Chapter 1

On Saturday, 20 January 1663, at eleven o’clock in the evening, two young men burst out of the Palais-Royal where Monsieur, the King’s brother, was hosting a great ball. Six others immediately followed. They began to heap insults upon one another, in a blaze of feathers and lace.

A tall fellow in a flamboyant diamond-encrusted outfit, his lips stretched over his gums, shoved a short potbellied man in a black wig, who seemed to be standing on stilts so very high were his heels. In his many rings and bracelets, he staggered on his shoes and choked, ‘Vassal? La Frette, how dare you compare me to a slave – me, the Prince of Chalais?’

‘Prince of inverts, you mean – sodomite! Like Monsieur, you prefer a young squire to a chatty wench. And I have an aversion to that kind of vice. Let them indulge such things in Naples!’

During this altercation, the door to the well-lit ball-room, filled with music, fumes and the movements of the dancers, closed again, and the eight fine fellows found themselves in the icy darkness of the street.

A hunchback crouching against a column, holding a pole with a large lantern on the end of it, stood up, went over to them and called out, ‘A lantern-bearer to accompany you to your homes, Messieurs?’

He was limping and swaying, having one leg shorter than the other. His hair lay flat against his skull, tied at the nape of his neck like a well rope, and he circled around them, casting the light of his lantern.

Little Chalais slapped La Frette; his shaken head exuded a cloud of periwig powder. Humiliated, the tall fellow snapped his mouth shut over his teeth, which he had adorned in the Dutch style, plugging the cavities in his incisors and canines with butter. He had been stretching his mouth wide over his lips to keep his dairy plaster fresh and prevent it from melting but now, in his rage, he pursed his lips, puffing his cheeks out. He was burning with resentment. When he opened his mouth again, his teeth were oozing. ‘Did you see, Saint-Aignan? He slap—’

A cruel-looking chevalier of nineteen years of age, with a hat decorated with very long feathers, and one eye ravaged by smallpox, planted himself before Chalais. The lantern-bearer scurried to offer his itinerant lighting services to them both, explaining, ‘At night, gentlemen, there are rascals, purse-snatchers and rapscallions who lie in wait for passers-by out late and hurrying to their homes …’

Divided into two groups, the eight bewigged youths cursed, scowled at each other and tore at the silks and ribbons of each other’s garments. The lantern-bearer raised his luminous bladder. One of the youths, who had just been referred to as ‘Flamarens, you filthy whore’, was pale of face. With a paintbrush he had traced false lines of blue, the colour of nobility and purity of blood. The lantern-bearer lowered his beam onto the shining shoes and cobblestones. The oil of his lamp was smoking.

‘Five sols to take you thither! What are five sols to gentlemen who wear the red heels of aristocrats, like your good selves!’

Chalais’s friend Noirmoutier unsheathed a dagger; it flashed treacherously and left a wound upon a surprised face. The wounded gent’s hand reached for his sword: he would stick Noirmoutier like a pig. The one Noirmoutier called d’Antin – ‘D’Antin, don’t meddle!’ – intervened all the same in the fast-degenerating quarrel: ‘Zounds, be reasonable!’

The lantern-bearer concurred wholeheartedly: ‘Aye, be reasonable … The darkest, most deserted forest in the realm is a place of safety compared to Paris …’

‘Fat harlot of a tripemonger, I will see you on the field of honour, tomorrow morning!’

But the offended party, tall La Frette, standing next to Saint-Aignan, ordered, ‘Arnelieu, Amilly, we’re going now.’

Four of them left in the direction of the lighted windows of the Tuileries, and the other four headed the opposite way. As for the lantern-bearer, he shuffled and swayed along Rue Saint-Honoré. The light of his bladder cast a hunchbacked dancing shadow onto the walls, whilst he memorised the names: ‘La Frette, Saint-Aignan, Amilly, Arnelieu … and Chalais, Flamarens, d’Antin, Noirmou …’

At first light of the silent dawn, through the thick fog shrouding the field, d’Antin heard the silver-buckled shoes of the Chevalier de Saint-Aignan crunching over the frozen puddles. He turned to his neighbour Noirmoutier for his flask of Schaffhausen water, excellent for treating apoplexy.

The cockerel had not yet crowed, and there was not a sound in all of Paris. Standing in a row against a hedge of frozen hazel trees, the supporters of the offending party, Chalais, discerned the pale misty figures of La Frette’s clique emerging from a vast hay barn. They, too, moved forward in a row, straight towards their adversaries.

Soon they would be a breath away, for the rectangular field was narrow. To the right were sleeping mansions. To the left, the charterhouse of Boulevard Saint-Germain, with its cloisters and cells, and the monks whom they must not alert by shouting pointless invectives.

In any event, there was no more to be said. They had moved beyond words; this was a duel to the death, and d’Antin, beneath his heavy curled wig, was not feeling well. Yet, he struck a fine pose in his scarlet cloak, which was thrown over one shoulder, and his black hat, its brim turned up in the Catalan style, placing one foot forward, his hand on his hip. But his fingers were trembling. As soon as the duel had been called, his eyelids had started to swell and an erysipelatous rash had broken out on his forehead. His ears oozed, a fearsome scab had appeared on his neck, and beneath his chin and armpits he itched with scurf.

Chance had paired off the golden youths. La Frette would confront Chalais, Amilly would face Flamarens. Noirmoutier would take on Arnelieu, and d’Antin saw the Chevalier de Saint-Aignan striding towards him.

He was like a human bird with his mane of Greek curls and his splendid plumage, despite the eye lost to contamination by the whores in the brothels. He looked his adversary up and down, never slowing his pace through the fog, and his confident face betrayed no fear. He was most impressive as, sword in hand, he prepared to avenge his brother’s honour. He took long strides, thumbing the blade of his weapon. D’Antin wondered when he would stop and stand on guard, but the other fellow continued on his way as if he intended to go through the hedge of hazel trees. Thwack! D’Antin felt the bone of his forehead burst under the tip of the sword as it passed over his entire head. It dragged his wig behind his skull, and he tried to catch it – how stupid … How stupid to die like this in the frosty dawn, falling flat on his back in his pearl-grey breeches and pink silk stockings fastened with garters, when all around there was nothing but carnage. To his right, his three partners were moaning in the grass. Their adversaries departed.

Little Chalais got to his feet, twisting his ankles because of his thick soles. Bleeding profusely, he slapped a hand to his belly. Flamarens dragged a bloody leg behind him and hobbled towards the pale outline of a carriage. Noirmoutier, with a torn shoulder, ran in the opposite direction, to his horse.

‘Where will you go?’ asked the other two.

‘Portugal.’

The cockerel crowed. Cartwrights, blacksmiths, carters, weavers and saddlers opened the shutters of their little workshops. The fog lifted. The sun rose above the roofs of the mansions, to reveal a body lying on the ground …

At noon, the vertical shadows were sharp, and fell in triangles on the crowd from the roofs all around Place de Grève. The silence was impressive; windows had been rented at auction. Guards stood neatly in order around a platform.

‘That makes six!’

The hooded executioner’s axe fell so swiftly and cleanly that Saint-Aignan’s head remained poised on the block. For a moment the executioner believed he had missed and would have to strike a second time, but then the head collapsed onto the other five scattered on the floor of the platform, like a pile of cabbages. It looked as if, reconciled at last, they were kissing one another – on the forehead, the ears, the lips (and that is what they should have done in the first place, in their lifetime). The executioner wiped his forehead and turned to speak to someone just below the platform.

‘Monsieur de La Reynie, six in a row, that’s too much! I am not the Machine du monde, after all…’

‘Don’t complain. There should have been eight,’ sniggered the lieutenant of the Paris police, the prosecutor in cases of duelling, as he walked away towards the Châtelet.

‘Monsieur le marquis, there is no greater violation, no greater sacrilege of the laws of heaven than the frenzied rage of a duel. Do they not teach you that in your native land of Guyenne?!’

The young Gascon thus roundly admonished in the courtroom at the Châtelet gazed through the window at the late-afternoon sun … The only person seated in one of the courtroom’s chairs, he sighed, ‘You may say that to me, yet I am not involved, for I am not of a quarrelsome nature. Nor was my brother, for that matter—’

‘And yet he took part in a duel!’ La Reynie interrupted, brutally. ‘The nobility must cease, absolutely, from drawing their swords at the slightest provocation! These duels are decimating the French aristocracy, and since 1651 a royal edict has outlawed this bloody manner of avenging one’s honour. Duels are, first of all, in defiance of His Majesty’s authority, for his authority alone can decide who must die, and how we must live!’

Solemn and erect, La Reynie had reached this point in his sermon when, at the back of the room, behind the young marquis’s back, a door creaked, and he heard footsteps on the tiles. The disheartened Gascon looked down at his red-heeled shoes and caught a glimpse of a rustling cloak and petticoats as they sat down to his right.

‘Forgive me for being late, Monsieur de La Reynie,’ she said; ‘I but lately heard the news.’

Her voice was soft and even. The prosecutor declared, ‘Mademoiselle, if your future husband, Louis-Alexandre de La Trémoille, Marquis de Noirmoutier, returns to France, he shall be beheaded.’

The Gascon heard his neighbour unclasp her cloak and lower her hood onto her shoulders, then he looked up at La Reynie and saw he was speechless, his mouth agape; on either side of his aquiline nose, his eyes were transfixed. Who could she be, this young woman able to so discomfit such a prosecutor? Was she a Medusa who transformed men into stone? But La Reynie gathered his wits about him and came to stand opposite the Gascon, who was wiping his damp palms against his white satin breeches.

‘Monsieur,’ declared the prosecutor, ‘His Majesty’s investigation will be merciless, and will go so far as to rule in absentia against the memory of your brother, the late lord of Antin.’

The marquis replied docilely, ‘With all due respect and all imaginable zeal, I am the very humble, very obedient and most indebted servant of His Serene Highness…’

His neighbour enquired of the prosecutor, ‘How were you informed of the duel?’

‘The lantern-bearers who wait outside the spectacles and balls are our best informers,’ smiled the chief of police.

The crestfallen marquis sadly lifted his plumed hat from the chair to his left, stood up and turned at last to face his neighbour, who had also stood up. Zounds! It was all he could do not to sit down again. She was not merely beauteous, she was beauty personified. The twenty-two-year-old Gascon’s breath was taken away. He had always had a preference for plump blondes, and he was utterly captivated by this voluptuous marvel, who must have been his own age. A milky complexion, the green eyes of the Southern Seas, blond hair curled in the peasant style … Her gown was cut low in a deep décolletage from her shoulders, the sleeves stopping at the elbows in a cascade of lace. She was wearing gloves. The marquis could barely contain himself. He set his white hat on top of his enormous wig shaped like a horse’s mane (which weighed more than two pounds and was terribly hot), only to find that he had put it on backwards: the ostrich feather now hung in front of his face. In his effort to swivel his headpiece he dislodged his wig, which now covered one eye. The girl had a charming laugh, of the sort to rouse tenderness deep in any heart. He bid farewell to La Reynie and then – ‘Goodbye, Madame! Oh …’ – he excused himself as the amused young lady strode and bounced to keep pace with his gangling figure loping, knock-kneed, towards the far end of the hall. He tried to open the door for her but only just managed not to thump her, decided to let her go out first, then went ahead himself. She was immediately charmed by such gauche thoughtfulness – not to mention the adoring gazes he bestowed upon her.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked, with a smile.

‘That way, um, this way, and you?’

‘Straight ahead.’

On leaving the Palais de Justice at the Châtelet, they were immediately caught up in the noise, mud and stench, the extraordinary bustle, the permanent commotion of the city. Open sewers, mounds of excrement and pigs foraging in the rubbish meant that the perfumed gloves or bouquets of violets placed beneath one’s nose were indispensable as a remedy for nausea. But the marquis was oblivious to all that.

‘I have no more brothers. The eldest, Roger, succumbed during the siege of Mardyck. Just de Pardaillan died in the army, and now the Marquis d’Antin has been killed in a duel …’

‘And I have no more future husband,’ echoed the fair lady. The air she breathed out was purer than the air she breathed in. ‘Noirmoutier clearly cares more about his own skin than about me.’ Her profile was proud and noble. Rebellious blond strands escaped from beneath the hood of her cloak. Her nostrils quivered like the wings of a bird. Her laughing mouth, not a little scheming, had a delightful effect on the marquis, as the sun dipped behind the trees …

Their double loss had brought them together. While they made their way past song merchants – selling drinking songs, dining songs, songs for dancing or hailing the news – the two young people spoke of the deceased man and the exiled fiancé, finding ways to compliment, to please, to console. A group of Savoyard street minstrels proclaimed ‘Bring me back my sparrow, fair redhead’ and ‘Ah, how vast is the world’.

‘’Tis all the more exasperating,’ nodded the lovely blond head, ‘that when they brought the news to me, on Rue Saint-Honoré, I was trying on my wedding gown, for next Sunday. I do not know what I shall do with it.’

‘’Twould be a great pity, were it to go to ruin…’

A street performer took a swallow of water and spat it back out in a spray of various colours and scents.

‘What I mean, that is,’ stammered the marquis, ‘it is because of the moths. ’Tis true, sometimes one puts away new garments in a chest and then later, when one unfolds them again, they are ruined, consumed by grubs and full of holes … And then one regrets one did not wear them …’

The demoiselle in her pointed high-heeled slippers contemplated the fumbling Gascon. He amused her, and was not without charm. ‘Might you be implying that you …?’

‘Well, one doesn’t fall in love only once in a lifetime.’

A pâtissier stood in his doorway, proudly adjusting his appearance: a ribbon for a cravat, a beret with a large knot, and a sprig of flowers to attract the ladies. The abandoned fiancée placed her head on the marquis’s shoulder in an intimate gesture. And the marquis, an assiduous devotee of the lansquenet circles and reversi tables in the hôtels particuliers of the Marais, now thought he was playing the finest game on earth. Astonished and adrift, on a square teeming with horse carts and ecclesiastics, he scratched his periwig.

‘Is it not paradise here?’

‘Ah, no, Monsieur, in paradise there wouldn’t be so many bishops!’

They burst out laughing. For his part, the marquis was certain that an angel had blessed him, and he raised his eyes to heaven.

The vaults of the church of Saint-Sulpice, forming a lofty sky of stone, resounded with laughter. After the reading of the Gospel, the blonde in the red pearl-embroidered dress had knelt before the altar alongside the marquis in lavender grey, then exploded with laughter, murmuring in his ear, ‘You know what we’re kneeling on, you know how we forgot the embroidered silk cushions and had them sent for from Rue des Rosiers, at the Hôtel Mortemart …’

‘Yes?’ asked the young Gascon.

‘The servant made a mistake. She brought the dogs’ cushions.’

‘No!’

They laughed and dusted off the dog hairs like mischievous little children dressed up in garments of embroidered silk. Their guests were seated behind them at the heart of the vast church, which was still under construction. The Gascon, in a fine light-coloured horsehair wig, radiated happiness. His bride, graceful and glowing in the gentle brilliance of her twenty-two years, was still full of the candour of childhood.

Near the entrance to the church, sitting on a prie-dieu, a chubby-cheeked duc with protuberant green eyes and a small, full-lipped mouth exclaimed ecstatically to his neighbour, ‘My daughter is extremely amusing! One is never bored when she is present. Do you see that obese boy in the first row? That is my eldest, Vivonne. The other day, when I was reproaching my daughter for not taking enough exercise, she replied, “How can you say that? Not a day goes by that I do not walk four times round my brother!”’

The man to whom he was speaking, an elderly man with a great hooked nose that seemed to take up his entire face, enquired, ‘Is that your wife next to your son? She seems most exceedingly pious …’

‘Oh, indeed,’ said the husband, ‘where adultery is concerned, I believe I am safe before mankind, but before God, I surely wear my horns!’

‘Look at my wife, then: she prefers to live away from me, the great Chrestienne de Zamet there on the right – she’s the same,’ grumbled the man with the hooked nose. ‘She knows perfectly how to season a mother’s tenderness with that of a bride of Jesus Christ! Ha-ha-ha!’

The two fathers of the wedded couple guffawed; they were witty and cheerfully debauched. Someone in front of them turned round with a frown, then whispered to his neighbour, ‘Those two have found perfect company in each other …’

And the young couple had found perfect company, too, now married only eight days after meeting. They pledged their troth on a wintry Sunday before the priest and four trusty witnesses. The cleric inscribed the date – 28 January 1663 – in the parish register, then the names of the turtledoves, proclaiming them out loud: ‘Françoise de Rochechouart de Mortemart, also known as Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente, and …’

The voluptuous blonde Françoise took up the goose quill as it was handed to her and, as the priest pronounced the name of her spouse – ‘Louis-Henri de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Marquis de …’ – for the first time she signed her new name:

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