Before Versailles Read online

  Of course Madame sleeps until noon, thought Louis, not a shard of what he was thinking showing on his face. She has danced all night, she has laughed and delighted us and kept us up with her, unlike my wife, who is yawning by ten of the evening, who hasn’t learned French after nearly a year, and who thinks dressing well is putting on more diamonds. Last night he’d come very close to kissing—

  He stopped himself. This was a line of thought that led to no good whatsoever. He rubbed his face vigorously on the linen, took his jacket from his brother, accepted his hat from someone else, climbed the steep outside steps two at a time, going into the door at their end, a door which led to that part of the palace where his bedchamber lay.

  As in a beehive, where the most important chamber is the queen bee’s, so, in royal palaces, the most important room was the king’s bedchamber. It was the pulsing heart of the palace. When the king journeyed to another of his castles, the pulse ceased to beat. Those left behind kept chambers cleaned and gardens weeded and waited for the next royal arrival. Those who had any standing traveled with the heart. For the nobility, there was no life that was real life without the king’s presence, or so it had been, once upon a time. The wars, the power of royal advisers, first Cardinal Richelieu and then Cardinal Mazarin after him, had shifted and diluted the sense of importance around a king, but the shape of tradition remained. Whether or not the tradition strengthened would be up to Louis.

  As he passed through his guardroom, musketeers who were his personal bodyguard stood up at the sight of him and saluted. Their lieutenant had been leaning against a smooth stone wall in the courtyard during the dueling watching not only Louis, but also the great, arched, open entrances from other pavilions. If there was one thing a king of France could depend upon, it was the loyalty of these musketeers. It was their tradition and a prized one.

  As Louis walked through the maze of chambers that made up this part of the palace, servants bowed. There was always someone bowing. One creaking step on the intricate parquet of an antechamber, and the massive doors to his wife’s apartments opened as if by magic. Two of her ladies, a sullen brunette and a sunny-faced beauty, stood in his path, their gowns belled around them because of their curtsies.

  “Soissons, my dear,” Louis nodded to the brunette of the two, an old friend of his, a childhood playmate, and sometimes more, Olympe, the Countess de Soissons. “How is her majesty this morning?”

  But the sunny beauty answered before Olympe could speak. “She slept very well, sire.” The beauty was pert and certain of herself and smiled at Louis.

  Surprised, Louis looked directly at her. Her smile widened. He didn’t return it. He didn’t like her, never mind that his friends considered her the most beautiful woman at court. He’d give her that. But she put him on edge, always smiling that bright smile, always watching. And she was bold, like now, speaking to him before he’d spoken to her, answering for the Countess de Soissons, who was superintendent of his wife’s household, which made her first lady of the household and far more important than a maid of honor. He’d known Olympe since they were children, and he had loved the man who’d brought her and her sisters to court as if he were his own father.

  The beauty always made him want to stutter. He didn’t have a true stutter, just a slight stalling of words that he had conquered during childhood through sheer willpower. It unnerved him when he felt it in his throat, swelling his tongue. Those around him would laugh, as they’d done when he was a child, and the laughter hadn’t been kind. A king couldn’t afford to be laughed at. It had been part of his father’s downfall, his nervous, limping, coughing father, who twitched when he was upset and stammered spit when he was angry and trusted no one and loved only brightly, briefly, and very dangerously. Somehow those whom his father had loved ended up dead—his father had always believed they’d betrayed him in the end.

  Had they? What was betrayal and what was simple human error and what was suspicion sickened to insanity, coloring even good with its darkness?

  “She’s up early,” he said to Olympe, ignoring the beaming beauty, who lost some of her shimmer. But the young men following Louis smiled and nodded at her, showing their approval in every way save stomping their feet, so it didn’t take long for her to brighten back to full power.

  Louis walked with Olympe through several other rooms, high ceilings, huge fireplaces, intricate woodwork and molding and inlay, thick rugs, big tapestries on the walls, until finally they were in the queen’s bedchamber, the ornate and curtained bed at one end. It was the fashion to have a series of rooms called antechambers that led to the bedchamber, and even the bedchamber wasn’t private. For strict privacy, a person of high birth had to retreat to a room called a closet, where, finally, he or she might be alone. Just as there were layers of chambers between him and his wife, there were layers of people, and, at this moment, he was glad of it.

  “So, she slept well?” he asked as they walked through the antechambers, and women fell into curtsies wherever his glance moved. I do care about her, he thought. I do.

  “I don’t think so, and she woke irritable. However, the Viscount Nicolas’s gift cheered her.”

  “The viscount sent a gift?”

  “You know how generous he is, sire.”

  “Does that mean you received a gift, also?” Louis was ironic.

  Naughty dimples appeared in Olympe’s cheeks. That and her sullenness had kept more than one man awake at night. “Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.”

  Louis pinched her arm. “You will. You always have.”

  Olympe winked at him, and Louis’s queen, sitting up in her bed, excited as she always was that Louis was visiting her, gave a little sigh. Some of the radiant happiness faded from her square, rather fleshy face, but no one noticed. All eyes were on the king, on Olympe. There were wicked rumors about the two of them, but the queen didn’t know of them. Surrounded by a soft bubble of privilege and royalty and lack of speaking French, she was the last to learn of any scandal. Her jealousy was more instinctive. The king was so lean, so grave, so dark-eyed, so kind, that it was impossible not to see other women’s notice of him, and this wasn’t Spain, where young noblewomen were kept in strict seclusion until their marriages, and where even after their marriages they were kept cloistered with other women. This was France, where women were quite amazingly—to her eyes—quite extraordinarily bold. And no one here seemed to mind it.

  Dwarves she’d brought with her from her home saw the hurt that moved over her face before she gathered back all of her smile. The dwarves served as her jesters and soothers. Philippe couldn’t stand them, but Louis was more tolerant. His and Philippe’s mother was fond of dwarves. They were a reminder of the strange and intricate and still medieval court both women had left behind forever when they married and journeyed to France. Maria Teresa, who had been the foremost princess of the foremost kingdom of Europe and was now queen of France, was lonely for her native Spain, lonely for the majestic and glacial ritual she’d left behind, lonely for the manners and way of life, so different from here. Unlike her mother-in-law, she was having a hard time embracing that which was French.

  Louis bent down and kissed her on the mouth. He was strict about who might kiss her, allowing only his mother and brother, and now, his new sister-in-law, to do so. It wasn’t from jealousy, but from his sense of pride. This was a princess of Spain, most powerful kingdom in the western world, fat with a hundred years of riches from her colonies across the sea. There was no one higher born than she. She is such an important princess that if she doesn’t marry you, she has to marry Christ and take the veil, his dear cardinal had joked with him. You’re the only one of her stature. You’re the only one worthy. Louis’s mother was a Spanish princess, too, aunt to his wife, and she’d planned this marriage when he and Maria Teresa were in their cradles.

  France and Spain had been at war for a long time, and this marriage had secured a peace, a peace his dear cardinal had killed himself working toward.
For forty-one years, there had been war at some border of France. Take her and defang a faltering Spain. Take her and be the lion of the west. France will supercede Spain. I know it. I feel it. And Mazarin had smiled as he spoke, eyes crinkled in his lively face, a face that was too thin, a face that Louis had seen all his life, literally. One of his first memories was of Mazarin leaning over his baby bed, something loving, something safe radiating from his eyes. He was the handsomest man in the world when he came to court, his mother’s favorite lady-in-waiting liked to gossip. When we first saw him, we all swooned, and even your mother noticed.

  Louis’s kiss opened Maria Teresa the way a knife does a ripe melon. She looked almost pretty, a light flush on her alabaster cheeks.

  “I’m so glad to see you, dear heart. I had a bad dream, my husband. I can’t remember it now, but I didn’t like it. It has made me sad. Cats were in it, I think. Stealing my breath. Was it an omen? About dying in childbed?”

  Louis sat down on bed covers whose embroidery was so thick that the color of the fabric upon which it was sewn could barely be seen. He took her hands in his, listening thoughtfully, as she continued on, in Spanish, of course.

  “I might, you know. Anyway, I just lay here for a while and I thought about my bedchamber at the Alcázar, the vines that grew there in the summer, covering the iron on the balcony. I always smelled them when I woke up, and their smell made me happy. And their color. ‘Cup of gold’ they’re called because they are shaped like a chalice, like the Lord’s chalice at the Last Supper. And then the viscount’s little gift arrived. Do look, dear heart. It’s a fan.”

  She spread it open for Louis to see the scene painted across it.

  “It’s the Alcázar! It’s just what I needed. Some reminder of home, and so I’ve been fanning myself with it and thinking perhaps I might not eat breakfast. I’m not hungry, you know, which is strange for me. A fever, do you think I might be coming down with a summer fever?”

  Louis put his hand on her forehead. “No, sweet, there’s no fever.”

  She sighed. Several of the maids of honor sighed too, imagining his touch.

  “No fever, dear one,” said Louis, “and as for home, this is your home now. You are France’s queen, and I must have you by my side, and our son is not going to cause any trouble. He is going to pop out like a bean from a pod and say, Mama, Papa, where is my milk? And we’re going to find the strongest, fattest, cleanest wet nurse in France to feed him. Maybe we’ll even send for a Spanish one. Would you like that? A fat Spaniard to feed him when our French one tires?”

  All the time he was talking, answering her in Spanish because it comforted her, there was a distant part of him observing, thinking, she should be speaking French, she should be attempting more, I need her to try harder. And as he spoke, he opened and closed the fan slowly, taking in the scene of this palace in Spain, taking in at some level he was not yet ready to allow emotion into, that the Viscount Nicolas reached here, even to his wife’s household.

  “And our little French dauphin”—the first son of the king was called the dauphin because three hundred years earlier a king of France had purchased huge territories that carried a hereditary title, taken from the dolphin on the coat of arms—“is going to teach you French.” Pray let someone do so, he thought.

  He went on, nothing of what he was thinking showing on his face. He’d learned that early, not to show what he felt if possible. “You’re going to learn it as he does, aren’t you, my sweet? How happy I will be when I hear you speak French well.”

  He stroked her hair, wiry with curl, a light brown. The first time he’d seen her he’d been shocked that the portrait of her sent to him lied. Her face was long, her cheeks fleshy, her nose, well, large. But he’d swallowed a quick flash of dismay and concentrated on duty and honor and the fact that she was the greatest pearl among princesses.

  “Our little dauphin isn’t going to cause his mother a bit of trouble.” Louis leaned forward and kissed the embroidered bedcovers under which lay his wife’s abdomen and the bud who was their child. “My precious son. This is your father. Grow strong, my boy, my prince, my dauphin. Grow strong, and then come out to greet me. I’m waiting for you.”

  Several hearts in the bedchamber beat faster at the sight of this still very young and oh-so-handsome king talking to his wife’s swollen belly with genuine love for the child growing there.

  Louis raised his face. “Tell me about the vine. What is its name again?”

  “Cup of gold,” said Maria Teresa. “The conqueror Cortés gave one to Montezuma.”

  “Who is Montezuma?”

  “He was the king of the new world across the sea, great and powerful, but not great enough, not powerful enough to outwit our gentlemen.” She arched her neck in a prideful gesture. Spain owned the new world and much of the old. There was the Spanish Netherlands to the north of France, and to the west, the Hapsburgs, sons of Spanish kings.

  “I’ll have cup-of-gold vines planted outside this window.” Louis stood. “I’ll plant them outside the windows of the Louvre and Saint-Germain,” these were other palaces in which they lived during the year, “so that everywhere you go you will wake to their perfume. This is your home, sweet plum. Where I am is your home. What do you do today?”

  “I will go with her majesty to a nunnery in the next village. The voices of the nuns are said to be exquisite.”

  The “majesty” Maria Teresa referred to was the queen mother, Louis’s mother, who had been queen of France for years, twenty and more before Louis was born, as well as regent after his father died, but was now in the background, not that his mother ever really stayed out of sight or mind. But Mazarin’s death had taken some of her gusto.

  Louis felt impatient. While his wife went off to listen to nuns chant, content to be in the shadow of his mother, neither of them noticing or caring that most of their ladies were bored to tears, Philippe’s wife would be on her way with her ladies, huge straw hats on their heads, to the river to swim, gentlemen banished with only their imaginations for company. And then several hours later, the women would return in carriages, and the men would accompany the carriages, leaning down from their horses to talk to enchanting young women whose hair was still wet. And they’d gather near the carp pool by the fountain courtyard for a light picnic in the park with some courtiers playing guitars and others practicing dance steps for the court ballet Madame was presenting in July, her idea, this ballet, and the court poet would walk from group to laughing, talking group as he gathered ideas for the poems about the noble performers that it was his task to write for the ballet. Philippe’s wife had become the light of court. Everyone adored her.

  Wouldn’t it be fun, she had said to Louis in her perfect French, her head tilting to one side, and again he was amazed that he’d ever thought her unattractive, wouldn’t it be fun if we gave a ballet, you and me and Monsieur and her majesty? Don’t you think that would be great fun?

  Yes. Yes, he did think that would be great fun. There was almost nothing he liked better than music, listening to music, playing music, composing music, hearing music someone else had composed, singing the words to the music. And dance was the beautiful sister of music, his second favorite thing, to dance. He had an innate ear, an innate talent for both. They fed his soul. He was the best dancer of the court. Everyone knew. And they didn’t say it simply to flatter him.

  “You’re too good to me,” said Maria Teresa, and startled, his mind a million miles away, Louis took her hand and raised it to his lips.

  “So I hope always to be,” he said, his way of speaking gentle and courteous. Courtesy had become his mask to hide a growing dismay with himself, with her. He had vowed to love no others, but others were in his mind, all the time now.

  Hauteur in her glance, Maria Teresa cut her eyes to Olympe as if to say, he’s mine.

  Outside in the antechamber, Louis rapped out a quick command to his secretary. “Have a fan made with the Louvre as its subject and one of Saint-Germain, and o
ne of Fontainebleau. The most skilled painter in Paris. For her majesty. And have him paint fleurs-de-lis on the end sticks.” The Louvre was his primary palace, and fleurs-de-lis were the lilies of France, an emblem, a symbol of French royalty.

  To remind her where her home is, he thought, striding through his throne room and down a set of stairs, his gentlemen and bodyguards following, out into the sun, which he loved. It was kind of the viscount to send her a fan. And clever. Playing upon her homesickness. How had he known of her homesickness? Who in her household is his spy? Louis wondered. The viscount’s spies were everywhere. Someone his dear cardinal trusted had told him so, but he hadn’t quite believed it at first. Now, he had begun to feel that he couldn’t sneeze without the viscount, this powerful minister whom his court treated so deferentially, knowing it and sending an embroidered handkerchief. Or, was he on his way to becoming as sick with suspicion as his father had been?

  Louis’s face showed a certain hawkish sharpness, and the men nearest him fell back a little, wondering if they’d displeased. Odd, they’d say to themselves later, how we didn’t used to care so much. Louis had been king for a long time. But the cardinal had also been alive, and in the cardinal, true power had lain.

  God, I despise myself, thought Louis, striding across his private courtyard and through the massive arch of a gatehouse out into open grounds behind the palace to where there was a long landscape canal and he could take a decent walk before he held his morning council meeting. He meant to be good to his wife, meant never to hurt her, but his heart was hungry, like a tiger’s. He’d wanted to lay that heart at her feet, wanted to love in the way men loved women in the romances, in the troubadour’s ballads. In his mind was a ballad: Off with sleep, love, up from bed, this fair morn, see for our eyes the rose-red, new dawn is born, now that skies are glad and gay in this gracious month of May, love me, sweet, fill my joy in brimming measure, in this world he hath no pleasure that will none of it.