculations of yours, and all the horrible payments, the untold expense: a hundred and twenty thousand
livres
; there are no limits!’

Madame Cartet, her face lined, crossed the drawbridge and left the chateau walls, still shouting at Louis-Henri. ‘You are drowning in debt and your house only survives by a miracle; your fine façade may have been restored, but it is being eaten away from within by a mountain of debt and depleted credit which might cause it to collapse like a house of cards at any moment … and it may even lead to you being stripped of your nobility, and from gentleman you shall become a commoner, subject to tallage and unworthy of any office! Ah, such a—’

‘Such a what?’ asked the marquis whilst, outside the chateau, the shrew hung her sheets on a line to flap in the sunlight. ‘One must learn how to make peace, Madame Cartet, and prepare a worthy reception for a woman who was led astray! But don’t leave that sheet there, foolish woman. If Françoise were to return today, I should not like her to be greeted by drying sheets, after all!’

‘I don’t know,’ sighed the steward’s wife, putting the still wet laundry back in the basket, and returning to the drawbridge, ‘this is becoming ridiculous. And now to cap it all, Monsieur is hiring an itinerant painter …’

‘She still has her temper,’ recalled the artist from Montlhéry, the very same who had visited so long before to paint the marquis’s portrait. ‘The decor, on the other hand, has changed considerably!’

‘You’ve noticed? The new gate at the entrance, which I ordered from the ironworks in Auch, is an imitation, though not as glorious, of the one at Versailles. And I’ve repaved the courtyard. Have you seen how it is now? Before, there were nettles growing everywhere, and brambles that would have torn her gown. The courtyard was muddy and carriage wheels used to get mired up to their axles on rainy days. She would have stained her little boots. I also had that step replaced, where the frost had cracked it, so that she will not twist her pretty ankles. The chateau has been given a new roof: I did not want it to rain on her lovely face when she sleeps again by my side in our chamber. You may say, “’Tis not the work of a Mansart”, but all the same! And the grounds, at the back, come and see the grounds.’

Moving stiffly and pressing his hand to his lower back, the marquis led the artist into the garden and sang its praises.

‘Look, all the undergrowth has been cleared. Everything has been trimmed, scraped and cleaned, ready to receive her, so that her graceful figure can stroll on the grass. ’Tis not the work of a Le Nôtre, but … it does have six orange trees in crates! It will remind her of where she used to live. She shall not suffer too greatly from homesickness. And have you seen, in the middle of the lawn, the little circular basin with its fountain? It doesn’t rise very high; it cannot be compared to the great fountains of the Bassin d’Apollon. But in spite of that, it’s a fine fountain, is it not? With one, yes, only one statue … but it is a statue of Venus, with Françoise’s features, and I had it made in Toulouse. ’Tis not a sculpture by Girardon … but from her open mouth there spurts a jet of water, where she will come to seek refreshment. It’s very pure water that flows from a spring six leagues hence, carried here by means of underground connecting pottery pipes. The water emerges from the lips of Venus-Françoise and goes on to feed the moat. The stagnant pools have been purified,’ continued Montespan, stretching as he led the painter back to the chateau. ‘And so there are no more mosquitoes, so terrible for her delicate skin, nor any stagnant smells rising to the windows to offend her sensitive nostrils on days of great heat, which would have made her sick. The flowers are blooming again. We will place bouquets in every room. I believe she will be happy …’