Before Versailles

by Karleen Koen

  “He was a fortunate man to have your love.”

  She put a hand on her heart, fresh tears starting. “I remain his until I die.”

  So, thought Nicolas, they did marry. He’d always thought it.

  “By the way,” he said, pausing at the door, “I thought you’d wish to know his majesty appointed a lieutenant governor to the province of Brittany.”

  In the antechamber, he found Madame de Motteville.

  “She asks for you,” he told her, and then in a low voice because other of the queen mother’s ladies were scattered about the chamber, “What precisely did Monsieur say?”

  Without looking from the embroidery threads she was tying off, Motteville answered as quietly as he’d asked, “Not here.”

  “You’ll send a note around later?”

  “A personal visit would be better.”

  She didn’t wish to put it to paper, thought Nicolas, as he walked down the long gallery that was part of the queen mother’s apartments. He smiled to himself. Madame and her ladies had become the sirens of court, luring men toward shipwreck. Claw marks from Catherine were still red on his back. They’d made love yesterday, not in the bed, as he’d imagined, but on the floor in a wild, tumbled, frenzied joining. Magnificent and completely satisfying. His majesty the king of France, Louis the fourteenth of that name, was about to make one very grand misstep, and he, Nicolas, the first viscount of that name, was going to be absolutely necessary to keep the disorder contained.

  SEARCHING FOR THE Countess de Soissons, holding up her skirts so that she wouldn’t trip, beautiful Athénaïs de Tonnay-Charente ran in high heels through the galleries of Fontainebleau. She had gossip. Shoes skittering on the intricate, inlaid woods of the floors, she ran from one chamber to another. This wasn’t an age for privacy, so one chamber opened into another, and she disturbed gatherings everywhere, except for the king’s council. She had nerve, but not for that.

  Olympe was alone in the queen’s gallery, a long, wide, majestic space that faced enclosed gardens. She sat in a window seat, feet drawn up under her skirts, and stared down at those gardens, where the young queen and her ladies were assembled, and where she should be, only she wasn’t. And neither was the maid of honor running toward her.

  “You’ll never guess what’s happened,” Athénaïs blurted out.

  Olympe lifted an eyebrow.

  “Monsieur has had a fit in the queen mother’s chambers this morning over his majesty and Madame’s flirting.”

  “His majesty couldn’t have serious feelings for that skinny pale wand.”

  “He might, I think.”

  Olympe glared at her, but Athénaïs didn’t care.

  “It’s because I didn’t go to the witch,” said Olympe.

  “What witch? Are you going to see one? I’ve never met a witch.”

  Olympe didn’t answer.

  “When you go, may I go with you? Please, oh please.” Athénaïs was charming without trying, but when she tried, she was difficult to resist.

  “I suppose so. Where are you off to now?”

  “I have to find my brother.”

  “As the queen’s superintendent, it’s my duty to tell you not to spread gossip. Not a word of this can be even hinted to her majesty, or we’ll lose our positions.”

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that. My lips are sealed. This was just for you.”

  As quickly as she’d entered the gallery, Athénaïs was gone again. That damned Vivonne, she was thinking. Her brother, as gentleman of the king’s household, had to know what was happening. He never said a word to me of this intrigue, she thought. But it was far worse than that. She’d gotten herself attached to the wrong household. Her family was wild and ambitious, and she possessed the same surety that Guy and Catherine did, except theirs was polished to gleaming arrogance. She’d thought she’d played the ace by being appointed to the new queen’s household, but excitement was occurring in Madame’s, where Madame’s sudden burst of acclamation had carried over to her maids of honor, most of them nobodies, certainly not daughters of dukes like Athénaïs. It just wasn’t fair.

  Chapter 12

  WISH TO REVISIT THE IDEA OF INTENDANTS,” LOUIS TOLD HIS council.

  “An old idea, your majesty, from your father’s reign, and, if I may speak frankly, it failed,” said Nicolas.

  “That’s true, viscount, but I think the wars, both foreign and civil, caused its failure. Mister Colbert has had the goodness to compose a brief treatise on why my father’s chief minister thought the idea a good one. I’m going to beg your indulgence and ask you to read it. It’s there among your papers.”

  Answerable only to the king, intendants were official administrators who collected taxes and watched the politics of a province. The position had been the idea of Cardinal Richelieu, minister to Louis’s father, as he labored to turn the fiefs and smaller kingdoms of France toward loyalty to the crown rather than toward their own interests. No one on the council could know that in ten years’ time their presence would be a key component in France’s march toward an absolute monarchy that was the envy of Europe.

  As the council members began to shuffle through the papers Colbert had prepared, a knock sounded, and one of the queen mother’s pages nervously entered with a note for the king.

  Louis ripped past the seal: his mother summoned him. He was to go to her chamber as soon as his council ended. He put the note to one side, but the page still lingered, and Louis turned to the boy. “Well?”

  “Would there, is there—” the boy swallowed. It took every ounce of his courage, but he had his orders. “Is there a reply, sire?”

  “Tell my mother I am her obedient servant in all ways. Go.” He turned back to his council. “Last year we imported corn and sold it cheaply from the royal granaries. The summer is dry so far. If there isn’t rain by August, harvests will be poor. I think we should consider it again, and I want to reduce the land tax. I thought to disband some of my infantry and the cavalry to cut expenses. Here are the details.”

  Louis’s minister of war passed out four single sheets of paper upon which specific regiments and amounts and estimated savings were listed. But Nicolas did little more than move the paper from one place to another. He already knew what was written on it. He and the minister of war were firm allies; there were no surprises between them.

  “And if we do have need for funds, you’ll find them, won’t you?” Louis said to Nicolas.

  “Of course.”

  “Colbert has put forth a proposal to build up the kingdom’s woolen industry. It is my thought to recruit cloth makers and weavers from Flanders,” Louis said. “If we find them places to live and wives, they’ll stay.”

  “Will any woman do for the worthy Colbert, or must she be pretty?” snapped Nicolas. He was tired of hearing Colbert’s name.

  “All French women are beautiful,” said Louis, and there was general laughter as a clock chimed, and Louis pushed back his chair. Council was ended for the day.

  “For him to disband some of his army,” one minister said to the other, shaking his head. There was no army larger than France’s, and Louis had been part of it, on its battlefields, among its soldiers, since he was a boy. He loved his soldiers.

  Nicolas followed the king into one of the antechambers. “If I may have a moment more of your time,” he said to Louis’s back.

  Louis turned and regarded him.

  “First, know I am your servant in all ways.” It was the closest he dared come to the looming scandal.

  Louis’s eyes flickered a moment. “So I have always assumed.”

  “There’s something I’ve been wishing to confess,” Nicolas went on. “I’ve not been completely straightforward in my estimation of loans outstanding and taxes collected. There was war for so long and such need for coin that I became careless. When you first asked, I could not summon together all the figures. Now, I have done so.” Nicolas lowered his eyes, held out a set of papers bound in blood-red leather. He didn’t loo
k up until Louis took the bound papers from him. “I hope this mitigates my carelessness and shows my earnest desire to serve you as best I may.”

  There was silence. Louis’s face was unreadable.

  “I hope I am forgiven.”

  “Honesty can never be punished. This kingdom, and I, cannot do without you.” Louis held out his hand, and Nicolas bowed over it. “I, too, have a confession to make. I need one million for my personal purse. Is that possible, viscount?”

  Not by so much as a blink did Nicolas betray the dismay that spread through him. “If I may have a few weeks, sire?”

  “You need them?”

  A bit of perspiration gleamed just above Nicolas’s upper lip. “If that is not inconvenient.”

  Louis didn’t answer, but walked into an adjoining chamber, and Nicolas heard dogs begin to bark. He sat down in a chair. Here it was when he least expected it. His test. It came at a bad time, of course. His personal fortune was overextended, but no matter. His tendrils into the world of money reached deep. His majesty would have his million given to him as if it were easy to obtain. So this was to be the way, was it? His majesty would ask for sudden large sums, and Nicolas would supply them. And one day, as reward, he would be first minister. Well, good to know. Now, at least the way in which he would have to satisfy to be all he wished to be was clear.

  THE GREAT DOORS to his mother’s bedchamber opened. What a bold, skillful scoundrel the viscount was, Louis was thinking. He saw that his mother half-sat, half-lay on the daybed their beloved cardinal had given her, but his thoughts were elsewhere. The viscount gambled Louis would be bound by his word, given at that first meeting after the cardinal’s death, that all old sins committed by ministers were to be forgiven. He felt like slamming his fist into something. Instead, he leaned down and kissed the top of his mother’s head. When she didn’t immediately turn to look up at him and smile, he noticed how tightly her hands were clenched together. He saw that the bedchamber was empty of everyone, not even his mother’s fat dog lay panting in its brocade bed in the corner, not even faithful Motteville was here. He suddenly knew. She had learned of his desire and love for Henriette. He straightened, waited a few moments for her to acknowledge his presence, and when she didn’t, he turned on his heel to leave.

  “Don’t you dare walk away from me!” she said to his back.

  The soldier in him took a sword from its scabbard and raised it. Unsmiling, he turned to face her. Inside, his pulse was beating hard, but the sword’s blade gleamed bright.

  “Is it true?”

  “Is what true? Which rumor in this dung heap has caught your ear this morning?”

  “Answer me!”

  Her eyes were daggers. If he’d been closer, they would have stabbed him a thousand times over. It used to frighten him, that quick fury of hers. But today he felt fierce himself. He owed the viscount a thank-you for having enraged him.

  “I’ve heard the most disgusting, most immoral thing,” she said.

  Those words stung. They were true, not the disgusting, but certainly the immoral. He fought to keep his face stoic.

  “I’m asking you one more time, is it true?”

  “And I’m asking you, one more time, is what true?”

  “That you and your brother’s wife are lovers.”

  “Good God! You can’t be serious!”

  “Don’t toy with me. Your brother is beside himself. He called on me this morning to tell me that the regard you and Madame share is shaming him. I want to hear from your own lips that it isn’t so.”

  “It isn’t so.”

  It was like watching ships’ sails collapse when the wind dies, but she continued to measure his every blink. Silence grew. Neither would be the first to break it. They were matched in stubbornness. She patted at the cushions upon which she sat.

  “Come, my son, sit.” Heat was gone from her voice.

  He fought to keep his face and bearing stoic as he sat down on the end of the daybed. She’d done everything in her power to keep the throne for him, and he knew it.

  She took his hand. “I was young once upon a time. I was indiscreet.”

  The Duke of Buckingham story, he thought. He’d always wondered what the truth was.

  “I felt affection for someone other than your father. I was so lonely, so abandoned. He—the man I felt affection for—was ardent, handsome, dashing. I flirted. I loved. But in the end, I remembered my duty as queen of France, and I did nothing I should not have done. You set the tone for court, my dear one. Everyone watches you. You are God’s anointed, God’s given.”

  Yes, he’d suckled it in with his breast milk, Louis, the miracle of the kingdom, coming after more than twenty years of marriage between his mother and his father, the last fifteen of those years in estrangement. Quite a miracle.

  “Your duty is to your queen—”

  “I do my duty to the queen.”

  “Of course. She adores you. Discretion, my son, discretion is all. If your feelings for our sweet Madame are stronger than they should be, then I plead for you to be the resolute man you have shown yourself to be and walk away from them.”

  The way I did before, he thought, bitterness at the back of his throat, bitterness at his younger self, at that self’s innocence and obedience, even though he knew he’d done what was best for the kingdom. It had been hard.

  “In the eyes of the Mother Church, Madame is your sister. Love her as one. She is lively and graceful—”

  “And innocent of these lies about her!”

  “I am so pleased to hear it. I would hate to think of our court being mocked or scorned in other kingdoms.”

  He had not gone this far in his imaginings, to what would be said of him and of her in other courts. He felt suddenly foolish, naïve.

  “This could never be ignored. You’d be lectured, gently, of course, by the king of Spain for certain, and she, well, she will be an object of ridicule and contempt in all courts.”

  “Spain wouldn’t dare—”

  “Spain’s princess is your wife! Its king, my brother, would dare.”

  “I’ll go to war—”

  “Over a flirtation?” She laughed.

  “Over my dignity.”

  She patted his hand. “Yes, you do possess dignity. And I trust you’ll do all that is proper to maintain it. There will also be the Holy Father in Rome with which to contend. You are his most Christian king. Such a title comes with responsibility.”

  He hadn’t thought about the Holy Father, either.

  “You appointed a lieutenant governor to the province of Brittany.”

  Nonplussed, he stared at her. What had that to do with anything? And he’d only just done so. How could she already know? “Yes.”

  “I am Brittany’s governor.”

  As if he didn’t know that. “Then you’ve decided to give the lieutenant governorship to the man I’ve selected, Mother.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  He would have smiled at her ruthlessness, except that he felt so bitter. “Dearest Mama and dearest majesty, will you allow me to select a lieutenant in Brittany? I’m going to choose someone our dear cardinal would have wanted.” She paid him back for not having put her upon the council, where she’d always been before.

  She looked out the windows to the gardens and sun, to her past, Louis would imagine, and all that had been. “Yes, then.”

  She pulled Louis forward, kissed his forehead, his cheeks, as if thinking about Mazarin had softened her. “He served you so well. There is another who wishes to do the same. The Viscount Nicolas thinks only of you.”

  He told her about the governorship, thought Louis. Who was the first name on the list Colbert had compiled for him of the viscount’s probable spies and friends? His mother. “Why do we speak of him, Mama?”

  “I was thinking of our dear cardinal, and thoughts of him led to thoughts of the viscount, who, as you know, is a treasured friend to me, now more than ever. May I ask if all is well between you?”


  A possibility unfolded itself in his mind. “The viscount is a good man. I’m fortunate in my ministers. How old is our dear Séguier now?”

  Séguier was chancellor of France. The position of chancellor was a grand, ancient one, one of the offices of the crown; only death took it away.

  “Ancient, my darling. I’ve heard he’s been ill. I must write him a note.”

  “When he leaves us, my dearest Mama, who do you think should take his place?”

  “I hadn’t really thought of it.”

  “Might the viscount consider it?”

  “The viscount chancellor of France? You don’t mean it!”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s brilliant. It would honor him as he deserves and give you an excellent servant in a most important position.”

  “It’s early days, yet, Mother. Our Séguier may live another twenty years, and let us pray to God that he does.”

  “Oh, my darling, I’m honored that you’ve confided in me this way.” She pressed at the sudden tears in the corners of her eyes with one of her exquisite linen handkerchiefs.

  “I wished to lay no burdens upon you in your time of mourning, Mother.” He could see that for this moment she was torn between continuing her grieving and being involved in governance of the kingdom again. He’d made that decision for her, but he was wise enough not to say so.

  She settled back against her lustrous, plump cushions and sighed. “My grief is so heavy some days I can barely lift my head. And your brother today—heartbroken.”

  “His usual drama over little, Mother. His usual jealousies. It was only a matter of time, wasn’t it?”

  “I hate to see you two at odds over anything, darling. I told him to pluck his suspicion from his heart and sent him to his confessor. And you—” she didn’t meet his eyes, “—must consider your admiration of Madame and understand more fully the impression it might be making upon others.”

  “How astute you are, as always.” Louis stood, kissed each of her cheeks, let her pat his face and fuss with the lace at his throat.

  What a king he’s made, thought Anne, watching his exit, admiring his straight back and legs, the graceful way he moved. It was like Philippe to exaggerate. You don’t include me, he had always whined. She’d suggest to Maria Teresa that she request Madame’s presence in visiting convents. She needs your influence, she’d say to the queen. She’d talk to the Spanish and Venetian ambassadors, ask a few questions, see what they might be writing in their dispatches. Or perhaps she’d have the viscount do it for her. Certainly he already knew through his spies. If he didn’t, shame on him. This little tender friendship between Madame and her son was not going to advance a fraction farther, not while she had breath in her body.