LITMIR.BIZ

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in her pointed high-heeled slippers contemplated the fumbling Gascon. He amused her, and was not without charm. ‘Might you be implying that you …?’

      ‘Well, one doesn’t fall in love only once in a lifetime.’

      A pâtissier stood in his doorway, proudly adjusting his appearance: a ribbon for a cravat, a beret with a large knot, and a sprig of flowers to attract the ladies. The abandoned fiancée placed her head on the marquis’s shoulder in an intimate gesture. And the marquis, an assiduous devotee of the lansquenet circles and reversi tables in the hôtels particuliers of the Marais, now thought he was playing the finest game on earth. Astonished and adrift, on a square teeming with horse carts and ecclesiastics, he scratched his periwig.

      ‘Is it not paradise here?’

      ‘Ah, no, Monsieur, in paradise there wouldn’t be so many bishops!’

      They burst out laughing. For his part, the marquis was certain that an angel had blessed him, and he raised his eyes to heaven.

      The vaults of the church of Saint-Sulpice, forming a lofty sky of stone, resounded with laughter. After the reading of the Gospel, the blonde in the red pearl-embroidered dress had knelt before the altar alongside the marquis in lavender grey, then exploded with laughter, murmuring in his ear, ‘You know what we’re kneeling on, you know how we forgot the embroidered silk cushions and had them sent for from Rue des Rosiers, at the Hôtel Mortemart …’

      ‘Yes?’ asked the young Gascon.

      ‘The servant made a mistake. She brought the dogs’ cushions.’

      ‘No!’

      They laughed and dusted off the dog hairs like mischievous little children dressed up in garments of embroidered silk. Their guests were seated behind them at the heart of the vast church, which was still under construction. The Gascon, in a fine light-coloured horsehair wig, radiated happiness. His bride, graceful and glowing in the gentle brilliance of her twenty-two years, was still full of the candour of childhood.

      Near the entrance to the church, sitting on a prie-dieu, a chubby-cheeked duc with protuberant green eyes and a small, full-lipped mouth exclaimed ecstatically to his neighbour, ‘My daughter is extremely amusing! One is never bored when she is present. Do you see that obese boy in the first row? That is my eldest, Vivonne. The other day, when I was reproaching my daughter for not taking enough exercise, she replied, “How can you say that? Not a day goes by that I do not walk four times round my brother!”’

      The man to whom he was speaking, an elderly man with a great hooked nose that seemed to take up his entire face, enquired, ‘Is that your wife next to your son? She seems most exceedingly pious …’

      ‘Oh, indeed,’ said the husband, ‘where adultery is concerned, I believe I am safe before mankind, but before God, I surely wear my horns!’

      ‘Look at my wife, then: she prefers to live away from me, the great Chrestienne de Zamet there on the right – she’s the same,’ grumbled the man with the hooked nose. ‘She knows perfectly how to season a mother’s tenderness with that of a bride of Jesus Christ! Ha-ha-ha!’

      The two fathers of the wedded couple guffawed; they were witty and cheerfully debauched. Someone in front of them turned round with a frown, then whispered to his neighbour, ‘Those two have found perfect company in each other …’

      And the young couple had found perfect company, too, now married only eight days after meeting. They pledged their troth on a wintry Sunday before the priest and four trusty witnesses. The cleric inscribed the date – 28 January 1663 – in the parish register, then the names of the turtledoves, proclaiming them out loud: ‘Françoise de Rochechouart de Mortemart, also known as Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente, and …’

      The voluptuous blonde Françoise took up the goose quill as it was handed to her and, as the priest pronounced the name of her spouse – ‘Louis-Henri de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Marquis de …’ – for the first time she signed her new name:

       2.

      An apple-green gilded carriage arrived at Rue Saint-Benoît, its doors adorned with the coat of arms of the Marquis de Montespan. The vehicle rattled along the rutted street, its body supported by thick leather straps on a four-wheel axle.

      Dustmen, collecting the city’s waste that would be tipped from their carts into the Seine, blocked the vehicle’s progress. Through their windows, Françoise and Louis-Henri contemplated the world outside. The quartier teemed with life, full of craftsmen with their displays and workshops and noise. The dustmen’s rags were hardly different from those of the beggars they passed. Françoise told Louis-Henri, ‘When I was a little girl, one holy-day my mother wanted me to wash the feet of the poor outside a church. I went up to the first pauper and could not bring myself to bend down. I stepped back, in tears. Poverty was there before me, inescapable, and it filled the child I was with revulsion. I did not wash the feet of the poor.’

      Suddenly the way was clear, the carriage moved on and turned into Rue Taranne, stopping almost immediately on the left beneath a wooden sign depicting a wig. Louis-Henri climbed down from the carriage, saying, ‘The misfortunes of the people are the will of God, and do not warrant that we should waste our feelings upon them.’

      He went round the vehicle to open the door for Françoise. ‘All my feelings are for you.’

      He gazed on her admiringly and bit his lip.

      ‘I do feel I love you more than anyone on earth is wont to love, but I only know how to tell you so in the way that everyone on earth would tell you. I despair that all declarations of love so resemble one another.’

      The marquise, lovely in her flowered hat, stepped down, reaching for the hand he was holding out to her.

      ‘That’s sweet …’ But then she began to poke fun, mincing and simpering in exaggerated fashion. ‘It is the greatest honour to be shown such admiration! Oh, I do love such heady stuff; I do love to be loved!’

      Louis-Henri adored the way she used jest to hide emotion. While the carriage was manoeuvring – the coachman gripping the mare’s bit – to pull in beneath the roof of the stables beyond the well in the courtyard, Françoise went through the wigmaker’s door and exclaimed, ‘Monsieur Joseph Abraham, our de-lightful landlord! We have mislaid our key yet again. May we come through the shop?’

      ‘Ten o’clock in the morning and ’tis only now that you two are coming home? Did you spend the night in the Marais again, playing bassette and bagatelle! I hope you won a few écus withal, this time.’

      ‘Nay, we lost everything!’

      Louis-Henri came into the shop. It was a clean place, all of beige and ochre, where long bunches of hair hung from the ceiling, almost touching the floor. A ‘red-heel’, his shaved crown covered with lard to avoid irritation and parasites, stood waiting for the periwig that an employee had nearly finished curling. An ecclesiastic stepped back to admire his platinum-blond tonsured wig in a mirror he was holding. Next to him, jovial and good-natured, Joseph Abraham saw his wife turn to Françoise and say, ‘But ’tis open, my dear! The cook, Madame Larivière, has been waiting with your new servant to serve dinner since yesterday evening. I do believe she prepared a squab bisque and minced capon.’

      ‘Ah, I know she did, but one card game led to another … We thought we might win back our losses, but … We’ll go through the door at the back of the shop, shall we, Madame Abraham? Farewell, gentlemen! We’re off to bed!’

      Six apprentices on the wigmaker’s mezzanine, leaning over the railing, admired the departure of Françoise’s

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