the husband, ‘and find something to distract her. Don’t worry about the children, I can keep them until the morrow if you wish…’
‘By then I shall have finished your wig,’ added Joseph. ‘Give it me that I may curl it.’
Louis-Henri de Pardaillan, his hair disarrayed from trying on the wig, thanked his landlords. He gently stroked little Louis-Antoine’s cheek with the back of his index finger, and went over to his daughter, who worshipped Athénaïs as much as he himself did. Marie-Christine had been leaning against the wall beneath the bunches of fresh hair from Normandy that hung from the ceiling; now she lifted the blond strands on either side of her ears. She twirled her fingers and tried to make ringlets to imitate the hairstyle her mother had invented.
When Louis-Henri entered the salon, he found his wife slumped in a chair.
‘Do you feel better, Athénaïs?’
She did not reply. The marquis, standing by the window, looked out on the roofs of the city and the falling twilight. A foretaste of boredom loomed on the horizon. The marquise was chewing the inside of her cheek, making faces. Finally she announced like one of the oracles, ‘Tomorrow will be worse, and the day after worse still.’
Montespan sat down at the gaming table and opened an ivory snuffbox. He handed a pinch scented with bergamot to his wife, who pursed her lips and looked away. He lit a long white pipe with a little bowl, drawing the tobacco smoke up the bone stem.
‘Why do you say that?’
She adjusted her hoop, rubbed her handwarmer and stared at her husband. Then she lowered her eyes, playing with her fan, mumbled two incomplete and incomprehensible words and, leaving time suspended, lapsed into a long, unhappy silence.
‘I say that because I should like to be protected from the parade of misery and creditors that my husband offers me every day! I should like to stop doing the rounds of notaries and moneylenders, and stop pledging our good name and our insignia of nobility. I should like to stop seeing you hiding on payment days!’
Louis-Henri shrugged and picked up the snuffbox.
‘Ah, yes, I know I am a man of little consideration, and my credit is that of a dog at the butcher’s. I am poorer than ever, but I have the curve of your neck, your nimble and frivolous arms, and the caresses, day and night, of your words. I have the wealth of your eyes. I live in your essence alone. I am rich in your countless kisses, the only thing I am rich in. What do I care if the hours seem dark if there is sunlight between us?’
‘There is no sunlight in me.’
‘Then I will take my chances on another war. I am told that France and Spain will fight in Flanders. I will bring you cloth from Ghent, and laurels of glory, and jewels from Antwerp, and bars of gold …’
‘Oh, do not speak to me of gold – I would do anything for gold! I am no longer in a mood to live in poverty.’
‘While I was away fighting the Barbary corsairs, might you have been corrupted by luxury when you went to dance at Versailles?’
‘Naturally! I love luxury. I can scarcely sleep for love of luxury – the clothes and meals and dances and interiors and everything that goes with it!’
She spluttered, ‘I will have money, and pots of it! And I need it right away, lest a catastrophe befall us.’
Louis-Henri murmured, ‘For me, the worst would be to say one day, “She is no longer here.”’
Madame Larivière came into the salon and placed the Montespans’ dinner on the gaming table: fresh eggs and two artichoke hearts, and a pitcher of water. Athénaïs burst into tears. Louis-Henri stood up.
‘Let us go to a salon in the Marais, and dine, and play hoca and piquet and quadrille. That is where one finds the best amusement. And we shall drink wines from Champagne!’
Outside, the long green flame of a poplar tree stretched towards the sky in astonishment. Its leaves shimmered against the windowpanes as if in sympathy with the marquise’s shuddering sobs as she looked up through her fingers. Her husband knelt before her. He kissed her hands which were like holy relics or religious statuary made of precious metal.
‘This morning, I arranged to lease our carriage horses for one year to the launderer in our street. I needed the money to repay a moneylender. Never mind, the Jew shall wait!’ concluded Louis-Henri, brusquely seizing Athénaïs by the waist and sweeping up her petticoats – modest, saucy, secret – all at once.
Embarrassed, Madame Larivière asked, ‘So what shall I do with the dinner then? Should Dorothée go up with the warming pan and heat your bed?’
The husband grabbed his wife as if she were a soldier’s wench, the fair lady’s thighs laid bare, her calves above his shoulders. The armchair collapsed in a volley of caresses and playful blows. Madame Larivière left the room and on meeting the servant said, ‘Don’t you go in there.’
And Athénaïs’s little feet once again touched the floor; a flurry of kisses and good spirits abounded, and the light from the fireplace flickering on the waxed furniture danced once again. Montespan said, ‘Your laughter lights my heart like a lantern in a cellar.’
‘Dearest, I shall put on my last remaining jewels, my emerald necklace.’
On his head Louis-Henri wore a worn-out double wig that was no longer very fashionable. In Rue Taranne, they hailed two sedan chairs. Athénaïs entered the first chair, calling, ‘To the Hôtel de Montausier!’
The bearers of the second chair, where Louis-Henri had taken his seat, did their best to keep up.
In the Marais salon, Louis-Henri scarcely recognised his wife. That afternoon she had been so desperate, yet now she was in her element. She wandered amongst the gaming tables. A good number of people had come up to Paris from court and they immediately fixed their gaze upon her, went up to her and paid her compliments. ‘What a marvellous gown, and you wear it with such grace! Was it not woven in secret by fairies; no living soul could have produced such a thing!’ Athénaïs’s conversation sparkled with charming words more naïve than they were shrewd, although they were shrewd all the same. She was offered some chocolate from a silver platter and pretended to take herself in hand. ‘I shan’t have too many … The Marquise de Coëtlogon told me that it was not her position as a slave-trader but rather her overfondness for chocolates as a child that caused her to give birth to a little boy as black as the devil!’
All around her there was laughter, and clouds of bean powder fell from rocking wigs. Athénaïs walked by the billiard table, where there was talk of a duc from Auvergne who had recently been appointed a maréchal of the realm, and she remarked, ‘A maréchal who swoons away at the mere sight of young wild boar.’ Her ferocious humour enchanted as it hit the bull’s eye. ‘He’s neither man, nor woman, nor little; he’s a little woman.’
‘Oh!’
The courtiers
