by Robert Merle
“Well, Maître Recroche,” she cried in a voice so rapid and abrupt that the words fairly crackled on your ear like the rain in a storm on your roof, “I bring you my sincerest apologies for having lingered in bed whilst you were waiting in my antechamber to deliver your bonnets! It weighs on my conscience! I had dined and stayed up so late the night before! And in such hilarious company! Oh, Recroche, I should die of shame! Recroche, Recroche, where are the bonnets? Let me have them immediately! This instant! Without delay, I beg you!”
“Without delay, Madame?” countered Recroche with a deep bow in which he expressed, it seemed to me, some secret disrespect, being of those Parisian merchants who like neither the nobles nor the princes and value no one and nothing more than themselves. “Delay, Madame? Didn’t I ‘delay’ for three long hours in your antechamber? My atelier was, meanwhile, unoccupied. My companions without work! My business abandoned! Well and good, Madame, but that will cost you ten sols more, that delay.”
“’Tis no matter!” cried Madame de Tourelles. “Recroche, those bonnets! Those bonnets, this instant! Ah,” she added, “I’m suffocating! It’s so hot this August! I could die of it!”
And putting her hands on her slim waist, as if to undo the corset that was oppressing her bosom, she cried, almost faint: “Corinne, my perfume! Nicotin, my fan!” Then, having breathed in the one and agitated the other, she was refreshed, and Recroche having unpacked the bonnets, she tried on each one over the structure of her hair arrangement while Alizon held a mirror for her, looking quite sullen.
I leave to your imagination the cries, the exclamations, the little faces, the chattering, the gracious turns of her neck, the swellings of her bosom and the “I could dies” that accompanied this fitting. When, at last, the baronne had finished, and asked Corinne for her purse to pay Recroche, she whispered a few words into his ear, which I couldn’t hear, but whose meaning I guessed when Recroche turned to me and said, “Monsieur de Siorac, the Baronne des Tourelles requests the pleasure of being introduced to you.”
“Madame,” I said, stepping forward, “I am overcome both by your person and by your good and kind benevolence.” And, so saying, I kissed—not her hand, but the tips of her fingers, as Madame de Joyeuse had taught me to do, as she didn’t want me to be so greedy in these matters, saying, “My sweet, don’t kiss the ladies’ hands as if you wanted to swallow them! And as for the fire in your eyes, try to moderate it. An honest lady is not some chambermaid that in a single glance you can lay out on the grass! Leave her, for goodness’ sake, some time to make up her mind!”
That Madame des Tourelles was satisfied with my ardent but respectful behaviour I believe, since she paid me a thousand little compliments, and with these compliments she mingled various adroit questions, posed in such a lively, prompt, imperious, yet simultaneously coaxing and coquettish manner that I was unable to resist so much suave authority, and in less than five minutes I told her almost everything about me.
“Monsieur,” she said, “would you be good enough to accompany me to my carriage? My groom’s plank is so narrow that I’m afraid I might fall onto the muddy pavement! I could die of it! Monsieur, your hand, I beg you!”
“Madame,” said I, “it is yours, and with it, my arm and my sword!”
“Well, Monsieur,” she laughed behind her fan, “you’re very gallant in your Périgord! Your sword! I wasn’t aiming so high!”
“Madame,” I replied, taking a lighter tone, not allowing myself to be deterred by her offhandedness, “it’s nevertheless true. Use me as you please, I’m yours.”
“Monsieur de Siorac,” she replied with a look that, had I taken it for what it clearly said, would have given me infinite rights with her—but then isn’t that exactly the point? There is no look, whether it has a literal meaning or not, that can’t subsequently be denied to have such a meaning. “Monsieur de Siorac,” she said, but then fell silent, pretending to be confused.
“Madame,” I said hanging on her vermilion lips, “speak, I’m listening.”
“Monsieur de Siorac, will you climb into my carriage and ride a little way with me?”
“Certainly, Madame.”
“Monsieur,” she said, correcting her remonstration with a more amorous look, “we don’t say ‘certainly’ in Paris. It’s the language of the Huguenots. We say, ‘assuredly’.”
“Assuredly, Madame,” I said with a bow, “I’m yours until the end of the road, and, if you wish, until the end of worlds known and unknown.”
“Monsieur,” she laughed, “you have an easy tongue, it seems. And if you’re as vigorous as you are witty, we shall be great friends for a while. But climb in, I beg you!”
With great emotion, I found myself sitting beside this noble lady, or at least as close as her voluminous hoop skirt would allow, on a very well-padded seat in her closed carriage, which was, as far as I could tell, upholstered in pale-green satin, Corinne and her little valet sitting opposite us.
“Corinne,” she said as soon as the carriage started up, “pull the curtain. You too, Nicotin. Monsieur,” she said, “I can’t bear it. I’ll die of it! Give me a kiss, I beg you!”
Ah, what contortions, stretching and reaching of arms and torso I had to do to reach over the immense and rigid hoop skirt and kiss the lips she tendered me, which, in truth, were so soft and smooth as to damn all the papist saints whom she believed in. I had not tasted such a delicious repast since my departure from Mespech, and, forgetting the encumbrance of her clothing, found myself on fire.
“Monsieur,” said Madame des Tourelles, pushing me away, “go easy! Be more gentle, I beg you! You’re behaving like you’re going to devour me!”
At this, Corinne, who hadn’t missed a drop or a crumb of the spectacle we offered her in the blue shadows of the carriage, burst out laughing, and let go of little Nicotin, whom, the moment before, she’d been tickling and teasing, she being so strong and the little fellow so youthful that one might have guessed he were a girl in disguise. I couldn’t doubt, as I watched these two disporting in a way that reminded me of my little Hélix, that the chambermaid and, perhaps, her mistress were well used to this kind of carrying-on with the little rascal.
Madame des Tourelles, after having had a laugh at her own wit (I wagered that she wouldn’t fail to brag of her conceit later on that same day), immediately went at it again, but this time I was careful to remain suave enough to satisfy her, which gradually led her to unbutton my doublet and chemise and slide her right hand under them to stroke my chest, a caress I would have greatly enjoyed if, all of a sudden, she hadn’t withdrawn her hand with as much horror as if she’d been burnt.
“What, Monsieur!” she gasped, pulling away. “You have hair on your chest?”
“But assuredly, Madame!”
“From top to bottom?”
“From bottom to top.”
“Oh, heaven!” cried the baronne. “Corinne, did you hear that? Monsieur de Siorac has all his hair! Oh, gracious! How could anyone be so provincial?”
“But what can I do? It’s nature that made me hairy!”
“By my conscience!” she cried, half-laughing, half-angry. “Corinne, did you hear? Monsieur,” she continued, “did you really not know? For a long time, we haven’t worn hair here! No doubt it’s all right for an old greybeard! But I dare say that in Paris you won’t find a single young gentleman who doesn’t have all his hair removed before he offers his services to the honest ladies of the court!”
I might have answered that it wasn’t I who offered these services, but that another had requested them. I preferred to remain silent, however, well aware that ladies can pardon anything in their lover except discourteous language, and I had learnt from Madame de Joyeuse that in commerce with women, you have to take it or leave it, slights along with caresses. Those of the tender sex often take revenge on their lovers for the injuries inflicted on them by their fathers or husbands. I’ve never found anything but advantages in letting myself be misused without complaint,
for I’ve observed that most often my lover will treat me with great tenderness after wounding me, and that after the claws come the velvet paws, and these last in exquisite proportion to the former. So I said nothing, but looked at my beautiful companion wide-eyed, and as if I were terrified of having fallen from her good graces.
“Oh, Madame,” cooed Corinne, who was the first to respond with sympathy to my predicament, “now he’s all distressed and abashed! For heaven’s sake, let’s give him back our lips! Monsieur de Siorac has sinned only out of ignorance! It’s a venial sin at worst, and quickly forgiven! In less than an hour, a good barber at the baths will make him as smooth and soft as Nicotin!”
“Well,” I thought, “how you do go about it, Corinne! You have me already shaved and clipped! Sent right back to my beardless childhood! Don’t I risk, like Samson in the Bible, losing my strength from all these Parisian refinements?”
“Monsieur,” soothed Madame des Tourelles, taking my hand and mingling her fingers with mine in the most delicious way, “if you wish to serve me, as I believe you are so inclined, you must remedy these imperfections, and see to your doublet, which you must have inherited from some ancestor…”
“Oh, Madame!” cried Corinne.
“You must not wear a doublet which has been resewn in front. You’d be the laughing stock of the court!”
“Madame, we’ve arrived,” said Corinne.
And indeed, the carriage pulled to a halt and Madame des Tourelles withdrew her fine, pretty, perfumed hand from mine and said with a caressing smile, “Monsieur de Siorac, I must leave you. Here we are in the rue Trouvevache. This little house with the blue shutters is mine. I come here when I’m tired of the setbacks, troubles and noise that I must bear in my mansion. Monsieur de Siorac, I shall be here towards six in the evening tomorrow and will receive you alone for supper.”
“Madame,” I replied, “I will be infinitely happy to accept.”
“I hope so,” she cautioned with a soupçon of haughtiness, “as long as you do everything I told you.”
After this, I kissed her fingertips with the greatest respect and got out of the carriage as deftly as I could, as I did so giving a nod to Corinne, who, as far as I could tell, seemed unusually interested in me, though at the moment I could not foresee where this interest would lead us.
I walked quickly away so as not to be spattered by mud as the carriage started off, and in the quick motion I made to get out of its path, I found myself in a narrow doorway, and was surprised to feel the door opening behind me. Pierre de L’Étoile appeared, all dressed in black, his aquiline nose elongated by all the worries he had.
“Ah, Monsieur de L’Étoile!” I cried. “By what miracle have you appeared here like some deus ex machina?”
“No miracle, no mystery,” replied L’Étoile. “This is my house. As is the one opposite which you’ve been looking at with such interest. I rented it out, at Recroche’s request, to the person whose carriage you just stepped out of. There was a time,” he mused in his morose and moralistic tones, while throwing me a half-scolding, half-amused look, “when it was only the lords of the court who kept such, ahem, little houses in Paris at some distance from their mansions. But now,” he sighed, “the honourable ladies do as well.”
“Indeed, Monsieur!” I said.
“Monsieur de Siorac,” he continued, “I have business in the rue de la Ferronnerie. Shall I accompany you, while we chat?”
“The pleasure will be mine!”
“Mine as well. You are well aware, no doubt, that I fulminate against our present morality. Did you know what the late Jeanne d’Albret told me when she came to Paris to sign the marriage contract between Henri and Margot?”
“What did she say?” I replied politely.
“That in the royal court it’s no longer the men who pursue the women, it’s the women who pursue the men.”
“Ah!”
“Please don’t feign surprise, Monsieur de Siorac,” he continued, lowering his voice. “You’re a very strange sort of Huguenot. Scarcely are you in Paris one day before you’ve been hooked, and, what’s worse, are all atremble at the end of your hook.”
“Monsieur,” I replied, more bitterly than politely, “do you see me ‘all atremble’?”
“Oh, yes, decidedly. But we must hurry. I’m expected in the rue de la Ferronnerie.”
And, saying this, he hurried his pace, his long, thin, stiff legs churning, his neck and shoulders held stiffly, but his curious, ferreting eyes darting this way and that with enviable insatiability.
“Monsieur,” I said, taking great care not to name her, “so you know this lady?”
“Like the back of my hand. Except that my right hand isn’t unaware of what my left is doing, whereas, at the Tourelles residence, they don’t know what’s going on in the little house in the rue Trouvevache. Monsieur de Siorac, I detect a weak smile. Did you believe you were the first?”
“Neither first not last. But, Monsieur, may I ask how it is that you know this lady?”
“Through Recroche, having learnt that the lady was interested in renting a little house near her bonnet-maker.”
“And why so near?”
“Because of the extreme refinement of her coachman, who would rather wait for her outside the workshop of her bonnet-maker than in the rue Trouvevache.”
“Aha! What a clever ruse!” I cried.
And this time I didn’t laugh weakly, but out loud.
“Ah, what a relief!” said L’Étoile, with a bitter smile, but his eyes bright. “I was afraid our sorceress had snared your soul along with your body. Ah, Monsieur de Siorac, what shreds your tenderest feelings would have left on those thorns! Our Circes of the court have hearts as cold as their private parts are hot! Inside and outside, all is show and vanity. They’ll throw you away as soon as you don’t satisfy them any more.”
“Yes, so I heard, as soon as her little heart has tired of this vast world.”
“It won’t ever tire! It’s too hungry. Venerable doctor, I will take my leave of you here. Would you like to meet Ambroise Paré?”
“Oh, Monsieur! Nothing would make me happier!”
“I will try to make it happen then.”
And while I stammered my gratitude and salutations, the honest L’Étoile went to knock on a door, leaving me enchanted with his prudence, his wisdom and his beneficence.
When I entered the workshop of Maître Recroche to ask about my brothers, I found Baragran and Alizon doing their needlework, and as they went about it, they had at each other in a furious argument.
“You can’t deny, silly goose, that the baronne is as beautiful as the Holy Virgin!”
“Beautiful!” snarled Alizon. “Beautiful, the baronne! Most assuredly I deny it!”
“That’s because you’re jealous!” said Baragran.
“Jealous! Me? You fat idiot!” Alizon retorted bitterly with a half-pitying, half-derisive laugh. “That’ll be the day! Jealous of a baronne? My noble Monsieur, did you hear this idiot? Jealous, me, of a baronne?”
“It’s not so much about her nobility,” countered Baragran, “but about the lady’s beauty! For she is beautiful. Yes, I’m saying it and I’d say it again, even with a noose around my neck. And I’d add that it would take a hundred Alizons mixed together to make a wench as brilliant as the baronne.”
“And what’s she got that I haven’t got, you poor impotent fool,” cried Alizon, “except her plumage?”
“Her plumage?” scoffed Baragran. “But her feathers are hers!”
“Oh, no they’re not! Pluck her, Baragran! And what will be left? Take off her bodice, her hoop skirts, her silk gown, her high heels, her pearls, her ridiculous coiffure, her false braids, her perfumes and the powders she pastes on her face! And what will you have left, Baragran, my sweet? A wench neither younger nor prettier than I, who’s not made any different, who’s got the same slit in her middle as I, and who doesn’t give her men any more pleasure than I would!”
&nbs
p; At this I laughed out loud, remembering what my little Hélix had said of Diane de Fontenac when that lady was convalescing from the plague at Mespech and sat in the window of our gatehouse, wearing her ermines, attracting my brother François’s attention and my own like filings to a magnet. Well, I thought, this Parisian fly stings as hard as my little Périgordian wasp! And suddenly surprised to have thought about my poor little Hélix as if she were still alive, I felt a sadness so poignant that I had to turn away and look out the window onto the street, my eyes blurry and my throat in a knot.
Giacomi and my beautiful Samson awoke from their long sleep powerfully hungry, and, having but a faint memory of the two meat pies I’d swallowed earlier that morning, my first concern was to discover a restaurant with a table for four, and sit down to a flagon of wine and a roasted chicken, but this proved more difficult than I’d thought given the enormous crowds that had arrived in Paris for the marriage of Princesse Margot. However, on Baragran’s recommendation we were able to find one in the rue de la Truanderie whose prices were clearly marked on a wooden pillar outside the door in conformity with a royal ordinance (which, I heard, was mostly ignored). Our host, a cousin of Baragran, received us quite civilly, though in his own inquisitive and talkative way, wanting to know the whys and the wherefores of our visit to the capital. But when I’d happily satisfied his curiosity, he repeated our story to his patrons and to his neighbours without the least malice, having the Parisian mania for always wanting to appear in the know about everything. And from that moment, liking us the better for it, he promised us a table morning and night in his cafe, which relieved us greatly, for the food was good and the prices modest, in comparison with what they were elsewhere in Paris, though three times what I would have paid in Sarlat.
I was careful to ensure his continued good graces by the stories I told him of my misadventures in the capital, and especially of the attempted theft of my horse directly in front of Notre-Dame, which furnished him with an entire day of gossip at my expense. I’d be hard put to be able to describe him today since he had a very ordinary face, but I do remember his name, for he made a great deal of the fact that he was called Guillaume Gautier. He’s no longer living, having tasted too many of his wines, but his son took over the management of the restaurant and will cook you up a good roast for a reasonable price. I dined there last Thursday, and if the reader would like to taste his simple fare, all he has to do is mention my name to Abel Gautier (the son) and he’ll be received like a lord. The street is calm, with few wagons or other conveyances, and the serving girl is quite pretty.
