The Hurlyburly's Husband (6 page)

Louis-Henri slipped between his wife’s legs then, starting with his head between her knees, moved up along her thighs.

‘We shall arrive through here. A fleet consisting of fifteen war vessels and ten transport ships carrying six thousand soldiers.’

‘Of whom many will die…’

‘If the life of a man lasted a thousand years, there would be cause for regret. But as it is so short, it matters little whether they lose it twenty years earlier or later.’

The marquis’s lips brushed against a blond curly fleece.

‘The aim will be to establish and fortify a permanent military base in this strategic region and to overcome the formidable enemies who covet it. I read all of this in last week’s
Gazette.
’

The marquise felt her husband’s warm breath, so close to her. He had stopped moving. She closed her eyes.

‘’Tis said that France has no more navy, or, at least, that it is in a most pitiful state.’

‘The departure will not take place before two months have passed, and by that time the ships shall be made seaworthy. We must trust His Majesty.’

The husband, with a jerk of his neck, gathered momentum to plant a deep kiss within his wife’s sex, but she stopped his brow with her palms and warned him that she had her menses: ‘The cardinal is in residence.’

His face was covered in blood and splattered with fragments of brain; it was a rout. On the beach of this legendary city and pirate stronghold which smelt of spices, Officer Montespan was kneeling in the sand beneath the stars. Nearby, swirls of light bounced off the corners of a building. As he encouraged his men in their regalia, he felt punch-drunk. A first line moved ahead fearlessly, fired and withdrew. A second line took its place, and so on. The sound of cannons added to the shooting, but the enemy were legion. Bullets and cannonballs were fired blindly and Louis-Henri’s men fell, the ranks growing thinner. Bombardments and exchanges of musket fire doubled in intensity. A burst of flames signalled the explosion, under heavy fire, of one of their defences. Their blackened chests now exposed, the marquis’s soldiers, once held close by fair demoiselles, fell together on the sand in a hideous parody of the act of love. And all around the thunder howled. The fire was fierce; nature unleashed death. The vaguely indecent strangeness of it all would haunt his dreams. The enemy slavered at the walls. They climbed and swarmed. All the disastrous sounds arced through the air over the glow of the battlefield: this was hell. The fire was everywhere, city walls were attacked, weapons were fired. Since eleven o’clock in the morning the situation had been untenable. After three months occupying the city of Gigeri, His Majesty’s army was suddenly pushed back to the sea, this evening of All Saints’ Day, 1664.

Two days earlier, Montespan had attended the deliberations of the council of war, where he had stood off to one side. There had been much discussion about how to finish the wall built from west to east, from the sea at the foot of the Montagne Sèche to the Pointe du Marabout, forming a broken semicircle. Clerville, who was in charge of the fortifications, had called out plaintively to Gadagne, the commander of the troops on the ground: ‘It has suddenly become impossible to obtain the supplies of wood and limestone we need to manufacture lime! Why is this? Furthermore, you promised me that the natives would supply the materials to me. Where are they?’

The commander of the ground troops, in his armour, did not know how to reply, so Beaufort had ordered, ‘If we need stones, take them from the cemetery; the wall must go through there.’

Montespan, leaning against a wall, had ventured to voice his doubts out loud: ‘Are you sure? The Kabyles have already vehemently insisted that we stop the work before we reach the rocky headland at the end of the beach. The place is sacred to them; it is home to the mausoleum of a marabout and the graves of Muslim dignitaries. Sidi Mohamed, who hitherto supported our efforts to fight against the pirates, will proclaim a holy war…’

‘Who is this captain who dares to interfere!’ said the King’s cousin, head of the expedition, much irritated. ‘Monsieur, the presence of men such as yourself in the navy, men with poorly defined powers, is not to everyone’s liking. Know that His Majesty’s true warriors despise such opportunistic captains and mock them as “curly-haired marquis”, or, worse yet, “petticoat bastards”!’

Montespan, contrite, fell silent and did not intervene again. He had not gone deep into debt yet again and come here just to have the monarch’s cousin turn against him. He had only been trying to … But almost all the officers – La Châtre, Martel, Charuel, Lestancourt, etc. – had sniggered servilely as they stood round Beaufort. Only the Chevalier de Saint-Germain had observed the marquis attentively. Fat Vivonne had also doubled up with laughter (seeming to forget that he himself had bought a naval commission without hitherto ever having set his red heels on board even a riverboat). The King’s cousin, very sure of himself, then said derisively, as he smoothed his perfumed moustache, ‘Is the world’s greatest power to fear a band of goatherds wearing cloaks? Come now, even the army’s launderesses could hold the forts at Gigeri and the redoubts in the jebel of El-Korn. Go and take what you need from the cemetery.’

The soldiers had then hastened away to remove the stones from the mausoleums to finish building their wall. The following night, in the desert, a voice had chanted in Arabic, ‘The dead who have been deprived of their tombs have obtained permission from heaven to take their revenge. The Prophet has appeared before them, and has promised to make the Frenchmen’s cannonballs melt like wax!’

Montespan had looked worriedly upon the fires the Kabyles had lit on the hills, calling upon the faraway Turkish gunners and encampments to attack the Christian position. Which is precisely what they had done.

*

’Twas the rebellion of the Koran, driven by the sirocco! Stars pierced the walls. Everywhere the fortifications were embellished with blazing flowers and, in the sky, science forged haphazard moments of magic. Stores of powder and ammunition exploded, reducing a thousand Frenchmen all around to a smoking heap. The order to evacuate this spicy country had been given. The first boats fled, drifting with the fogbanks. Standing next to the golden drums and red cannons abandoned on the sand, Montespan, the last captain still on land, tried with his musketeers to slow the enemy’s progress just long enough to allow the boats to reach the ships waiting off shore. But the Turkish army was formidable; it roared with strength, howled like a dog and crashed like the sea, with lances and iron pikes, drums and market vendors’ cries. Montespan’s eyes rolled in their sockets. Over his left shoulder, slung both to the front and behind, was a double saddlebag, of the type used on the back of a horse. The open leather pouches were overflowing with jewels, bars of gold, fistfuls of diamonds, fine porcelain and pearls, that he in turn had pillaged, hurriedly, from the pirates’ den. He had not wanted to leave behind all the riches stolen by the Barbary corsairs, which filled the port. This would serve to compensate him for the disastrous expedition, pay all his debts and cover Athénaïs in jewels. Even at that moment, in the blinding light of cannon fire, he was thinking of
her.
His vision faltered. She was everything to him, and thanks be! Then he ran to the sea, but the soldiers were trying in vain to free a grounded launch where a hundred or more wounded lay. So, with Saint-Germain and three of his men, he returned to the beach. Saint-Germain had been wounded in the thigh, and collapsed in the water. Followed by his three companions, Louis-Henri hurled himself in fury at the first Kabyles and killed two of them with his sword (without even knowing how he did it), breaking the enemy’s momentum. When he saw that at last the launch was moving away from the shore, he fell back and threw himself into the water with the last remaining soldiers. The Turks were now lined up on the beach and used the bobbing figures in the shallows for target practice. Two men were killed, but the third was saved from drowning. Saint-Germain was wounded twice more. His strength was failing. In a final burst he managed to reach up to the outstretched arms on the launch. Louis-Henri, already on board, clutched his hand and hoisted him slowly out of the sea. Saint-Germain, streaming with water, promised, ‘I am very close to the King and will convey your perspicacity and heroism to him. His Majesty shall reward…’

Just at this moment a cannonball caught him right in the head. The chevalier’s torso fell into Montespan’s out-stretched arms.

The waves rose and fell in the starless night amid the muted sounds and creaking of the vessel –
La Lune –
where the Gascon had found a berth. The ship, overloaded with the wounded, was the last to weigh anchor. The other transport ships –
L’Hercule
and
La Reine –
(in better condition) carried the high command to the open sea whilst Louis-Henri was on board his leaky, sluggish tub. It had been poorly refitted by Rodolphe, a carpenter in Toulon. Planks were giving way on deck, where the badly burned survivors had left their shirts of skin. Winds drifted over human detritus where the marquis was seated. The stumps in that military laundry, that public bathhouse, were wrapped in blue and white cloth; to those of a sensitive nature, these men were more terrifying than monsters. Over there were the sweating shapes of hundreds of Christ-like faces with dark, gentle eyes. Not far from Louis-Henri a man lay humming, his guts spilling out. His mouth gaped open and his sleeves gestured in the air, making mad signs that no one responded to. He sang,

‘Beaufort, you’re a clever one

And we’re right to fear ye

But the way ye’re reasoning

We’d take ye for a gosling.’

Long oars reached out and lapped the rhythm across the surface of the water. In the morning, near the peninsula of Giens, a terrible cracking sound ripped through
La Lune
: it split in two and sank in a second, like a block of marble. One thousand two hundred wounded men from the regiments of Picardy and Normandy were lost. A few survived miraculously, clinging to a rowing boat. Montespan was pulled deep into the roiling waves. He struggled to make it back to the surface, burdened by his saddlebag, which had not left his side. The gold was weighing him down. He had to get rid of it. In the rush of swirling water as the ship touched bottom, sand rose and scratched his face; he groped blindly in his treasure and filled the pockets of his military greatcoat. He let go of the saddlebag and rose breathless to the surface, his lungs bursting. The rowing boat was far away and he had no strength left to shout. He tried to calm himself and swam among the mutilated bodies. He clung to one of them to recover his breath and, at water level, contemplated the disaster of this failed expedition against the Barbary corsairs. He was astonished to find himself thinking, ‘Where is La Fontaine? Could the fabulist not pen a lovely sonnet? And Le Brun – these floating stumps, would they not inspire a pretty tapestry?’ Slowly he set off, swimming across a Mediterranean in mourning, but he was truly too exhausted and, on either side, the heavy pockets of his greatcoat pulled him towards the bottom. He plunged his head underwater and tore at the seams of his coat. He watched wearily as the heavy bracelets sank straight down, with sets of diamonds and necklaces of precious stones gliding away like snakes. Broken strands of pearls hovered, and their little white globes escaped from the string. They scattered, shone and disappeared into the black water.

Finally he saw a meadow in the distance, where the last buttercups, the last daisies begged the day for mercy. He washed up on the beach, like a jellyfish. With one cheek in the sand, his lips blew bubbles, a rosary of love: ‘Athénaïs …’

He returned to France: the war had brought no glory to his name. Once again, Montespan had come back covered not in honour but in shame and debt. His head wound in rags, he arrived on foot, and only in his shirt, at Rue Taranne. He climbed the steps, and opened the door to the kitchen. Athénaïs was sitting in a tub, taking a bath. She stood up, clutching a towel to her, then, on recognising her husband, she dropped the towel in the water. Louis-Henri looked at her round belly and gaped.

‘A girl, and now a boy: ’tis what is called “the King’s choice”!’

Constance Abraham, the wigmaker’s wife on Rue Taranne, waxed ecstatic as she gazed at the sleeping infant before picking him up. ‘Ah, praise be to God, is he not lovely, this little Louis-Antoine with his fair white skin. He is the image of his mother!’

But Athénaïs, standing next to her in the shop, was wringing her hands whilst Marie-Christine, now two years of age, tugged at her mother’s skirt. Athénaïs pushed her away: ‘Leave me alone.’

Louis-Henri de Pardaillan was sitting in a tall armchair being shaved. He looked at his wife.

‘Are you all right, Athénaïs?’

The marquise was not all right. She felt oppressed, had difficulty breathing, and had sudden violent urges to weep. The kindly, plump wigmaker’s wife thought she understood her malaise.

‘Don’t worry, my dear, this must be a
post partum
reaction; ’tis quite frequent. I had the same, did I not, after my son’s birth. Do you recall, Joseph?’