first, then went ahead himself. She was immediately charmed by such gauche thoughtfulness – not to mention the adoring gazes he bestowed upon her.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked, with a smile.
‘That way, um, this way, and you?’
‘Straight ahead.’
On leaving the Palais de Justice at the Châtelet, they were immediately caught up in the noise, mud and stench, the extraordinary bustle, the permanent commotion of the city. Open sewers, mounds of excrement and pigs foraging in the rubbish meant that the perfumed gloves or bouquets of violets placed beneath one’s nose were indispensable as a remedy for nausea. But the marquis was oblivious to all that.
‘I have no more brothers. The eldest, Roger, succumbed during the siege of Mardyck. Just de Pardaillan died in the army, and now the Marquis d’Antin has been killed in a duel …’
‘And I have no more future husband,’ echoed the fair lady. The air she breathed out was purer than the air she breathed in. ‘Noirmoutier clearly cares more about his own skin than about me.’ Her profile was proud and noble. Rebellious blond strands escaped from beneath the hood of her cloak. Her nostrils quivered like the wings of a bird. Her laughing mouth, not a little scheming, had a delightful effect on the marquis, as the sun dipped behind the trees …
Their double loss had brought them together. While they made their way past song merchants – selling drinking songs, dining songs, songs for dancing or hailing the news – the two young people spoke of the deceased man and the exiled fiancé, finding ways to compliment, to please, to console. A group of Savoyard street minstrels proclaimed ‘Bring me back my sparrow, fair redhead’ and ‘Ah, how vast is the world’.
‘’Tis all the more exasperating,’ nodded the lovely blond head, ‘that when they brought the news to me, on Rue Saint-Honoré, I was trying on my wedding gown, for next Sunday. I do not know what I shall do with it.’
‘’Twould be a great pity, were it to go to ruin…’
A street performer took a swallow of water and spat it back out in a spray of various colours and scents.
‘What I mean, that is,’ stammered the marquis, ‘it is because of the moths. ’Tis true, sometimes one puts away new garments in a chest and then later, when one unfolds them again, they are ruined, consumed by grubs and full of holes … And then one regrets one did not wear them …’
The demoiselle 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:
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
