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

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 La Voisin.

 

The door was opened for them by a young woman of some twenty years

of age - Marguerite Monvoisin, the daughter of the witch - who led

them upstairs to a room that was handsomely furnished and hung with

fantastic tapestry of red designs upon a black ground - designs that

took monstrous shapes in the flickering light of a cluster of

candles. Black curtains parted, and from between them stepped a

short, plump woman, of a certain comeliness, with two round black

beads of eyes. She was fantastically robed in a cloak of crimson

velvet, lined with costly furs and closely studded with double-headed

eagles in fine gold, which must have been worth a prince’s ransom;

and she wore red shoes on each of which there was 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

conceal from 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

carry concealed 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

you procure 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

as mine,” she said. “Let me consider first what must be done. In

a few days I 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

so dismissed the great lady.

 

Leaving a heavy purse behind her, as Vanens had instructed her, the

Marchioness departed with her escort. And there, with that

initiation, as far as we can ascertain, ended Louis de Vanens’s

connection with the affair.

 

At Clagny Madame de Montespan waited for three days in a fever of

impatience for the coming of the witch. But when at last La Voisin

presented herself, the proposal that she had to make was one before

which the Marchioness recoiled in horror and some indignation.

 

The magic that La Voisin suggested involved a coadjutor, the Abbe

Guibourg, and the black mass to be celebrated by him. Madame de

Montespan 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 and raged a while, and even went near to

striking La Voisin, who looked on with inscrutable face and stony,

almost contemptuous, indifference. Before that impenetrable,

almost uncanny, calm, Madame de Montespan’s fury at last abated.

Then the urgency of her need becoming paramount, she desired more

clearly to be told what would be expected of her. What the witch

told her was more appalling than anything she could have imagined.

But La Voisin argued:

 

“Can anything be accomplished without cost? Can anything be gained

in this 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

boundless honour, to be more than queen - is not all this worth

some sacrifice?”

 

To Madame de Montespan it must have been worth any sacrifice in this

world or the next, since in the end she conquered her disgust, and

agreed to lend herself to this horror.

 

Three masses, she was told, would be necessary to ensure success,

and it was determined that they should be celebrated in the chapel

of the Chateau de Villebousin, where Guibourg had been almoner, to

which he had access, and which was at the time untenanted.

 

The chateau was a gloomy mediaeval fortress, blackened by age, and

standing, surrounded by a moat, in a lonely spot some two miles to

the south of Paris. Thither on a dark, gusty night of March came

Madame de Montespan, accompanied by her confidential waiting-woman,

Mademoiselle Desoeillets. They left the coach to await them on the

Orleans road, and thence, escorted by a single male attendant, they

made their way by a rutted, sodden path towards the grim castle

looming faintly through the enveloping gloom.

 

The wind howled dismally about the crenellated turrets; and a row

of poplars, 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

indescribably wicked.

 

Desoeillets was frightened by the dark, the desolate loneliness and

eeriness of the place; but she dared utter no complaint as she

stumbled forward over the uneven ground, through the gloom and the

buffeting wind, compelled by the suasion of her mistress’s imperious

will. Thus, by a drawbridge spanning dark, oily waters, they came

into a vast courtyard and an atmosphere as of mildew. A studded

door stood ajar, and through the gap, from a guiding beacon of

infamy, fell a rhomb of yellow light, suddenly obscured by a squat

female figure when the steps of the Marchioness and her companions

fell upon the stones of the yard.

 

It was La Voisin who stood on the threshold to receive her client.

In the stone-flagged hall behind her the light of a lantern revealed

her daughter, Marguerite Monvoisin, and a short, crafty-faced,

misshapen fellow in black homespun and a red wig - a magician named

Lesage, one of La Voisin’s coadjutors, a rogue of some talent who

exploited the witches of Paris to his own profit.

 

Leaving Leroy - the Marchioness’s male attendant below in this

fellow’s company, La Voisin took up a candle and lighted Madame de

Montespan up the broad stone staircase, draughty and cold, to the

ante-room of the chapel on the floor above. Mademoiselle

Desoeillets followed closely and fearfully, and Marguerite Monvoisin

came