Before Versailles (17 page)

“Let me see if I understand,” Nicolas said because he was so surprised by her request. “You wish to resign your most high, most important position, the premier position among ladies-in-waiting, and take something in the household of the wife of the king’s brother?”

“Thank you, viscount. I’m in your debt, as always.” Olympe put her hand to the mask she’d taken off. “When I’m mistress, I’ll see you rewarded a hundred times over for your kindness to me.”

Mistress? thought Nicolas. What’s this? “A moment more, my dear countess. He still visits the queen every night, doesn’t he? I rely upon you to tell me such things. Or have we misunderstood each other?”

She had tied her mask back upon her face and now stared at him through the eyeholes. “I tell you everything of interest,” she answered.

“A mistress is of immense interest to me, my dear. Has his majesty—” he paused to find a delicate way to express his question, “—invited you?”

“Her majesty doesn’t satisfy him. Any fool can see it. He’s ripe to fall into someone’s hands, and he is going to fall into mine, and if I am at Madame’s, it will be easier to win him.”

“But if he’s still visiting her majesty every evening—”

“Later and later. He’s out until all hours with Monsieur and Madame and their group. It’s diverting, you see. He likes to laugh and talk and walk among us as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Who wouldn’t? Her majesty, that’s who. We pray, we embroider, we go to hear chanting in the monasteries and nunneries, we go to visit the queen mother and her ancient coven of witches, we nap. Yesterday, Madame’s ladies let down their hair in the park in front of everyone to dry it. Do you know how beautiful, how thick my hair is? He wouldn’t have been able to stop thinking of me if I’d been sitting among them.”

Nicolas remained in the doorway to watch her walk down his back hall. She was a niece of Cardinal Mazarin, who had brought his sisters’ children under his wing, so that his majesty had known them all since they were children, had lived and played among them as if they were related. Each child had made or would make a grand marriage into the highest families of the land or among the kingdom’s neighboring kingdoms, first because Cardinal Mazarin had seen to it, and now, because his majesty had taken on that task. No one gossiped any longer that the cardinal had begun as nobody because he’d ended as more than somebody. It was a story Nicolas liked, the way a man of exceptional ability could ease himself into a majesty’s life, become indispensable, and then he and his children were guaranteed a place in the firmament of court forever and ever, amen.

He was caught off guard at what she’d just told him, surprised at himself, that he hadn’t sensed it, seen it, guessed it. The king had been married a year, and, as far as anyone knew, had been faithful. The queen was less than stimulating. Of course he would begin to look elsewhere. He showed restraint not to have leapt from the marriage bed sooner. A mistress was an extremely important piece on the chessboard that was court, more important than the queen, if the queen was weak. A mistress became, in fact, the queen. Strength in a queen or a mistress turned women from delightful companions and playthings into dangerous people who must be pleased, who took sides in official business, who demanded favors, who changed kings’ minds. What a secretive young man this king was, this king who didn’t like surprises. Well, neither did Nicolas, but the thing was, he paid handsomely so that there should be none, and in that, he became a cat, always knowing where to leap.

Chapter 7

OUIS MET WITH HIS COUNCIL THAT AFTERNOON
. T
HEY
talked of Charles II, the king of England, only upon his throne a year, and unmarried. They had manipulated a bride-to-be for him from among the princesses of Europe. The choice was to the advantage of the kingdom of France and certain long-term priorities Mazarin had set in place. The years the three members of this highest of councils had worked together showed in the adroitness with which they had maneuvered a Catholic princess for a Protestant king.

“Who on the English council do we have in our pocket?” asked Nicolas, as skilled in diplomacy as he was in finding funds. Much of the credit for the coming English royal marriage belonged to him, but there were delays in the wedding that they were attempting to hurry with bribes.

“Having just signed orders for payments, I say, all of them.” Louis’s wry answer surprised everyone, and there was a burst of laughter, as Louis made a motion for the secretary to allow someone else into the meeting.

The man who entered was dressed all in black and carried a large velvet pouch under one arm. He did not attempt to sit down with the others but kept his eyes lowered, as if he were well aware that he was not in the same league as these men, who had been secretary of state, secretary of war, and superintendent of finance for years.

“I’ll request Madame write to her brother, to ask him specifically about his marriage negotiations. He and she are very close,” said Louis. He kept himself from smiling at his own guile. This gave him an excuse to spend even more time with Henriette.

Nicolas, who was on alert now, didn’t miss the gleam that came into Louis’s eyes when he said the word “Madame.” At once he began to draw conclusions that were slightly different from Olympe’s.

“We are all agreed on the importance of commerce to the kingdom. I wish to speak again of a commercial fleet,” said Louis, “and so I have summoned Monsieur Colbert.”

Known to them all, since Mazarin’s death he sat on a lesser council that concentrated upon trade. With a dry cough, Colbert opened his velvet pouch—as black as the coat he wore—and pulled out papers upon which could be seen figures drawn in a tiny, cramped hand. He began to reel off numbers for the building of a merchant fleet, even though Nicolas had explained only yesterday that there was no money in the treasury for ships.

“It is therefore my suggestion that we import Dutch shipbuilders,” finished Colbert, as the others sat in silence, a little stunned with his facts and figures.

“I can always find funds if this is what his majesty truly desires,” Nicolas finally said. He threw out the names of several financiers and gold merchants in Paris, eloquent and smooth in his knowledge of them. “My credit is good with them, and if need be, your majesty, I’ll put my own funds into shipbuilding.”

“I don’t wish your credit to be good with them, Viscount.” Louis was sharp. “I wish my kingdom’s credit to be good with them.”

“But of course, your majesty, such goes without saying.” Nicolas bit his tongue on the words that they were already two years in arrears. He’d said it yesterday.

“Excellent. Monsieur Colbert will assist you in finding funds somewhere, so that we can begin.”

“I look forward to working with him,” said Nicolas.

Colbert had moved back toward the tapestried walls. He didn’t raise his eyes to meet the viscount’s, did not make a move to draw any attention to himself. But Nicolas could feel triumph radiating from the man. There was enmity between them, bad blood. Does his majesty do this deliberately to test me? thought Nicholas, but he doubted Louis knew the old struggles between him and Colbert. Was it fate, then, throwing up a wry twist when all was going his way? Whatever it was, nothing and no one were going to keep him from his destiny. Time and finances were on his side, no one else’s.

T
HE LIEUTENANT OF
his majesty’s musketeers, Charles d’Artagnan, wandered through the huge square that was the kitchen and entrance courtyard. It was a habit of his to keep watch on the pulses of the palace. This was where servants and soldiers lived and worked. This was where any coach from the outside must enter and discharge its occupants. The bustle here reminded him of a Paris marketplace, farmers in with baskets of tiny lettuces or potatoes, the Italian troupe practicing its acrobatics and pratfalls by jumping in and out of a ground-floor window, women’s voices rising among the men’s, to quarrel or order someone about or call a child, girls with bare arms washing clothes in big tubs of water, musketeers off duty enjoying a pipe of tobacco and a peep at anything female. A dog chased one of the royal peacocks that had somehow wandered out of the queen’s garden. Cats sat on the ledge of the wall by the moat sunning themselves or seeing what mischief they’d find next. Merchants, sellers of fans and gloves and fabric, sat on leather trunks of inventory awaiting some noblewoman or nobleman’s pleasure to view their wares.

One of his majesty’s cousins had arrived with her carriage and her servants’ carriages and her guard. Once she, her family, had been his majesty’s enemies. Were they still? He’d go down to the stable later, talk with her chief groom, find out what was the princess’s latest whim, who she was seeing in Paris, ask what servants and companions she’d brought with her. In a far corner was a new acting troupe, squatting like gypsies around their wagon. This particular set of vagabonds—that’s what actors were; the Holy Church would not even allow them the sacraments—had made his majesty laugh like a boy last spring with a play that made fun of what had been fashionable for years, women and the men who admired them setting themselves as too refined to have natural urges and emotions and using an absurd, affected language to describe the world at large.

D’Artagnan had seen the king throw back his head and yelp at certain lines in the play. What was the line that had amused his majesty so much? Oh, yes, an actress, over-powdered and purse-mouthed, looking just like more than one older countess at court, waving her fan like a windmill, announcing, marriage is awful—how can one endure the thought of lying by a man who’s really naked?

D’Artagnan had thought his majesty was going to fall out of his chair laughing. That and the actors calling a looking glass a “counselor of the graces” and a chair “a commodity of conversation.” Sweet blue heaven, it warmed an old soldier’s heart to see a play so plain and so damned funny when the style was for tragedy with actors marching around in togas and declaiming in deep, serious voices. Of course, the court and Paris society, full of people who talked exactly like the over-powdered actresses, hadn’t known what to do.

But since the king laughed, they did also. And the fashion of over-sensibility was erased overnight by the yelping amusement of a young king who for days afterward had advised his brother to go back at once to his counselor of the graces or offered his wife a commodity of conversation whenever he saw her. And here in the kitchen courtyard of Fontainebleau was the ringleader of the laughter, an actor in the play and the playwright. Word was his father had a shop somewhere in Paris, was a prosperous merchant, but his son had kicked over the traces, choosing another life entirely.

“Molière, how are you?” asked d’Artagnan. “Working on something that pokes fun at my soldiers?”

The actor bowed. “What an excellent idea.”

“Don’t do it. I’d hate to have to arrest you. What brings you here?”

“We’ve been asked by his majesty to perform our little nothing again. And the Viscount Nicolas has expressed interest in my writing a small farce, and we help the incomparable Madame with her upcoming ballet.”