The Historical Nights' Entertainment: First Series

by Rafael Sabatini

  VI. THE NIGHT OF WITCHCRAFT--Louis XIV and Madame De Montespan

  If you scrape the rubbish-heap of servile, coeval flattery that usuallysmothers the personality of a monarch, you will discover a few kingswho have been truly great; many who have achieved greatness because theywere wisely content to serve as masks for the great intellects of theirtime; and, for the rest, some bad kings, some foolish kings, and someridiculous kings. But in all that royal gallery of history you willhardly find a more truly absurd figure than that of the resplendent RoiSoleil, the Grand Monarque, the Fourteenth Louis of France.

  I am not aware that he has ever been laughed at; certainly never to theextent which he deserves. The flatterers of his day, inevitable productsof his reign, did their work so thoroughly that even in secret they donot appear to have dared to utter--possibly they did not even dareto think--the truth about him. Their work survives, and when you haveassessed the monstrous flattery at its true worth, swept it aside andcome down to the real facts of his life, you make the discovery thatthe proudest title their sycophancy could bestow and his own fatuityaccept--Le Roi Soleil, the Sun-King--makes him what indeed he is: aking of opera bouffe. There is about him at times something almostreminiscent of the Court buffoons of a century before, who puffedthemselves out with mock pride, and aped a sort of sovereignty to excitelaughter; with this difference, however, that in his own case it was notintended to be amusing.

  A heartless voluptuary of mediocre intelligence, he contrived to wraphimself in what Saint-Simon has called a "terrible majesty." He wasobsessed by the idea of the dignity, almost the divinity--of kingship. Icannot believe that he conceived himself human. He appears to haveheld that being king was very like being God, and he duped the world byceremonials of etiquette that were very nearly sacramental. We findhim burdening the most simple and personal acts of everyday life with asuccession of rites of an amazing complexity. Thus, when he rose in themorning, princes of the blood and the first gentlemen of France were inattendance: one to present to him his stockings, another to profferon bended knee the royal garters, a third to perform the ceremony ofhanding him his wig, and so on until the toilette of his plump, notunhandsome person was complete. You miss the incense, you feel that somenoble thurifer should have fumigated him at each stage. Perhaps he neverthought of it.

  The evil fruits of his reign--evil, that is to say, from the pointof view of his order, which was swept away as so much anachronisticrubbish--did not come until a hundred years later. In his own day Francewas great, and this not because but in spite of him. After all, he wasnot the absolute ruler he conceived himself. There were such capable menas Colbert and Louvois at the King's side'; there was the great geniusof France which manifests itself when and as it will, whatever theregime--and there was Madame de Montespan to whose influence not alittle of Louis's glory may be ascribed, since the most splendid yearsof his reign were those between 1668 and 1678 when she was maitresse entitre and more than Queen of France. The women played a great part atthe Court of Louis XIV, and those upon whom he turned his dark eyes werein the main as wax under the solar rays of the Sun-King. But Madame deMontespan had discovered the secret of reversing matters, so that in herhands it was the King who became as wax for her modelling. It is withthis secret--a page of the secret history of France that we are hereconcerned.

  Francoises Athenais de Tonnay-Charente had come to Court in 1660 asa maid of honour to the Queen. Of a wit and grace to match her superbbeauty, she was also of a perfervid piety, a daily communicant, a modelof virtue to all maids of honour. This until the Devil tempted her. Whenthat happened, she did not merely eat an apple; she devoured an entireorchard. Pride and ambition brought about her downfall. She shared theuniversal jealousy of which Louise de la Valliere was a victim,and coveted the honours and the splendour by which that unfortunatefavourite was surrounded.

  Not even her marriage with the Marquis de Montespan some three yearsafter her coming to Court sufficed to overcome the longings born ofher covetousness and ambition. And then, when the Sun-King looked withfavour upon her opulent charms, when at last she saw the object of herambition within reach, that husband of hers went very near to wreckingeverything by his unreasonable behaviour. This preposterous marquis hadthe effrontery to dispute his wife with Jupiter, was so purblind as notto appreciate the honour the Sun-King proposed to do him.

  In putting it thus, I but make myself the mouthpiece of the Court.

  When Montespan began to make trouble by railing furiously against thefriendship of the King for his wife, his behaviour so amazed the King'scousin, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, that she called him "an extravagantand extraordinary man." To his face she told him that he must be mad tobehave in this fashion; and so incredibly distorted were his views, thathe did not at all agree with her. He provoked scenes with the King, inwhich he quoted Scripture, made opposite allusions to King David whichwere in the very worst taste, and even ventured to suggest that theSun-King might have to reckon with the judgment of God. If he escapeda lettre de cachet and a dungeon in the Bastille, it can only have beenbecause the King feared the further spread of a scandal injurious to thesacrosanctity of his royal dignity.

  The Marchioness fumed in private and sneered in public. WhenMademoiselle de Montpensier suggested that for his safety's sake sheshould control her husband's antics, she expressed her bitterness.

  "He and my parrot," she said, "amuse the Court to my shame."

  In the end, finding that neither by upbraiding the King nor by beatinghis wife could he prevail, Monsieur de Montespan resigned himself afterhis own fashion. He went into widower's mourning, dressed his servantsin black, and came ostentatiously to Court in a mourning coach to takeceremonious leave of his friends. It was an affair that profoundlyirritated the Sun-King, and very nearly made him ridiculous.

  Thereafter Montespan abandoned his wife to the King. He withdrew firstto his country seat, and, later, from France, having received more thana hint that Louis was intending to settle his score with him. By thattime Madame de Montespan was firmly established as maitresse en titre,and in January of 1669 she gave birth to the Duke of Maine, the firstof the seven children she was to bear the King. Parliament was tolegitimize them all, declaring them royal children of France, and thecountry was to provide titles, dignities, and royal rent-rolls for themand their heirs forever. Do you wonder that there was a revolutiona century later, and that the people, grown weary of the parasiticanachronism of royalty, should have risen to throw off the intolerableburden it imposed upon them?

  The splendour of Madame de Montespan in those days was something thelike of which had never been seen at the Court of France. On her estateof Clagny, near Versailles, stood now a magnificent chateau. Louis hadbegun by building a country villa, which satisfied her not at all.

  "That," she told him, "might do very well for an opera-girl"; whereuponthe infatuated monarch had no alternative but to command its demolition,and call in the famous architect, Mansard, to erect in its place anultraroyal residence.

  At Versailles itself, whilst the long-suffering Queen had to be contentwith ten rooms on the second floor, Madame de Montespan was installedin twice that number on the first; and whilst a simple page sufficedto carry the Queen's train at Court, nothing less than the wife of amarshal of France must perform the same office for the favourite. Shekept royal state as few queens have ever kept it. She was assigned atroop of royal bodyguards for escort, and when she travelled there was anever-ending train to follow her six-horse coach, and officers of Statecame to receive her with royal honours wherever she passed.

  In her immeasurable pride she became a tyrant, even over the Kinghimself.

  "Thunderous and triumphant," Madame de Sevigne describes her in thosedays when the Sun-King was her utter and almost timid slave.

  But constancy is not a Jovian virtue. Jupiter grew restless, andthen, shaking off all restraint, plunged into inconstancy of the mostscandalous and flagrant kind. It is doubtful if the history of royalamours, with all its fecu
ndity, can furnish a parallel. Within a fewmonths, Madame de Soubise, Mademoiselle de Rochefort-Theobon, Madamede Louvigny, Madame de Ludres, and some lesser ones passed in rapidsuccession through the furnace of the Sun-King's affection--which is tosay, through the royal bed--and at last the Court was amazed to see theWidow Scarron, who had been appointed governess to Madame de Montespan'sroyal children, empanoplied in a dignity and ceremony that left no doubton the score of her true position at Court.

  And so, after seven years of absolute sway in which homage had beenpaid her almost in awe by noble and simple alike, Madame de Montespan,neglected now by Louis, moved amid reflections of that neglect, witharrogantly smiling lips and desperate rage in her heart. She sneeredopenly at the royal lack of taste, allowed her barbed wit to makeoffensive sport with the ladies who supplanted her; yet, ravagedby jealousy, she feared for herself the fate which through her hadovertaken La Valliere.

  That fear was with her now as she sat in the window embrasure, hell inher heart and a reflection of it in her eyes, as, fallen almost to therank of a spectator in that comedy wherein she was accustomed to theleading part, she watched the shifting, chattering, glittering crowd.And as she watched, her line of vision was crossed to her undoing by theslender, wellknit figure of de Vanens, who, dressed from head to foot inblack, detached sharply from that dazzling throng. His face was pale andsaturnine, his eyes dark, very level, and singularly piercing. Thushis appearance served to underline the peculiar fascination which heexerted, the rather sinister appeal which he made to the imagination.

  This young Provencal nobleman was known to dabble in magic, and therewere one or two dark passages in his past life of which more thana whisper had gone abroad. Of being a student of alchemy, a"philosopher"--that is to say, a seeker after the philosopher's stone,which was to effect the transmutation of metals--he made no secret. Butif you taxed him with demoniacal practices he would deny it, yet in away that carried no conviction.

  To this dangerous fellow Madame de Montespan now made appeal in herdesperate need.

  Their eyes met as he was sauntering past, and with a lazy smile and alanguid wave of her fan she beckoned him to her side.

  "They tell me, Vanens," said she, "that your philosophy succeeds so wellthat you are transmuting copper into silver."

  His piercing eyes surveyed her, narrowing; a smile flickered over histhin lips.

  "They tell you the truth," he said. "I have cast a bar which has beenpurchased as good silver by the Mint."

  Her interest quickened. "By the Mint!" she echoed, amazed. "But, then,my friend--" She was breathless with excitement. "It is a miracle."

  "No less," he admitted. "But there is the greater miracle to come--thetransmutation of base metal into gold."

  "And you will perform it?"

  "Let me but conquer the secret of solidifying mercury, and the rest isnaught. I shall conquer it, and soon."

  He spoke with easy confidence, a man stating something that he knewbeyond the possibility of doubt. The Marquise became thoughtful. Shesighed.

  "You are the master of deep secrets, Vanens. Have you none that willsoften flinty hearts, make them responsive?"

  He considered this woman whom Saint-Simon has called "beautiful as theday," and his smile broadened.

  "Look in your mirror for the alchemy needed there," he bade her.

  Anger rippled across the perfect face. She lowered, "I have looked--invain. Can you not help me, Vanens, you who know so much?"

  "A love-philtre?" said he, and hummed. "Are you in earnest?"

  "Do you mock me with that question? Is not my need proclaimed for all tosee?"

  Vanens became grave.

  "It is not an alchemy in which myself I dabble," he said slowly. "But Iam acquainted with those who do."

  She clutched his wrist in her eagerness.

  "I will pay well," she said.

  "You will need to. Such things are costly." He glanced round to see thatnone was listening, then bending nearer: "There is a sorceress named LaVoisin in the Rue de la Tannerie, well known as a fortuneteller to manyladies of the Court, who at a word from me will do your need."

  La Montespan turned white. The piety in which she had been reared--thehabits of which clung to her despite the irregularity of her life--madeher recoil before the thing that she desired. Sorcery was of the Devil.She told him so. But Vanens laughed.

  "So that it be effective. . ." said he with a shrug.

  And then across the room floated a woman's trilling laugh. She lookedin the direction of the sound and beheld the gorgeous figure of the Kingbending--yet haughty and condescending even in adoration--over handsomeMadame de Ludres. Pride and ambition rose up in sudden fury to trampleon religious feeling. Let Vanens take her to this witch of his, for bethe aid what it might, she must have it.

  And so, one dark night late in the year, Louis de Vanens handed a maskedand muffled lady from a coach at the corner of the Rue de la Tannerie,and conducted her to the house of La Voisin.

  The door was opened for them by a young woman of some twenty yearsof age--Marguerite Monvoisin, the daughter of the witch--who led themupstairs to a room that was handsomely furnished and hung with fantastictapestry of red designs upon a black ground--designs that took monstrousshapes in the flickering light of a cluster of candles. Black curtainsparted, and from between them stepped a short, plump woman, of a certaincomeliness, with two round black beads of eyes. She was fantasticallyrobed in a cloak of crimson velvet, lined with costly furs and closelystudded with double-headed eagles in fine gold, which must have beenworth a prince's ransom; and she wore red shoes on each of which therewas the same eagle design in gold.

  "Ah, Vanens!" she said familiarly.

  He bowed.

  "I bring you," he announced, "a lady who has need of your skill."

  And he waved a hand towards the tall cloaked figure at his side.

  La Voisin looked at the masked face.

  "Velvet faces tell me little, Madame la Marquise," she said calmly."Nor, believe me, will the King look at a countenance that you concealfrom me."

  There was an exclamation of surprise and anger from Madame de Montespan.She plucked off her mask.

  "You knew me?"

  "Can you wonder?" asked La Voisin, "since I have told you what you carryconcealed in your heart?"

  Madame de Montespan was as credulous as only the very devout can be.

  "Since that is so, since you know already what I seek, tell me can youprocure it me?" she asked in a fever of excitement. "I will pay well."

  La Voisin smiled darkly.

  "Obdurate, indeed, is the case that will not yield to such medicine asmine," she said. "Let me consider first what must be done. In a few daysI shall bring you word. But have you courage for a great ordeal?"

  "For any ordeal that will give me what I want."

  "In a few days, then, you shall hear from me," said the witch, and sodismissed the great lady.

  Leaving a heavy purse behind her, as Vanens had instructed her, theMarchioness departed with her escort. And there, with that initiation,as far as we can ascertain, ended Louis de Vanens's connection with theaffair.

  At Clagny Madame de Montespan waited for three days in a fever ofimpatience for the coming of the witch. But when at last La Voisinpresented herself, the proposal that she had to make was one beforewhich the Marchioness recoiled in horror and some indignation.

  The magic that La Voisin suggested involved a coadjutor, the AbbeGuibourg, and the black mass to be celebrated by him. Madame deMontespan had heard something of these dread sacrificial rites to Satan;sufficient to fill her with loathing and disgust of the whitefaced,beady-eyed woman who dared to insult her by the proposal. She fumed andraged a while, and even went near to striking La Voisin, who lookedon with inscrutable face and stony, almost contemptuous, indifference.Before that impenetrable, almost uncanny, calm, Madame de Montespan'sfury at last abated. Then the urgency of her need becoming paramount,she desired more clearly to be told what would be expec
ted of her.What the witch told her was more appalling than anything she could haveimagined. But La Voisin argued:

  "Can anything be accomplished without cost? Can anything be gained inthis life without payment of some kind?"

  "But the price of this is monstrous!" Madame de Montespan protested.

  "Measure it by the worldly advantages to be gained. They are not small,madame. To enjoy boundless wealth, boundless power, and boundlesshonour, to be more than queen--is not all this worth some sacrifice?"

  To Madame de Montespan it must have been worth any sacrifice in thisworld or the next, since in the end she conquered her disgust, andagreed to lend herself to this horror.

  Three masses, she was told, would be necessary to ensure success, andit was determined that they should be celebrated in the chapel of theChateau de Villebousin, where Guibourg had been almoner, to which he hadaccess, and which was at the time untenanted.

  The chateau was a gloomy mediaeval fortress, blackened by age, andstanding, surrounded by a moat, in a lonely spot some two miles to thesouth of Paris. Thither on a dark, gusty night of March came Madame deMontespan, accompanied by her confidential waiting-woman, MademoiselleDesceillets. They left the coach to await them on the Orleans road, andthence, escorted by a single male attendant, they made their way by arutted, sodden path towards the grim castle looming faintly through theenveloping gloom.

  The wind howled dismally about the crenellated turrets; and a row ofpoplars, standing like black, phantasmal guardians of the evil place,bent groaning before its fury. From the running waters of the moat,swollen by recent rains, came a gurgling sound that was indescribablywicked.

  Desocillets was frightened by the dark, the desolate loneliness andeeriness of the place; but she dared utter no complaint as she stumbledforward over the uneven ground, through the gloom and the buffetingwind, compelled by the suasion of her mistress's imperious will. Thus,by a drawbridge spanning dark, oily waters, they came into a vastcourtyard and an atmosphere as of mildew. A studded door stood ajar, andthrough the gap, from a guiding beacon of infamy, fell a rhomb of yellowlight, suddenly obscured by a squat female figure when the steps of theMarchioness and her companions fell upon the stones of the yard.

  It was La Voisin who stood on the threshold to receive her client. Inthe stone-flagged hall behind her the light of a lantern revealed herdaughter, Marguerite Monvoisin, and a short, crafty-faced, misshapenfellow in black homespun and a red wig--a magician named Lesage, one ofLa Voisin's coadjutors, a rogue of some talent who exploited the witchesof Paris to his own profit.

  Leaving Leroy--the Marchioness's male attendant below in this fellow'scompany, La Voisin took up a candle and lighted Madame de Montespan upthe broad stone staircase, draughty and cold, to the ante-room of thechapel on the floor above. Mademoiselle Desceillets followed closely andfearfully, and Marguerite Monvoisin came last.

  They entered the ante-room, a spacious chamber, bare of furniture savefor an oaken table in the middle, some faded and mildewed tapestries,and a cane-backed settle of twisted walnut over against the wall. Analabaster lamp on the table made an island of light in that place ofgloom, and within the circle of its feeble rays stood a gross old man ofsome seventy years of age in sacerdotal garments of unusual design: thewhite alb worn over a greasy cassock was studded with black fir-cones;the stole and maniple were of black satin, with fir-cones wrought inyellow thread.

  His inflamed countenance was of a revolting hideousness: his cheeks werecovered by a network of blue veins, his eyes squinted horribly, his lipsvanished inwards over toothless gums, and a fringe of white hair hungin matted wisps from his high, bald crown. This was the infamousAbbe Guibourg, sacristan of Saint Denis, an ordained priest who hadconsecrated himself to the service of the Devil.

  He received the great lady with a low bow which, despite herself, sheacknowledged by a shudder. She was very pale, and her eyes were dilatingand preternaturally bright. Fear began to possess her, yet she sufferedherself to be ushered into the chapel, which was dimly illumined by acouple of candles standing beside a basin on a table. The altar lighthad been extinguished. Her maid would have hung back, but that shefeared to be parted from her mistress. She passed in with her in thewake of Guibourg, and followed by La Voisin, who closed the door,leaving her daughter in the ante-room.

  Although she had never been a participant in any of the sorceriespractised by her mother, yet Marguerite was fully aware of their extent,and more than guessed what horrors were taking place beyond the closeddoors of the chapel. The very thought of them filled her with loathingand disgust as she sat waiting, huddled in a corner of the settle. Andyet when presently through the closed doors came the drone of the voiceof that unclean celebrant, to blend with the whine of the wind in thechimney, Marguerite, urged by a morbid curiosity she could not conquer,crept shuddering to the door, which directly faced the altar, and goingdown on her knees applied her eye to the keyhole.

  What she saw may very well have appalled her considering the exaltedstation of Madame de Montespan. She beheld the white, sculptural form ofthe royal favourite lying at full length supine upon the altar, her armsoutstretched, holding a lighted candle in each hand. Immediately beforeher stood the Abbe Guibourg, his body screening the chalice and itsposition from the eye of the watching girl.

  She heard the whine of his voice pattering the Latin of the mass, whichhe was reciting backwards from the last gospel; and occasionallyshe heard responses muttered by her mother, who with MademoiselleDesceillets was beyond Marguerite's narrow range of vision.

  Apart from the interest lent to the proceedings by the presence ofthe royal favourite the affair must have seemed now very stupid andpointless to Marguerite, although she would certainly not have found itso had she known enough Latin to understand the horrible perversionof the Credo. But when the Offertory was reached, matters suddenlyquickened. In stealing away from the door, she was no more than in timeto avoid being caught spying by her mother, who now issued from thechapel.

  La Voisin crossed the ante-room briskly and went out.

  Within a very few minutes she was back again, her approach now heraldedby the feeble, quavering squeals of a very young child.

  Marguerite Monvoisin was sufficiently acquainted with the ghastly ritesto guess what was impending. She was young, and herself a mother.She had her share of the maternal instinct alive in every femaleanimal--with the occasional exception of the human pervert--and thehoarse, plaintive cries of that young child chilled her to the soul withhorror. She felt the skin roughening and tightening upon her body, and asense of physical sickness overcame her. That and the fear of her motherkept her stiff and frozen in an angle of the settle until La Voisin hadpassed through and reentered the chapel bearing that piteous bundle inher arms.

  Then, when the door had closed again, the girl, horrified andfascinated, sped back to watch. She saw that unclean priest turn andreceive the child from La Voisin. As it changed hands its cries werestilled.

  Guibourg faced the altar once more, that little wisp of humanity thatwas but a few days old held now aloft, naked, in his criminal hands.His muttering, slobbering voice pronouncing the words of that demoniacconsecration reached the ears of the petrified girl at the keyhole.

  "Ashtaroth, Asmodeus, Princes of Affection, I conjure you to acknowledgethe sacrifice I offer to you of this child for the things I ask ofyou, which are that the King's love for me shall be continued, and thathonoured by princes and princesses nothing shall be denied me of allthat I may ask."

  A sudden gust of wind smote and rattled the windows of the chapel andthe ante-room, as if the legions of hell had flung themselves againstthe walls of the chateau. There was a rush and clatter in the chimney ofthe ante-room's vast, empty fireplace, and through the din Marguerite,as her failing limbs sank under her and she slithered down in a heapagainst the chapel door, seemed to hear a burst of exultantly cruelsatanic laughter. With chattering teeth and burning eyes she sathuddled, listening in terror. The child began to cry again, moreviol
ently, more piteously; then, quite suddenly, there was a littlechoking cough, a gurgle, the chink of metal against earthenware, andsilence.

  When some moments later the squat figure of La Voisin emerged from thechapel, Marguerite was back in the shadows, hunched on the settle towhich she had crawled. She saw that her mother now carried a basin underher arm, and she did not need the evidence of her eyes to inform her ofthe dreadful contents that the witch was bearing away in it.

  Meanwhile in the chapel the ineffably blasphemous rites proceeded. Tothe warm human blood which had been caught in the consecrated chalice,Guibourg had added, among other foulnesses, powdered cantharides, thedust of desiccated moles, and the blood of bats. By the addition offlour he had wrought the ingredients into an ineffable paste, and overthis, through the door, which La Voisin had left ajar, Marguerite heardhis voice pronouncing the dread words of Transubstantiation.

  Marguerite's horror mounted until it threatened to suffocate her. Itwas as if some hellish miasma, released by Guibourg's monstrousincantations, crept through to permeate and poison the air she breathed.

  It would be a half-hour later when Madame de Montespan at last came out.She was of a ghastly pallor, her limbs shook and trembled under her asshe stepped forth, and there was a wild horror in her staring eyes. Yetshe contrived to carry herself almost defiantly erect, and she spokesharply to the half-swooning Desceillets, who staggered after her.

  She took her departure from that unholy place bearing with her thehost compounded of devilish ingredients which when dried and reduced topowder was to be administered to the King to ensure the renewal of hisfailing affection for her.

  The Marchioness contrived that a creature of her own, an officer ofthe buttery in her pay, should introduce it into the royal soup. Theimmediate and not unnatural result was that the King was taken violentlyill, and Madame de Montespan's anxiety and suspense were increasedthereby. On his recovery, however, it would seem that the demoniacsacrament--thrice repeated by then--had not been in vain.

  The sequel, indeed, appeared to justify Madame de Montespan's faithin sorcery, and to compensate her for all the horror to which inher despair she had submitted. Madame de Ludres found herself coldlyregarded by the convalescent King. Very soon she was discarded, theWidow Scarron neglected, and the fickle monarch was once more at thefeet of the lovely marchioness, her utter and devoted slave.

  Thus was Madame de Montespan "thunderously triumphant" once more,and established as firmly as ever in the Sun-King's favour. Madame deSevigne, in speaking of this phase of their relations, dilates upon thecompleteness of the reconciliation, and tells us that the ardour ofthe first years seemed now to have returned. And for two whole years itcontinued thus. Never before had Madame de Montespan's sway been moreabsolute, no shadow came to trouble, the serenity of her rule.

  But it proved, after all, to be no more than the last flare of anexpiring fire that was definitely quenched at last, in 1679, byMademoiselle de Fontanges. A maid of honour to madame, she was a childof not more than eighteen years, fair and flaxen, with pink cheeks andlarge, childish eyes; and it was for this doll that the regal Montespannow found herself discarded.

  Honours rained upon the new favourite. Louis made her a duchess withan income of twenty thousand livres, and deeply though this may havedisgusted his subjects, it disgusted Madame de Montespan still more.Blinded by rage she openly abused the new duchess, and provoked a fairlypublic scene with Louis, in which she gave him her true opinion of himwith a disturbing frankness.

  "You dishonour yourself," she informed him among other things. "And youbetray your taste when you make love to a pink-and-white doll, a littlefool that has no more wit nor manners than if she were painted oncanvas!" Then, with an increase of scorn, she delivered herself of anunpardonable apostrophe: "You, a king, to accept the inheritance of thatchit's rustic lovers!"

  He flushed and scowled upon her.

  "That is an infamous falsehood!" he exclaimed. "Madame, you areunbearable!" He was very angry, and it infuriated him the more thatshe should stand so coldly mocking before an anger that could bow theproudest heads in France. "You have the pride of Satan, your greed isinsatiable, your domineering spirit utterly insufferable, and you havethe most false and poisonous tongue in the world!"

  Her brutal answer bludgeoned that high divinity to earth.

  "With all my imperfections," she sneered, "at least I do not smell asbadly as you do!"

  It was an answer that extinguished her last chance. It was fatal tothe dignity, to the "terrible majesty" of Louis. It stripped him ofall divinity, and revealed him authoritatively as intensely and evenunpleasantly human. It was beyond hope of pardon.

  His face turned the colour of wax. A glacial silence hung over theagonized witnesses of that royal humiliation. Then, without a word, in avain attempt to rescue the dignity she had so cruelly mauled, he turned,his red heels clicked rapidly and unsteadily across the polished floor,and he was gone.

  When Madame de Montespan realized exactly what she had done, nothingbut rage remained to her--rage and its offspring, vindictiveness. TheDuchess of Fontanges must not enjoy her victory, nor must Louis escapepunishment for his faithlessness. La Voisin should afford her the meansto accomplish this. And so she goes once more to the Rue de la Tannerie.

  Now, the matter of Madame de Montespan's present needs was one in whichthe witches were particularly expert. Were you troubled with a rival,did your husband persist in surviving your affection for him, did thosefrom whom you had expectations cling obstinately and inconsideratelyto life, the witches by incantations and the use of powders--in whicharsenic was the dominant charm--could usually put the matter right foryou. Indeed, so wide and general was the practice of poisoning become,that the authorities, lately aroused to the fact by the sensationalrevelations of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, had set up in thisyear 1670 the tribunal known as the Chambre Ardente to inquire into thematter, and to conduct prosecutions.

  La Voisin promised help to the Marchioness. She called in another witchof horrible repute, named La Filastre, her coadjutor Lesage, and twoexpert poisoners, Romani and Bertrand, who devised an ingenious plot forthe murder of the Duchess of Fontanges. They were to visit her, Romanias a cloth merchant, and Bertrand as his servant, to offer her theirwares, including some Grenoble gloves, which were the most beautifulgloves in the world and unfailingly irresistible to ladies. These glovesthey prepared in accordance with certain magical recipes in such a waythat the Duchess, after wearing them, must die a lingering death inwhich there could be no suspicion of poisoning.

  The King was to be dealt with by means of a petition steeped in similarpowders, and should receive his death by taking it into his hands. LaVoisin herself was to go to Saint-Germain to present this petition onMonday, March 13th, one of those days on which, according to ancientcustom, all comers were admitted to the royal presence.

  Thus they disposed. But Fate was already silently stalking La Voisin.

  It is to the fact that an obscure and vulgar woman had drunk one glassof wine too many three months earlier that the King owed his escape.

  If you are interested in the almost grotesque disparity that can liebetween cause and effect, here is a subject for you. Three monthsearlier a tailor named Vigoureux, whose wife secretly practised magic,had entertained a few friends to dinner, amongst whom was an intimateof his wife's, named Marie Bosse. This Marie Bosse it was who drank thatexcessive glass of wine which, drowning prudence, led her to boast ofthe famous trade she drove as a fortune-teller to the nobility, and evento hint of something further.

  "Another three poisonings," she chuckled, "and I shall retire with myfortune made!"

  An attorney who was present pricked up his ears, bethought him of thetales that were afloat, and gave information to the police. The policeset a trap for Marie Bosse, and she betrayed herself. Later, undertorture, she betrayed La Vigoureux. La Vigoureux betrayed others, andthese others again.

  The arrest of Marie Bosse was like knocking down the fi
rst of a row ofninepins, but none could have suspected that the last of these stood inthe royal apartments.

  On the day before she was to repair to Saint-Germain, La Voisin,betrayed in her turn, received a surprise visit from the police--who, ofcourse, had no knowledge of the regicide their action was thwarting--andshe was carried off to the Chatelet. Put to the question, she revealeda great deal; but her terror of the horrible punishment reservedfor regicides prevented her to the day of her death at the stake--inFebruary of 1680 from saying a word of her association with Madame deMontespan.

  But there were others whom she betrayed under torture, and whose arrestfollowed quickly upon her own, who had not her strength of character.Among these were La Filastre and the magician Lesage. When it was foundthat these two corroborated each other in the incredible things whichthey related, the Chambre Ardente took fright. La Reynie, who presidedover it, laid the matter before the King, and the King, horror-strickenby the discovery of the revolting practices in which the mother ofhis children had been engaged, suspended the sittings of the ChambreArdente, and commanded that no further proceedings should be takenagainst Lesage and La Filastre, and none initiated against Romani,Bertrand, the Abbe Guibourg, and the scores of other poisoners andmagicians who had been arrested, and who were acquainted with Madame deMontespan's unholy traffic.

  But it was not out of any desire to spare Madame de Montespan that theKing proceeded in this manner; he was concerned only to spare himselfand his royal dignity. He feared above all things the scandal andridicule which must touch him as a result of publicity, and becausehe feared it so much, he could impose no punishment upon Madame deMontespan.

  This he made known to her at the interview between them procured by hisminister Louvois, at about the time that the sittings of the ChambreArdente were suspended.

  To this interview that proud, domineering woman came in dread, and intears and humility for once. The King's bearing was cold and hard. Coldand hard were the words in which he declared the extent of his knowledgeof her infamy, words which revealed the loathing and disgust thisknowledge brought him. If at first she was terror-stricken, crushedunder the indictment, yet she was never of a temper to bear reproacheslong. Under his scorn her anger kindled and her humility was sloughed.

  "What then?" she cried at last, eyes aflash through lingering tears. "Isthe blame all mine? If all this is true, it is no less true that Iwas driven to it by my love for you and the despair to which yourheartlessness and infidelity reduced me. To you," she continued,gathering force at every word, "I sacrificed everything--my honour, anoble husband who loved me, all that a woman prizes. And what did yougive me in exchange? Your cruel fickleness exposed me to the low mockeryof the lick-spittles of your Court. Do you wonder that I went mad, andthat in my madness I sacrificed what shreds of self-respect you had leftme? And now it seems I have lost all but life. Take that, too, if itbe your pleasure. Heaven knows it has little value left for me! Butremember that in striking me you strike the mother of your children--thelegitimate children of France. Remember that!"

  He remembered it. Indeed, he was never in danger of forgetting it; forshe might have added that he would be striking also at himself and atthat royal dignity which was his religion. And so that all scandalouscomment might be avoided she was actually allowed to remain at Court,although no longer in her first-floor apartments; and it was not untilten years later that she departed to withdraw to the community of SaintJoseph.

  But even in her disgrace this woman, secretly convicted among otherabominations of attempting to procure the poisoning of the King and ofher rival, enjoyed an annual pension of 1,200,000 livres; whilst nonedared proceed against those who shared her guilt--not even the infamousGuibourg, the poisoners Romani and Bertrand, and La Filastre--nor yetagainst some scores of associates of these, who were known to live bysorcery and poisonings, and who might be privy to the part played byMadame de Montespan in that horrible night of magic at the Chateau deVillebousin.

  The hot blast of revolution was needed to sweep France clean.