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 deep décolletage from above. They were rooted to the spot. The wigmaker clapped his hands: ‘Now then!’
Françoise’s bodice gaped open, possibly accidentally, then she entered the dark stairwell. Louis-Henri smiled. ‘As lovely as the day, with a devilish-fine spirit!’
Her proud rounded breasts gave off the only true perfume: her very own scent. Louis-Henri extended a hand towards the radiant bosom.
‘Oh, my! Take heed, Monsieur!’ The marquise pretended to be offended. ‘Do not forget it is scarcely two years since I left the convent.’
‘And so?’
‘Let me see, first of all, what your face is like: your chin is too long, your nose is too big, your eyelids droop, you have freckles. Taken separately, all of that is hardly handsome, but all together rather pleasing. All right. You may go up …’
Her moiré skirt flowed like a tide over the first steps of the stairway. Louis-Henri, standing by the copper ball of the newel post, played the sulking husband.
‘I’m not sure now … With a wife who is from the noblesse de robe, I don’t know … I could have found many others who would have better suited my position, in the matter of the dowry, for I am from the old nobility! Montespan … my noble family goes back to the Crusades, to the battles between the Comtes de Bigorre and the Comtes de Foix, or against Simon de Monfort! Whereas a Mortemart … a mistress made for moonlight, a woman of secret trysts and borrowed beds … Yes, really I hesitate …’
‘You’re right,’ laughed Françoise. ‘To marry for love means to marry disadvantageously, carried away by a blind passion. Let us speak of it no more,’ she concluded, climbing a few more steps with an exaggerated sway of her hips.
The marquis’s pupils dilated at the thought of the beauty of her body beneath the silk of her deep-pleated dress. Like a horse, he began to breathe through his nose whilst the fair woman began a recital of her attractions.
‘Do you know that I am wearing three petticoats? Observe the first one, this pale-blue thing, it is known as the modesty,’ she said, lightly lifting the back of her dress to reveal a skirt that she then raised in turn. ‘The second, dark blue, is called the saucy…’
Louis-Henri would have liked to seize his wife round the waist but she slipped through his fingers. Her flexibility, her agility, were admirable. The newlyweds’ apartments had been divided up vertically over three storeys – a nonsensical distribution due to the narrow plots allotted in Paris, which obliged the inhabitants to build upwards. Such comings and goings in the stairway! The firewood stored in the cellar had to be carried up, as had the water, in buckets drawn from the well in the courtyard. The marquis was suddenly lustful, and ogled his wife, roaring comically and rolling his eyes.
‘I have done all I can not to offend God and not to succumb to my passion,’ he explained, climbing a few steps. ‘But I am forced to confess that it has become stronger than my reason. I can no longer resist its violence, and I do not even feel inclined to do so … Raah!’
‘Help!’ Madame de Montespan fled up the stairs, pursued by her husband who galloped after her traitorous petticoats, which she raised too high, offering the tempting vision of the fruit. All her petticoats were very light indeed and lifted at the slightest breeze, wafting a perfume of tuberose and waxed wood inside the dark stairwell.
On the first floor, to the left, a door opened onto a salon modestly furnished with folding seats made of webbing and heavy canvas, a mirror from Venice and a gaming table with several drawers. On a green-painted wall hung a framed tapestry from Rouen, mere cotton threads now, but representing the story of Moses. Louis-Henri chased after Françoise in a clattering of steps. There was a bulge in the front of his grey satin breeches. The marquise turned round, saw it and cried, ‘Dear Lord!’
On the second floor was the kitchen with a brick oven, cast-iron spits and frying pans, pitchers, pots and stone-ware terrines. Food was stored inside boxes covered in wire netting to protect it from mice and flies. Salt meat hung from the ceiling above Madame Larivière and the new servant. Sitting side by side on a little bench, they were eating soup from earthenware bowls on their laps using wooden spoons. They watched as their masters scurried by, but their masters did not notice them, so intent were they on their celebration of the senses.
‘As for the third petticoat,’ said Françoise with a peal of laughter, ‘it is the secret. Mine is sea blue!’
Her dress and petticoats were now over her head revealing that, like all the women
