The Historical Nights' Entertainment, Rafael Sabatini [freenovel24 .txt] 📗

the absolute ruler he conceived himself. There were

such capable men as Colbert and Louvois at the King’s side’; there

was the great genius of France which manifests itself when and as

it will, whatever the regime - and there was Madame de Montespan

to whose influence not a little of Louis’s glory may be ascribed,

since the most splendid years of his reign were those between 1668

and 1678 when she was maitresse en titre and more than Queen of

France. The women played a great part at the Court of Louis XIV,

and those upon whom he turned his dark eyes were in the main as wax

under the solar rays of the SunKing. But Madame de Montespan had

discovered the secret of reversing matters, so that in her hands it

was the King who became as wax for her modelling. It is with this

secret - a page of the secret history of France that we are here

concerned.

 

Francoises Athenais de Tonnay-Charente had come to Court in 1660 as

a maid of honour to the Queen. Of a wit and grace to match her

superb beauty, she was also of a perfervid piety, a daily

communicant, a model of virtue to all maids of honour. This until

the Devil tempted her. When that happened, she did not merely eat

an apple; she devoured an entire orchard. Pride and ambition

brought about her downfall. She shared the universal jealousy of

which Louise de la Valliere was a victim, and coveted the honours

and the splendour by which that unfortunate favourite was surrounded.

 

Not even her marriage with the Marquis de Montespan some three years

after her coming to Court sufficed to overcome the longings born of

her covetousness and ambition. And then, when the SunKing looked

with favour upon her opulent charms, when at last she saw the object

of her ambition within reach, that husband of hers went very near

to wrecking everything by his unreasonable behaviour. This

preposterous marquis had the effrontery to dispute his wife with

Jupiter, was so purblind as not to appreciate the honour the SunKing

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

the friendship of the King for his wife, his behaviour so amazed the

King’s cousin, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, that she called him

“an extravagant and extraordinary man.” To his face she told him

that he must be mad to behave in this fashion; and so incredibly

distorted were his views, that he did not at all agree with her.

He provoked scenes with the King, in which he quoted Scripture,

made opposite allusions to King David which were in the very worst

taste, and even ventured to suggest that the SunKing might have

to reckon with the judgment of God. If he escaped a lettre de

cachet and a dungeon in the Bastille, it can only have been because

the King feared the further spread of a scandal injurious to the

sacrosanctity of his royal dignity.

 

The Marchioness fumed in private and sneered in public. When

Mademoiselle de Montpensier suggested that for his safety’s sake

she should 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

beating his wife could he prevail, Monsieur de Montespan resigned

himself after his own fashion. He went into widower’s mourning,

dressed his servants in black, and came ostentatiously to Court in

a mourning coach to take ceremonious leave of his friends. It was

an affair that profoundly irritated the SunKing, and very nearly

made him ridiculous.

 

Thereafter Montespan abandoned his wife to the King. He withdrew

first to his country seat, and, later, from France, having

received more than a hint that Louis was intending to settle his

score with him. By that time Madame de Montespan was firmly

established as maitresse en titre, and in January of 1669 she gave

birth to the Duke of Maine, the first of the seven children she

was to bear the King. Parliament was to legitimize them all,

declaring them royal children of France, and the country was to

provide titles, dignities, and royal rent-rolls for them and their

heirs forever. Do you wonder that there was a revolution a century

later, and that the people, grown weary of the parasitic anachronism

of royalty, should have risen to throw off the intolerable burden

it imposed upon them?

 

The splendour of Madame de Montespan in those days was something

the like of which had never been seen at the Court of France. On

her estate of Clagny, near Versailles, stood now a magnificent

chateau. Louis had begun by building a country villa, which

satisfied her not at all.

 

“That,” she told him, “might do very well for an opera-girl”;

whereupon the infatuated monarch had no alternative but to command

its demolition, and call in the famous architect, Mansard, to erect

in its place an ultraroyal residence.

 

At Versailles itself, whilst the long-suffering Queen had to be

content with ten rooms on the second floor, Madame de Montespan was

installed in twice that number on the first; and whilst a simple

page sufficed to carry the Queen’s train at Court, nothing less than

the wife of a marshal of France must perform the same office for the

favourite. She kept royal state as few queens have ever kept it.

She was assigned a troop of royal bodyguards for escort, and when

she travelled there was a never-ending train to follow her six-horse

coach, and officers of State came to receive her with royal honours

wherever she passed.

 

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

himself.

 

“Thunderous and triumphant,” Madame de Sevigne describes her in

those days when the SunKing was her utter and almost timid slave.

 

But constancy is not a Jovian virtue. Jupiter grew restless, and

then, shaking off all restraint, plunged into inconstancy of the

most scandalous and flagrant kind. It is doubtful if the history

of royal amours, with all its fecundity, can furnish a parallel.

Within a few months, Madame de Soubise, Mademoiselle de

Rochefort-Theobon, Madame de Louvigny, Madame de Ludres, and some

lesser ones passed in rapid succession through the furnace of the

SunKing’s affection - which is to say, through the royal bed -

and at last the Court was amazed to see the Widow Scarron, who had

been appointed governess to Madame de Montespan’s royal children,

empanoplied in a dignity and ceremony that left no doubt on the

score of her true position at Court.

 

And so, after seven years of absolute sway in which homage had been

paid her almost in awe by noble and simple alike, Madame de

Montespan, neglected now by Louis, moved amid reflections of that

neglect, with arrogantly smiling lips and desperate rage in her

heart. She sneered openly at the royal lack of taste, allowed her

barbed wit to make offensive sport with the ladies who supplanted

her; yet, ravaged by jealousy, she feared for herself the fate

which through her had overtaken La Valliere.

 

That fear was with her now as she sat in the window embrasure, hell

in her heart and a reflection of it in her eyes, as, fallen almost

to the rank of a spectator in that comedy wherein she was accustomed

to the leading part, she watched the shifting, chattering,

glittering crowd. And as she watched, her line of vision was

crossed to her undoing by the slender, wellknit figure of de Vanens,

who, dressed from head to foot in black, detached sharply from that

dazzling throng. His face was pale and saturnine, his eyes dark,

very level, and singularly piercing. Thus his appearance served to

underline the peculiar fascination which he exerted, the rather

sinister appeal which he made to the imagination.

 

This young Provencal nobleman was known to dabble in magic, and

there were one or two dark passages in his past life of which more

than a 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. But if you taxed him with demoniacal practices he would

deny it, yet in a way that carried no conviction.

 

To this dangerous fellow Madame de Montespan now made appeal in her

desperate need.

 

Their eyes met as he was sauntering past, and with a lazy smile and

a languid wave of her fan she beckoned him to her side.

 

“They tell me, Vanens,” said she, “that your philosophy succeeds

so well that you are transmuting copper into silver.”

 

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

his thin lips.

 

“They tell you the truth,” he said. “I have cast a bar which has

been purchased 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

- the transmutation of base metal into gold.”

 

“And you will perform it?”

 

“Let me but conquer the secret of solidifying mercury, and the rest

is naught. I shall conquer it, and soon.”

 

He spoke with easy confidence, a man stating something that he knew

beyond the possibility of doubt. The Marquise became thoughtful.

She sighed.

 

“You are the master of deep secrets, Vanens. Have you none that

will soften flinty hearts, make them responsive?”

 

He considered this woman whom Saint-Simon has called “beautiful as

the day,” 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 - in vain. 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 to see?”

 

Vanens became grave.

 

“It is not an alchemy in which myself I dabble,” he said slowly.

“But I am 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 that none was listening, then bending nearer: “There is a

sorceress named La Voisin in the Rue de la Tannerie, well known as

a fortuneteller to many ladies 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

- the habits of which clung to her despite the irregularity of her

life-made her 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

looked in the direction of the sound and beheld the gorgeous figure

of the King bending - yet haughty and condescending even in

adoration - over handsome Madame de Ludres. Pride and ambition

rose up in sudden fury to trample on religious feeling. Let Vanens

take her to this witch of his, for be the aid what it might, she

must have it.

 

And so, one dark night late in the year, Louis de Vanens handed a

masked and muffled lady from a coach at the corner of the Rue de

la Tannerie, and conducted her to the house of