‘What day is it today?’
‘Thursday, 26 May 1707, Madame de Montespan.’
‘1707…’ said she, a widow these sixteen years. ‘Torches! Torches! Night is falling.’
‘They are bringing them and lighting them. Look, Marquise, I shall even leave this candle for you on your bedside table,’ said the maid soothingly.
‘The shadow is coming alive. Its claws are reaching out to me, catching the sheets! A light! A light!’
Massive candelabras now filled the room with light. Through the window, its curtains drawn, the dusk behind the three towers of this half-feudal, half-thermal town was red with flames and destruction. Athénaïs panicked. The bedridden marquise had foresworn her legendary gowns, gold and pearls for a ‘conjugal shift’ pierced with a hole … a shirt made of rough, stiff canvas. Her once-perfect body had grown very thin. Her lovely blond hair was white. She suffered from a disgust of self, and wore bracelets, garters and a belt with metal spikes that left sores upon her skin. Françoise never took her eyes from the portrait of her husband that she had had hung on the wall.
… my great portrait painted by Sabatel, and I shall beg her to hang it in her bedchamber when the King no longer enters …
From the corridor there was a sound of brisk footsteps approaching. The door to the room was flung open. In came d’Antin, followed by the Maréchale de Coeuvres, who was telling him, ‘On the night of 22 May, your mother had fainting spells. We brought her vinegar and cold water. As we feared a fit of apoplexy, we administered an emetic, but I believe she was made to absorb too much. She vomited sixty-three times. The physicians have declared that she is lost. A priest came to administer the last rites. At that time we sent you a message regarding the “great attack of vapours” suffered by the marquise whilst taking the waters at Bourbon-l’Archambault.’
‘I was in Livry and curtailed my hunting expedition with the Grand Dauphin to come as quickly as possible by post horse.’
‘Monsieur d’Antin, you shall be the sad witness to the death of a sincere penitent.’
The sad witness … Louis-Antoine went up to the bed. He listened to the dying woman complaining of her weakness, that she was neither so strong nor so healthy as she once had been.
‘I have no appetite, I cannot sleep, I am suffering from indigestion.’
‘It is because you are getting old.’
‘But how can I escape this decline?’
‘The quickest means, Mother, is to die.’
The affectionate son then distinguished himself by an exploit that revealed the beauty of his soul: he pulled a key from around his mother’s neck and opened a drawer in the secretaire.
‘I was taken for a fool once, it shan’t happen a second time.’
He took possession of the dying woman’s will.
‘Given the fact that you own a great deal of property, and I am fearful of being dispossessed in favour of bastard half-brothers and -sisters or even servants, it occurs to me that if you were to die intestate – and your last wishes in writing were not found – I would be the sole heir in the eyes of the law.’
The marquise, with her garters adorned with metal spikes, sighed.
‘I should have so liked you to take after your father … And now what are you doing?’
‘I am removing this portrait of your husband, and I will burn it. Thus no one shall ever know what he looked like. I had a sledgehammer taken to the stone horns on the gate and on his coat of arms. I have burnt all his letters. The King, on hearing of it, has promised me a street in Paris. Just imagine, Mother … the Chaussée d’Antin!’
Without another word, the fat courtier took his leave, without waiting for his mother to be placed in her coffin, or even for her death. He strode away, his red heels tapping on the parquet. He mounted his horse in the courtyard of the hôtel particulier.
‘Gee up!’
The marquise turned her head towards the door, left wide open, and in the next room she could see the nuns gathered around a painting.
‘What are they doing?’ asked a cook. ‘And why do they have paintbrushes in their hands?’
The maid, sitting at the table shelling crayfish, told her, ‘Before she left Versailles, the former favourite wanted to have her portrait painted as a repentant Mary Magdalene with a book open in her left hand, since she is left-handed. But the nuns in the convent of La Flèche to whom she gave the painting say that this Mary Magdalene is revealing too much bosom, so they are doing a “modesty repainting”. The good sisters are adding a blue tulle cloth to la Montespan’s bosom whilst she’s dying. Would anyone else like a crayfish?’
Seven or eight girls were eating and drinking in the room, conversing freely as if the marquise were no longer there. And yet she was still breathing. From time to time she drifted off, then emerged from her torpor in a sweat, screaming. At around three o’clock in the morning someone said, ‘Look, she has stopped breathing.’
The physician from Bourbon-l’Archambault certified the death.
‘Are you sure?’ insisted the maid. ‘Because in her lineage there has already been one woman resuscitated!’
The physician confirmed that no condensation had formed on the mirror he held to the marquise’s lips – ‘She is dead’ – and went out.
The maid asked, ‘Now where did the Maréchale de Coeuvres go?’