Before Versailles

by Karleen Koen

  AT FONTAINEBLEAU, LOUIS allowed himself an hour or two of sleep at the side of his wife, woke, was dressed, and began his day, which included a hunt that took courtiers all the way to Versailles, where a picnic was set up, and the court gratefully descended from horseback to rest. Louis walked among them like a restless animal. He sat by his cousin, La Grande, who’d ridden as hard as he had and had mud on her skirts, tossed a note, its seal broken, in her lap. She read it, and shocked, raised her eyes to his.

  “You’re caught,” he said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know you’ve been writing these.”

  “I haven’t—I wouldn’t—”

  Two musketeers had appeared.

  “Go quietly with them, now,” Louis said.

  Tears rolled down his cousin’s face. “I’m innocent, majesty! You must believe me!”

  “There’s a carriage waiting. I’m sending you to your estate in the country.”

  Rain had begun to fall. The storm that had threatened all the morning broke. Courtiers, who’d been sitting on rugs and idly chatting, stood up and began to run for shelter. They were less than a mile from the old hunting château, in its overgrown park. The hunt had been long and particularly ferocious. It was as if the king had been determined to bring down the stag, no matter how long it took. Louis had taken the knife from the master of the hunt and cut the stag’s throat himself, throwing down his blood-stained gloves as he strode past exhausted courtiers.

  As the rain turned suddenly harder, Louise found shelter under a tree and put her back against its broad trunk. She felt strained to a breaking point. She’d barely been able to look his majesty in the eye today and was scorched by what was in his expression when she did. She felt frightened and exhilarated, as scattered as these raindrops, which were now pelting down. The tree’s thick branches and leaves provided a little shelter, but soon she’d be wet to the skin. It was all right.

  Out from the sheets of pouring rain stepped Louis, his hat off his head. He held it over her. The chivalry, the foolishness, the courtesy of that gesture made her dig her hands into the tree’s bark.

  “You’ve captured me,” he said.

  She couldn’t answer, even if she’d wanted to.

  “I believe I’m in love with you.”

  She must have made some sound because he began speaking as fast as he could, as if he would outrun whatever her objections might be, objections he had to know himself.

  “I’ll be in the middle of a council meeting, or riding back from a long journey, and all I am thinking of is the exact shade of your eyes when you swore you’d keep my secret. The sky after a rain? At soft twilight? What is your birth date? Who is your father? Why does your mother never come to court? All the things I don’t know about you—I want to know them. I want to know you.”

  His eyes raked over her face, demanding, searching, appealing. This can’t be happening, she thought. His hair was mussed, curling wildly. She could smell it. She could smell him. Exaltation and dread warred in her.

  “Do I disgust you? Do you think me lighthearted, evil, going from one woman to the next, seeing who I can seduce? I’m not like that. I want to hold you like a talisman in my heart against all I must do.” Now he looked at her directly. “It’s as if I was blind, and now I see. I swear on all that’s holy I don’t trifle with you, Miss de la Baume le Blanc. Name of Jesus, I want permission to speak your given name. I was going to say nothing to you, to quell what’s in me for both our sakes, but I can’t keep myself from you. What is she thinking? I ask when I see you with your friends. What is she feeling? I wonder. Can she care for me even half as much as I find I suddenly care for her? Say you’ll give me a chance to woo you, to show you that I would take the moon right out of the sky and hang it around your neck, if that’s what you desired.”

  What his eyes promised—something true and sober and stead-fast—went straight to her heart, and she felt like a newborn bird fallen from its high nest, turning in frenzied circles in the dust, struggling and afraid in its nakedness.

  Louis smiled, joy blazing in his eyes. It was like the sun bursting out after a long night of dark. She felt dazzled. He was everything a man should be, strong and good and brave and gallant. He leaned in toward her, so that his great hat was covering them both, so that his hair was falling over his shoulders. They did not quite touch.

  “Tell me I can hope.”

  His eyes were inches from her. She felt like fainting, like running away, like staying, like grabbing his mane of hair and pulling him to her and pressing her mouth to his.

  “I think you care for me a little,” he said, moving even closer.

  She could see that the brown of his eyes had a tinge of green around the edges.

  “I love you.” He repeated it. Gently, he put his mouth on hers.

  She couldn’t move. Feelings tumbled like plates thrown off shelves. She felt soldered to him at the lips. He didn’t move to touch her with his hands; his hands were in fact still holding the hat above them. The only place they touched one another was at the mouth, and even then not deeply, just a light kiss that was as sweet as any marzipan she’d ever tasted. One could die in this sweetness.

  When he stepped back, it was all she could do to stay leaning against the tree. Her body wanted to follow his, felt bereft, abandoned, cold, and wet now with rain. The space between them literally hurt her. What’s happening? she thought, and she felt as wild as the stag being brought to its knees by the maddened lunges of the dogs. The stag bled and lowered its antlers, as trumpets blew to announce its falling.

  The downpour had lessened. Louis stepped back from her, said, “You hold my heart in your hands,” and then he walked toward the chateau in the light drizzle. When he seemed far enough away, Louise followed.

  “See that Miss de la Baume le Blanc has her horse immediately,” Louis told a courtier.

  The courtier found the horse as asked, took it to a wet and drooping young maid of honor who hadn’t joined the melee of chattering, milling courtiers waiting for horses. Concerned, he said, “My dear miss, are you ill? Are you certain you can sit in the saddle?”

  “Yes, ill.” Ill with love, ill with dread, but alive from the top of her head to the toes curling with damp in her boots. She could hear the slightest rustle in the woods, could see the farthest bird flying, could smell the rain and earth and leaves and bark as if they were a bouquet at her nose.

  “Wait here and I’ll have a carriage sent for.”

  “No, just help me onto my horse.” She was always more whole on horseback. She’d get some sense of herself as she rode back. She’d stay far back, not up front with the others where the king would be, his majesty, the beautiful, sensual, aloof Louis whom they all secretly loved. Could she care for him? he asked. Such a question. He was the brightest star in their sky.

  She settled herself in the sidesaddle. Already thoughts were clearer. She’d die if he ever tired of her. She felt a little stronger with the fatalism of that truth. This mustn’t begin. She hadn’t the heart for it. His majesty had had a sudden fit—and like all fits, it would pass. She would ride this out, let it wither on its green young vine.

  Chapter 26

  HE WOMAN BEGAN TO WEEP, HARD. LOUIS KEPT HIS FACE impassive. If the Duchess de Chevreuse knew nothing, this woman knew everything. In Madame de Motteville’s hand was clasped a single piece of paper, a dreaded lettre de cachet, putting her in prison with no record of her arrest or whereabouts. Reading it, Madame de Motteville had burst into tears.

  What an effective tool the letter was, Louis thought dispassionately as Motteville continued weeping, and his heart, which could never bear to hear a woman cry, remained as hard as the marble of the walls and floors around him.

  “But why, sire? In God’s name, how have I offended?”

  He held out a second sheet of paper, which she took in trembling hands to read also, and then she made a sound deep in her throat, half growl, half moan, as she fell on her knees
in supplication before him. It was another lettre de cachet, but this time the name was her daughter’s.

  “Two days ago I discovered a boy, half-grown, ten and five perhaps, in a monastery. He wore an iron mask so that his face couldn’t be seen; however, I saw his face.”

  Motteville made another sound.

  “The monks of that monastery are now in the Bastille,” Louis continued, “and the boy has been taken to a safe place.”

  She brought one hand up to her heart, staring at him as if he were a ravening beast.

  “When was the boy born?”

  The question lay between them. Seated—which should have been Motteville’s first understanding that something was wrong, for Louis invariably stood in the presence of women—Louis let the silence grow. It would take time to unlock these secrets, hidden for so long.

  “In 1645,” she finally said, her voice weak, strained, as if she brought the answer up from a place very far away.

  He did a rapid calculation in his mind. Ten and six. Small for his age, but Philippe was small.

  “How was this secret kept from court?”

  “We—it was said her majesty was ill with dropsy. She received visitors in bed for the last months. He was taken away immediately. The cardinal saw to that.”

  “And when did you learn he was not as other children?”

  “I no longer remember. He was but a baby.”

  “How often does her majesty visit him?” His eyes didn’t leave her face. There wasn’t a blink he missed, not even the tiniest movement of muscle.

  “Never, anymore.” Motteville swallowed, looked away. “I go in her place.”

  “And why might that be, if you would be so kind as to conjecture?”

  “He became distraught at her presence. Howled.”

  But that wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth was her majesty hated this child, and that Madame de Motteville would grieve but never tell. The boy’s strangeness left her ill. It was the cardinal who would go to see him, twice a year, taking gifts of clothing and marzipan cakes and toys. At his command, Motteville would accompany him. So that you may tell her majesty of him, Cardinal Mazarin had said, his face sad, except that the queen never asked. It had been agreed that the queen and the cardinal never spoke between themselves of him. Such always led to dreadful quarrels, days of raging for her, of grief for him. She saw the boy as penance for her sins, Mazarin saw him as one of life’s little tragedies, loved anyway.

  “And the mask?”

  “There was a certain family resemblance,” whispered Motteville.

  “When was it first fashioned for him?”

  “When he was five,” she said, her face a mix of sadness, distress, and memory. “A new one was made as he grew. It was ordered that no one see his face. Ever. It was clear—” She stopped, unable to utter the words.

  How much he resembled me. “Yes,” Louis finished for her. Whatever else was said between them at this moment, he did not want the word “brother” emerging from thought to tongue to the air between them. If he kept the spoken word at bay, he could do all he must do.

  “Who else knew of this?”

  “No one.”

  “Cinq Mars.”

  “He was the cardinal’s most trusted musketeer. His orders were to care for and guard the boy as if he were his own.” She knelt before him. “He’s a good man, your majesty. Please don’t—please be forbearing with him.”

  “Tell me about the abbot.”

  “He and the cardinal were old friends, from Italy, from the cardinal’s days when he was a papal diplomat, before he came here to serve Richelieu.”

  “And the monks?”

  “Assembled from Italy and Spain, Cistercians, who have taken a vow of silence and the mission of service to boys who are born idiots.”

  “Did the abbot know this boy’s parentage?”

  “No, sire.”

  A boy whom France’s greatest minister deigned to visit, to bring treats for? The abbot would certainly have made conjectures if nothing else, thought Louis. “Does the Viscount Nicolas know?”

  “No one knows.”

  “Return the lettres, please,” Louis said.

  Still kneeling, she crept forward with them. “Are you going to arrest me, majesty? Do so, if you must, but not my daughter, never my daughter. She has no part in this. The blame is mine alone.”

  “This interview between us remains a secret not even your priest must know. And I have a few new duties for you. You are to report every day about who calls upon her majesty and what is said.”

  Her loyalty had always been to his mother. Now she must redefine that loyalty.

  “Any correspondence of her majesty’s will be brought first to me. And I am most particularly interested in that between her majesty and the Viscount Nicolas.”

  He watched the struggle going on in Motteville’s face. He let his hand touch the paper on which her daughter’s name was written. Motteville met his eyes, odd, flickering lights in them, she thought, hard. She curtsied.

  “Your every wish is my command,” she whispered. “I will serve to the best of my ability.”

  She stood, backed from the chamber, bent forward submissively, her skirts held in each hand. Louis tapped restive thumbs on the stiff parchment of the lettres. There was no word yet from D’Artagnan, who had promised to send a musketeer straight back once the boy and Cinq Mars and the abbot were in the fortress. Louis walked to the cupboard, pulled down its massive front, unlocked a drawer and dropped the letters in. These, with the monks’, were the first he’d ever written, letters that erased a person from life, no record of arrest anywhere, so that he or she were essentially obliterated, until it should be the king’s pleasure to make it otherwise. How many more will I write in this life of mine? thought Louis, and he stared at the shelves that held his curios without seeing them. Between his brows was the first line his face would imprint, a line of worry and sadness and absolute determination.

  “THEY ARRIVED QUIETLY in Paris before dawn, went into the Bastille, and then word of them simply stops.”

  It was a Jesuit Nicolas knew, a highly placed priest with ties to the general of their order who resided in Rome, at the hand of the Holy Father.

  “How extraordinary,” said Nicolas. He was at Vaux-le-Vicomte, the estate to his mind still too unfinished in spite of the fact he was holding a grand fête with the king as a guest of honor in a few weeks. “You spoke to the governor of the Bastille yourself?”

  “I sent my secretary, and the governor swore he has no knowledge of monks coming into the Bastille.”

  “And you’re certain it was his majesty’s musketeers who took them in?”

  “That’s what was seen. Musketeers on gray horses.”

  “Odd, indeed. You’re right to bring it to me. I will find out what I can. But for now come and look at the drawings Le Brun has made for my rotunda dome. I’m satisfied with none of them.”

  He showed him the drawings, then the tapestries now in place in the king’s bedchamber—it was the extravagant custom to have a bedchamber reserved strictly for majesty, and in it, Nicolas had already placed the richest fabrics and objects in the château.

  The Jesuit fingered the thick fabric of the bed’s long curtains. Nicolas told him how he’d established a workshop not far from the château whose sole purpose was to weave the tapestries that covered his walls and furniture.

  “Everyone will be in ecstasies over them,” said the Jesuit. “When you’ve done with your own, might I order some for my general in Rome?”

  Nicolas bowed. There was a myth about a man named Midas whose every touch produced gold. He’d known courtiers would rush to copy what he’d done, and that eventually his tapestry mill would turn a profit. It already had its first commission, it seemed.

  “You must see the gardens,” he said.

  “They cannot be more magnificent than your entrance court.”

  But they were. The stone château was surrounded by a square moat, and
the water was like a necklace around the throat of a lovely woman. From the broad back terrace, a grand vista swept all the way to a hill on which stood a colossal statue of Hercules, uncrated and placed on its base just this month, Nicolas explained as they walked toward it. His brother, also a priest, sent him treasures and antiquities from Rome. When they walked to the hill and looked back, the château shimmering in the distance, Nicolas told him that they were standing at the end of an axis that stretched two miles from north to south, an axis with the house as its focal point.

  “Breathtaking,” said the priest.

  Nicolas was gratified, told him of the men who had helped create this vision: a royal architect, painter, and gardener.

  “Their genius will go down in history,” said the Jesuit, bowing, “and so will yours for having the foresight to combine their talents.”

  Nicolas offered him dinner.

  “I’ve heard from the general and council regarding your request,” the Jesuit said, as he pondered whether to have foie gras or patties of braised tongue. “We would be most happy to accommodate.”

  Nicolas had gone to them to borrow a portion of the king’s million. All his own funds were tied up here, in this. “If I may recommend the patties, they are my cook’s specialty. And the interest for a loan would be?”

  “Twenty-five percent.”

  When the man was back in his carriage, on the road to Paris, where, Nicolas knew, he would spread the word of the serene and orderly beauty of the house and gardens, Nicolas let himself feel the shock of the amount of interest the Jesuits would charge before calling for his secretary, telling him the story the Jesuit had brought.

  “Circulate among the king’s men,” Nicolas ordered. “Find out what they have to say.”

  “They’re remarkably tight-lipped these days.”

  Nicolas smiled. “Approach the one with the biggest debt.”

  One of the foremen who ran the building crews walked up the stairs of the château’s broad back terrace. “There’s been a fire, sir. A few acres burned, but rain stopped there from being much damage to your land. It was the monastery that caught fire,” continued the foreman. “It burned to nothing but bare stone, its arbors too. No bodies found.”