The French Mistress (7 page)

I began to thank her, but before I could, a servant announced the arrival of the king. At once the entire company rose with a rustle of silk and a murmur of voices. Eager for my first glimpse of His Majesty, I rose up on my toes and craned my neck, striving to peek over the heads of the others. Though I couldn’t yet see the king, I knew when he entered the gallery, for as soon as those near the door spied him, every gentleman bowed and every lady sank into her deepest curtsy, the motion spreading through the gallery with the rolling inevitability of an ocean wave.

Even Madame rose from her chair to curtsy, for though she was the king’s first cousin with the blood of two countries’ royalty in her veins, she was still his inferior. Of course I curtsied, too, and stayed low, waiting to be guided by Madame’s actions. My heart raced with excitement as I heard the footsteps coming closer. At last, at last, I was to be in the presence of His Most Christian Majesty!

Even with my head bowed low, I could roll my gaze forward to look before me. First I saw before me a pair of the most elegant gentleman’s shoes imaginable: golden leather with a squared toe, the high red heels that only the nobility were entitled to wear, tiny buckles sparkling with brilliants on the tongue, and then scarlet stockings embroidered with gold clocks at the ankles. The feet in the golden leather were large, the calves in the red silk muscular, the legs of a rider. Beside them was the ferrule of an ebony walking stick, clearly employed for effect, not for support, and perhaps even as a substitute for a scepter.

“Good evening, Madame,” the king said, his voice solemn and polite. I was surprised he greeted her with such formality, considering they were family through both blood and marriage. But then he was the King of France, and she was only the duchesse d’Orleans, and I—I was so humbly born in comparison that I’d no right to judge either. “We are pleased you have joined us.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Madame said softly, and I could hear the smile and the warmth in her voice for him. She stood upright beside me, her skirts slipping from her hands, and when all the other ladies around me began to rise, I rose, too.

“Who is this lady?” he asked, and with a start I realized he meant me. “Your new maid of honor?”

Quickly Madame introduced me as I curtsied again. “Mademoiselle’s father has always been most loyal to Your Majesty, and served in your army. Further, her family offered comfort to the English refugees who supported my father and brother, with special tenderness for those who espoused the True Faith.”

“We are grateful they have shared her with us,” he said, and smiled. “Welcome, mademoiselle.”

“I—I am honored, Your Majesty,” I stammered. “Most honored.”

I shouldn’t have been startled to find His Majesty regarding me with interest. I was young and knew I was considered beautiful enough that even my country-fashion gown would not completely disguise me. I was a member of Madame’s household, and I knew that had been the nursery bed for at least two of his mistresses. Also, and perhaps of most importance to the king, I was new to the palace, and it was widely understood that His Majesty distrusted strangers.

In turn I studied him, too. I’d heard so much of him—of his comeliness, his grace and manners, his absolute manly perfection—that I doubt I could have refrained from considering him even if I’d been ordered not to. I was eighteen, and he was my king.

And what did I see? A gentleman slightly over moderate height in the full glory of his manhood (he was then only just thirty years of age), dressed with splendor like the monarch he was, from the toes of those golden shoes to the top of his cocked black beaver hat, trimmed with a veritable crown of scarlet plumes. His wig was lush and long and very black, though I guessed that was likewise the color of the hair nature had granted him, matching his brows and slender mustache. His nose was long and narrow, his chin dimpled and full, and his mouth was poised in a half smile of constant pleasantry.

Yet as much as I was prepared to be impressed by the king’s personal glory and magnificence, I was . . . disappointed. His expression was too careful, too reserved, without the emotion or passion that would bring his face to life. His elegantly almond-shaped eyes were shrewd rather than intelligent, and bright with ambition, but they shone with very little kindness.

I did not judge him handsome at all.

“You always choose the fairest flowers for your own, don’t you, Madame?” he said, tapping his walking stick lightly on the floor as she smiled at me. “Please Her Highness, mademoiselle, and thus you will please us.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” I said, but he was already turning away to join Monsieur and Madame du Montespan, and the empty chair that would, it seemed, be left unoccupied by the queen. Already I knew there would never be a handkerchief dropped before me, and the secret relief that came with that knowledge was boundless.

Beside me Madame watched him, her face as carefully composed as his had been toward her, the face of royalty at Court. Yet in her eyes, I saw the truth.

She loved him.
Not as the brother of her husband, not as her king, but as the man she could never have. My poor English princess! I understood much now, and in my inexperience, I thought I understood everything.

I was wrong. Sadly, sadly wrong.

Chapter Four

PALAIS-ROYAL, PARIS
December 1668

 

 

 

T
he first snow of the season had fallen in the night, just enough to cover Paris with the most delicate veiling of white, like a confection feathered with sugar. It was hardly enough to keep Madame from her morning walk, and as soon as she was sufficiently fortified against the cold—fortifications that included layers of woolen petticoats and kerchiefs, a cloak and gloves lined in fur and a muff as well, for the princess, being so thin, felt any chill most grievously—we stepped out into the palace’s gardens, and the bright morning sun.

“A beautiful day, Louise, isn’t it?” Madame said, breathing deeply of the icy air. “I cannot fathom why anyone would wish to lie abed by choice on a morning such as this.”

“Nor can I, Madame,” I said, glad to be outside and away from the too-close quarters of my shared lodgings as well. The gardens behind the Palais-Royal were the princess’s favorite place in Paris, and she lavished much time on her gardeners planning the beds and bushes. She claimed that this interest came from her English blood, that all people from Great Britain loved their gardens, though I doubted that so rough and wild a country ever produced a garden as precise and formal and overwhelmingly
French
as one belonging to the Palais-Royal.

“Mark this, Louise: the air’s so cold, it shows my breath.” To prove it, she puffed up her cheeks and slowly blew out, making a small cloud before her face like one of the four winds cartographers draw on the corners of maps.

I laughed, pleased to see how my breath, too, showed before me. I was the only maid of honor who chose to rise early with our mistress (who, with her usual kindness, did not make these walks a requirement for her ladies), and I’d left them all still noisily asleep, snuffling and mumbling with their hair tied in rags to curl and their faces slick with various potions designed to enhance their beauty. Being country-bred near the sea, I believed my skin benefited far more from walking out-of-doors than from any foul-smelling unguents, the most popular one at that time being distilled from the piss of small dogs.

For all the suffering Madame had endured in her life, she was still but twenty-five, and liked to set a brisk pace. Her other two constant ladies-in-waiting were older, and perfectly content to let me be the one who squired Madame between the clipped hedges and parterres.

But there was more than rosy cheeks to these walks with Madame. As we walked side by side, the princess began to confide in me as a trusted companion, and spoke to me of whatever filled her head. Part of her love for her gardens was because of their vast size, and the certainty that this was the one place she’d not be overheard by her husband’s spies, and thus I was told many things of a most private nature. I heard more of Monsieur’s infidelities and barbarous treatment of her, of how she’d wept when Louis had wed not her, but a Spanish princess; and how wounded she’d been when not once, but twice, he’d taken her maids of honor for new lovers.

I won’t claim that I contrived this familiarity. I was only eighteen, and I hadn’t yet curried my cleverness to that extent, or my ambition, either. I was lonely, and Madame was kind to me. In the beginning, it was as simple, and as complicated, as that.

But her tales saddened me no end, for I had come to love her not just as a mistress, but for her own sweet self. To see her treated so ill, with no recourse, was a sorry thing indeed. Who would have guessed that the life of a royal princess could be so unhappy?

There were but two topics that served to raise her spirits. The first (albeit the less interesting to me) was her daughter, Marie-Louise, six years of age and the only one of several infants to have survived. The second was far more fascinating: her oldest brother, Charles Stuart, the English king.

To hear Madame describe him, Charles was everything in both a king and a man that Louis was not: generous, charming, witty, and impulsive. Both cousins had suffered as impressionable boys at the hands of their subjects, surviving civil wars and injustices that had threatened their thrones. The uncertainty of the Fronde had made Louis innately suspicious of Paris and determined to rule implacably and at a distance from his people, while the far greater sufferings of Charles—the beheading of his father, King Charles I, the scattering of his mother and brothers and sisters while he likewise was in exile, a wandering decade in poverty unbecoming to any prince—seemed to have done the opposite.

In Madame’s telling, her brother walked through the streets and parks of London with an astonishing ease, speaking to any man as he pleased. He attended the public playhouses, drank beside sailors in taverns, rode his own horses in races, and swam naked in the Thames River for all the world to see. With a sister’s pride, she claimed him to be as tall as a giant and as handsome as Adonis, though with a nonchalance in his attire that made her despair. I longed to meet such a royal paragon, and when at last I confessed my desire to the duchess, she’d winked merrily, and vowed she’d do her best to make my wish come true.

Bereft of her husband’s love in her life, she had turned her passion to making an alliance between France and England, and between Louis and her brother. If those two and their armies could join together against the Dutch, then there’d be a real chance of negotiating a lasting peace among them, and an end to the costly small wars that had been waged for twenty years and more.

There were many more fine points and subtleties of diplomacy to this plan, of course, many concessions back and forth that were not shared with me. But the one feature dearest to Madame’s heart was also the one most likely both to infuriate and terrify the English, and that was for Charles to renounce his Protestant beliefs and embrace instead the Catholic faith of their mother. She wished for an alliance between England and France based not just on shared politics, but on faith, joined together against the hated Protestant Dutch. If the King of England could be drawn back to the True Church, then surely his nation would follow. To sweeten the prospect, Louis was offering a substantial amount of gold to Charles as well, a gift that Charles, who was perpetually impoverished (a curious situation for a king, but then English kings were forced to rely upon the largesse of their Parliament), could scarce afford to ignore.

Could there be a more glorious, more noble, more worthy design? Madame longed for this, prayed for it every day. I understood, and prayed with her. The final success would come down to the two kings, the two cousins, with this single young lady as a bridge between them.

This, too, Madame confessed to me in the garden, with such giddy pride and excitement that I came to believe in her powers, too. Monsieur might mock her ambition, but Louis trusted Madame far more than he did his waspish brother. Declining a secretary for such delicate correspondence, she sat at her desk each day and herself wrote feverishly long letters to both kings, letters that were sent only by the most trusted of couriers. Sometimes Louis himself visited her in her rooms, the two of them locked away to plot and plan (and whatever else they wished, too, I suppose), exactly as Monsieur most dreaded.

I could only guess at the contents of these letters—she did keep that to herself—but I knew that her dearest hope was to be a part of the final negotiations in person, in England. Not even Monsieur would be able to keep her back. She hadn’t seen her brother since before her marriage, and a reunion on English soil was now her fondest dream.

And yes: by the time she finally would make that journey, I planned to be so indispensable to her that I’d be sure to be brought along, too. I’d ambition enough for that.

I ran my hand along the edge of a low wall, gathering up a mitten full of snow. Though it was too dry and light to pack into a ball to toss, I still could throw it up into the air to make my own private snowfall, and I laughed with cheery delight as the tiny crystals sparkled in the sunlight around me.

“Here, Madame, here,” I called, scooping up more snow into my hands. “I’ll do the same for you, if you wish.”

Madame laughed, but held her oversized beaver muff up before her face to shield it. “No, Louise, I beg you, don’t!”

She caught up her petticoats with one hand and began to run down the next path and away from me, her hood flopping back over her shoulders and her dark curls bobbing. This I took as invitation enough to chase her, laughing still with my hands filled with the snow.

“Wait, Madame, you’ve forgotten something,” I called gaily, laughing so hard my words could scarce be understood. “Here, Madame, here, a most luscious favor for you!”