Chapter Three

‘Tell me what you’ve done,’ said Madame de Cardonnoy in the carriage. Victoire was still acting half as the gentleman, lifting Marie Catherine’s slipper up with the toe of her riding shoes as they sat side by side in the carriage, but she giggled and brandished her hat when Marie Catherine asked her questions.

‘It was stupid of me,’ said Mademoiselle de Conti. ‘Don’t be angry with me.’

Marie Catherine felt a familiar combination of admiration and helplessness. Victoire was eight years younger. Her grandmother, Madame de Chevreuse, had been a famous intriguer, a conspirator, a rebel of the Fronde that had nearly unseated the king at the start of his reign. Her father, a Prince of the Blood, had been imprisoned in the same rebellion’s aftermath, and, it was said, had gone mad, fallen in love with his own sister and attempted to take his life. He had died young, leaving Victoire’s mother to manage the affairs of his heirs. These were the kinds of stories that Marie Catherine’s father had told her at the dinner table, to prepare her for the world that she would one day join. Victoire had been born to that world. She did as she pleased. At twenty-one she had refused all suitors, a defiance in which her mother supported her, happy enough not to break up the family fortune to fund a dowry for a younger girl. Victoire had commissioned a portrait of herself in which she posed as an Amazon, with a golden breastplate and spear. She liked women better than men, and spoke so freely about their virtues that Marie Catherine sometimes found herself wanting to cover the girl’s mouth to keep her heart from spilling out of it, as much for her own safety as for Victoire’s.

‘Tell me,’ said Marie Catherine.

‘I wrote a poem,’ Victoire replied. ‘It was only a joke! But I gave it to another of de Montespan’s ladies, and she gave it to Madame de Thianges, who is a little viper, and she gave it to Athénaïs herself.’

Athénaïs de Montespan was the king’s official mistress, a woman who wielded as much influence at court as the queen herself, if not more.

‘I imagine there was something in the contents of the poem that upset the king’s mistress?’ Marie Catherine asked.

Victoire rolled her neck back and looked at the carriage ceiling, in a loose-boned way that made her look younger than she was, or more wild, as if she really were a young man who had just ridden back from some adventure. Although Victoire was not exactly a beauty, with her unruly dark hair and her beaky nose, she had a halo around her that broke hearts.

‘It was only a love poem!’ She blushed. ‘Nothing serious – really – I only thought that the lady I showed it to would take it as a joke. But it was quite clearly addressed to a woman, so I had to convince Madame de Montespan that the poem was only intended for a piece of drama I was writing. For a male hero, naturally. And then I had to stay and mollify her by losing at cards all night, when I’d meant to ride back to Paris!’

‘That sounds like an expensive apology,’ said Marie Catherine. Athénaïs de Montespan was a notorious gambler.

‘It was. I’m going to murder Madame de Thianges.’ Victoire sighed and tugged at her shirt cuffs.

The carriage rocked around a corner, and Marie Catherine had to brace herself to keep from sliding off her seat. Victoire reached out and gripped her elbow. Outside, someone was cursing. Marie Catherine shook off the girl’s hand.

‘And which lady did you give the poem to?’ she asked, and Victoire sighed and leaned her head against Marie Catherine’s shoulder, turning so that her eyelashes brushed Marie Catherine’s neck when she blinked and the plume in her hat tickled her forehead. She was always leaning in for a kiss, always so quick to touch, and so easy to touch in return. Marie Catherine could have leaned into her, but she wasn’t feeling forgiving. Instead she brushed the feather out of her face and, when it sprang back up, flipped the hat off Victoire’s head. It landed upside down on the floor of the carriage, and Victoire sat up and pulled away from her with a needy sigh. Her discomfort pleased Marie Catherine more than she wanted to admit.

‘It was no one, really,’ Victoire said. ‘Just an idea I had. But I’ve brought you a copy to read, if you want it.’ She straightened up and reached into the breast of her coat and drew out a folded letter.

‘I prefer not to receive love poems second-hand,’ Marie Catherine said.

Victoire took the letter back with an expression that said she’d apologised as much as she planned to. Marie Catherine pulled the shade on her carriage window open and peered out through the glass at the city. They were near the Bois de Boulogne, a popular promenade, and a row of other carriages – grand coaches gilded with the crest of the house they belonged to, or cheap rented fiacres – were blocking the traffic ahead of them. The church bells were tolling the half hour.

The inside of Marie Catherine’s head also felt like a ringing bell, vibrating with suppressed desire. The worst part of her heart wanted to punish Victoire for having disappointed her, for her carelessness in making her wait at the theatre two nights ago, and for the regard she might have shown another woman. But the more she held the girl at arm’s length, the more the air in the carriage seemed cold and the less she felt the triumph of her own anger.

Slowly the carriage crept forward. She watched a man pasting flyers on a wall, moving methodically with his brush and bucket while the pedestrians hurried past him. The glass pane gradually warmed against her skin, and the pulse beating in her ears slowed down.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Victoire. ‘I’m not angry.’

‘Yes, you are.’

It was true that she had kept silent for too long.

‘I gave it to Mademoiselle de tavanne,’ Victoire said at last. ‘Not because I’m infatuated with her, but because I believed she was one of us. Mistakenly.’

‘That was a risk,’ said Marie Catherine.

‘I take risks, Marie. You’ve never known the loneliness of believing that you’re the only woman who—’

‘I know what it means to be lonely, Victoire,’ she said snappishly.

‘But not what it means to love another woman knowing that she’ll never love you back, and to believe that you’re the only woman in the world who is made that way.’

Marie Catherine could feel herself flushing. It was true that she had not spent her girlhood encased in the prison of her own difference. As Victoire had. She had heard enough stories of Victoire’s childhood. How at eight she had attached herself to her nursemaid, and given the older girl a betrothal ring from her mother’s box and been switched for stealing, and had wept and waited at the window when the girl was sent away. How in her days at convent school she had crept out, disobedient, and wandered the cold gardens in the evening, avoiding the moment when the other girls would strip down to their shifts, and comb their hair, and go to bed, fearing that someone would see how her heart leaped into her mouth and would know that she was a monster.

Victoire laughed off all of this loneliness as she was telling it, but Marie Catherine’s heart ached for her in those moments. Victoire would not hide. Everything that she was remained hidden in plain sight, as if neither law nor custom could touch her. Still, Marie Catherine thought that her comparison was unfair. That her own nature was to feel more than she showed did not mean that she had not felt the loneliness or the terror of her own desire.

After that first kiss at Madame de Fontet’s, Marie Catherine had intended to stay away from the salon for a while. She doubted she would miss the excuse to dress in her best clothes and admire herself coldly in the mirror, or the glittering light of the chandeliers in the evening, or the flattering astrologers or the charming men and women who she could so easily imagine laughing at her behind their hands, as they’d once laughed at her mother. There was nothing there for her, she thought, except bitterness – she was jealous of Victoire’s freedom, and that was the reason why she’d felt so strange when Victoire had kissed her. It had been the jealousy and the surprise of it, because who could have thought of such a thing. She’d stay away for a month, she wouldn’t speak to Victoire, everything that had happened would blow away with the passage of time. At the end of the week she wrote Victoire a note asking whether she would like to go with her to visit her perfumer on rue des Gravilliers before Madame de Fontet’s gathering, and then that morning she sent Jeanne running out of the house because she was out of argentine and the pomade for her hair had dried out, so that when Victoire came she was still in déshabillé, in her shift and stays, with her hair loose down her back. Of course one could receive a lady friend that way. It was a mark of intimacy, and Victoire needn’t have known the calculations that had gone into getting the maidservant out of the room.

‘Will you close the door?’ she’d said, and Victoire had jumped up from where she was perched on the edge of Marie Catherine’s bed and closed it. And crossed the room to where Marie Catherine was sitting at her dressing table, with her shift tucked up so that the ribbons holding up her stockings peeked out from under its lace hem.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

Victoire had stopped.

‘I understand you’re not married yet, Victoire, and perhaps you’re more innocent than many of the girls at court, but I can’t imagine what you were thinking last week at Madame de Fontet’s salon. If anyone had seen what you did that day, you’d have lost your good name, and I think I’d have been blamed as much as you.’

She was speaking very calmly and precisely, despite the feeling of pressure that was building up in her throat, as if there were a wave of something rising up inside her that was going to end by pushing her entirely out of her own body. Whatever court game this was, she couldn’t play it. She was so focused on the words that she couldn’t look at Victoire. When she did look up, she saw that the girl was standing very still in the middle of the room, one hand pressed over her mouth.

‘Forgive me,’ Victoire said. ‘I thought you felt as I did.’ She took a step back towards the door, and for a moment it was clear that she was going to leave and they wouldn’t see each other again after that, but the wave that Marie Catherine had felt rising through her finally crested and, without having made any decision to do so, she jumped up from her chair and intercepted Victoire at the door. For a moment Victoire stood there, within arm’s reach, looking surprised, and then Marie Catherine stepped in towards her and ran her hands up from Victoire’s waist, feeling the movement of her stays under the silk as she gasped.

She was burning with what felt at first like anger – she, Marie Catherine, who had always been cold, who was the master of her own passions, who had turned the resentment she felt against her husband into a surface of stone. How could Victoire – unmarried, headstrong, without responsibilities – how could she play on her feelings this way? How could she ask Marie Catherine what she felt? She expected Victoire to flinch when she put a hand on the back of her neck. Instead she brought her hands up to Marie Catherine’s face and kissed her back, and held her there, when she would have pulled away.

Marie Catherine had never taken a lover. She had had only her husband. Sometimes she had imagined what it might be like if she had been a man and had married the girl she’d been, or a different girl – how she might have won her wife over. Now she was halfway between that daydream and something she’d never thought of, and she didn’t have to think about what she wanted to do with her hands or her mouth. Victoire’s hair smelled like irises, softly metallic. She pulled up the hem of Marie Catherine’s shift. The down on her neck prickled with goosebumps. Victoire, she thought, had done this before, and the thought made her both jealous and grateful. She let herself fall backwards onto the bed, pulling Victoire with her. She’d sent Jeanne away. She hadn’t known. And, also, she’d known.

Now, in the carriage, she took Victoire’s hand again and ran her fingers over the seam where her nails joined her skin. Victoire’s skin was soft, her nails shaped into clean ovals, but she chewed the thumbnail sometimes, when she was lost in thought, and so that one was rough. Her knuckles were redder than the rest of her hand, and green veins patterned her fingers like lacework on the creamy silk of her skin. Marie Catherine brought the hand to her lips and kissed it, the way she might have done if she were the one playing the gentleman.

What must it be like, to wear those clothes so easily, to climb the stairs in her coat with as much freedom as if she had been a man? She couldn’t imagine it – the gesture that Victoire performed naturally was a parody on Marie Catherine’s lips. Perhaps it was the effect not only of Victoire’s social station, but of having a heart that was always spilling over with a flood of feeling. Victoire no sooner desired a thing than she was transformed.

‘You know I love you best.’ Victoire clenched her hand on Marie Catherine’s until the knuckles turned white. A blush was making the tip of her nose red.

‘It’s all right,’ Marie Catherine said, at last. ‘Try to send me a note with a servant next time you’re stuck at cards.’

She leaned forward and kissed Victoire, her nails finding the soft skin behind the girl’s ear, tracing a hieroglyph that she knew she liked, inhaling the slight sourness of her breath. Victoire, nimble in her gentleman’s clothes, swung her leg across Marie Catherine’s lap and sat straddling her.

‘And what else, Madame?’ Victoire asked her.

‘And I love you,’ Marie Catherine said.

The carriage jerked forward, the suspension bouncing, and outside the coachman called out to someone passing in his way. Marie Catherine pulled the curtain across the carriage window and the inside of the box fell into a cool twilight, as if they were in some bower deep in the forest.

She made a fist in Victoire’s hair and pulled her head back, not gently, so that she could kiss her neck, where the skin was as soft as a pair of new gloves. Always the fear rose up at these moments – of discovery, of damnation. What passed between them was something for which the only name she had ever heard spoken aloud was ugly. Victoire pulled back against the grip on her hair, straining to kiss her, inhaling her breath in the moment before the kiss. She was reaching through a gauze of fear and shame to touch her, as if they were both children wandering in a wood at night, holding hands to scare away the wolves and the witches. They kissed. Victoire kicked her hat away and began undoing the buttons of her own shirt.

Jeanne found the painter waiting for her in the courtyard outside the kitchen. The lackey, Arnaud, had warned her on her way down the stairs, with a swatting gesture in the direction of her buttocks. She’d had a chamberpot in her hands and, when she’d jumped away, Madame’s morning piss had nearly slopped over onto her skirt. She didn’t want to go and meet the painter with the pot in her hands, so she’d thrown its contents out on the midden behind the kitchen and then left it sitting on the doorstep. Agnès the chambermaid could put it back.

Now the stab of irritation she’d felt with Arnaud swelled into a tight, searing band across her forehead when she saw Lavoie’s nonchalant silhouette, his back turned, admiring the stables. He looked like someone’s prize hunting dog, begging at the table – sleek and long and hopeful. She hadn’t eaten breakfast and she wanted nothing to do with him.

‘Bonjour, Monsieur,’ she said, when she was close enough to have put her hand on his shoulder. He jumped at the sound of her voice. ‘If you are looking for Madame, I am afraid that she is not here.’

Although she had been born on a farm outside Paris, Jeanne could, when she desired to, speak a French as icily correct as that of any young marquise. She had recognised the same schooling in Lavoie, in the combination of stiffness and gallantry in his manners. He was good at hiding the fear that someone would see through his handsome face and polished voice, the fine cloth of his good coat, and make him out for what he was. Now she held her back a little straighter than normal, and her chin a little higher. There was nothing in her bearing that anyone could have pointed to as definitively rude, but she saw from the way the painter stepped back a pace that he realised she did not want to speak to him.

‘I hope I’m not intruding,’ he said, with a smile and a slight bow. ‘I had the day free, and I thought I’d come back and see you.’

‘You’re too kind, Monsieur.’

‘Your mistress suggested that if she wasn’t too busy, she might finish her tale.’

Jeanne was good at reading people. It was indispensable, in her profession. The painter did not care at all if he saw her. His interest was in her mistress, and he hoped that charming Jeanne might open a path to Madame de Cardonnoy. He was not the first man to have had that idea, which was common to a number of gentlemen who rarely seemed to understand that their mere attention was not the infinite flattery they supposed it to be.

‘I was about to eat my meal,’ she said.

‘By all means. I’m at your service.’

He held out his hand to her as if she were a lady at a dance, and she reluctantly took it and let him lead her into the steam and smoke of the kitchen. One of the kitchen boys was plucking a pheasant for the baron’s dinner, and handfuls of feathers drifted across the floor like blown snow and stuck wherever the cooking grease had dried without being properly scrubbed. The whole cavernous room smelled of hot oil, fresh bread and fresh blood.

Lavoie’s manners were wrong here, but he kept up the game even as Jeanne called to the cook to give her something to eat. The painter bowed to the other servants, led her on his arm, found her a chair at the table and pulled it out so that she could sit. It was a little bit mocking, but his disdain seemed to be directed at the custom itself, and not at her. He brought her a plate with cold chicken from last night’s dinner, a wedge of cheese and a cupful of bay-scented broth. She ate with her fingers.

‘Do you mind if I sketch you?’ Lavoie asked.

‘What, like this?’ There was a smear of soft cheese stuck to her finger that she would have liked to lick off, but she couldn’t do that and still play the lady. She pointed at the chicken bone on her plate. ‘It’s hardly a fit subject for a portrait.’

But Lavoie had already produced a sheaf of paper and a little nub of charcoal from his bag. His hands moved quickly over the paper. Jeanne put her hands in her lap, trying to surreptitiously wipe her fingers on the inside of her sleeves.

‘No, just sit naturally. It’s a sketch, you don’t need to pose.’

‘I don’t want you to draw me with a chicken bone in my mouth.’ As if she’d like to see herself with a greasy mouth and fingers red from washing.

Lavoie smiled. ‘If you don’t like it, I’ll tear it up.’

Jeanne sniffed. ‘How gallant of you.’

Lavoie concentrated on his paper, with only the occasional sharp-eyed glance up at her. Albert, one of the two kitchen boys, whooped that Jeanne was having her portrait done, and his companion, Philippe, scuttled out of the pantry with a bunch of greenery in his fist and peered over Lavoie’s shoulder. The cook was rolling out pastry and did not look up.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ said Lavoie. ‘Is your family in Paris?’

Jeanne shook her head. ‘I grew up in the country. My mother had a sister in service and too many mouths to feed, so when I was fourteen they sent me to my aunt.’

Lavoie nodded, distractedly. ‘How many brothers and sisters?’

‘Seven, last I counted.’ Her mother had cried when she fell pregnant with the youngest, when Jeanne was twelve. Jeanne found now that she was worrying the hem of her sleeve between her fingers, finding a place where the ruffled seam had started to unravel and caressing the rough edge with her fingertips. The question had called up a memory, filled with abrupt shame, of her first placement in a household, where she’d discovered with incredible relief that she could steal down to the kitchen and eat bread whenever she wanted, without worrying that it would be missed, or that she was taking food from a little brother’s or sister’s mouth. She’d never eaten choux pastry or jam made with white sugar or veal before, but the cook had been generous and there was always something left over from the master’s table. It had taken only six months in service before her breasts had filled out and her skirts hung several inches too short on her new frame. ‘Why don’t you tell me about your family.’

‘The job of a portraitist is to make his subject comfortable. To open him up, so that he can perceive his character and translate it to the page.’

‘I thought his job was to flatter the rich with their own images.’

‘That, too.’

‘Perhaps we ought to change professions,’ Jeanne suggested. She’d let a touch of acid creep into her voice.

‘Yes, come here and chop this parsley,’ called Philippe from his post at the other end of the table.

Lavoie shrugged and gave her a green-eyed look. ‘I doubt I’d make a good cook. I can mix paint, but I wouldn’t eat it.’

‘A valet perhaps,’ said Jeanne. ‘Since you’re used to flattery. Monsieur le Baron has kept his man for a long time, but I could find you a comte who needs a new valet every six months or so.’

She had expected this to goad him, but he merely frowned and held the paper out in front of him, looking from her to the page.

‘Look.’ He offered the picture to her.

Jeanne took it and held it by the very edge of the paper, afraid the grease on her hands would mark the drawing. It was a quick sketch, with her hair smoking away around her head in a soft drift of shade. But she was surprised at how he’d drawn her expression – her face half shadowed, as if she’d been disturbed in the contemplation of some secret. An angry look almost, but her eyes and the cast of her mouth seemed more beautiful than she would have expected from the glances she’d stolen in the little square mirror that hung over Madame’s dressing table, her figure fuller and more elegant. All the folds of the baronne’s cast-off dress fell beautifully across her lap, like a statue’s.

‘You’ve made me look quite fierce,’ she said.

‘You don’t like it?’ Lavoie made a ripping gesture.

She held the paper out in front of her with two hands, and for a moment he looked so doubtful that she almost did tear it in half, just to shock him. But her nerve failed the moment after she’d tested the paper. She set it down on the table.

‘So you are pleased.’ Lavoie’s smile was wider than she’d seen it before, more genuine. He liked to see his work liked. She put her hand down flat on top of the drawing.

‘Careful, you’ll smudge it.’ He leaned over, fussily, and pulled her hand away from the table. She heard Philippe snort, and she drew her hand back.

‘May I keep this?’

‘Of course, it’s yours.’

‘I really don’t know when Madame will return. The baron came back from Versailles last night.’ Jeanne paused. She’d been charmed by the drawing, but she still knew why he was here. ‘She often stays away, as much as she can, when he’s here.’

‘How unfortunate,’ said Lavoie. His tone was equivocal. He might almost have been expressing genuine disappointment in an unhappy marriage. Jeanne stood up from her chair, and he offered her his arm again.

‘She goes to Madame de Fontet’s ruelle most Saturdays. She said she would come back for me today, but she’s visiting with a lady friend and she might forget.’ Jeanne might have told the painter he was wasting his time, but no amount of flattery could have induced her to explain the situation with Mademoiselle de Conti.

They left the kitchen and walked back through the courtyard. Jeanne held the drawing by her side, fingering the edges of the paper.

Lavoie smiled. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have an entrance to Hôtel Fontet.’

Jeanne couldn’t help but sigh. ‘Some men would pay money for this kind of information, you know.’

Lavoie looked affronted, although he ought to have known that a lady’s maid was a valuable ally, if you wanted to be close to the lady. Perhaps he guessed that Madame had another lover and would have nothing to do with him, however much he bribed her maid. ‘Are you going to send me your bill?’

‘I’m beyond your means, Monsieur.’ Jeanne laughed. ‘Consider it an act of charity.’

They’d crossed the courtyard. Lavoie stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at the ground. The lace on his cuffs was a little shabby. He probably couldn’t afford her kind of help.

‘You really don’t know anyone?’ Jeanne waved the sheet with the drawing at him. ‘And to think that everyone at Hôtel Fontet is missing the fun of having their portrait taken.’

‘I’m sure they have no shortage of talent.’

The sky was grey, and the thick clouds hung very low overhead. Jeanne wasn’t sure whether to invite him into the salon or not. The other servants would laugh, to see Jeanne entertaining this man as if she were the mistress of the house. Arnaud already lost no opportunity to point out when she acted above her station.

‘I’ve been there, accompanying Madame. I haven’t seen anyone do what you did.’ She was holding the drawing close by her hips, almost hidden in the gentle wave of her skirt. She peeked at it, surreptitiously, and saw the painter smile. ‘Everyone likes games. And everyone likes to know how others are looking at them.’

A finger of cold touched her nose, and when she looked up, the snow was falling in fat, sticky caterpillars. They settled on the painter’s hair and stayed a while before melting.

‘Ah, look, snow,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

Lavoie drew her a little closer by his hold on her arm, so that she felt her elbow pressed into his ribs and the warmth of his body through his coat. A snowflake touched her forehead and slid in a droplet down her cheek. She held out her free hand and watched more snow fall into it.

‘I suppose I’d still need an introduction,’ the painter said.

Jeanne sighed and took her arm back.

‘You’re such a man. You act a little bit gallant, and then you expect me to do absolutely everything for you.’

Lavoie covered his face with his hand and laughed. Jeanne turned back to look at the façade of Hôtel Cardonnoy. The weak sunlight caught the windowpanes and reflected it back, so that they looked like polished teeth exposed in a smile.

In Madame de Fontet’s salon, Mademoiselle de Conti and her scandalous outfit were the centre of attention. She had entered Hôtel Fontet like a general announcing a victory, and circled the room exchanging absurd gallantries with men and women alike. At the moment she was down on one knee before Madame de Fontet, offering a very flattering description of her beauty and wit. The saucer of coffee that she’d just taken from a servant’s hand was in danger of spilling all over the sleeve of her red coat. Madame de Fontet was laughing in delight, and her expression filled Marie Catherine with conflicting emotions – jealousy for Victoire’s attention and the kind of near-despair that came from having got away with something. She felt as if Victoire’s mouth must have left an indelible mark on her skin. It was astonishing that no one else saw it. She’d got out of the carriage with her hair all mussed up on the side and had had to fabricate a story on the doorstep of Hôtel Fontet – the sickness of her maid, the cancellation of her hairdresser, the terrible jostling of the carriage, which had knocked her head right against the door: could she possibly borrow Madame’s servant girl and retreat to her cabinet to fix it?

Her hair had turned out quite nicely, although she’d been tempted to linger in Madame de Fontet’s cabinet, as if she could get back to that moment of joy in the carriage when she and Victoire were alone. The coffee, served in a gilded cup the size of a walnut, was too bitter. Marie Catherine preferred hers sugared, although Madame de Fontet insisted that this was not the way to take it. She found the side table on which the servants had laid out a selection of pastries, and scooped a handful of candied nuts onto her saucer to nibble between sips. Then she drifted back towards the silk couches where Victoire was paying court. She had moved from admiring Madame de Fontet herself to admiring her newest treasure – a table whose surface was a slab of green porphyry, its surface polished so highly that the guests could see their reflections in its green crystals. The base was a profusion of carved nymphs and fauns, gilded gold.

Flatterer, Marie Catherine thought, affectionately. She enjoyed seeing Victoire admired too much to be upset that she’d left her and rushed into the crowd. But her memory was still lingering in the carriage. Marie Catherine had kissed Victoire’s neck down to her breasts, both of them swimming in the froth of Marie Catherine’s skirts, hiked to her waist. The skirt had seemed to have a life of its own. It was like being caught in a capsizing boat. It made her laugh helplessly, the way the fabric kept spilling up over her shoulders and down to the carriage floor, as she tried to kick free of it, the ribbons that held up her stockings untied and swimming away from her like eels. She had felt the gooseflesh rising across Victoire’s skin as if it were her own skin, her own heart beating, her own face buried in her lover’s hair, the same moment of release – and now Victoire seemed as alien and unknowable as rain. Why didn’t she feel the fear that Marie Catherine felt, that anyone in this room might look at her and see that a careless kiss had left a mark on her neck, or that she’d dipped her ungloved fingers somewhere forbidden?

‘Truly, you’re incomparable,’ Madame de Fontet was saying. ‘We’ll send you over to the young men at court, and you can instruct them.’

The lackey who served the coffee was dressed as an Armenian, in an elaborately embroidered caftan and a fur hat, under which one could see his ears sweating. The toasted scent of the drink and a sour human smell hung in his wake. He appeared to be about sixteen, was very tall, and handsome in the girlish way of young men.

At the end of the pink silk couch nearest Marie Catherine was a wizened old woman with a strand of pearls across her chest, and skin like old crinkled paper that settled under her eyes in bruised rings. Marie Catherine leaned close and touched her shoulder.

‘May I get you anything, my dear?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Madeleine de Scudéry, who had been known to her friends of a former generation as Sappho, the wisest of women, was deaf in one ear, although Marie Catherine had trouble remembering which one. She pointed at the coffee cup, then the candied almonds.

‘Would you like me to bring you a sweet?’

Mademoiselle de Scudéry stood halfway up, only to subside back onto the couch into the rolling hills and rivers of her dress with a sigh. ‘I’m afraid I can’t hear you, Madame.’

‘Oh, don’t worry.’ Marie Catherine sat down next to her, feeling her face flushing. In her youth she’d met Mademoiselle de Scudéry, not then quite so old, once or twice, and had barely been able to stammer more than a sentence or two about her great love and appreciation for her books. Every time they met now, she felt herself becoming almost equally tongue-tied. Mademoiselle de Scudéry ran her own ruelle, from her house in the Marais, and although it was not as fashionable as the gatherings of Madame de Fontet, Marie Catherine had always wanted to be invited. Recently she had begun trying to win the old woman over, but she was never certain if Mademoiselle de Scudéry remembered her from one week to the next, or if she thought she was subject to an entire parade of identical female flatterers who’d read Artamène and Clelie and wanted to sit down beside her and tell her about the passages they’d memorised as girls. About how she had read and reread the story of Sappho herself, who had extracted a promise from her lover that he would never ask her to marry him, for marriage was little more than slavery for women. How, reading, she had felt that she was looking through a window and into a different possible world.

At Madame de Fontet’s, Mademoiselle de Scudéry often appeared with a companion, a Monsieur Pellisson, some twenty years younger than her and a one-time royal historian. With his unhandsome, jowly face and stolid manner, he made a strange pair with the old woman who had once been famed for her wit and invention, but he paid her such careful attention that Marie Catherine couldn’t help but like him. Today, however, she did not see him.

‘Let’s have a game!’ Madame de Fontet clapped her hands together, and her voice rang out over the room. ‘In honour of our Mademoiselle de Conti, who has so recently transformed herself into Monsieur de Conti, we’ll play the game of metamorphoses!’

‘Madame de Cardonnoy,’ said Victoire, bowing, ‘will you start? Your stories are the best.’ Their eyes met across the room.

‘If she’s the best, then she ought to go last, otherwise no one else will want to go after her,’ said Monsieur de Crésny, one hand on the back of the sofa on which Marie Catherine sat with Mademoiselle de Scudéry.

‘When you introduce me like that, I’m afraid I can only disappoint you,’ said Madame de Cardonnoy. ‘I just tell the stories I heard from my mother.’

There was a little rustle of laughter around the room. Her apology about her mother was a well-known and threadbare fiction.

‘Nonsense, darling,’ said Madame de Fontet. ‘Everyone knows you’re entirely unique.’

Marie Catherine smiled and raised her gilded coffee cup to hide the smile that betrayed her pleasure in the compliment. There had been a time, before the birth of her children, or even after, when she would have been terrified to speak at one of these gatherings, and many of the guests would have looked down on her for her father’s birth. It always pleased her, even now, to see them draw close around her, praise her tales and the way she told them.

A little crowd had formed around the chair. Marie Catherine recognised Monsieur Perrault, the secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, with his young niece, Mademoiselle L’Héritier, who, teenaged and shy, hung in her uncle’s shadow with an expression of furious concentration and said very little.

‘Will you give me an object?’ Marie Catherine asked. The game began with a choice selected by the audience. Afterwards the story teller’s wit would supply the tale.

‘Tell us,’ said Monsieur Perrault, ‘of the buttons on Mademoiselle de Conti’s coat.’

Madame de Cardonnoy took a small sip of her coffee and held it in her mouth before swallowing. The bitterness scorched her throat. She was conscious of Mademoiselle de Scudéry shifting in her seat, searching out her voice with her good ear.

‘There was once,’ she began loudly, the warmth of the coffee still in her mouth, ‘a fertile kingdom with a broad river running through it. In this land lived seven brothers, alike as acorns that have fallen from the same oak tree. Although they were not of distinguished birth, they were strong and fearless, and their bravery covered them with the gold of glory.’

The trick of the game was to tell a story whose character would show some clever correspondence with the object chosen by the audience. A glittering diamond might become a woman who was beautiful, but hard and unfeeling; a silver serving spoon a generous lord who shared his gifts with everyone he knew.

‘It happened that when they were away at war, a great calamity struck the land. An enormous water serpent, its tail as thick as a tree and its fangs like two long spears, came into the river and laid waste to the land around it. Every day for seven days it rose up from the water and killed any who happened by – farmer or traveller or humble wife washing her linen at the river’s edge. Soon the people of the valley were afraid to go out and tend the fields or do their daily work. The crops fell to ruin, and the serpent crept up to the very doors of the houses and painted the fields red with blood.’

Monsieur de Crésny hummed appreciatively. So the red fabric of the coat might become a field stained with blood, the opening at its front a wide river. Marie Catherine took a sip of her coffee, to disguise her need to think, and let her thoughts run in the creases of Victoire’s coat, as if they were high grasses in which she could stumble back on her lost path. Funny that she should have made the body in whose arms she felt safest into the site of a massacre.

‘The seven brothers had also one sister, who despite her age and her sex was clever and brave.’ Now she was looking at Victoire and speaking only to her. ‘She knew that, if her brothers heard of the beast that ravaged their home, they would return at once to kill it and avenge the deaths of their neighbours. And so, under cover of darkness, she put on her travelling cloak and went boldly through the bloody fields to the river. The trees cast terrible shadows in the twilight, each looking like the approaching serpent, and every step that she took left her soft slippers warm and wet with blood.’

‘This story’s rather gruesome, Madame,’ Victoire protested. ‘You’ll convince me that you don’t like my outfit.’

‘A fairy tale need not always apply the rules of bienséance,’ said Monsieur Perrault. ‘It’s only the theatre that forbids blood to be spilled.’

Marie Catherine smiled sweetly. Was it so wrong to tease Victoire? It was true she felt something like jealousy, that she wore those clothes so easily. That her rank permitted her eccentricities. But although Marie Catherine, the financier’s daughter, would have been met with silence if she had worn that outfit, only she knew the body under the clothes.

‘She had reached the bridge over the river before the serpent found her. Its head rose up like a spear from the water, and she could see its mouth opening like a dark cave before her. The brothers’ sister feared then that her cause was lost, but, keeping her back straight, she curtseyed and said, “Bonsoir, Monsieur le Serpent.”’

‘Brave girl!’ Madame de Fontet applauded.

Madame de Cardonnoy smiled. ‘And the serpent, who was unused to being addressed with such respect, asked her whether she was not afraid for her life, alone as she was. “Not even a little,” said the girl. “For while I know that you are strong and terrible, I confess that you are too beautiful to provoke my fear. May I stay awhile and talk with you?”’

She paused again, but now it was not to discover what she ought to say, but to see the effect her story had on the room. Victoire looked up at her, no longer annoyed. The clever heroine made up for the jibe about her coat’s colour. Even Mademoiselle de Scudéry was listening.

‘At her words,’ Madame de Cardonnoy continued, ‘the snake approached her more closely and looped its enormous body around her waist. “And now are you afraid, Mademoiselle?”’

She tapped her coffee cup with one fingernail.

‘“Not at all,” the girl said. “Though you feel me shiver, I confess it is only because the river water has wet my cloak through.”’

The servant in the Armenian robe hovered around the edges of the group, pouring coffee into each tiny cup, unasked.

‘“Well then,” said the snake, “if you are so curious, would you travel with me to my kingdom, which is far away at the bottom of the sea? There you will find many strange wonders, which must surely fill you with delight, if even the sight of my face, which I know to be terrible, cannot move you to fear.”’

Here she paused, smiled, took a sip from her cup and, when she had finished drinking, resumed her tale at a different point.

‘When the seven brothers returned from battle, the serpent was gone and so was their sister, and the wheat in the fields grew red from all the blood that had been spilled there. No one could tell them what had happened that night their sister left their cottage and went to face the serpent all alone, but each brother held out hope in his heart that either there would come a day when she would return, or else, if she was dead, the serpent who had devoured her would reappear so that the brothers might have their revenge. Each chose a post along the river and, with one foot on the left bank and one on the right, they wait there still, protecting their kingdom, and waiting for news of she who is gone.’

She gestured at Victoire.

‘As you can see, they would be waiting there still, if not for their metamorphosis.’

‘Very clever,’ said Madame de Fontet, reaching out to adjust the drape of her skirts. ‘But whatever happened to the serpent and the brave sister?’

‘Oh, that’s another story!’ said Madame de Cardonnoy, laughing. ‘Shall we say that, in her travels with the beast, she tricked it into devouring its own tail, and now it is knotted around itself, much like Mademoiselle de Conti’s belt?’ She glanced sidelong at Mademoiselle de Scudéry and found that the face of Paris’s Sappho was creased into a smile.

‘Now you’ve skipped the best part of the adventure,’ said Monsieur de Crésny. ‘We’ll have to drag it out of you!’

‘I’m afraid you’re unfamiliar with my mother’s stories, Monsieur,’ said Madame de Cardonnoy. ‘I must stop somewhere or we’ll be here until midnight, and no one else will get a chance to play the game.’

‘You ought to choose the next object,’ said Monsieur Perrault, steepling his hands under his chin with an air of high solemnity.

‘Who will go next?’ said Victoire.

‘Marie-Jeanne,’ said Monsieur Perrault, drawing his niece forward by her arm, ‘will you try?’

The girl shook her head. ‘Oh no, I can’t.’

Madame de Fontet cast a dismissive look at the girl. ‘Why don’t you tell one yourself, Monsieur Perrault?’

Shyness won no favours in Madame de Fontet’s household. But Marie Catherine felt her sympathy unexpectedly contract for Mademoiselle L’Héritier’s sake, as she saw the girl step back and turn away to conceal her dismay. She had wanted, clearly, to be coaxed into speaking, and she must have felt she’d lost her chance to impress the company.

‘I’m sure Mademoiselle L’Héritier has a story to tell,’ Marie Catherine said. ‘You’ll find it’s not so difficult, once you start.’

‘All right,’ the girl mumbled, and then she pulled her spine straighter and seemed to find her voice. ‘Will you choose the thing I’m to describe?’

‘Why don’t you tell us the story of the ring on your uncle’s right hand?’

Monsieur Perrault extended his hand so that his niece could look more closely at the ring. Mademoiselle L’Héritier pored over it as if she was reading his fortune.

‘Well,’ she said, huffing out a short, nervous breath, ‘once there was a woman with blue eyes who had no suitors …’

Later the servant boy in the Armenian robe circled and poured coffee again, along with stronger spirits. There was populo, smelling of lemon and musk, and the drink made with carnations, cinnamon and vanilla that gallants called the water of Venus. The gathering had quieted, and now the guests stood spread out in little knots in various rooms, murmuring in pairs by a harpsichord or breaking out into laughter in the twilight illumination of a window. At one time this would have been the height of the gathering, when guests began to gamble, and Madame de Fontet might summon a magician to tell fortunes in the fire.

Now fortune-telling was dangerous, and the company was more subdued. Marie Catherine was beginning to feel the effect of the coffee, a high humming in her temples and a stiffness in her shoulders, as if her body was a thread in a dress that had caught on something and now pulled the fabric of the entire garment askew. She set her cup on the porphyry table and brushed down her skirt to stand.

Madame de Fontet had led a small group into her bedroom, where they were playing cards around the polished dressing table. The lackey at the door was eating a pastry, his gold braid dotted with crumbs. Victoire threw down her cards in defeat and laughed, her hair loose on her shoulders, as if she’d entirely forgotten about her humiliation at cards in the aftermath of the scandalous poem. The whole group was framed in the doorway like a scene in a miniature painting, the kind that one might keep in a locket and look at, privately, in moments of quiet. Marie Catherine stood in the doorway for a moment, waiting for them to see her, until Monsieur de Crésny glanced up and caught her eye.

‘I think I’ll be going, my dear,’ she said, with a little bow towards Madame de Fontet.

‘Oh, that’s too bad.’ She tossed a card triumphantly into the centre of the table, then laid down her hand. ‘I was hoping we could convince you to play a round with us.’

‘I’m afraid Monsieur de Cardonnoy will have my head if I lose.’

‘Oh, my horse is at your hôtel,’ said Victoire. ‘Will you wait until I’ve finished this round?’

‘I’ll be downstairs.’

Marie Catherine stood by a window and watched the red sky fading over the gardens and the adjacent roofs of grand houses, like the dye leaching out of a bolt of new silk. A hand touched her arm.

‘I enjoyed your story.’ It was Mademoiselle de Scudéry, the incomparable Sappho. Her smile creased her face.

‘I feel I owe you a thousand stories, for the books of yours I loved as a girl.’ The words tripped off her tongue without her having to puzzle over them, and too loudly, but that was all right. Mademoiselle de Scudéry was hard of hearing.

‘They’re out of fashion now.’ Sappho spread her hands, as if to ask, What can you do? ‘I’m afraid the little gathering at my house is also not so fashionable these days, but you would be welcome there.’

‘Thank you,’ Marie Catherine said. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘Do you have other stories?’

‘Only small ones. Fairy stories.’

‘Bring one to tell. Monsieur Perrault collects them.’

‘I will.’

Victoire stepped into the room, the last light of the sun and new-lit candles reflecting together in her eyes and off the glazed china of her teeth. Her hair floated like a dark cloud against her red coat.

‘I hope to see you soon,’ Marie Catherine said and, impulsively, she raised the novelist’s hand to her lips and kissed her bony fingers. Her skin felt like the very softest old leather and smelled like pastry.

Mademoiselle de Scudéry laughed.

In her excitement, she nearly kissed Victoire before the carriage had pulled safely out of Madame de Fontet’s courtyard.

‘She invited me! Now I think I can die happy.’

The carriage wheels sounded on the cobbled streets like the rhythmic crack of an axe.