Mistress of the Sun (40 page)

I
WAS ATTENDING TO
my morning toilette at Versaie when the messenger was shown in: my mother was dying, he announced. “Thanks be to God,” I said. The boy no doubt found that to be an unloving response, but my mother’s suffering, in this, her sixty-fifth year, had been painful to witness. A strong, proud woman, she had weakened dramatically after she’d had to strip the convent chapel of its ornaments the year before to help finance my father’s wars. I believe her dying began then: the crippling headaches, the back pain, her hands so twisted with rheumatism she could not hold a quill. And something more, I suspect: something inside, something ruptured.

I ordered my fastest carriage brought around, took up my walking stick. If only I had stayed the summer in Paris. But, selfishly,
I had come with my father to Versaie, escaping the stink, the dirt and the heat. “Have them tell her I am on my way. Tell her I’m racing.” It was ten past seven of the clock: at this moment my father would be in the ceremonial of his Grand Lever. With age, he’d become fixed in his daily routine—anything unexpected disturbed him. I decided to send word. In any case, I was anxious to get to Paris before my mother passed away.

In spite of the congestion on the road, we made good time, the horses always at a trot. I lowered the blinds to keep out the dust. I was thinking impious thoughts: the discomfort of wearing black in summer, the people who would have to be notified (the list sadly short: most everyone dead). I wondered if Carmelites allowed gravestones, and, if so, what I should have inscribed on it. I believe, in retrospect, that this was God’s way of making distress tolerable: “the solace of minutia,” my mother used to say.

Used
to say. Already, in my mind, she’d passed. It was then that the tears came.

I am, people say, very like my father: we are known for our spirit, our stubbornness, and—yes—our cold heart. But this is just a facade. I believe we feel too much, my father and I, that we’re capable of being felled by emotion, and for this reason we must keep it in check.

Death. Grief. How sad to be the survivor, I thought. My mother had outlived everyone, in spite of her sometimes frail health. Grandmother, Uncle Jean—both gone. Her confessor, the
kindly Abbé Patin. My brother Tito: his death at sixteen on his first military campaign nearly killed her, I know.

What sort of funeral would the Carmelites require? I wondered. No doubt it would be austere. What a relief not to have to stage a royal production. la Grande Mademoiselle’s funeral had been spectacularly offensive, the container of her entrails exploding, filling the church with such noxious smells that people were trampled in the rush for the door, everyone gasping for air. How fitting, somehow: the big Princess had always been an angry woman, especially after marrying Lauzun and suffering his abuse.

And how fitting, likewise, that the Marquise de Montespan had not been honored at all. If one were to believe the account (and I do),
her
entrails had been thrown to pigs. If there is a Heaven, she is not there, despite what my mother might say—my saintly mother who’d even consented to being the Marquise’s spiritual director. No, regardless of my mother’s counsel, I’m quite sure that that woman is in that other place, suffering for the pain she caused others. Suffering for the pain she caused my mother.

And Father: is he innocent of blame? Doubtful.

He is putting up a strong fight against age—still goes riding, still hunts, still, according to Madame de Maintenon’s whispered complaints, insists on daily congress. (At seventy-two! Dieu merci I have not inherited his lust.)

Did he ever love my mother? I wish I knew. He is, curiously, a jealous and possessive man. He does not take rejection well;
once my mother left, he rarely even spoke of her. Certainly, he never went to see her. “She is dead to me,” he said—yet he allowed his gardener to send flowers to the convent every morning. Was this his wish? There were always flowers in the visitors’ salon, extraordinary bouquets. In a rare moment of intimacy, he told me that she was the only woman who had ever truly loved
him.
It was one of those sad and somewhat uncomfortable revelations between a father and daughter, and I did not pursue it.

Love is rare at Court: that I do know. I count myself fortunate to have experienced it, as painful as it was to sit by my poor husband as he lay dying, covered in oozing pustules. Such was the price my dear prince paid for nursing me to health.

Oh, Death. I still mourn.

T
HUS MY THOUGHTS
ran as I entered the cool of the convent. I waited in the visitors’ parlor, wondering if I would even be allowed inside. The door opened, and a lay sister summoned me: Sister Nicole, my mother’s friend.

I stepped through the door into the inner sanctum. The silence was profound. “Is she…?”

“Thank God you’ve come,” Sister Nicole whispered. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

I followed Sister Nicole through a labyrinth of porticos and courtyards. The gardens were lush, fragrant and bursting with color.
We passed a music room, a library. It did not feel like a life of deprivation, and this was a comfort.

We came to an arched wood door, the entrance into the infirmary, the room in which my mother lay dying. “She just had Extreme Unction,” Sister Nicole said in a low voice.

“Is she in pain?”

Sister Nicole nodded, pressing her lips together.

I braced myself, and entered the room.

My mother was laid out on a high bed in her heavy brown robes. She looked so small, stretched out thus. She’d always been something of a giant in my eyes.

I approached. Her eyes were closed, and she was making a low, drawn-out moan of pain, the plainsong of the dying. The nuns praying beside her stepped back.

She opened her eyes, her beautiful eyes. I touched her dry, stiffened fingers: how thin they were. Was I hurting her? I looked at Sister Nicole.

“She can no longer speak,” Sister Nicole whispered.

“May I embrace her?”

Sister Nicole hesitated. “She must turn to God.”

My mother shook her head.

“What is she saying?”

“I think she wants you to hold her.”

Carefully—for I did not want to hurt her—I gathered my mother into my arms. She laid her cheek against my heart. I held her thus, until she passed.

I
STAYED THAT NIGHT
in the infirmary. Sister Nicole and I laid my mother out. I thought I would be repulsed by death, but my mother taught me otherwise. She looked at peace. The nuns came, one after another: I saw that they had been a family to her, saw that love was not rare in that place.

The next morning, we moved her bed—her bier—to the choir, and positioned it behind the grille for public viewing. There was already a large crowd waiting when the shutters were opened. I was surprised by the passionate reverence, although I shouldn’t have been. For years, my cook had been bringing me songs written about my mother, verses people sang in the markets. It was said people regarded her as something of a saint, credited her with healing ailing animals—dogs, but mostly horses.

All that long day, humble men and women came with their reliquaries, their crosses and rosaries, their medals and holy images. The nuns would take them, touch them to my mother’s folded hands, her forehead, her lips, and hand them back. This went on until after five in the evening.

I sat veiled, at her head, moved by the singing of the choir, the prayers, overwhelmed by the love these people had for my mother. When the clerics entered, a great cry went up.

“They’re going to take her away now,” Sister Nicole told me. “To bury her.”

“May I go too?”

“Yes, but first: we want you to have this.” She pressed a humble wooden rosary into my hands. “It was her father’s.”

I ran the worn beads through my fingers. “Thank you.” I touched it to my mother’s hand, her lips, and then kissed it myself.

“And one other thing,” Sister Nicole said, handing me a brass locket on a gold chain.

The clasp was tarnished; I pried it open with my nail. Inside was a strand of white horsehair, and a lock of fine hair—the hair of a baby, likely—as well as some decayed matter. “Do you know what it signifies?”

Sister Nicole shook her head. “All I know is that she never went without it.”

“Then she should have it with her now,” I said, fastening the chain around my mother’s neck. Her skin had a porcelain luster.
Sleep, little one.

Mistress of the Sun
is a work of imagination sparked by real-life events and personalities. In the seventeenth century, the roman à clef (novel with a key) became popular. These were novels about real people, disguised by false names. Most of my characters are based on real people (Louis, Louise, Athénaïs, Lauzun, Nicole). A few, however, are composite. Gautier is inspired by the real-life Monsieur le Duc de Saint-Aignan, but many liberties have been taken with that distinguished man’s life. A number of “Religious” influenced Louise de la Vallière’s avocation (Abbé Rancé, Jacques Bousset, Louis Bellefonds, Père César); I’ve combined them into one individual, Abbé Alphonse Patin, a composite of them all. Clorine was indeed the name of Louise de la Vallière’s maid, but that is all that is known about her.

Louise de la Vallière was an extraordinary horsewoman—that’s fact—and no doubt there were special horses in her life. However,
nothing is known of them, and Diablo, therefore, is a fictional creation. A travel journal by Sebastiano, an Italian priest visiting Paris, describes seeing Louise de la Vallière vaulting, and mentions her teacher, a Moor. There was said to have been a whisperer—a “gentler”—at the Court of the Sun King, and it is possible that this gentler and the Moor were one and the same.

Louise de la Vallière’s health is something of a mystery. She was an athletic woman, yet she suffered periods of disability (including the attack of blindness). I discussed what little is known with a doctor, who suggested that she might have had multiple sclerosis, a disease that existed but would not be identified until the late eighteenth century. It’s only a guess, but it fits.

In order to recreate history in fiction, one must simplify. In “real life,” there were more houses and palaces, more scandals, more loves, more entertainments, more journeys and war—but most of all there were simply more people: more children, relatives, friends and servants. The Marquis de Saint-Rémy had a daughter, Catherine, by his first marriage. She no doubt complicated Louise de la Vallière’s life, but I chose not to have her complicate this novel. Gaston d’Orléans and his wife did in fact have a much-wanted son, born developmentally impaired, who died at two, before Louise joined the Orléans Court at Blois. When she did arrive, there was also a fourth Princess, Marie-Anne, who lived only three years. Cardinal Mazarin is not mentioned, in spite of his significant role both to the country, politically, and to the young King, personally. There were, as well, a number of
delightfully eccentric individuals who are not mentioned. I reluctantly did not delve into the stories of Madame de Choisy and her cross-dressing son, the evil Olympe Mancini and her equally evil lover, the Marquis de Vardes, the famous courtesan Ninon, and the charmingly outspoken Princess Palentine…not to mention a vast array of underworld characters. No doubt some of these individuals will appear in future novels.

Although never convicted, Athénaïs, the Marquise de Montespan, remains suspected of the witchcraft hinted at in
Mistress of the Sun.
For those wishing to read more about the period, I highly recommend Antonia Fraser’s
Love and Louis XIV.
For more information on my research and the writing process, please see my website: www.sandragulland.com.