The Hurlyburly's Husband (28 page)

Beneath his neatly groomed wig with twin protuberances, the marquis, dressed in a grey doublet and pink hose, listened as the physician explained the hubbub from the street.

‘There are nearly eighty days of merry-making, where the city forbids all work … The carousing and mockery aimed at conjugal misfortune have been going on since early February.’

‘Doctor, how long might I hope—’

‘You will not see out the year 1691, Monsieur de Montespan. What are you doing this evening?’

*

The next afternoon, after alighting from the coach at the post house three leagues from his home, Montespan continued his journey to the chateau on horseback, clinging to the saddle. His head was spinning. He felt sick and thought that his bones must be swelling and crumbling. In the courtyard he slipped from his mount, bathed in sweat, with Cartet’s help.

‘There is a letter for you, Captain.’

‘Oh? A letter from whom?’

‘I do not know. It is from the abbey at Fontevrault.’

Collapsing into his armchair at the end of the kitchen table, his back to the window, the cuckold unsealed the missive.

15 March 1691

Louis-Henri,

I have just awoken from a nightmare. I had a bad dream, where my name was Athénaïs
…

Stupefied, the marquis read the rest. When he had finished, the letter fell from his hands.

‘Françoise has been driven from Versailles and has gone into a convent. She is offering to return to me.’

‘What!’

‘She asks forgiveness from her husband and permission to return to his side if he will condescend to see her again…’

The cook was dumbfounded. The steward’s moustaches drooped. Dorothée opened her eyes wide whilst Marie-Christine, on her lap, asked, ‘What is happening, Maman? Is a lady going to come and live with us? When? Is she kind to children?’

The little girl’s grandmother set a glass of water down in front of Montespan – a shimmering liquid mirror where the cuckold could see his features stretch, collapse, expand and undulate, greatly changing his appearance.

‘I do not want her to come back.’

‘What?’ exclaimed the cook. ‘But Monsieur, if you recall, ever since Rue Taranne … You’ve been waiting twenty-four years for this day to—’

‘To what?’ replied the marquis curtly, with a horrible chuckle. ‘Offer her my aching knee and my slippers? I do not want her to witness what will become of me in the months ahead. I do not want her to see me wasting away. I do not want her to keep such an image of her husband. I did not long for her so deeply, for so many years, only to offer her now the sight of a poor broken husband, an invalid on a pisspot. Bring me some paper and ink.’

Madame,

I wish neither to receive you nor to hear speak of you for the rest of my life.

That evening, sitting by the moat in the moonlight, the steward put his arm round the cook as she leant against his shoulder. They turned to look at the light in the window upstairs in the chateau and listen to the marquis crying and weeping, which he was to do all night long.

On 1 December 1691, at the age of fifty-one, Louis-Henri de Pardaillan, Marquis de Montespan, was fading away in his bedchamber in the chateau. Sheets covered the chairs in his theatre; the fountain had been turned off in the garden; a green moss was beginning to grow once again on the waters of the moat.

The enormous wisteria had invaded the horned carriage, abandoned for over a quarter of a century against a wall in the courtyard. Branches had made their way through the windows, forcing the doors off their hinges and dislodging the roof with its tall antlers. The plant had thrust with phenomenal strength around the wheels, lifting them from the ground or breaking them in its tight embrace, twisting the vehicle into a grotesque position. One could imagine the poor coach’s lament, oppressed by the reptilian movement of the branches crushing its black veneer in a shattering of wood. Nature was chewing it up. The marquis was in the same state …

His parents were dead, his daughter had died of sorrow, he would never see his wife again and his son disgusted him.

His offspring, at the age of twenty-six, had become a fat monolith; now he was leaning on the mantelpiece of the bedchamber in front of a wall with a sky by Sabatel, and he stared scornfully at his bedridden father.

A notary – Maître Faulquier – was reading out loud the cuckold’s new last will and testament. The marquis had ordered that after his soul departed from his body, the latter was to be shrouded and buried without ceremony at the foot of the cross in the parish cemetery of Bonnefont.

The dying man’s son, listening to what followed, told himself that this was one grave that he would not often be visiting with flowers … For whilst his father might designate him the sole heir and legatee, he was asking him to keep on the employees, to whom he had granted handsome sums – three thousand
livres
to the Cartet couple and one thousand five hundred to Dorothée. Louis-Antoine, in an ermine-lined cape, thought it a waste of money. He sulked even more when he heard that his father had offered new clothes to all the inhabitants of Bonnefont, in recompense for true and loyal service, and had exempted them from a full year of seignorial dues.

‘That’s the end, he must be finished off. He’s raving ...’ remarked the fat courtier of a son.

D’Antin was very attentive, not to say downright scrupulous, where inheritance was concerned, and now he grumbled, sneered and swore that he would not be so well-mannered when it came time to execute his father’s will.

‘Ah, but it is not up to you to decide,’ said Maître Faulquier to the indignant son. ‘Your father has called upon his wife to execute his will.’

And the notary read the following to an enraged d’Antin to illustrate his point.

‘
…
The aforementioned testator has also said and declared that he has always placed his entire trust in the charity of Madame la Marquise de Montespan, his wife, and particularly at the present time when the aforementioned marquis needs it most greatly, finding himself to be infirm and afflicted by disease, which causes him to fear for the future. Therefore he begs her to pray to God after his death for the relief of his soul, which he hopes to find, and implores her to consent to being his testamentary executor, in light of the very sincere friendship and tenderness that he has retained for her. And the aforementioned testator affirms, in gratitude, that he shall die a happy man and very satisfied to have known her.

Louis-Henri de Pardaillan

Marquis de Montespan

Separated albeit inseparable spouse’

The pathos of such an ardent confession, couched in legal jargon, aroused no emotion whatsoever in the son, who walked out without even a last look at his father.

The Cartets, along with Dorothée and her daughter, who had been standing to one side, now went up to the bed. The cook patted her hands all over her clothing and felt in her pockets.

‘If it is your rosary you are looking for,’ said her husband softly, ‘it is there, wrapped around your wrist, Madame Larivière …’

‘All right, never mind, I’ve got it, thank you!’ scolded the cook, in a state of confusion.

Montespan looked up at the cook in surprise.

‘You call your spouse Madame Larivière?’

‘It’s a question of habit, Captain.’

Marie-Christine went up to the head of the bed. She had Lauzun’s pointed nose.

‘Maman says you’re going away. Where?’

Montespan whispered into the child’s ear, ‘I’m going to go and hide behind a cloud to wait for Louis XIV with a bludgeon ...’

The cook lost her temper with the dying man (it was about time). ‘Will this never end! Even up there! For all the good it’s brought you here on earth … Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! What have you gained?’

Louis-Henri murmured, ‘I can claim only the glory of having loved her …’

Then he lowered his eyelids, as if to rise up to heaven. The former sergeant removed his plumed beaver cap and held it to his chest. Madame Cartet hurriedly touched her fingers to her forehead, her belly and each shoulder. Seeking to unwind the rosary from her wrist, she tore it off, breaking the thread, and the beads bounced and rolled on the tiles. ‘Aaargh!’ she shouted, whilst Dorothée clasped her hands and bowed her head.

‘What day is it today?’

‘Thursday, 26 May 1707, Madame de Montespan.’

‘1707…’ said she, a widow these sixteen years. ‘Torches! Torches! Night is falling.’

‘They are bringing them and lighting them. Look, Marquise, I shall even leave this candle for you on your bedside table,’ said the maid soothingly.

‘The shadow is coming alive. Its claws are reaching out to me, catching the sheets! A light! A light!’

Massive candelabras now filled the room with light. Through the window, its curtains drawn, the dusk behind the three towers of this half-feudal, half-thermal town was red with flames and destruction. Athénaïs panicked. The bedridden marquise had foresworn her legendary gowns, gold and pearls for a ‘conjugal shift’ pierced with a hole … a shirt made of rough, stiff canvas. Her once-perfect body had grown very thin. Her lovely blond hair was white. She suffered from a disgust of self, and wore bracelets, garters and a belt with metal spikes that left sores upon her skin. Françoise never took her eyes from the portrait of her husband that she had had hung on the wall.

…
my great portrait painted by Sabatel, and I shall beg her to hang it in her bedchamber when the King no longer enters
…

From the corridor there was a sound of brisk footsteps approaching. The door to the room was flung open. In came d’Antin, followed by the Maréchale de Coeuvres, who was telling him, ‘On the night of 22 May, your mother had fainting spells. We brought her vinegar and cold water. As we feared a fit of apoplexy, we administered an emetic, but I believe she was made to absorb too much. She vomited sixty-three times. The physicians have declared that she is lost. A priest came to administer the last rites. At that time we sent you a message regarding the “great attack of vapours” suffered by the marquise whilst taking the waters at Bourbon-l’Archambault.’

‘I was in Livry and curtailed my hunting expedition with the Grand Dauphin to come as quickly as possible by post horse.’

‘Monsieur d’Antin, you shall be the sad witness to the death of a sincere penitent.’

The sad witness … Louis-Antoine went up to the bed. He listened to the dying woman complaining of her weakness, that she was neither so strong nor so healthy as she once had been.

‘I have no appetite, I cannot sleep, I am suffering from indigestion.’

‘It is because you are getting old.’

‘But how can I escape this decline?’

‘The quickest means, Mother, is to die.’

The affectionate son then distinguished himself by an exploit that revealed the beauty of his soul: he pulled a key from around his mother’s neck and opened a drawer in the secretaire.

‘I was taken for a fool once, it shan’t happen a second time.’

He took possession of the dying woman’s will.

‘Given the fact that you own a great deal of property, and I am fearful of being dispossessed in favour of bastard half-brothers and -sisters or even servants, it occurs to me that if you were to die intestate – and your last wishes in writing were not found – I would be the sole heir in the eyes of the law.’

The marquise, with her garters adorned with metal spikes, sighed.

‘I should have so liked you to take after your father … And now what are you doing?’

‘I am removing this portrait of your husband, and I will burn it. Thus no one shall ever know what he looked like. I had a sledgehammer taken to the stone horns on the gate and on his coat of arms. I have burnt all his letters. The King, on hearing of it, has promised me a street in Paris. Just imagine, Mother … the Chaussée d’Antin!’

Without another word, the fat courtier took his leave, without waiting for his mother to be placed in her coffin, or even for her death. He strode away, his red heels tapping on the parquet. He mounted his horse in the courtyard of the
hôtel particulier.

‘Gee up!’

The marquise turned her head towards the door, left wide open, and in the next room she could see the nuns gathered around a painting.

‘What are they doing?’ asked a cook. ‘And why do they have paintbrushes in their hands?’

The maid, sitting at the table shelling crayfish, told her, ‘Before she left Versailles, the former favourite wanted to have her portrait painted as a repentant Mary Magdalene with a book open in her left hand, since she is left-handed. But the nuns in the convent of La Flèche to whom she gave the painting say that this Mary Magdalene is revealing too much bosom, so they are doing a “modesty repainting”
.
The good sisters are adding a blue tulle cloth to la Montespan’s bosom whilst she’s dying. Would anyone else like a crayfish?’

Seven or eight girls were eating and drinking in the room, conversing freely as if the marquise were no longer there. And yet she was still breathing. From time to time she drifted off, then emerged from her torpor in a sweat, screaming. At around three o’clock in the morning someone said, ‘Look, she has stopped breathing.’