Epilogue

To Victoire Rose, Mademoiselle de Conti,

This letter is unsigned, but you will know who writes it. It may even be that several souls are ahead of you and me, and as it travels from a foreign country it may arrive to you with the seal broken, on the suspicion that it contains some unpleasantness, or else matters of great secrecy.

Alas, I can offer nothing of the kind! I am afraid there has been much foolishness in Paris of late. And while the news from home tells me that this scandal of poisons is much discredited, and many of those who were imprisoned have gone free, I can only confess that I was too faint-hearted to face those months in prison, even in the full confidence that the truth would, at last, come out and clear me of all wrongdoing. Perhaps some day I will be able to clear my name of the accusations against me and return to Paris, where my heart will always dwell. For now, my children are learning to speak Spanish. Perhaps you might, too, if one day you tire of life among the women of the court.

I do still receive my share of rumour here, and what they say is that there have been many changes there – that La Montespan, who I so admired, is out of favour and has been replaced by a stricter lady, who disapproves of the pastimes that were once in vogue. Perhaps you have adjusted to the new fashion, but somehow, my darling, I cannot picture you in that sombre company.

As you know, and must always know, I feel for you such bonds of friendship that I am incapable of putting them to paper. And I have so many adventures to relate that if I set them down here you might believe that they, too, were a tale of the kind I tell my children. One day I will tell them to you, in person. Perhaps you will sit across from me, at this table, and take an orange from this china bowl. It will be summer, as it is now, and the sound of the roaming bees will filter through from the garden, along with just this kind of golden sunlight, which is thicker and more like burnished metal than any light in Paris. I can feel your presence so clearly that I know, without a doubt, that it will come to pass.

Some day we will sit together, and I will ask you the fates of our common friends, and news from the salons, and how you have spent your days, on all the days that we have been apart. On that day you will also have the full story of my adventures, but that will have to wait. And so here is a fairy story, of the kind I tell my children. Forgive me – I know that such things are no longer the fashion in Paris, because they mislead the foolish, and disturb the natural order, and make the lowly into the kings of creation. Or so I’ve read, from pens wiser than mine. Nevertheless, I’m foolish. I find I don’t want to give up my mother’s stories, fashionable or no.

Once upon a time there was an ogre’s wife. She lived with him for many years, and perhaps it was not such a bad marriage. The ogre was rich. He gave his wife silk embroidered by the hands of his hundred servant girls, and soft white gloves from Italy, and Chinese vases with painted birds so lifelike that the porcelain, when one touched it, was as soft as feathers. He gave her a grand house, servants, a bedroom that he only occasionally entered. He let her read what she liked, and didn’t mind whose company she kept. He would, perhaps, have been a fine husband, if only he had not been an ogre.

Was she a good wife? She was, I think, a wife like many others. Sometimes she saw the monster to whom she was married sitting across from her at the dinner table and she wished that her life had been otherwise, that she had had the purity or the obstinacy to go to her death in her girlhood rather than accept her marriage, or to flee to the wilderness and live in rags, eating berries and the bark of trees.

There came a night when the ogre left, and when dawn broke, his wife heard his carriage returning. Then instead of going to her mirror to dress for the day, she went to her window and opened it.

Before the window, she took off her silk shoes.

She took off her dress.

She cleaned the paint from her face.

She cut off her hair, and it fell to the floor in sheaves like ripe wheat.

She took off her skin of the ogre’s wife, her breasts, her smile, her softness, until if anyone had been looking at her, they would not have known if she was a woman or a man.

She stepped up onto the windowsill.

And though sense and prior experience say that she should fall to her death, it does not happen that way. The air, alive, lifts her up. And she flies to her freedom.

And so, Victoire, I wish it for you.