misty figures of La Frette’s clique emerging from a vast hay barn. They, too, moved forward in a row, straight towards their adversaries.
Soon they would be a breath away, for the rectangular field was narrow. To the right were sleeping mansions. To the left, the charterhouse of Boulevard Saint-Germain, with its cloisters and cells, and the monks whom they must not alert by shouting pointless invectives.
In any event, there was no more to be said. They had moved beyond words; this was a duel to the death, and d’Antin, beneath his heavy curled wig, was not feeling well. Yet, he struck a fine pose in his scarlet cloak, which was thrown over one shoulder, and his black hat, its brim turned up in the Catalan style, placing one foot forward, his hand on his hip. But his fingers were trembling. As soon as the duel had been called, his eyelids had started to swell and an erysipelatous rash had broken out on his forehead. His ears oozed, a fearsome scab had appeared on his neck, and beneath his chin and armpits he itched with scurf.
Chance had paired off the golden youths. La Frette would confront Chalais, Amilly would face Flamarens. Noirmoutier would take on Arnelieu, and d’Antin saw the Chevalier de Saint-Aignan striding towards him.
He was like a human bird with his mane of Greek curls and his splendid plumage, despite the eye lost to contamination by the whores in the brothels. He looked his adversary up and down, never slowing his pace through the fog, and his confident face betrayed no fear. He was most impressive as, sword in hand, he prepared to avenge his brother’s honour. He took long strides, thumbing the blade of his weapon. D’Antin wondered when he would stop and stand on guard, but the other fellow continued on his way as if he intended to go through the hedge of hazel trees. Thwack! D’Antin felt the bone of his forehead burst under the tip of the sword as it passed over his entire head. It dragged his wig behind his skull, and he tried to catch it – how stupid … How stupid to die like this in the frosty dawn, falling flat on his back in his pearl-grey breeches and pink silk stockings fastened with garters, when all around there was nothing but carnage. To his right, his three partners were moaning in the grass. Their adversaries departed.
Little Chalais got to his feet, twisting his ankles because of his thick soles. Bleeding profusely, he slapped a hand to his belly. Flamarens dragged a bloody leg behind him and hobbled towards the pale outline of a carriage. Noirmoutier, with a torn shoulder, ran in the opposite direction, to his horse.
‘Where will you go?’ asked the other two.
‘Portugal.’
The cockerel crowed. Cartwrights, blacksmiths, carters, weavers and saddlers opened the shutters of their little workshops. The fog lifted. The sun rose above the roofs of the mansions, to reveal a body lying on the ground …
At noon, the vertical shadows were sharp, and fell in triangles on the crowd from the roofs all around Place de Grève. The silence was impressive; windows had been rented at auction. Guards stood neatly in order around a platform.
‘That makes six!’
The hooded executioner’s axe fell so swiftly and cleanly that Saint-Aignan’s head remained poised on the block. For a moment the executioner believed he had missed and would have to strike a second time, but then the head collapsed onto the other five scattered on the floor of the platform, like a pile of cabbages. It looked as if, reconciled at last, they were kissing one another – on the forehead, the ears, the lips (and that is what they should have done in the first place, in their lifetime). The executioner wiped his forehead and turned to speak to someone just below the platform.
‘Monsieur de La Reynie, six in a row, that’s too much! I am not the Machine du monde, after all…’
‘Don’t complain. There should have been eight,’ sniggered the lieutenant of the Paris police, the prosecutor in cases of duelling, as he walked away towards the Châtelet.
*
‘Monsieur le marquis, there is no greater violation, no greater sacrilege of the laws of heaven than the frenzied rage of a duel. Do they not teach you that in your native land of Guyenne?!’
The young Gascon thus roundly admonished in the courtroom at the Châtelet gazed through the window at the late-afternoon sun … The only person seated in one of the courtroom’s chairs, he sighed, ‘You may say that to me, yet I am not involved, for I am not of a quarrelsome nature. Nor was my brother, for that matter—’
‘And yet he took part in a duel!’ La Reynie interrupted, brutally. ‘The nobility must cease, absolutely, from drawing their swords at the slightest provocation! These duels are decimating the French aristocracy, and since 1651 a royal edict has outlawed this bloody manner of avenging one’s honour. Duels are, first of all, in defiance of His Majesty’s authority, for his authority alone can decide who must die, and how we must live!’
Solemn and erect, La Reynie had reached this point in his sermon when, at the back of the room, behind the young marquis’s back, a door creaked, and he heard footsteps on the tiles. The disheartened Gascon looked down at his red-heeled shoes and caught a glimpse of a rustling cloak and petticoats as they sat down to his right.
‘Forgive me for being late, Monsieur de La Reynie,’ she said; ‘I but lately heard the news.’
Her voice was soft and even. The prosecutor declared, ‘Mademoiselle, if your future husband, Louis-Alexandre de La Trémoille, Marquis de Noirmoutier, returns to France, he shall be beheaded.’
The Gascon heard his neighbour unclasp her cloak and lower her hood onto her shoulders, then he looked up at La Reynie and saw he was speechless, his mouth agape; on either side of his aquiline nose, his eyes were transfixed. Who could she be, this young woman able to so discomfit such a prosecutor? Was she a Medusa who transformed men into stone? But La Reynie gathered his wits about him and came to stand opposite the Gascon, who was wiping his damp palms against his white satin breeches.
‘Monsieur,’ declared the prosecutor, ‘His Majesty’s investigation will be merciless, and will go so far as to rule in absentia against the memory of your brother, the late lord of Antin.’
The marquis replied docilely, ‘With all due respect and all imaginable zeal, I am the very humble, very obedient and most indebted servant of His Serene Highness…’
His neighbour enquired of the prosecutor, ‘How were you informed of the duel?’
‘The lantern-bearers who wait outside the spectacles and balls are our best informers,’ smiled the chief of police.
The crestfallen marquis sadly lifted his plumed hat from the chair to his left, stood up and turned at last to face his neighbour, who had also stood up. Zounds! It was all he could do not to sit down again. She was not merely beauteous, she was beauty personified. The twenty-two-year-old Gascon’s breath was taken away. He had always had a preference for plump blondes, and he was utterly captivated by this voluptuous marvel, who must have been his own age. A milky complexion, the green eyes of the Southern Seas, blond hair curled in the peasant style … Her gown was cut low in a deep décolletage from her shoulders, the sleeves stopping at the elbows in a cascade of lace. She was wearing gloves. The marquis could barely contain himself. He set his white hat on top of his enormous wig shaped like a horse’s mane (which weighed more than two pounds and was terribly hot), only to find that he had put it on backwards: the ostrich feather now hung in front of his face. In his effort to swivel his headpiece he dislodged his wig, which now covered one eye. The girl had a charming laugh, of the sort to rouse tenderness deep in any heart. He bid farewell to La Reynie and then – ‘Goodbye, Madame! Oh …’ – he excused himself as the amused young lady strode
