The Oracle Glass (2 page)

My first appearance in the world gave little hint of the splendor that I was to attain as the Marquise de Morville. At the very least, there should have been a comet or a display of Saint Elmo's fire. I have, of course, remedied this defect in my official biography, adding as well a thunderstorm and an earthquake. In the narrative before you, however, the truth will have to suffice.

My birthday was, in fact, a very ordinary gray winter's morning in Paris, early in the year 1659. My mother had labored the day and night previous, and her life was despaired of. But at the very last minute, when the surgeon had already removed from its case the long hook by which, as a last resort, the mother alone might be saved, his midwife-assistant cried out. Inserting her hand, she brought forth the shriveled product of the premature labor, gasping at the blood that poured onto the sheets.

“Madame Pasquier, it is a healthy girl,” announced the surgeon, peering severely at the tiny cause of his difficulties as the midwife extended me, howling, for my mother's inspection. My foot was twisted; I was covered with black hair.

“Oh, God, but she's ugly,” replied my mother—and, with that, she turned her pretty face to the wall and wept with disappointment for the next two days. And so, within the week, I had been bundled off with a cart full of howling newborn Parisians to be nursed in the country near Fontenay-aux-Roses. I was not to return for the next five years, and then, only because of an accident. I had remained at home just long enough for my father to remark that I had gray eyes.

When I had just turned five, a great coach, all shining black with gold trim and high red wheels, arrived in Fontenay-aux-Roses. In those days, when coaches were less common even in Paris, an elephant could not have aroused more interest in the tiny village. Heads peeped out of every window, and even the village priest came to stare. The carriage was pulled by two immense bays in jingling, brass-trimmed harness. There was a coachman on the box with a long whip, three men behind in blue livery with bright brass buttons, a maidservant in a snow-white cap and apron, and also my father, gray faced and bent with worry. A letter addressed to Mother had come into the hands of his bankers, demanding more money for my care, and now he had come to fetch me home. He knew me right away because of my bad foot. The black hair, they tell me, had fallen out within a few weeks of my birth. He pointed me out with his walking stick as I scuttled along with the running children who had come, shouting, to admire the stranger's carriage. Then the maidservant leaped out and washed me and dressed me in fine clothes brought from the city, and my father gave a purse full of coins to Mère Jeannot, the baby-nurse, who wept.

The coach was hot and uncomfortable inside. The leather seats were slippery, and the fine clothes stiff and scratchy and tight. Mère Jeannot was gone. The strange man in the old-fashioned traveling suit and wide, plumed hat sat on the seat opposite me all by himself, looking at me. His eyes were full of tears, and I imagined at the time that it was because he, too, missed Mère Jeannot. Finally he spoke.

“And your mother told me you had died,” he said. He shook his head slowly, as if he couldn't believe it. I stared at his sad face for a long time. “I am your father, Geneviève. Don't you know me at all?”

“I know you,” I answered. “You are the kindest father in the whole world. Mère Jeannot told me so.” Then the tears ran down his face and he embraced me, even at the risk of spoiling the beautiful embroidery on his long-sleeved vest.

***

“What a cold-hearted little thing you've brought to me,” said Mother, fixing me with a sharp glance from her china-hard green eyes. She was sitting in an armchair in her reception room, dressed in a
sacque
of yellow silk, inspecting samples of material sent by the ladies' tailor she frequented. Fresh from my trip, I stood across the room and looked at her for a long time. She was very pretty, but I remember that I did not wish to touch her. The fires were out and there was a chill in the tall, blue-and-white paneled room. I didn't notice for several years, until it was pointed out to me, the barrenness of the parquet floor, where the carpet had been removed, or the light squares on the wall, where the paintings by Vouet and Le Sueur no longer hung.

The house to which my father had brought me was an old mansion built in the days of Jean le Bon, located in the Quartier de la Cité in the heart of Paris. Above a reception and dining room rebuilt in the new fashion, its narrow old rooms were compressed around a courtyard with a tower at one corner and a well at its center. On the ground floor, the kitchen and the stable let into the courtyard. There César and Brutus, the bay geldings, put their long faces out into the sun, dogs and cats lounged in the muck and searched for scraps, and cook shouted insults at the kitchen maid as she dumped dirty water out on the cobblestones. Above was the elegant floor, with gilt-paneled walls and nymphs painted on the ceiling, from which the music of violins could be heard when Mother entertained. Beyond this lay all that was ancient and unplanned, curious rooms of various sizes running almost at random into twisted staircases, and a maze of interconnected chambers.

The front of the house, a wide, low Gothic arch and heavy door to the street, revealed little of the complex life within: the maids kneeling to dust the heavy furniture while my mother locked the silver-laden sideboards; the manservant lowering the chandelier to replace the candles; my older sister playing the clavichord; father's valet hurrying upstairs with a cup of cocoa; and high, high above, Grandmother's parrot pacing and squawking while the old lady read the court news in the
Gazette de France
. Above this all-concealing door were carved in the stone arch those little Gothic grotesques called
marmousets
; and from this, not only was the house known as the House of the Marmousets, but the narrow winding street beyond it, which ran from the rue de la Juiverie to the cloister of Notre Dame itself, was called the rue des Marmousets.

Father, as I was to learn much later, had risen rapidly as a financier under the protection of Nicolas Fouquet, the
surintendant
des
finances
, only to lose his fortune and his freedom in Fouquet's fall. Father's face never lost the pallor of the Bastille, nor his heart a disgust for the court and its intrigues. He had been forced to sell his offices and now had only the income from a tiny country property left to him by an uncle. His years in prison had left him caring only for philosophy and with no interest whatsoever in returning to high finance. Rumors abounded that he had hidden money abroad, safe from Colbert, the King's
contrôleur-général des finances
, but Father kept his secrets.

Mother had had several horoscopes cast indicating the return of good fortune, but it was not returning fast enough to suit her. She still resented the fact that the royal pardon had not returned Father's fortune, which had been gobbled up into the maw of the ever-hungry Colbert. The King, she said, should have taken into account the fact that she was practically a Matignon on her mother's side and granted her an allowance.

“After all,” she would announce, “it is inconceivable that a family such as mine, no matter in what straits, would have arranged my marriage to a
poor
man of your name, and now your mismanagement has left me in
most
inappropriate circumstances. It's entirely improper for a Matignon to live this way. I deserve to live better. Besides, you have quite spoiled my Wednesdays.”

“What's a Wednesday, Grandmother?” I asked some weeks after my arrival, when I had climbed the stairs from the kitchen to Grandmother's room. Grandmother was always there. She never left her immense bed, all hung about with heavy green curtains. Whenever I knocked at the door, Grandmother's parrot repeated her “Come in!,” stepping back and forth on its tall perch with its dry, yellow feet and peering at me over its curved orange beak with its little black eyes. If it had had a pink face instead of a green one, and wore a little cap, it would have looked not altogether unlike Grandmother.

“Ah, you've brought my chicory water, have you? Come and sit here on the bed and tell me what's going on downstairs.” The walls of the room were painted in the old style, in dark red, the color of dried blood, with geometric designs in gilt around the edges. The curtains were always pulled across the windows; Grandmother thought the sun unhealthful.

“Grandmother, why does mother say she has a Wednesday, when they belong to everybody?”

“‘Wednesday,'
ha
! That's the afternoon that whorish daughter-in-law of mine displays her bosom to the world and flirts with strangers. She calls it her ‘salon' and demands that people call her ‘Amérinte' instead of by her Christian name. Genteel, indeed—it's nothing but cards and court gossip…that, and an occasional bad poet who can't make a name for himself somewhere better. Oh, it was a ruinous day when that poverty-stricken family of parasites attached themselves to my son! Hand me my Bible from that nightstand, Geneviève, and I'll read to you about Jezebel, and what happens to wicked women.” And so I heard something very interesting and lurid from the Bible, about the dogs eating up Jezebel except for her hands and feet. For Grandmother had been a Huguenot before her family had been forced to convert, and she'd kept the Protestant habit of Bible reading—to the scandal of the rest of the family.

On my way back downstairs, I crossed through Uncle's room, where he'd been sleeping all morning because he never went to bed at night. I saw his head and a strange woman's peeking out from under the covers. Uncle, my mother's brother, called himself the Chevalier de Saint-Laurent, although Grandmother always said the title was as false as he is, and it is what one could expect of a worm who made his living sinning at the gaming tables and borrowing from women. Uncle was accounted handsome by many, but there was something about his narrow, foxy face and arrogant, pale eyes above the high, slanting cheekbones that I did not like. Still, women thought him dashing.

So I peeked into the tall, gilt reception room on Wednesdays, hoping to see some interesting sinning like Jezebel and the hands and feet, but it was just grown-ups calling one another by pretend names and saying sharp things to one another and drinking from the good glasses, while Mother laughed her special, silvery little laugh that she saved for Wednesdays. She wore her tight dress in violet silk that was cut very low in front and her gold bracelets with the diamonds on them. This was the time she would glance sideways under her lashes at the men, who would praise her green eyes and perhaps recite an impromptu verse on the subject of her nose or lips. There were only a few ladies, and those not as pretty as she was, and a lot of men who dressed like my uncle in baggy pants with lace hanging down their shins and embroidered doublets and short jackets all in silk. They talked a lot about luck at
bassette
or
hoca
, and whom the King had looked at last Friday, and pretended to be interested in Mother until, at a signal from her, my big sister, Marie-Angélique, would glide through, blushing. Then she was the only person they'd look at. Everyone knew she had no dowry because Father had no money—or, rather, had to save it so that my older brother, Étienne, could stay at the Collège de Clermont and become an
avocat
and get rich again for the sake of the family. But Mother hoped my sister might “meet someone important” on her Wednesdays, someone who could launch her into society on account of her beauty.

On Wednesdays Father shut himself up in his study to read about the Romans. That, and take snuff from a little silver box Monsieur Fouquet had once given him. He never really wanted to talk to anyone, except sometimes me.

“Why the Romans, Father?” I asked him one afternoon.

“Because, my child, they teach us how to bear suffering in a world of injustice where all faith is dead,” he answered. “You see here? Epictetus shows that reason governs the world, being identical with God.” He pointed to a place in the Latin book he was reading.

“I can't read it, Father.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” he answered in that distant, absentminded way he had. “No one has seen to your education. I suppose I shall have to myself. Modern education is nothing but fables anyway, fit only to enslave the mind. Look at your sister—nothing but the most fashionable empty-headedness. She embroiders, tinkles a bit at the
clavecin
, and knows two dozen prayers by heart. Her mind is entirely formed by the reading of romances. And your brother, memorizing legal precedents. He learns precedent instead of logic, and law instead of virtue. No, far better to learn about the Romans.” Telling me that the rational discovery of truth was the highest activity of the human mind, he then gave me his own little leather-bound notebook to write down my thoughts to make them more orderly and arranged for a Latin tutor.

And so it was that I was educated according to my father's eccentric plan by a series of starving abbés and penniless students who exchanged lessons for meals until I had sufficient knowledge to be able to discuss the Romans and especially his beloved Stoics with him.

Very soon my days fell into a pleasant routine, although one utterly abnormal for a child. In the morning, I studied whatever my current tutor was interested in: fragments of Descartes, the Epicureans, the question of proof in geometry, the new discoveries in physiology of Monsieur Harvey, the English doctor. In all this, they were guided by Father, who believed that new minds should be trained for the new age; that science and rationality would drive away the superstition of the old era.

In the afternoon, I ingratiated myself with my mother by running confidential errands for her. From her I had three petticoats my sister had outgrown, an old comb, and the promise of a new dress at Christmas if I kept her secrets. Although Mother left me unkempt and untaught in matters feminine, still, I learned a great deal from her indirectly. It was on my afternoon errands that I learned where love potions, hair dye, and wrinkle creams could be bought, how to make change and tell false coin from good. I found out where to buy the best illegal broadsides for Grandmother and that Mother received letters in secret with heavy wax seals on them. It was not at all the proper training for a young lady of good family, who should never be seen outdoors without a lackey, but my twisted body and wild, untutored manners exempted me from all rules, just as they prevented me from receiving the benefits of my birth.