The Hurlyburly's Husband (25 page)

It was not known whether the King, on entering the Queen’s bedchamber, had wished to anoint himself with holy water and been surprised by what he found on his brow and lips, or whether it was because he had seen, on Marie-Thérèse’s desk, the man’s pipe still smoking next to an abandoned periwig, along with the glass, the empty carafe, the upturned chocolate box and the traces left by muddy heels on the precious wood, or his wife’s bare bottom turned towards the astral ceiling: but for whatever, or all these reasons, the Jupiterian voice had roared, booming in the Versailles night like thunder, ‘Lauzun!’

‘I don’t think I like my son. He is a harpy. His ferocious ambition should make him the most perfect and refined of courtiers, despite the fact we live in a century where among many the art of vileness seems impossible to surpass. On my return journey from Paris, I stopped to visit him at his Jesuit boarding school in Moulins. I was not at all pleased with Louis-Antoine.’

‘Is it because we’ve gone hunting, Captain, that you’re thinking about him? It puts you in mind of the time when we tried to teach him—’

‘He told me that I must no longer come to visit him, for it would harm his access to the court.’

‘And … the favourite, does he see her?’

‘She has granted him a pension of six thousand
écus
and often has him brought to Versailles. He is very lucky at games of chance, and is suspected of contributing to her fortune. This year Françoise promised him a lieutenant’s commission in the first infantry of the King’s regiment when he turns eighteen.’

‘Eighteen years old already? How time flies…’ Cartet shook his head in disbelief as they arrived at the huge rock where the two paths crossed in the marquis’s forest.

Down in the valley, bent old women gnawed at cabbage stalks by the side of the fields and scavenged for walnut shells to make bread. The second crop of hay would bring the beasts a bit more forage for the winter, which the old folk predicted would be worse than any other within living memory.

‘Versailles ignores the poverty of the country …’ lamented Montespan, turning back to his former sergeant, who had dropped his hunting net amongst the leaves; they would stretch it between two trees to catch wild game.

The Gascon stood at one end of the woven mesh and took hold of a rope that he began to tie around a tree trunk.

‘Leave that,’ said Cartet. ‘I’ll do it.’

The marquis went on tying his sailor’s knot.

‘Louis-Antoine confessed to me , “I have succumbed to the love of grandeur. ’Tis the sweetest of thoughts to me.” D’Antin has his absurd notions. Not many men so completely dishonour themselves as my boy does,’ said the father regretfully, testing the resistance of the stretched net with his hand as he lowered it to the ground. ‘I don’t know where this comes from. I—’

Cartet put his hand over the cuckold’s mouth. ‘Sssh!’

‘What? What’s happening?’ murmured Louis-Henri through the steward’s stubby fingers before he pulled his hand away.

‘I can hear some noise approaching.’

‘Animals?’

‘No.’

‘Poachers?’

‘No. They would have taken greater care with regard to the wind, and now I can smell them,’ said Cartet, sniffing; his moustache, like an insect’s antennae, seemed to stand to attention. ‘Hunters of men, there are four of them, not brigands, either. I scent their putrid smell of the tannery and the military wash house. It’s a squad of dragoons coming for you, in response to your escapade in Versailles, Captain … Methinks ’tis the King’s shadow drawing closer. They’ll enter the clearing from the left.’

‘Hide behind that thick oak tree, Cartet, I shall wait for them at the crossroads.’

What vigilance the marquis required to stay alive! The ambushed dragoons finally emerged from behind a thicket, with a flash of unsheathed swords.

One of them, who had a thin moustache like a line of charcoal beneath his nose, seemed to be the leader of these killers and declared in a terrible voice, ‘To the death, cuckold, I will skewer you, and your wife is a whore!’

Louis-Henri acted the part of a man whose fear of weapons rendered him impervious to insults. As they advanced, he withdrew, calling to the leader, ‘One against four, brave sir, let us meet elsewhere, where our swords will not all be on one side.’

Then, turning towards the thick oak tree, he fled at a run, beginning to feel the effects of age in his legs. The King’s young official assassins, who were more lively, set off after him, swords drawn and held straight ahead. Just as they reached the thick oak tree, Cartet raised the net and they were caught in the mesh, whilst the leader’s drawn pistol fell and slid on the ground. The steward took his long dagger from his boot and stabbed one of the men. Then he fought another, who was very strong, with his bare hands. They grappled, becoming entangled in the net. Montespan had reappeared and he picked up the pistol and rammed the barrel against the leader’s teeth.

‘I don’t like wicked things to be said to my face about my wife. You’ll be excommunicated like a werewolf.’

He fired the pistol into the charcoal-streak moustache, which vanished.

‘This is how one deals with those who dare misspeak their mind.’

Next to him, the former sergeant, spattered with brains, was stunned. ‘Did you not tell me, Marquis, that before meeting your wife you were of a very peace-loving nature?’ Then he went on to snap the neck of another dragoon with the crook of his arm, whilst the last one escaped. The pistol was empty, so Montespan hurled his hunting knife deep into the fugitive’s shoulder. As they tried to decide whether to pursue the still running youth, Cartet reassured the Gascon.

‘Stay here, Captain, he’s done for, and if he goes in that direction he is not about to find any help in the immense tangle of forest that goes as far as the Bielsa pass. The wolves will get him. Whoever finds his body will be a clever sort. What should we do with the dead?’

The marquis was standing by the huge rock and he raised the grate of the underground escape route.

‘Let’s drop them in here. In any event, this tunnel no longer serves, since the intendant had the entrance in the courtyard demolished.’

After folding up the net to sling it across his back, Cartet headed along the path towards the chateau’s smoking chimneys and complained of pain in his joints.

‘I think I’m getting too old to run about with young bloods. Faith, ’tis no longer my age to sport with such rowdy knaves – or else it’s a sign of a deep freeze …’

Montespan, on his right, sighed.

‘My son is ashamed of his father …When I tell him I love him in spite of everything, he sniggers and cackles malevolently. I do not know where he gets it from ...’

The steward, his bearskin boots scraping against the loose stones, said nothing.

In the ruined chateau of Bonnefont, with its collapsing roof, the cold was almost worse than in the peasants’ cottages. The huge residence could not be heated, with its crumbling rooms, its draughty corridors and its closets. Water would have frozen in the jug and wine in the bottle had they not been placed by the hearth, where the fire hissed with a continuous sound like a spinning wheel twisting the hemp.

At the end of the long table in the kitchen, Dorothée was standing with a wide brush in her hand and was covering all the clothes and shoes with
cirure
, a mixture of wax and tallow used for waterproofing. She raised her green eyes to the frozen window and saw the flickering of a torch flame in the distance, coming nearer.

‘Hello, there’s someone coming!’

The marquis was in his armchair at the other end of the table, his back to the window, and he turned round. Cartet was sitting on a bench to his right, and had been in the middle of advising him to chop down those trees whose wood had rotted, for otherwise they would be utterly worthless; and they should inspect the woodpigeons’ roosts. Madame Larivière was finishing washing up the supper dishes and putting them away. The door opened.

The fine veil of mist in the courtyard was suddenly lit up, swirled above the cobblestones and rose in the black night. A man came in.

‘Brrr! I wanted to pull the chain of your bell next to the gate but it is frozen.’

‘Lauzun?’ Montespan was dumbfounded. ‘You here – but to what do I owe the honour? And how have you been all these years?’

‘I was briefly condemned to life imprisonment at the fort of Pignerol,’ said the visitor, who wore a heavy fur coat, as he went to warm his hands above the flames in the fireplace. ‘I escaped, was recaptured and then everything was forgiven. Here I am again buried in the King’s trifling paperwork. You should follow my example …’ smiled Lauzun, spinning on his heels and opening his coat to display a marvellous suit of brocade decorated with pink and gold ribbons. ‘His Majesty has given me a commission as colonel of the dragoons.’

‘Dragoons?’ echoed the marquis. ‘Are you thirsty, or hungry? I think there’s still some soup in the pot, with some crusts of bread made from ferns in it.’

‘Just a bit of hot wine, if you please, Madame,’ the colonel asked the cook. ‘Good even, Mademoiselle,’ he said to Dorothée, who could not take her eyes off him.

He greeted the steward as he sat down by him on the bench. He was a small, erect man whose dirty-blond wig was spattered with snow and dripped beneath the wide-brimmed felt hat he wore; he looked reluctant. By his side was a large satchel, which he now opened.

‘On the subject of dragoons, just before the winter I sent four of ’em from Versailles for a walk in your woods. This is all I have found of ’em!’ he continued, removing from his satchel a human vertebra that he set down on the table.

‘’Tisn’t a great deal,’ Montespan was forced to concede, unruffled.

‘Where exactly did you find it?’ asked Cartet, intrigued.

‘Well beyond the marquis’s woods, in the immense forest between here and the Bielsa pass.’

The former sergeant, amazed, turned to face the visitor full on and watched him.

‘Next to it I also found this,’ said Lauzun, placing on the table a shoulder blade run through with a white weapon.

‘Do you intend to show us many more of these disgusting objects?’ complained Madame Larivière. ‘What is the point of cleaning the house if you—’

‘No. That is all. There was nothing else.’

‘Oh, look, Cartet, it’s my hunting knife! I thought I had lost it. Yes, it’s definitely mine. See, it has been carved with my coat of arms, with the horns added. The wind and the storm must have carried it and flung it into the bone.’

‘It’s true we’ve had some frightful weather,’ said the steward. ‘Part of the chateau roof blew away. First there was a frost that lasted nearly two months during which the rivers froze, and the seashores were able to bear the weight of horsecarts. A false thaw melted the snow that had covered the land, then was followed by a sudden return of the frost, which was even more severe than before and lasted another three weeks. That second frost was so harsh that all was lost. The fruit trees were ruined. There are no more walnut trees, or olive trees, or vines. The animals died in the stables and the game in the woods. The gardens perished, and all the seeds in the ground. There is devastation everywhere. Everyone is hoarding their old grain: the price of bread is increasing in proportion to the despair over the coming harvest.’

‘I know,’ said Lauzun. ‘’Tis the same all over France. In Auvergne, the famine is so great that women devour their dead children. During my journey, at the post houses I saw people arrive so exhausted and weakened by hunger that when they were given a crust of bread they could not even unclench their teeth to eat. There are dark years ahead of us … The renewed persecution of the Protestants, the deterioration of the climate, with direct repercussions on the harvest, the common folk crushed by taxes and poverty, and ruinous wars blazing on every border.’

‘Really?’ said Madame Larivière, astonished, her hands on her hips. ‘The King is starting conflicts?’

‘At Versailles,’ replied Lauzun, without turning to look at her, ‘the work has just been completed, and Europe is greatly concerned because this means that the money will go to finance new wars. It is as if the King were beginning to weary of something …’ continued the colonel, staring at Montespan.

Louis-Henri was contemplating the objects on the table: the mustard pot – a little earthenware barrel – next to the vertebra; the salt in a small shell-shaped bowl next to the hunting knife rammed in the shoulder blade, and he asked the cook to bring the bottle of ratafia and some glasses.

‘So, you have not seen my dragoons?’ Lauzun persisted, blowing on his wine to cool it.

‘Nay,’ replied Cartet. ‘If there were four of them, we’d certainly have seen them.’

‘And if that were the case, you would tell me.’

‘Oh, yes. Anyway the last time we went to the woods, that was … well now, it must have been the day before the first big frost: the day before Saint Thomas’s Day.’

‘I believe that was the day they were in the forest also.’

‘They must have got lost, and the wolves ate them,’ concluded the steward, pouring out the drink.

Madame Larivière prodded about with the fire tongs, and the flames rose high and lively in the chateau in the Pyrenees. The alcohol oiled their speech and loosened their tongues. Dorothée admired the noble sparkle of the rings on the visitor’s fingers and, by the table legs, his magnificent shoes encrusted with pearls and diamonds. The cook was anxious, for she thought there was too much drinking around the table.

As the evening passed, the bottle emptied. Eventually, by dint of all they had swallowed, the colonel and the marquis were inebriated. Lauzun merely grew all the more serious, whilst Montespan was so dazed and heavy that he leant on the table and said, ‘So now my wife’s lover wants to send me to kingdom come! Quickly, Madame Larivière, thaw the inkwell so that I might write my last will and testament. I would like to have everything in order, should an “accident” befall me – if I were to collide with a sceptre, for example …’

‘And in this will, do you plan to invoke His Majesty?’ asked the colonel of the dragoons.