The French Mistress (12 page)

Chapter Six

CHÂTEAU DE SAINT-CLOUD
June 1669

 

 

 

T
he violent departure of Mademoiselle de Fiennes from our house hold did little to relieve the constant unease between Madame and Monsieur. In truth it seemed to make matters worse, not better, for soon afterward, Monsieur announced that we were all to shift from Paris to Saint-Cloud to await the birth of Madame’s child. To the world, he proclaimed this as a benefit to his wife, removing her from the demands of Court and the city. To anyone who knew anything, the real circumstances were abundantly clear: that Monsieur was far too jealous of Madame’s meetings with his brother and the political power that she appeared to wield, while he himself had none. By removing her from Paris, he did indeed end the visits made by Louis to the Palais-Royal, as well as the numerous calls from the English ambassadors and other prominent English gentlemen.

But if Monsieur believed that banishment (for in essence, so it was) would be sufficient to end Madame’s interest in an English-French alliance, then he’d woefully underestimated the strength of Madame’s will. He could have borne her off to the farthest reaches of Creation, and so long as she had a messenger bound for Paris and London, she still would have continued to write to the two kings.

In the beginning, I couldn’t imagine a sweeter place to be banished than the Château de Saint-Cloud. The château was Monsieur’s country estate, just as Versailles belonged to his brother the king. While the house and its parks offered all the felicitous airs of rural living, the journey to reach it was not arduous, being only twelve miles on good roads from Paris. The progress of our household from one royal home to the other took but a day, and that with our usual unwieldy cavalcade of ladies’ coaches, gentlemen on horseback, guards on foot and on horse, and wagon after wagon bearing servants and all the baggage and trunks we couldn’t possibly survive without, even in the country.

But no one would mistake Saint-Cloud for some humble retreat, a peasant’s cottage blown large by a nobleman’s whim. Like all younger brothers, Monsieur sought to rival his sibling in everything, including the magnificence of their houses. Saint-Cloud was of a size to match the Palais-Royal, and its interiors were even more gorgeously decorated with elaborate plasterwork and gilded
rinceaux
of the flowers and fruits grown on the estate. Every salon was lit by tall windows and glittering chandeliers, and every wall was hung with either a looking glass, a painting, or a richly woven tapestry.

A year earlier, I would have been full of wonder to be admitted to such a place. Now my eye had grown discerning and my taste more critical, and I could see for myself which pictures were considered the works of masters, and which were no more than gaudy daubs meant to bring cheer to a dark hall. Guided by Madame, I’d learned to recognize and appreciate the quality that surrounds royalty, whether in a gleaming lacquered cabinet from China, a length of finely wrought Venetian
point de neige
lace to edge a pair of linen cuffs, or even a perfectly baked cherry pastry, the edges crimped with exquisite perfection.

Such knowledge was part of any French lady’s education, and a valuable one, too. His Majesty expected his courtiers to set the taste for all other Christian countries. I listened, and observed, and learned, and resolved one day to be like Madame, and surround myself only with the very best.

I’d plenty of time for such education at Saint-Cloud. After the liveliness of Paris, the château seemed quiet, indeed. Our company had shrunk to Madame’s immediate attendants, a score of us ladies and no more. My first confidante, Gabrielle de la Touraine, left our household to wed a widowed but wealthy vicomte of her parents’ choosing, and her departure reminded me all the more of how I was failing in my purpose to secure a suitable husband.

With the memory of Mademoiselle de Fiennes’s downfall still sharp, Madame worried over the souls of her remaining maids of honor, and arranged for assorted clerics to come address us. Left to ourselves, we turned to less spiritual resorts like telling one another’s fortunes, acting charades, playing cards, and reading romantic novels, like Madame de Scudery’s
Clelie
, which only fed our thwarted longings. Endless games of loo and lansquenet stretched far into the summer night with the wagers rising to include golden louis d’or and jeweled earrings. I’d sit through a hand only when the stakes were low, not having the resources or the inclination at that time for deep play.

We’d no gallants, no beaus, for admiration or flirtations, a sorry lack for ladies our age. The only gentlemen we saw were Monsieur and the chevalier and their catamite accomplices, which is to say no proper gentlemen at all. Like a swarm of wasps, they would descend on Saint-Cloud to plague and torment Madame, then flee back to Versailles when Monsieur’s jealous rage was spent.

The heat affected poor Madame so that she could not even find ease in her bed, but preferred instead to lie on an arrangement of cushions near the open windows, where she could hear the cooling sound of falling water from the château’s garden fountains. Lolling like some pagan odalisque, she would read the letters from her brother and from Louis, and continue to plot the alliance that was so dear to her.

The news was not fortuitous, either. In early summer, word came that Abbé Prignani’s mission had failed, and ignominiously, too. With the Duke of Monmouth to support him, the abbé’s cleverness and his gift for prognostication had soon made him a favorite at an English Court that prized amusement. Guided by his astrological charts (and doubtless information from others), he made several predictions regarding His Grace’s petty loves that came to pass, and astounded the Court. Soon Charles himself declared the abbé to be excellent company, exactly as Madame and Louis had hoped.

But like many men before him, the abbé soon began to believe too much in his own quite mortal powers. Instead of concentrating on the alliance between France and England, and on convincing Charles to declare his faith, the abbé frivolously boasted that he could predict the winning horses in races. Perhaps he’d enjoyed too much wine among the hard-drinking English, or perhaps he’d let himself be lured into overconfidence by the charming king. The sorry result was the same. At once Charles seized this chance to test him, and carried the hapless abbé off at a trot to the races at the spring meeting at Newmarket.

There, of course, the abbé faltered, and the horses he’d chosen lost. His erroneous predictions cost his patron, the Duke of Monmouth, heavy losses from wagers. Even worse, Charles gleefully packed the abbé back to Louis, praising the monk as the most loyal servant of France, and worthy of some other assignment.

“I cannot believe my brother would treat the poor abbé with so little regard,” Madame said mournfully over the latest letters from both her brother and Colbert de Croissy. “To take him to Newmarket like that, as if he were some common jockey or tout!”

“Perhaps His Majesty judged that to be a fitting test of the abbé’s gifts,” I suggested carefully. “Every sporting gentleman knows there is nothing more difficult to predict than a horse.”

“Oh, I know that, just as I know my brother,” she said crossly. “Surely he is the most cynical of gentleman, and the most vexing, too. Mark this, Louise: ‘You may be sure I will keep the secret of your prophet, Minette. I give little credit to such kind of cattle, and the less you do it, the better, for even if they could tell anything, ’tis inconvenient to know one’s fortune beforehand, whether good or bad.’ Oh, how he will plague me!”

I nodded, not daring to venture an opinion that might wound the princess further. Yet I agreed completely with His Majesty’s good-natured advice, and his estimation of the abbé as well.

I hadn’t forgotten the foolish fortune he’d predicted for me. If the king had swallowed that manner of nonsense, then he would have sadly slipped in my esteem. But hearing that he hadn’t made him only rise higher. I could imagine him listening with a skeptical half smile to the abbé’s charlatan performance, concealing his true feelings behind his handsome royal face. How I wished I’d been there at Newmarket to watch, where this clever king’s wry test of the abbé must have granted better entertainment than any sport to be found on the racecourse!

“I vow he will make a jest of anything,” she continued, pressing her fingertips to her temples and closing her eyes. “Another glass of the lemon water here, Louise. That’s it, child, thank you. My brother does it to tease me, I know, but there are others who will spin this into a righteous tempest. Buckingham, for one.”

“Lord Buckingham?” I asked, pouring the chilled lemon water from the silver pitcher into Madame’s tumbler. “Why would His Grace make the abbé his affair?”

“Because Buckingham pokes his long nose into everything,” she said darkly, sipping at the water without opening her eyes. “He keeps his own stable at Newmarket, and because his nags were among those who lost, he took a viperish dislike to the poor abbé.”

“But His Majesty didn’t,” I said. “That’s of more import, isn’t it?”

She sighed mightily, the swell of her belly rising high before her. On account of the heat, she wore only the lightest of linen dressing gowns, and beneath it I could see the gentle shift of the child kicking within her womb.

“With any other than Buckingham, it would be,” she said. “But the rascal’s told Charles that his sister here in Paris—the lady waits upon my dear mother at Colombe—swears I sent the abbé to London with the sole and hateful purpose of discrediting
him
. Him, Louise, as if I’d squander so much thought upon a creature such as Buckingham!”

“If His Majesty did not believe the abbé’s predictions, Madame, then surely he would not listen to His Grace, either.”

“No.” She opened her eyes to glance again at the letter in her hand. “Charles found the entire business vastly amusing, as he does most everything in life. Ah, I only wish Louis would feel the same!”

I nodded. It was impossible to imagine Louis laughing with amusement over something as important as this. “Does His Majesty also know of Abbé Prignani’s failures?”

“If I know, then so does he,” she said, refolding the letter and pressing it flat along the creases between her fingertips. “His Majesty will of course pretend he’d nothing to do with any of it, and neatly pass the blame to another’s shoulders. Then he will look to me to concoct a fresh plan to deliver my brother, as if my brother could ever be meekly led into anything.”

Discouraged, she tossed the letter away from her, letting it drop to the floor. “My brother doesn’t need Louis as much now. His Parliament has been more generous of late, and voted more to his taste, and thus he can afford to be more independent of French gifts. No, the only sure way to persuade him will be if I can journey to England, and speak to him directly. Yet so long as I’m a prisoner here, what can I do? What can I
do
?”

“Don’t upset yourself, Madame, I beg you,” I said, hurrying to plump the cushions behind her. “If you are delivered of a son, then surely—”

“Oh, Louise,” she said, and groaned. “It could as well be another daughter, and my prayers go for nothing.”

“Well, then, a daughter,” I said, striving to cheer her. “Once your babe is born—”

“Once this babe is born, then my husband will try his best to fill my belly with another, and another, and another after that, to keep me here in France,” she said bitterly. “We women are no more than slaves to men’s desires, Louise. You’ll learn that in time for yourself. Slaves, and no more.”

I blushed, and looked away, for what could I say to such an argument? I’d no doubt at all that Monsieur would do exactly as she’d claimed. He enjoyed using her with cruel purpose, and if it were left to him, from purest spite, Madame would never again see either her homeland or her brother. The alliance meant nothing to Monsieur, especially not when compared to the countless slights and injustices that he believed both Madame and Louis had inflicted upon him.

Suddenly I realized that I was gazing at the largest painting on the wall of Madame’s salon: an idealized picture by Jean Nocret of Monsieur as the victorious warrior-god Mars, surrounded by symbols of masculine combat and come home at last to celebrate his conquest in the waiting arms of Madame, painted as an adoring, voluptuous Venus. The distance between wedded truth and romantic allegory might have been droll if it weren’t also so painfully sad.

“England is so lovely in the summer.” Madame’s voice was soft with poignant longing, and she gazed from the window as if she herself could see across the Channel from Saint-Cloud to London. “It was summer when I visited last, you know, the summer before I was wed to Monsieur. Everything was green and bright, and the flowers—Oh, Louise, you would not believe how flowers prosper and bloom in England. How I should like to show them to you!”

“You will see them again, Madame,” I promised, more from wishing it were so than from any real conviction. “His Majesty your brother will make certain of that.”

“I pray that you’re right,” she said. Without turning from the window, she reached blindly for my hand and slipped her fingers into mine. “You would like my brother, too, Louise, even more than the roses. Ha, the great impudent rogue! He’s not at all like these chilly French gentlemen, you know, for all they claim to be such gallants. I vow he could even make you laugh, my solemn little Louise.”

“Yes, Madame,” I said, fervently agreeing to everything. I was sure I’d like her brother, and far more than mere roses, too, and I was just as certain he could make me laugh. I wasn’t solemn by nature. It was the Court, and the unhappiness of Madame’s household, that had made me appear that way. “I pray that you may visit him as you wish, and that in your kindness, you shall include me as a member of your party.”

Though we’d spoken often of this before, it was still surpassing bold of me to ask such an enormous favor. She trusted me, and in her way loved me well, but likewise I knew my rank and birth were too humble for such a considerable honor. As a reflection of French glory, Louis would insist on sending only the most beautiful ladies (and the ones with the most opulent jewels and gowns) to England. Yet I still girlishly dreamed of Madame’s handsome, jesting brother, and did indeed pray for even a glimpse of him.