The Hurlyburly's Husband by Jean Teulé Page A

behind, and she asked her husband to take her away to Bonnefont. ‘It is all too much – being lady-in-waiting, and receiving gold from the butchers’ shops, and the King’s contribution to your company – it is all too much, living at court. Let us go and live with your mother and our children in Guyenne.’
    Montespan refused to consider it. ‘In an uncomfortable old chateau in the wilderness of the far reaches of the realm, surrounded by country bumpkins? You will be bored.’
    She begged Louis-Henri to forgo his military aspirations and take her away. He laughed at her distress and made fun of her when she insisted.
    ‘Versailles is a dreadful place,’ she lamented; ‘there is not a single person whose head is not turned by it. The court changes even the best of souls.’
    ‘It shall not change you. I have greater trust in you than you have yourself.’
    *
    Then one day Athénaïs arrived red and embarrassed, with a new pearl necklace. She hid her face on her husband’s chest, with his scent of liquorice and orange-flower water. ‘There is still time to leave.’
    Louis-Henri, in his Indian dressing gown, smiled and spoke to her quite formally. ‘Pray explain yourself, Madame!’
    ‘Explain myself? Then you should know that this fête everyone is talking about, entitled “Disguised Love”, where I shall figure as the water nymph and His Majesty as Neptune brandishing a trident in gilded wood – the King is giving this fête in my honour.’
    ‘Well, are you not lovely enough to deserve a fête in your honour?’
    ‘Louis-Henri, since I must spell it out, the King is in love with me.’
    ‘Well then! A King’s love is no insult.’
    ‘Louis-Henri, I am afraid.’
    ‘What can you be afraid of?’
    ‘Last night, at Versailles, I had a dream. In the dream, I was climbing a mountain. When I reached the peak, I was dazzled by a brilliant cloud, before plunging into a darkness so deep that my fear awoke me.’

13.

    ‘Louis-Henri, do you think I am the devil?’
    ‘Of course not, why do you say such a thing? Do you think I am Marie-Christine? Are you going to growl at me? Grrr … oh, oh, oh! … Frrr.’
    On a clear night, in their bed of twisted columns in Rue Taranne, the marquise had raised her husband’s lids and roused him from sleep. An infinitely pale glow of moonlight hovered and shimmered over her face. Her eyes were two large holes. She told her husband a story she had never told him before.
    ‘During my childhood in Lussac, I often shivered with fear listening to my nurse at night, when she would tell me the family legend about an ancestor in the sixteenth century. Renée Taveau, the daughter of the Baron de Mortemart, had married my great-grandfather, François de Rochechouart. But the young bride quickly fell ill and was dying. She was no longer breathing, had no pulse, and they buried her, not yet twenty years of age, with her flawless diamond ring. This gem is too brilliant to be left in the obscurity of a tomb, thought a covetous valet. He waited until nightfall to raid the burial place and steal the jewel. But it was impossible to slide the ring from her stiff, bent finger. So he decided to cut it off by biting the joint. When he dug his teeth into the icy flesh, the “dead” woman suddenly awoke with a scream. Naturally, the word spread quickly that Renée was a diabolical creature with supernatural powers. However, the husband was so glad to be with his wife again that he gave her a child – my grandfather.’
    The naked Montespans found warmth under a woven blanket from Holland, mingling their souls. As the walnut bed creaked, Athénaïs declared to her husband, ‘I am the resurrection of a dead body …’
    ‘Do you mean a miracle? That I knew, that you are a miracle.’
    ‘Do you think that I am a demon?’
    Louis-Henri paused above his blonde: her sex was voracious, man-eating, avid for the milk of his flesh. As for other women – fie upon them! He never thought of them.