An extract from Monsieur de Montespan
Jean Teulé’s forthcoming novel tells the hilarious, bawdy and touching story of a good man who loved too well and dared challenge the absolute power of the Sun King himself.
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But love is not enough to maintain their hedonistic lifestyle, and the couple soon face huge debts. When Madame de Montespan is offered the chance to become lady-in-waiting to the Queen at Versailles, she seizes this opportunity to turn their fortunes round.
Too late, Montespan discovers that his ravishing wife has caught the eye of King Louis XIV. As everyone congratulates him on his new status of cuckold by royal appointment, the Marquis is broken-hearted. He vows to wreak revenge on the monarch and win back his adored Marquise.
With this extraordinary novel, Jean Teulé has restored a ridiculed figure from history to the rightful position of hero…
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At first light of the silent dawn, through the thick fog shrouding the field, d’Antin heard the silver-buckled shoes of the Chevalier de Saint-Aignan crunching over the frozen puddles. He turned to his neighbour Noirmoutier for his flask of Schaffhausen water, excellent for treating apoplexy.
The cockerel had not yet crowed, and there was not a sound in all of Paris. Standing in a row against a hedge of frozen hazel trees, the supporters of the offending party, Chalais, discerned the pale misty figures of La Frette’s clique emerging from a vast hay barn. They, too, moved forward in a row, straight towards their adversaries.
Soon they would be a breath away, for the rectangular field was narrow. To the right were sleeping mansions. To the left, the charterhouse of Boulevard Saint-Germain, with its cloisters and cells, and the monks whom they must not alert by shouting pointless invectives.
In any event, there was no more to be said. They had moved beyond words; this was a duel to the death, and d’Antin, beneath his heavy curled wig, was not feeling well. Yet, he struck a fine pose in his scarlet cloak, which was thrown over one shoulder, and his black hat, its brim turned up in the Catalan style, placing one foot forward, his hand on his hip. But his fingers were trembling. As soon as the duel had been called, his eyelids had started to swell and an erysipelatous rash had broken out on his forehead. His ears oozed, a fearsome scab had appeared on his neck, and beneath his chin and armpits he itched with scurf.
Chance had paired off the golden youths. La Frette would confront Chalais, Amilly would face Flamarens. Noirmoutier would take on Arnelieu, and d’Antin saw the Chevalier de Saint-Aignan striding towards him.
He was like a human bird with his mane of Greek curls and his splendid plumage, despite the eye lost to contamination by the whores in the brothels. He looked his adversary up and down, never slowing his pace through the fog, and his confident face betrayed no fear. He was most impressive as, sword in hand, he prepared to avenge his brother’s honour. He took long strides, thumbing the blade of his weapon. D’Antin wondered when he would stop and stand on guard, but the other fellow continued on his way as if he intended to go through the hedge of hazel trees. Thwack! D’Antin felt the bone of his forehead burst under the tip of the sword as it passed over his entire head. It dragged his wig behind his skull, and he tried to catch it – how stupid … How stupid to die like this in the frosty dawn, falling flat on his back in his pearl-grey breeches and pink silk stockings fastened with garters, when all around there was nothing but carnage. To his right, his three partners were moaning in the grass. Their adversaries departed.
Little Chalais got to his feet, twisting his ankles because of his thick soles. Bleeding profusely, he slapped a hand to his belly. Flamarens dragged a bloody leg behind him and hobbled towards the pale outline of a carriage. Noirmoutier, with a torn shoulder, ran in the opposite direction, to his horse.
‘Where shall you go?’ asked the other two.
‘Portugal.’
The cockerel crowed. Cartwrights, blacksmiths, carters, weavers and saddlers opened the shutters of their little workshops. The fog lifted. The sun rose above the roofs of the mansions, to reveal a body lying on the ground…
At noon, the vertical shadows were sharp, and fell in triangles on the crowd from the roofs all around Place de Grève. The silence was impressive; windows had been rented at auction. Guards stood neatly in order around a platform.
‘That makes six!’
The hooded executioner’s axe fell so swiftly and cleanly that Saint-Aignan’s head remained poised on the block. For a moment the executioner believed he had missed and would have to strike a second time, but then the head collapsed onto the other five scattered on the floor of the platform, like a pile of cabbages. It looked as if, reconciled at last, they were kissing one another – on the forehead, the ears, the lips (and that is what they should have done in the first place, in their lifetime). The executioner wiped his forehead and turned to speak to someone just below the platform.
‘Monsieur de La Reynie, six in a row, that’s too much! I am not the Machine du monde, after all …’
‘Don’t complain. There should have been eight,’ sniggered the lieutenant of the Paris police, the prosecutor in cases of duelling, as he walked away towards the Châtelet.
‘Monsieur le marquis, there is no greater violation, no greater sacrilege of the laws of heaven than the frenzied rage of a duel. Do they not teach you that in your native land of Guyenne?!’
The young Gascon thus roundly admonished in the courtroom at the Châtelet gazed through the window at the late-afternoon sun . . . The only person seated in one of the courtroom’s chairs, he sighed, ‘You may say that to me, yet I am not involved, for I am not of a quarrelsome nature. Nor was my brother, for that matter—’
‘And yet he took part in a duel!’ La Reynie interrupted, brutally. ‘The nobility must cease, absolutely, from drawing their swords at the slightest provocation! These duels are decimating the French aristocracy, and since 1651 a royal edict has outlawed this bloody manner of avenging one’s honour. Duels are, first of all, in defiance of His Majesty’s authority, for his authority alone can decide who must die, and how we must live!’
Solemn and erect, La Reynie had reached this point in his sermon when, at the back of the room, behind the young marquis’s back, a door creaked, and he heard footsteps on the tiles. The disheartened Gascon looked down at his red-heeled shoes and caught a glimpse of a rustling cloak and petticoats as they sat down to his right.
‘Forgive me for being late, Monsieur de La Reynie,’ she said; ‘I but lately heard the news.’
Her voice was soft and even. The prosecutor declared, ‘Mademoiselle, if your future husband, Louis-Alexandre de La Trémoille, Marquis de Noirmoutier, returns to France, he shall be beheaded.’
The Gascon heard his neighbour unclasp her cloak and lower her hood onto her shoulders, then he looked up at La Reynie and saw he was speechless, his mouth agape; on either side of his aquiline nose, his eyes were transfixed. Who could she be, this young woman able to so discomfit such a prosecutor? Was she a Medusa who transformed men into stone? But La Reynie gathered his wits about him and came to stand opposite the Gascon, who was wiping his damp palms against his white satin breeches.
‘Monsieur,’ declared the prosecutor, ‘His Majesty’s investigation will be merciless, and will go so far as to rule in absentia against the memory of your brother, the late lord of Antin.’
The marquis replied docilely, ‘With all due respect and all imaginable zeal, I am the very humble, very obedient and most indebted servant of His Serene Highness …’
His neighbour enquired of the prosecutor, ‘How were you informed of the duel?’
‘The lantern-bearers who wait outside the spectacles and balls are our best informers,’ smiled the chief of police.
The crestfallen marquis sadly lifted his plumed hat from the chair to his left, stood up and turned at last to face his neighbour, who had also stood up. Zounds! It was all he could do not to sit down again. She was not merely beauteous, she was beauty personified. The twenty-two-year-old Gascon’s breath was taken away. He had always had a preference for plump blondes, and he was utterly captivated by this voluptuous marvel, who must have been his own age. A milky complexion, the green eyes of the Southern Seas, blond hair curled in the peasant style … Her gown was cut low in a deep décolletage from her shoulders, the sleeves stopping at the elbows in a cascade of lace. She was wearing gloves. The marquis could barely contain himself. He set his white hat on top of his enormous wig shaped like a horse’s mane (which weighed more than two pounds and was terribly hot), only to find that he had put it on backwards: the ostrich feather now hung in front of his face. In his effort to swivel his headpiece he dislodged his wig, which now covered one eye. The girl had a charming laugh, of the sort to rouse tenderness deep in any heart. He bid farewell to La Reynie and then – ‘Goodbye, Madame! Oh . . .’ – he excused himself as the amused young lady strode and bounced to keep pace with his gangling figure loping, knock-kneed, towards the far end of the hall. He tried to open the door for her but only just managed not to thump her, decided to let her go out first, then went ahead himself. She was immediately charmed by such gauche thoughtfulness – not to mention the adoring gazes he bestowed upon her.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked, with a smile.
‘That way, um, this way, and you?’
‘Straight ahead.’
On leaving the Palais de Justice at the Châtelet, they were immediately caught up in the noise, mud and stench, the extraordinary bustle, the permanent commotion of the city. Open sewers, mounds of excrement and pigs foraging in the rubbish meant that the perfumed gloves or bouquets of violets placed beneath one’s nose were indispensable as a remedy for nausea. But the marquis was oblivious to all that.
‘I have no more brothers. The eldest, Roger, succumbed during the siege of Mardyck. Just de Pardaillan died in the army, and now the Marquis d’Antin has been killed in a duel …’
‘And I have no more future husband,’ echoed the fair lady. The air she breathed out was purer than the air she breathed in. ‘Noirmoutier clearly cares more about his own skin than about me.’ Her profile was proud and noble. Rebellious blond strands escaped from beneath the hood of her cloak. Her nostrils quivered like the wings of a bird. Her laughing mouth, not a little scheming, had a delightful effect on the marquis, as the sun dipped behind the trees …
Their double loss had brought them together. While they made their way past song merchants – selling drinking songs, dining songs, songs for dancing or hailing the news – the two young people spoke of the deceased man and the exiled fiancé, finding ways to compliment, to please, to console. A group of Savoyard street minstrels proclaimed ‘Bring me back my sparrow, fair redhead’ and ‘Ah, how vast is the world’.
‘’Tis all the more exasperating,’ nodded the lovely blond head, ‘that when they brought the news to me, on Rue Saint-Honoré, I was trying on my wedding gown, for next Sunday. I do not know what I shall do with it.’
‘’Twould be a great pity, were it to go to ruin …’
A street performer took a swallow of water and spat it back out in a spray of various colours and scents.
‘What I mean, that is,’ stammered the marquis, ‘it is because of the moths. ’Tis true, sometimes one puts away new garments in a chest and then later, when one unfolds them again, they are ruined, consumed by grubs and full of holes . . . And then one regrets one did not wear them …’
The demoiselle in her pointed high-heeled slippers contemplated the fumbling Gascon. He amused her, and was not without charm.
‘Might you be implying that you …?’
‘Well, one doesn’t fall in love only once in a lifetime.’
A pâtissierstood in his doorway, proudly adjusting his appearance: a ribbon for a cravat, a beret with a large knot, and a sprig of flowers to attract the ladies. The abandoned fiancée placed her head on the marquis’s shoulder in an intimate gesture. And the marquis, an assiduous devotee of the lansquenet circles and reversi tables in the hôtels particuliers of the Marais, now thought he was playing the finest game on earth.Astonished and adrift, on a square teeming with horse carts and ecclesiastics, he scratched his periwig.
‘Is it not paradise here?’
‘Ah, no, Monsieur, in paradise there wouldn’t be so many bishops!’
They burst out laughing. For his part, the marquis was certain that an angel had blessed him, and he raised his eyes to heaven.
++
The vaults of the church of Saint-Sulpice, forming a lofty sky of stone, resounded with laughter. After the reading of the Gospel, the blonde in the red pearl-embroidered dress had knelt before the altar alongside the marquis in lavender grey, then exploded with laughter, murmuring in his ear, ‘You know what we’re kneeling on, you know how we forgot the embroidered silk cushions and had them sent for from Rue des Rosiers, at the Hôtel Mortemart …’
‘Yes?’ asked the young Gascon.
‘The servant made a mistake. She brought the dogs’ cushions.’
‘No?!’
They laughed and dusted off the dog hairs like mischievous little children dressed up in garments of embroidered silk. Theirguests were seated behind them at the heart of the vast church, which was still under construction. The Gascon, in a fine light- coloured horsehair wig, radiated happiness. His bride, graceful and glowing in the gentle brilliance of her twenty-two years, was still full of the candour of childhood.
Near the entrance to the church, sitting on a prie-dieu, a chubby-cheeked duc with protuberant green eyes and a small, full-lipped mouth exclaimed ecstatically to his neighbour, ‘My daughter is extremely amusing! One is never bored when she is present. Do you see that obese boy in the first row? That is my eldest, Vivonne. The other day, when I was reproaching my daughter for not taking enough exercise, she replied,
“How can you say that? Not a day goes by that I do not walk four times round my brother!”’
The man to whom he was speaking, an elderly man with a great hooked nose that seemed to take up his entire face, enquired, ‘Is that your wife next to your son? She seems most exceedingly pious …’
‘Oh, indeed,’ said the husband, ‘where adultery is concerned, I believe I am safe before mankind, but before God, I surely wear my horns!’
‘Look at my wife, then: she prefers to live away from me, the great Chrestienne de Zamet there on the right – she’s the same,’ grumbled the man with the hooked nose. ‘She knows perfectly how to season a mother’s tenderness with that of a bride of Jesus Christ! Ha-ha-ha!’
The two fathers of the wedded couple guffawed; they were witty and cheerfully debauched. Someone in front of them turned round with a frown, then whispered to his neighbour, ‘Those two have found perfect company in each other …’
And the young couple had found perfect company, too, now married only eight days after meeting. They pledged their troth on a wintry Sunday before the priest and four trusty witnesses. The cleric inscribed the date – 28 January 1663 – in the parish register, then the names of the turtledoves, proclaiming them out loud: ‘Françoise de Rochechouart de Mortemart, also known as Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente, and …’
The voluptuous blonde Françoise took up the goose quill as it was handed to her and, as the priest pronounced the name of her spouse – ‘Louis-Henri de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Marquis de …’ – for the first time she signed her new name: Montespan.
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An apple-green gilded carriage arrived at Rue Saint-Benoît, its doors adorned with the coat of arms of the Marquis de Montespan. The vehicle rattled along the rutted street, its body supported by thick leather straps on a four-wheel axle.
Dustmen, collecting the city’s waste that would be tipped from their carts into the Seine, blocked the vehicle’s progress. Through their windows, Françoise and Louis-Henri contemplated the world outside. The quartier teemed with life, full of craftsmen with their displays and workshops and noise. The dustmen’s rags were hardly different from those of the beggars they passed. Françoise told Louis-Henri, ‘When I was a little girl, one holy-day my mother wanted me to wash the feet of the poor outside a church. I went up to the first pauper and could not bring myself to bend down. I stepped back, in tears. Poverty was there before me, inescapable, and it filled the child I was with revulsion. I did not wash the feet of the poor.’
Suddenly the way was clear, the carriage moved on and turned into Rue Taranne, stopping almost immediately on the left beneath a wooden sign depicting a wig. Louis-Henri climbed down from the carriage, saying, ‘The misfortunes of the people are the will of God, and do not warrant that we should waste our feelings upon them.’
He went round the vehicle to open the door for Françoise. ‘All my feelings are for you.’
He gazed on her admiringly and bit his lip.
‘I do feel I love you more than anyone on earth is wont to love, but I only know how to tell you so in the way that everyone on earth would tell you. I despair that all declarations of love so resemble one another.’
The marquise, lovely in her flowered hat, stepped down, reaching for the hand he was holding out to her.
‘That’s sweet …’ But then she began to poke fun, mincing and simpering in exaggerated fashion. ‘It is the greatest honour to be shown such admiration! Oh, I do love such heady stuff; I do love to be loved!’
Louis-Henri adored the way she used jest to hide emotion. While the carriage was manoeuvring – the coachman gripping the mare’s bit – to pull in beneath the roof of the stables beyond the well in the courtyard, Françoise went through the wigmaker’s door and exclaimed, ‘Monsieur Joseph Abraham, our de-lightful landlord! We have mislaid our key yet again. May we come through the shop?’
‘Ten o’clock in the morning and ’tis only now that you two are coming home? Did you spend the night in the Marais again, playing bassette and bagatelle! I hope you won a few écuswithal, this time.’
‘Nay, we lost everything!’
Louis-Henri came into the shop. It was a clean place, all of beige and ochre, where long bunches of hair hung from the ceiling, almost touching the floor. A ‘red-heel’, his shaved crown covered with lard to avoid irritation and parasites, stood waiting for the periwig that an employee had nearly finished curling. An ecclesiastic stepped back to admire his platinum-blond tonsured wig in a mirror he was holding. Next to him, jovial and good-natured, Joseph Abraham saw his wife turn to Françoise and say, ‘But ’tis open, my dear! The cook, Madame Larivière, has been waiting with your new servant to serve dinner since yesterday evening. I do believe she prepared a squab bisque and minced capon.’
‘Ah, I know she did, but one card game led to another … We thought we might win back our losses, but . . .We’ll go through the door at the back of the shop, shall we, Madame Abraham? Farewell, gentlemen! We’re off to bed!’
Six apprentices on the wigmaker’s mezzanine, leaning over the railing, admired the departure of Françoise’s deep décolletage from above. They were rooted to the spot. The wigmaker clapped his hands: ‘Now then!’
Françoise’s bodice gaped open, possibly accidentally, then she entered the dark stairwell. Louis-Henri smiled. ‘As lovely as the day, with a devilish-fine spirit!’
Her proud rounded breasts gave off the only true perfume: her very own scent. Louis-Henri extended a hand towards the radiant bosom.
‘Oh, my! Take heed, Monsieur!’ The marquise pretended to be offended. ‘Do not forget it is scarcely two years since I left the convent.’
‘And so?’
‘Let me see, first of all, what your face is like: your chin is too long, your nose is too big, your eyelids droop, you have freckles. Taken separately, all of that is hardly handsome, but all together rather pleasing. All right. You may go up …’
Her moiré skirt flowed like a tide over the first steps of the stairway. Louis-Henri, standing by the copper ball of the newel post, played the sulking husband.
‘I’m not sure now … With a wife who is from the noblesse de robe, I don’t know … I could have found many others who would have better suited my position, in the matter of the dowry, for I am from the old nobility! Montespan … my noble family goes back to the Crusades, to the battles between the Comtes de Bigorre and the Comtes de Foix, or against Simon de Monfort! Whereas a Mortemart … a mistress made for moonlight, a woman of secret trysts and borrowed beds … Yes, really I hesitate …’
‘You’re right,’ laughed Françoise. ‘To marry for love means to marry disadvantageously, carried away by a blind passion. Let us speak of it no more,’ she concluded, climbing a few more steps with an exaggerated sway of her hips.
The marquis’s pupils dilated at the thought of the beauty of her body beneath the silk of her deep-pleated dress. Like a horse, he began to breathe through his nose whilst the fair woman began a recital of her attractions.
‘Do you know that I am wearing three petticoats? Observe the first one, this pale-blue thing, it is known as the modesty,’ she said, lightly lifting the back of her dress to reveal a skirt that she then raised in turn. ‘The second, dark blue, is called the saucy …’
Louis-Henri would have liked to seize his wife round the waist but she slipped through his fingers. Her flexibility, her agility, were admirable. The newlyweds’ apartments had been divided up vertically over three storeys – a nonsensical distribution due to the narrow plots allotted in Paris, which obliged the inhabitants to build upwards. Such comings and goings in the stairway! The firewood stored in the cellar had to be carried up, as had the water, in buckets drawn from the well in the courtyard. The marquis was suddenly lustful, and ogled his wife, roaring comically and rolling his eyes.
‘I have done all I can not to offend God and not to succumb to my passion,’ he explained, climbing a few steps. ‘But I am forced to confess that it has become stronger than my reason. I can no longer resist its violence, and I do not even feel inclined to do so … Raah!’
‘Help!’ Madame de Montespan fled up the stairs, pursued by her husband who galloped after her traitorous petticoats, which she raised too high, offering the tempting vision of the fruit. All her petticoats were very light indeed and lifted at the slightest breeze, wafting a perfume of tuberose and waxed wood inside the dark stairwell.
On the first floor, to the left, a door opened onto a salon modestly furnished with folding seats made of webbing and heavy canvas, a mirror from Venice and a gaming table with several drawers. On a green-painted wall hung a framed tapestry from Rouen, mere cotton threads now, but representing the story of Moses. Louis-Henri chased after Françoise in a clattering of steps. There was a bulge in the front of his grey satin breeches.
The marquise turned round, saw it and cried, ‘Dear Lord!’
November 16th, 2010 at 9:03 am
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