Bitter Greens

by Kate Forsyth

  Both Athénaïs and Françoise were forgotten. The first raged and wept; the second shook her head in quiet disapproval and said she would pray for the King’s soul.

  The King barely noticed. He had eyes only for Angélique. When she lost her hat while hunting and tied back her hair with her lace garter, it became at once the fashion to wear one’s hair loose and au naturel, bound back with a length of lace. Only Athénaïs refused to take up the new hairstyle, resolutely wearing her hair in the mass of tiny artificial ringlets that had once been copied so widely. Suddenly, she seemed out of touch with the times.

  Athénaïs took her revenge in her usual dramatic way, her pet bears ‘accidentally’ finding their way into Angélique’s sumptuous apartment and tearing it to pieces.

  All of this I observed because I had taken the position of Athénaïs’s lady-in-waiting, left vacant after Mademoiselle des Oeillets was dismissed for making a scene begging the King to recognise her illegitimate daughter. I had not known what else to do. I was penniless and ostracised after the failure of my engagement to the Marquis de Nesle, the Duchesse de Guise had refused to employ me again and my sister had written to tell me sadly that her husband refused to let me set foot inside his chateau.

  Kept busy tending to my demanding mistress’s needs, I had gradually seen my own scandal forgotten as other, newer scandals seized the court’s attention. Slowly, I had felt my terror at being accused of witchcraft fading. Athénaïs had reassured me by saying impatiently, ‘Half the women at court have bought aphrodisiacs before, and half the men too. No one cares about a little love spell, Charlotte-Rose.’

  Ashamed of how naive I had been, I determined to be as sophisticated and worldly as Athénaïs. I forgot all that my mother had taught me and spent my days gambling and drinking champagne and whispering scandal behind my fan as the King moved among us, immutable and enigmatic as gravity. He was the Sun King, and we could no sooner change our course than the smallest and most distant planet.

  All my hard-won sophistication had deserted me now. I remembered again how the court had turned out to watch the poor tortured body of the Marquise de Brinvilliers being burnt at the stake, and how the stench of her cooking flesh had tainted the air, making us all hide our faces in our pomanders. I was sick with fear that I too would burn, accused of using black magic to win a man’s love.

  ‘La Voisin has been arrested. They say she’ll be tortured to name her clients.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘They’ve found the bones of hundreds of aborted babies in her garden, and a laboratory where she made poisons.’

  ‘Sangdieu!’ Athénaïs started to her feet, knocking over the table and sending the decanter crashing to the floor. ‘I must go to Paris. Mordieu, it may be too late.’

  ‘You cannot go to Paris. I tell you, the police are there, at her house. They’ve already taken her to the Bastille.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I went … I went to a friend of La Voisin’s, someone who said she could help me get rid of Mademoiselle de Fontanges.’

  I felt cold. ‘Get rid of?’

  ‘Not kill her!’ Athénaïs said. ‘Of course not. No, I just wanted … I don’t know, for her to get the pox, or lose all her hair, or something. But I’m afraid the police will misunderstand my intentions. Louvois is my enemy. He resents my influence with the King and has done everything he can to bring me down. He will seize any chance to blacken my name. I must … I must stop him finding out.’

  I nodded, understanding at once. The Marquis de Louvois was the minister for war and the King’s spymaster. He was a big, broad, red-faced bully of a man, servile only to the King, and rude and peremptory to everyone else. He was a bitter enemy of Monsieur Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the chief minister, who was the King’s right-hand man and advised him on everything. The Marquis de Louvois wanted to be the King’s only advisor, so he worked secretly to bring Colbert down. Since Colbert was an old friend of Athénaïs’s family, and she had often supported his appeals to the King, Louvois hated Athénaïs too.

  ‘What will you do?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Find out what is happening. Make sure Colbert is keeping an eye on proceedings. He is my friend and will keep a check on Louvois. Maybe I can bribe the interrogators not to torture La Voisin. She’d say anything under torture. Anyone would.’

  I started to protest, thinking this a foolish idea, but she did not stay to listen. Without even affixing a patch to her face, she caught up her shawl and her purse and hurried out of the room.

  She returned a few days later, pale and haggard. When I asked her anxiously if all was well, she shrugged and said simply, ‘I have done all I can. We must just hope for the best.’ Then she made a little moue with her mouth and said, ‘Such a shame we cannot go and buy ourselves a good luck charm. But there’s not a fortune-teller left on the streets of Paris. They’ve seized them all.’

  The arrests and interrogations continued.

  The King ordered the chief of police to set up a Chambre Ardente, a name to strike terror into the heart of any Huguenot, as it was last employed as an Inquisition for heretics in the days of the St Bartholomew Massacre. Some said the Chambre Ardente was so named because interrogations took place in a room from which all daylight was excluded, the only illumination coming from flaming torches. Others said it was because so many of the accused ended up burning at the stake.

  The Chambre Ardente began its interrogations in April. One by one, the sorcerers and fortune-tellers of Paris were questioned. Most were tortured. Everyone in Versailles was hungry for details, but all was rumour. The King seemed imperturbable, though silver goblets were suddenly banished from court and crystal glass became all the fashion, since all knew that glass could not be impregnated with poison.

  Françoise spent her days praying and doing good works. Athénaïs spent her days gambling and alternatively storming at the King and trying to charm him. Neither strategy worked. The King was icily polite and gave Athénaïs a new position as the surintendante of the Queen’s household – an honour that allowed her to be treated as a duchess, including the right to sit down in the Queen’s presence. Athénaïs was in despair. ‘He always gives away such favours when an affair is over. He made Louise de la Vallière a duchess. It’s like paying off a servant. I won’t have it.’

  But she did not turn down the position, or rail against the King any more. Indeed, Athénaïs seemed weary and defeated. Her weight once again ballooned, and people began to make cruel jokes about the size of her thighs. In May, several of the Parisian fortune-tellers were burnt to death. The fourteen-year-old daughter of one was forced to watch so she would not be tempted to follow her mother’s career. Another witch, it was said, had died in the torture chamber. My sleep was tormented by nightmares.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Athénaïs said when I confided my fears to her while airing out her petticoats one evening. ‘You are nobly born. Your grandfather was the Duc de la Force, your father was the Marquis de Castelmoron. You are distant kin to the King himself. They will not dare accuse you.’

  In June, Madame de Poulaillon was tried at the Arsenal. She came from a noble Bordeaux family; my own mother had known her parents. Young and beautiful, she was accused of trying to poison her wealthy husband so she could marry her lover. By all accounts, the prosecutors had wanted her to suffer the punishment of torture and beheading, but the Chambre Ardente took pity on her and sent her to a severe prison for ‘fallen women’, where she was condemned to hard labour for the rest of her life. ‘She was nobly born,’ I told Athénaïs. ‘Yet they dared to put her on trial.’

  ‘Charlotte-Rose, this is not like you. What has happened to Dunamis?’

  I didn’t know. All my courage, all my boldness, seemed to have leaked away from me. I slept with a chair jammed under my door handle. I woke often at night, all my senses preternaturally acute, afraid I had heard someone standing over me, breathing. If someone touched me unexpectedly, I’d flinch. Worst of all
, I no longer stole time to write my stories. My quill was stuck hard in the dried ink of my inkpot. I did not even write to my sister.

  All summer, the tortures and executions continued. The Paris Gazette was full of hideous details. One witch had her right hand amputated before she was hanged. Another was strangled before being broken on the wheel. Yet another was tortured cruelly before being hanged. Meanwhile, La Voisin remained in prison, interrogated again and again and again. The royal spymaster Louvois brought reports to the council, but none of us could tell anything by the King’s face. He remained as impassive as ever. Only the sight of the beautiful Angélique seemed to soften his adamantine expression.

  On New Year’s Eve, at the beginning of 1680, Angélique arrived at mass dressed in a billowing gown of gold and blue brocade, trimmed with blue velvet ribbons. When the King arrived a few moments later, a buzz rose through the crowded chapel. He was wearing a coat of exactly the same material, embellished with blue velvet ribbons. The Queen uttered a distressed squeak and pressed her hand to her forehead. Athénaïs stood motionless, clutching her prayer-book so tightly her knuckles turned white. Françoise folded her hands in prayer, turning her eyes heavenwards.

  Angélique smiled and sat down.

  Normally, such a breach of etiquette would have enraged the King – a mere mademoiselle to sit in the presence of the Queen! But he only smiled and gestured for the mass to proceed.

  Two weeks later, Princesse Marie-Anne – the thirteen-year-old bastard daughter of the King’s first mistress, Louise de la Vallière – was married to her cousin, Louis Armand de Bourbon, the Prince de Conti.

  A grand ball was held at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye after the wedding. There were so many hundreds of guests that the royal carpenters built four new staircases from the terrace to the first-floor windows so everyone could mount to the ballroom without causing too great a crush. A long table was set up in the gallery, lined with golden baskets filled with sweet-scented hyacinths, jasmine and tulips, as if it was spring instead of the dead of winter. Outside, snow swirled down; inside was golden light and warmth and laughter and music. The King moved about the crowd, nodding with immense dignity and condescension to his guests. The Queen sat in her chair, a tiny dog on her lap, trying to pretend she did not care about all the thousands of livres being spent on the King’s illegitimate daughter. Princesse Marie-Anne herself danced as wildly as anyone else there, gulping down glass after glass of champagne and enduring much teasing about the wedding night to come. I wondered if she was afraid, but there was no sign of it on her face or in her bearing. She simply tossed her fair curls, so like her mother’s, and looked as stiff and pretty as a doll in a huge white dress glittering with diamonds.

  ‘He had best do as well by my daughters when it comes time for them to marry,’ Athénaïs said to me, sotto voce. ‘I swear I am about to expire with the heat! Charlotte-Rose, would you be a darling and go and find me another fan? These ostrich feathers look divine but just do not cool me down.’

  Indeed, her chubby cheeks were scarlet and her ringlets hung limply on her neck.

  ‘Of course,’ I said and made my way through the crowd. I saw Françoise standing with a few other devotees along the wall, looking like a line of owls with their drab clothes and disapproving faces. I smiled at her, but she did not smile back, just regarded me coolly. I did not let my smile fade but swept ahead, taking another glass of champagne as I went. I saw the King standing in a cluster of courtiers, all bowing and smiling and uttering fawning compliments. He was frowning and looking about him, and I wondered where his lovely young mistress was. Angélique was never normally found more than a few paces away from him.

  Ten minutes later, I was hurrying along one of the wide corridors, carrying Athénaïs’s fan, when I heard a low moan. I stopped and listened. Whimpering came from behind a half-closed door. I pushed open the door and saw the shape of a woman crouched on a low divan. I dropped the fan on a side table, took a candelabra and tiptoed in, my throat constricted. The light fell upon a golden head hanging low and a bowed back covered with oyster-coloured satin.

  ‘Mademoiselle?’ I asked.

  Angélique turned an anguished face towards me and lifted her hands. They were drenched with blood.

  ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve been feeling so sick … I had such bad cramps I thought I was going to die. Then all this blood gushed out.’

  I suddenly understood. My hand shook so much that the candelabra tilted and hot wax ran onto my skin. I put it down on a side table.

  ‘And there’s … there’s this thing … this monster …’ Angélique pointed at the ground. A blood-soaked shawl was all bundled up. My pulse banging, I unwrapped the shawl. Within lay a red naked creature, blind and mute like a newborn kitten. A tiny penis, scarlet in colour, was coiled like a snail between the floppy red legs. His bald head was much bigger than his spindly body, and a long, thin, slack cord hung from his stomach, its end ragged and torn and leaking blood. His foot was no bigger than my fingernail.

  ‘It’s a little boy,’ I managed to say. ‘You’ve had a baby.’

  ‘That’s not a baby. It’s all red and black. It’s an imp from hell. I’m being punished for my sin.’ She began to sob again. I saw that her satin dress was saturated with red from her lap to her knees.

  ‘Ssssh, don’t weep. You’ve had a miscarriage. That’s all it is.’ I wrapped the poor little limp thing back up again, my hands trembling.

  She shook her head, the tips of her loose golden curls stained with blood. ‘I don’t understand.’ She began to rock, clenching her hands together, pushing at her lap. ‘Aah, it hurts.’

  ‘We need to get you a doctor. Sit still. Please don’t cry any more.’ I looked around for some wine, but the room was empty of anything but paintings and statues and vases and silly little couches on legs so delicate they looked as if they would break if you sat on them. ‘Wait here, I’ll—’

  ‘Don’t leave me!’

  ‘I must. Just for a moment.’

  As I ran to the door, she screamed, ‘Don’t go, don’t leave me with that thing.’

  I found a footman and sent him for wine, for hot water, for napkins, for a doctor. ‘Find the King,’ I babbled, then thought better of it. ‘No, no, call Athénaïs, call the Marquise de Montespan.’

  Athénaïs did not let me down. Sweeping into the room, she understood the situation at a glance. She took Angélique’s hands in her own, chafing them gently. ‘There, there, all will be well. Were you all alone, you poor child? What an ordeal. Never mind, it’s over now.’

  I showed her the dead baby in the shawl.

  ‘How … how terrible. The poor little thing.’ I did not know if she meant the dead baby or her hated rival, the nineteen-year-old girl now weeping on her shoulder, ruining the priceless cloth with snot and blood and tears. Athénaïs looked up at me. ‘The King will be furious. He must not know, at least not until the wedding is over. We must get her to her bedchamber without a whiff of gossip. Will you help me?’

  I helped her lift Angélique to her feet. The couch beneath her was horribly stained. Athénaïs wrapped her in her own silver-embroidered shawl, I took up the dead baby and together we helped the King’s mistress stumble to her room.

  ‘I cannot stay here,’ Athénaïs said. ‘There will be a terrible scandal. It’ll be seen as a dreadful omen on the night of the King’s daughter’s wedding. If Mademoiselle de Fontanges were to die too …’

  Although Athénaïs spoke in an undertone, Angélique must have been listening, for she cried out now in terror. ‘Will I die? I don’t want to die.’

  ‘You’ll be fine. The doctor will be here soon.’ I did my best to soothe her but her fresh nightgown was already stained with a slow creeping red tide.

  ‘I must go. My absence will be remarked upon. Charlotte-Rose, you must not stay either. You can afford no more scandal.’

  I looked at Angélique, who clung to my ha
nd. ‘Don’t leave me!’

  Athénaïs went out, biting her lip. I took a deep breath and sat down beside Angélique, murmuring, ‘It’s all right, I won’t leave you. Rest easy now, the doctor will soon be here.’

  When the King’s chief physician, Antoine Daquin, at last arrived, his face and fingers shone with grease, and he carried a half-full glass of wine. His heavy wig was slightly askew, framing a pockmarked face with drooping jowls.

  He lifted the coverlet, glanced at the red pool in which Angélique lay and frowned at the sight of the tiny naked corpse.

  ‘What did you do to her, mademoiselle, to induce the bleeding?’ he demanded of me.

  ‘Nothing! I found her like this. All I did was help her to bed.’

  ‘If a child is aborted after its quickening, it is considered murder.’

  I steadied myself with one hand on the bedside table. ‘Mademoiselle de Fontanges did not seem to even know she was with child. I certainly did not know! Nor did I do anything except help her to bed and call for you. She has lost a lot of blood. Her gown was soaked in it.’

  He bent over Angélique. ‘Mademoiselle! What have you done? Did you not want your baby? To murder your own child is a grave sin on your conscience. What did you do? Did you drink a potion? Or insert a metal tool of some kind? Who helped you?’

  Angélique was so white even her lips were pale. ‘No! I didn’t hurt the baby. I didn’t know … I just felt sick … then there was all this blood … I thought I was being torn apart by demons.’