The French Mistress (4 page)

But this time, none of the other ladies were so rash as to laugh with her.

“Mademoiselle de Keroualle has no reason for dissembling,” Madame said. “I do recall now that the Duc de Beaufort also gave her age as eighteen, and it’s unlikely they would both misremember.”

Mindful of her earlier misstep, Mademoiselle de Fiennes said nothing, though the tiny shrug she gave her shoulders expressed her skepticism without a word spoken.

“If Mademoiselle de Keroualle appears too young,” Madame said sharply, “then it is not a fault of her innocence, but only a sorry judgment of the worldliness of other ladies at this Court.”

“Forgive me, Madame, I did not intend to—”

“I have no interest in your intentions, mademoiselle,” Madame said. She looked back at me, and her expression softened. “It will be refreshing to have such a measure of innocence beside me, Mademoiselle de Keroualle. I believe you to be of age for my service, and I’ll hear no more of it. Come, you must be weary after your journey. Mademoiselle de la Touraine, will you please show her to the quarters of the maids of honor?”

I followed Mademoiselle de la Touraine’s lead and curtsied, then remained facing Madame as we backed from the room as was proper with royalty. We passed between the guards at the door, taking no more notice of them than they did of us.

“It’s not far,” Mademoiselle de la Touraine said once we were beyond the hearing of the guards. She took short, swift steps, her slippers making almost no sound as her silken skirts rippled gracefully around her ankles: a skill I resolved at once to practice and acquire for myself. “Madame likes her ladies to be close to her, to keep from being lonely. You may call me Gabrielle if I may call you Louise. Our fathers are of the same rank, so there’s no harm to it.”

“Oh, yes, please, call me Louise.” I smiled eagerly, wanting her to like me. “But how do you know of my father? He never leaves Brittany. He despises Paris, and refuses to come here.”

“We know because he is your father, and you are here, as one of us now.” Gabrielle made a dismissive little wave with her hand. “Everyone knows everything at Court, Louise, from the king himself down to the lowest maidservant in the scullery or groom in the stable. There are no secrets here.”

“None?” I asked, skeptical of such certainty.

“None,” she repeated with relish, the coral beads of her earrings bobbing against her cheeks. “One never knows what advantage might come from a certain scrap of knowledge. You saw how it was with Françoise—that is, Mademoiselle de Fiennes. She wouldn’t have dared make such a fuss about your age unless she already knew your family possessed little influence with the king, or anyone else of note at Court. She knew there’d be no consequences if she teased you.”

“But
why
did she do it?” I asked.

“For sport.” Gabrielle paused at one of the tall arched windows that lit the hallway, gently pushing aside the heavy brocade curtains with her fingertips to glance at the street below to see who might be new arrived, and thus be the first who knew: a passion, I learned later, that she shared with nearly every courtier. “For amusement. Françoise is like that, you see. All of us maids have felt the prick of her cruelty at one time or another. She finds pleasure in the torment of others.”

“That’s wicked,” I declared solemnly. “Why doesn’t Her Highness make her stop?”

“Because of who she is,” Gabrielle said, letting the curtain fall from her fingers as she turned. “Who she is, and who she lies with.”

I stopped, determined to sort this out. “But she is unwed,” I said, my voice falling into a whisper. “And she’s also a maid of honor, which means she must be a—a virgin.”

“Truly you
are
an innocent, Louise, if you believe that,” Gabrielle said, her tone pitying. “There are as few true maids among the maids of honor as there are constant wives among the ladies-in-waiting, and the gentlemen are even more profligate. Françoise intrigues with the Chevalier de Lorraine, who in turn is the favorite lover of Monsieur, Madame’s husband.”

I shook my head. “That is not possible. How can two gentlemen be lovers?”

“They can if they are sodomites,” she said, with as little concern for decency than if she were discoursing upon the weather. “There are a number of Court gentlemen who prefer to find pleasure with other men rather than with women, while there are also others, like Monsieur, who are true libertines, and amuse themselves with both sexes.”

I shook my head in denial, unwilling (or perhaps truly unable) to comprehend such behavior. And here I’d believed adultery to be the greatest sin of Louis’s court!

Yet Gabrielle understood my confusion. “I didn’t believe it myself, when I first came to Court, but I swear by all that’s holy that it’s the truth,” she said. “These rogues follow the Italian manner for their spending, and take each other in their mouths, or in their bottoms. You’ll learn soon enough which gentlemen are so inclined. Not only do they paint and patch their faces like courtesans, but they will also make a show of sitting daintily on down-stuffed cushions, all the while boasting about the size of what they’ve recently accommodated within their nether regions.”

“But that—that is an abomination, a perversion!” I stammered, sickened at the very notion of such acts. Surely my mother and father had not known of these activities, else they’d never have permitted me to come to Paris. “An act so debauched is a disgrace to God.”

“It’s also a capital crime against the Crown that can cost the participants their heads on the block,” Gabrielle said wryly. “But though His Majesty loathes the practice, he can say nothing to stop it, not when his brother is the most grievous offender of them all.”

She held her hand up before her, using her fingers as markers to tick off the steps to her argument. “Thus the king pretends he does not see, and Madame, though she knows that Françoise intrigues with the chevalier, also pretends ignorance for the sake of keeping the peace with Monsieur, while Monsieur himself looks away to avoid risking the loss of his own favorite love. Round and round and round we all must go, yes? There may be no secrets at Court, but there is much willful blindness.”

She laughed, and there was something to that laughter that made me uneasy. Was my unwitting ignorance the true source of her amusement?

“What secrets do you have, Louise?” she asked, her manner merry despite the sordid nature of her revelations. “I can tell already that you’re one of those determined to be virtuous, rather than a favorite. At least you will at first. That’s the way it always is with country virgins.”

“Not with me,” I said, wishing I didn’t sound so priggish. “I’ll not give myself to any gentleman save the one I wed before God.”

“I wish you well of that, if that is what you wish.” She laughed again and winked, I suppose, to show she believed in neither virtue nor wishes. “But if you do preserve your innocence and remain a true
maid
of honor to Her Highness, then you’ll find Madame will love you all the more. Here are our quarters.”

Relieved to put aside our scandalous conversation, I followed Gabrielle past more guards, and into the quarters for Her Highness’s youngest attendants.

“There are six of us maids of honor,” Gabrielle explained, “as is proper for a royal princess. Madame du Frayne is the lady who is supposed to advise us, and keep us from mischief, and a dragon she is, too. You won’t want to cross her. Of course there are servants to tend to our hair and others to look after our clothes and help us dress. You’ll meet them all soon enough. This small parlor is for the maids to share in common.”

The parlor
was
small, scarce more than a closet with a table and several straight-backed chairs. In one corner was a tiny shrine to the Virgin Mother for us to say our rosary, or other prayers. The single window opened onto a courtyard and faced the gray stone wall of another wing of the palace, with only a single slanting ray of watery Paris sunlight making its way into the room. I couldn’t help but recall the window in my bedchamber at home and the sweet breezes and endless view of the countryside that I’d had there, and with that memory came a sharp, sudden pang of longing for everything I’d so blithely left behind.

“That door there leads directly to Madame’s quarters,” Gabrielle continued. “We’re only to use it when she summons us to her. I know it all likely seems mean and low to you—I know it did to me, when I first arrived—but lodgings are at such a premium here at Court that they say there are marquises living beneath the garrets of the Louvre, and grateful for that. Here’s the chamber you’ll share with me.”

I would have called it an alcove, not a room, and one without any windows or a door for privacy. For all that we were within a palace, it was not so very different from the pupils’ quarters at the nunnery in Lesneven. Two narrow beds—mere cots, really, without proper bedsteads or hangings—were set against the walls, with two chamber pots, two washstands, two chairs, and a single looking glass on the wall between. Of more importance were the pair of tall wardrobe chests that held our clothes. A maidservant had already unpacked my trunks and hung my gowns on the pegs within, leaving the doors open for my approval.

I unfastened my cloak and hung it inside. I knew I was supposed to wait for the maidservant to appear again, that no real lady would tend to her own clothes, but a lifetime’s habit was difficult to break, and besides, the simple act was one I could perform without fearing I’d misstep.

“Ooh, let’s see your gowns,” Gabrielle said, opening the wardrobe’s doors more widely. “I’m so weary of the same ones here among us. This blue wool is rather fine, isn’t it? But then, if my skin were as clear and white as yours, I’d wear blue, too.”

She held out the skirts of each of my new gowns in turn, considering them one by one while I stood by anxiously awaiting her judgment.

I was mindful of the expenditure my new clothes had represented to my father, and how the rest of my family had been obliged to do without in some area so that I’d be able to represent them well here at Court. Maman herself had chosen every length of cloth with frugal care, and had cut away old lace from her own gowns to be washed and stitched freshly onto mine.

Yet even before Gabrielle gave her verdict, I knew what she’d say. I’d eyes to see for myself. The moment I’d entered Madame’s rooms earlier I’d understood. How could I have missed the dress of the other ladies attending the princess this afternoon? For gossip and handwork, every one of them had dressed with more elegance, more artistry, and vastly more expense than the gown I’d intended for the most formal of Court occasions. Gabrielle need not speak a word aloud; her garb alone told me more of my lackings than any mere words ever could.

Her gown was fashioned of peach-colored silk satin of such a weave that it seemed to change from rose to pale gold as she moved, just as did that summer fruit. Her billowing skirts were cunningly gathered in neat cartridge pleats, while the bodice was the work of a master mantua maker, boned and curved behind a long, straight busk to accentuate Gabrielle’s waist. Intricate rosettes of green silk ribbon blossomed from her cuffs, and a collar of finely wrought lace nearly half a foot wide circled her shoulders and was caught at her breasts with a brooch of pearls and carved coral, with more coral beads around her throat and hanging from her ears.

Beside such opulence, my new gowns—mostly wool or linen, with only one of silk, and no gay rosettes or wide lavish bands of imported lace or cuffs that fell open like a flower’s petals around the elbow—seemed humble indeed, and a woefully inadequate match to my family’s grand aspirations.

“The cut of these sleeves is rather amusing,” Gabrielle was saying, though now I heard her words as condescending, not kind, and meant more likely to mock the poor country seamstress than to praise her ingenuity.

“Thank you,” I said, keeping my misery to myself as I prayed that would be sufficient answer. My parents and all the other de Keroualles behind me deserved that much.

Gabrielle had come to the last of my gowns, lifting the skirts of the final one to glance beneath it, as if to find more hidden beneath.

“I wonder where that lazy porter must be with your other trunks?” she asked, though I was sure she knew perfectly well that there’d be no more. “We’re all to go to the Louvre tonight with Madame for an entertainment, you know. Likely she’ll present you to His Majesty then, and you’ll want to dress to please him.”

“I dress to please only myself,” I said. “Not the king, or anyone else.”

She gasped with surprise: likely the first honest reaction I’d had from her. “But, Louise, everyone dresses to please His Majesty! To catch his favor is the most fervent desire of every lady at Court.”

“I would wish to please His Majesty, yes,” I said carefully, “but as his loyal subject, not as an adulterous favorite.”

“But it’s not that way, not with the king,” Gabrielle insisted. “Because he is His Most Christian Majesty and the most powerful monarch of God’s will on earth, even His Holiness in Rome pardons him his indulgences. Besides His Majesty’s reputation as a most pleasing lover, as every woman who has enjoyed the royal person will attest, he is a generous one, too. Jewels, benefices, titles, honors, estates! It is the surest course to success for any lady and her family at Court.”

Jewels, benefices, titles, honors, estates
. Surely such gifts would ease my parents’ situation as they grew older. My younger sister would have a dowry to attract a husband. Royal influence would further my brother’s military career, too, and please my sponsor, the Duc de Beaufort.

But was it equal to the dreams I’d had of a husband and children of my own? Would jewels and titles be worth the devil’s bargain of my own soul and virtue?

Could the rules of heaven and earth truly be so different for those here at Court?

“When you have the honor of His Majesty’s presence tonight, you’ll understand,” Gabrielle promised, excitement quivering in every word. “He is the very model of a king, and surely the first gentleman of the kingdom, not yet thirty years of age, tall and handsome and virile beyond reason. When he smiles in your direction, la! You’ll melt and glow with the delicious honor of it, Louise, even you.”