Bitter Greens (29 page)

If I’d had any choice, I’d have left the Queen’s service long ago, but I couldn’t afford to. Ladies-in-waiting are not paid very much, and most of my winnings were spent on scented gloves, red-heeled shoes, lace trimmings (exorbitantly expensive) and sedan chairs to get me to the various salons that I slipped out to once the Queen was snoring in her bed. Oh, and on bundles of expensive paper, ink, goose-feather quills and pumice stone. I spent every spare second I had scribbling stories.

I made my excuses, called for my cape and hat, and slipped out behind the Queen. Not to return tamely to the Louvre, but to make my way to Molière’s house.

It was not far, being just across from the theatre on Rue de Richelieu, but I was frozen to the bone by the time I got there. The house was full of actors and actresses in the very throes of histrionics, people weeping, sighing, groaning and throwing themselves about. No one paid me any attention at all, so I was able to find my way up the stairs to Molière’s bedchamber, where his wife, Armande, and her mother, Margeurite, were chafing his hands, burning feathers under his nose, lifting cordials to his slack mouth and generally trying to make themselves feel useful.

Michel sat by the bed, his head sunk in his hands, his fingers writhing about in his curls. I bent over him and whispered his name.

He looked up, his eyes red-rimmed. ‘Oh, Charlotte-Rose, he’s dying.’

‘Can nothing be done?’

Michel shook his head. ‘He has consumption. He caught it in gaol, you know, that time he was imprisoned for debt. He has been ill for years.’

‘Why did he go on stage?’

‘He needed the money,’ Michel said simply.

‘Is there anything I can do? A doctor? An apothecary?’

Michel snorted in derision. ‘Would they attend him after he ridiculed them so in his play?’

‘Surely they would not refuse …’

Michel shrugged one thin shoulder. ‘People hate to be mocked.’

I nodded in agreement, remembering in one quick flash the King’s fury when I had humiliated him in front of his courtiers. I shoved the memory away – it brought nothing but pain – and tried to think what I could do to help. Molière’s green coat lay crumpled on the dusty floor. I bent and picked it up, shaking out its folds. Michel shrank back at the sight of it.

‘Get rid of it,’ he cried. ‘It’s the devil’s colour! Oh, I’ll never wear green again.’

I glanced at him quizzically but shoved the coat out of sight nonetheless. Michel was always like this, at the peak of delight or the depths of despair, but it was one of the things that had drawn me to him. I had grown tired of the King’s famous impassivity; one was always trying to guess what he was thinking. With Michel, one always knew.

‘Have you eaten?’ I asked.

‘As if I could eat at a time like this.’ Michel flung his face down into his arms again.

On the bed, Molière moaned and muttered something. Armande and her mother wept in each other’s arms.

‘A priest?’ I asked hesitantly.

‘We’ve already sent for two, but they will not come. They say the author of
Tartuffe
is no fit person to receive the last consolations.’ Michel looked up at me with an agonised face.

‘The King will be furious if he hears that. Let me send for the King’s
own confessor. If he will not come himself, he will at least send someone else.’

I ran downstairs and found a small frightened-looking young actor and gave him some money and told him where to go. I then took some wine up to the gloomy bedchamber and poured it for Michel and the two weeping ladies. The atmosphere was so oppressive that I must admit I gulped a goblet myself, though it was cheap nasty stuff.

Molière’s breath was rasping in and out of his throat. He lay so perfectly still, and his profile was so white, he looked as if he was an effigy carved from marble. Only that dreadful, wet, slow breathing showed he was still a man. Between each exhalation and each inhalation was a long ravine of silence, growing longer each time until we were hanging over him, sure each time that it was his last breath.

The door opened. Two nuns came in, snow still frosting their black veils. They seemed so out of place among this rabble of gaudily dressed actors, still in their stage maquillage, that we all started like guilty children. I thought they had come to give the final rites, ignorant
réformée
that I was, but they shook their heads sadly and said only priests were permitted to do that. Nonetheless, they mumbled some Latin and prayed over him, and it seemed to comfort the two women, and maybe Molière too, for he let out his breath in one long sigh and then did not breathe in again. We listened to the silence for some time before we realised he was gone.

‘He was a great man,’ Michel said. ‘We’ll not see another like him again.’ I was trembling. I had never seen a man die before. My heart felt as if someone was squeezing it in their fists. I too would die like that one day. People died of consumption all the time, even young women like me. If I were to die tomorrow, what would I have done with my life? Molière at least had written more than thirty plays. He had travelled all of France, and he had had many lovers. I had never even been kissed.

I bent and cupped my hand around the nape of Michel’s neck, seeking to comfort him. ‘We must arrange his burial.’

‘Actors are not permitted to be buried in sacred ground,’ Michel said in a shaking voice.

‘What? Why?’ Incredulity sharpened my voice.

Michel slanted me a wry look. ‘Demon spawn,’ he explained.

‘The King surely would …’ My voice failed me. ‘Bring me some paper. I’ll write to him.’

The nuns looked impressed. Even Marguerite, who had played before the King many times, looked impressed. Paper was brought – poor-quality stuff that was brittle and yellow – and I composed a hasty letter and paid more coins to yet another young actor to carry it to the Palais-Royal for me. The reply came swiftly, wrapped around a gold
louis
. Molière could be buried in the cemetery, but it must be at night and in the section reserved for unbaptised infants. The King could do no more.

The church bells were ringing. It was midnight. The nuns were preparing to lay poor Molière out. I bent and whispered to Michel, ‘There is nothing more you can do. You must rest. Come.’

He nodded and rose. Catching me by the hand, he led me out of the room and down the corridor, Michel picking up a candlestick from a nearby table.

He opened a door and led me inside. I saw, in one brief glance, that it was a man’s bedroom in wild disorder, clothes flung across the chair and spilling onto the floor, a pair of boots lying discarded in the middle of the floor. Then Michel caught me and drew me to him, his mouth coming down on mine.

At first, I froze, startled, but then I kissed him back, urgently, desperately. He fumbled with my bodice. ‘I must tell you … I want you now … more than I’ve ever wanted anyone,’ he said between frantic kisses. ‘I’m sorry. Is this wrong?’

‘Yes,’ I said, helping him rip away the lace. ‘So wrong.’ I drew his head down to my breast.

And so, willingly, eagerly, I surrendered to him my maidenhead – in the eyes of the world, the only thing of value I owned. Yet I have few regrets. I had never felt so acutely alive, the night I watched a man die and made love for the very first time.

It was our passion for words and our ardent desire to write that drew me and Michel together, and the same that drove us apart.

Michel wanted to be a great playwright, like his former master Molière. He had high ambitions and scorned what I wrote as frivolous and feminine.

‘All these disguises and duels and abductions,’ he said contemptuously, one day a year or so after our affair began, slapping down the pile of paper covered with my sprawling handwriting. ‘All these desperate love affairs. And you wish me to take you seriously.’

‘I like disguises and duels.’ I sat bolt upright on the edge of my bed. ‘Better than those dreary boring plays you write. At least something happens in my stories.’

‘At least my plays are
about
something.’

‘My stories are about something too. Just because they aren’t boring doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy.’

‘What are they about? Love?’ He clasped his hands together near his ear and fluttered his eyelashes.

‘Yes, love. What’s wrong with writing about love? Everybody longs for love.’

‘Aren’t there enough love stories in the world without adding to them?’

‘Isn’t there enough misery and tragedy?’

Michel snorted in contempt.

‘What’s wrong with wanting to be happy?’

‘It’s sugary and sentimental.’

‘Sugary? I am not sugary.’ I was so angry that I hurled my shoe at his head.

He caught it deftly and tossed it into the corner. ‘I’ll give you that. You’re not sweet at all. Too much pepper in the brew. But sentimental. You’re definitely sentimental.’ As he spoke, he advanced on me, undoing his coat.

‘I am not sentimental.’ I took off my other shoe and threw it at him, and he caught it and hurled it into the other corner, then flung his coat down on the chair, unbuttoning his cuffs.

‘Don’t you cry at the end of a play? Don’t you sigh when the hero kisses the heroine?’ Michel laughed at me and untied his shirt laces.

‘That’s not being sentimental, that’s having a heart.’ As he stripped off his shirt and flung it on the floor, I cried, ‘Don’t do that. We’re not making love, we’re arguing.’

Michel pushed me back against the bed.

‘No,’ I protested, leaning up on both elbows. ‘I’m talking!’

‘You talk too much,’ he replied and pressed me down with his weight, stopping my indignant words with his mouth.

And I let him. I was so enchanted with this new game of love that I was in thrall to him. When I was with him, he made me feel as if I was the most important thing in the world. We did not need to speak. All he had to do was lift that black sardonic eyebrow and I knew we were sharing a secret current of amusement at the world.

I had determined long ago not to marry. It seemed to me that marriage was just a way of selling a woman into slavery. A woman could not choose who she married, or protest if her husband beat her with anything thinner than his thumb. It made me angry.

Yet our society did not take kindly to women who wished to live their own lives, to have a small corner of the world in which they could be their own mistress, as the King’s cousin Anne-Marie-Louise said to my mother all those years ago.

My poor mother. The very thought of her brought tears to scald my eyes. She had died in that convent, and we had never seen her again. Marie had inherited her title and the chateau, but at the beginning of the year she had been married to a man she had never seen, the Marquis de Théobon, who had cut down a great deal of the oak forests to raise money to pay his gambling debts. I had not seen her since, though we wrote careful letters to each other, trying to read between the lines.

My small corner of the world was to be found in the salons of Paris. There, women ruled and willing men fell at our feet. We created secret societies with passwords and hidden handshakes, where we could discuss politics and religion without fear of being betrayed to the King’s spies. In the salons, I met wise and witty women, many of them writers, and there my own secret ambition to write had burst into bloom. Letters, poems, fairy tales and scandalous love stories flowed from my quill. I dreamt of being published, like Marie-Madeleine de la Fayette and Madeleine de Scudéry.

Through these months, my affair with Michel Baron ebbed and flowed, sometimes filled with gaiety and laughter, sometimes a thing of bitter tears. I was of no real use to him, being poor, but I could make him laugh and I could fill him with tenderness, and both these things moved him. He had other, more beautiful, mistresses and many a rich patroness who expected him to dance at her heel, yet somehow we would find ourselves nestled together at the back of some fine lady’s drawing room, laughing at a particularly precious line of poetry.

I began to have secret dreams of marriage. I imagined a life spent writing and arguing and making love and going to the theatre. I would no longer need to sit all day with Queen Marie-Thérèse, playing cards and grooming her smelly little dogs and pretending to laugh at the grotesque antics of her dwarves. I would no longer have to smile at people who were not amusing, and flatter people who were not kind, and gossip about people who were not interesting. Michel and I would lie abed in the mornings, drinking hot chocolate and reading, and then we would spend our days writing. I’d write stories of love and magic and adventure that would take
Europe by storm; he would write magnificent plays that would make the audience weep and bring carriages of rich patrons to our door. At night, we would go out to dinner or visit the salons or go to the theatre. We’d dance till dawn in Ménilmontant, and then make love till we fell asleep in each other’s arms.

One night, I put the idea to him, phrasing it as a spur-of-the-moment notion, a mere bagatelle. We had finished making love and I was tucked into the curve of his arm. Both of us were naked but Michel wore his nightcap, which he had brought rolled up in his coat pocket as a joke, after complaining about how cold my room was. He looked down at me in surprise. ‘Get married? But why on earth would we do that?’