The Last Banquet (20 page)

‘You’re done?’

‘He’ll take more. But he’ll do for now if you want me finished?’

Looking at my milk-drunk son in her arms and the sweet curve of breast behind, I shook my head. She was young, fresh-faced and so full of life her skin glowed and her flesh was as firm as a perfect peach. ‘Feed him again.’

I came to sit beside her and made no pretence of looking away when she lowered him from her shoulder and shifted her dress to free the other side. Laurent fed less hungrily and dozed in the gaps between guzzling. His head lolling back to expose her nipple. The sun shone warmly on the three of us and chaffinches sang in the trees beyond the hedge. A robin dropped to the dirt at our feet to search for worms or crumbs, hopping in ever-wider circles until disappointment took him away. Finally, Laurant was done.

‘Here,’ I said.

She handed me my son and I held him as she had, jiggling him until he burped in my ear. Her dress was still undone but she was reaching for the buttons when I leant forward to stop her. Very slowly I opened one side to reveal where my son had been feeding. Her nipple was raspberry, the circle around it lilac. Milk oozed as I watched and collected in a bead that rolled to the underside of the raspberry. Her face stiffened when I wiped the bead free before it could drop and carried it to my lips. A second drop collected and I took that too. ‘Chestnuts. You’ve eaten chestnuts and fruit.’

‘I took a plum from the orchard. But only from the ground.’

‘Next time take one from the trees. And the chestnuts?’

‘For lunch,’ she said. ‘My mother made soup.’

I shut her dress to the neck. ‘You want this job?’

She nodded fiercely.

‘And your own child?’

‘My mother will look after.’

‘Who will feed him?’

‘Her, my lord. My ma will feed her. She has a baby that age of her own and, as she says, two tits for two mouths.’ She blushed at her mother’s crudeness and I waved her blush aside. So it was settled. Manon came to the chateau to take care of Laurant and the nursery. I explained what I wanted. I wanted him happy and well fed, on her milk and pureed vegetables from the walled garden. I wanted all responsibility for his care lifted from my wife. Manon would deal direct with me. She was to start today. She was to start now. Manon curtsied before taking Laurant back. And having told her to find my housekeeper and explain the arrangements, I sent for a stable boy and told him to find Manon’s mother in the village and tell her what had been agreed.

1762
Master of the Menagerie

I
n the three or four years that followed my love for Virginie was worn to tattered cobwebs by her tears and my own anger at being unable to change how she felt or comprehend the source of her sorrow. We had Hélène, now eight and the image of her mother, we had an heir, the building work on the chateau was finished and the grounds had never looked more beautiful. An Italian fountain cascaded cooling water in the middle of the terrace, peacocks roamed the grounds fanning their tails in grand display and puffing themselves up with pride. The king himself came with his retinue and emptied our larders of food and our forests of prey, and rode his hunt through the middle of the harvest, scattering silver to compensate the peasants.

I was asked if Virginie was seriously ill.

My answer, that I did not know but that I was worried, was greeted as a display of tact and kindness unusual in marriages of our kind. By the time Louis rode away I’d had three offers of friendship, and mentions of beautiful daughters, from members of his court. His majesty left with a smile on his face and his stomach full, although not as full as he left the stomach of a peasant girl who bore his bastard nine months later. And he left me a knight grand cross of the Order of St Louis, with the promise that a place on the Privy Council was mine when one next came available, should I want it.

Virginie listened to all this with a tired smile and retired to her room to play sad melodies on her harpsichord, having first suggested I might want to take myself and Laurant to Paris to consolidate the impression I’d made on His Majesty, and I might like to take Manon too. My reply, that obviously I’d take her if I was taking Laurant, produced a sadder smile and a softly closed door.

We left a week later and slept at the duc de Saulx’s chateau on the way. Charlot asked carefully after his sister, dandled his nephew on his knee and let his gaze slide over Manon without really noticing her. He could probably have told me she was female and from a peasant family, given the broadness of her face. I doubt he could have managed more without looking again. Later that night we shared a cognac on the terrace, looking down over a lake he was having widened and deepened so his son’s sailing boat would not keep running aground and stranding the boy.

‘How is she really?’

The cognac was old and almost auburn, with odours of quince and fig, perhaps a little jasmine and liquorice. ‘Your own?’

He nodded, his face serious to show he still awaited my answer. I let him wait while I swirled the straw-coloured liquid round the glass to release its scent and then sipped, letting the complexity roll over my tongue. Maybe Charlot knew how hard I struggled to find the words; he certainly knew how much I’d loved his sister, and perhaps still did, because he let me have my tasting and my silence. In the end I told him the truth because he was my friend.

‘She keeps to her room. She reads a little, writes a little, plays harpsichord, pieces by Rameau and Couperin, and walks occasionally in the garden.’

‘Anything else, marquis?’

‘She cries.’

Charlot came to stand beside me and rested his arm heavily around my shoulder. He had always been the biggest, at school and after. Age and good living had thickened his waist and filled his frame so the velvet of his frock coat stretched across his back and was cut in a curve at the hips to flatter his thighs. He’d be too heavy for the hunter he owned when I first knew him. Probably too heavy for the horse I rode now. We looked at the lake with its ugly mud scars and silvery water and let the silence lengthen. ‘You are . . .’ he hesitated. ‘Still man and wife?’

This was a conversation it would be hard to have with any brother-in-law but harder still because he was one of my oldest friends. I nodded, and then made myself put the situation into words. ‘I go to her bed occasionally. She has stopped coming to mine and I do not send for her. Even in bed, even during that, we are polite strangers.’ There were tears in my eyes and I knew Charlot had noticed because he shifted uncomfortably. He disliked strong emotions; his whole family disliked strong emotions. Before today, before noticing Charlot’s uncomfortableness, I would have said I disliked them myself.

‘You know I loved her . . .’

‘Loved?’

‘I would love her again if I could find her. But she’s not in there. I’ve been left with a husk, beautiful and elegant, dutiful if required, but wanting only to be left alone to her books and her harpsichord and her walks and her tears. She sits in her room playing Couperin to the mouse that come out from the wainscot and makes up her audience in exchange for crumbs.’

‘Is there anybody else for you?’

I shook my head.

‘You must have mistresses? Willing wives among the local gentry? Favourites among the servants? That young woman you arrived with?’

So he had noticed Manon after all. ‘She looks after Laurant, no more.’

‘Take a mistress, Jean-Marie. It’s not normal for a man to do without, you’ll fall ill. Now, why are you going to Versailles?’

He listened to my tale of the king’s visit and Virginie’s suggestion that I follow up the promise of royal favour. ‘Do you want a post at the palace?’

I could think of nothing worse. Charlot’s father, the previous duke, was of the generation Louis XIV made live there, back in the days when nobles were still rich and powerful and influential enough to plot. The Sun King bankrupted his own nobility with the fees and attendance he demanded and the retinues he required his court to keep. I knew the figures. Almost 2,500 rooms, as many windows, a hundred staircases, more mirrors than had ever been gathered together in one place. He gave them a honeypot, his courtiers, the grandest there had ever been.

‘So, why are you going?’ Charlot asked.

‘Virginie . . .’

‘Is my sister. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know her faults. A worse man might have beaten her. A man worse still might have had her removed to a hospital or found a convent willing to take responsibility.’ He looked at my face and knew I’d thought of the second and third if not the first. ‘I’ll write you a letter for de Caussard, although you’ll hardly need it. Still you and me together . . .’ He stopped. ‘You know Jerome has control of the appointments now? That he’s comptroller of the household.’

‘Jerome?’

‘He’s a marquis now, like you. De Caussard de Sallis. He made a wise marriage to a family with good connections.’

Also like me, I thought. Though Charlot was too polite to say.

‘He would do whatever you ask anyway. But he owes me a debt and it won’t do any harm to remind him.’ Charlot’s eyes hardened. ‘He bets heavy and he bets often. Avoid saying yes if he suggests a hand of cards.’

I nodded, and left Chateau de Saulx early next morning, riding my horse while the carriage conveying Laurant and Manon trundled along behind me. We arrived at Versailles three days later, having stayed one night at a hotel, another with the mayor of a small city and finally with some distant cousin of Virginie’s. The hotel was by far the most comfortable and least irritating.

Versailles was built to stun and impress and overawe, and I felt the effects of all of those by the time I stopped at the edge of the road on a gently sloping hill and heard the carriage draw up behind me.

‘Bring Laurant here.’ Climbing from the coach, Manon lifted the boy down, walking with him hand in hand until they reached the point where I had dismounted. ‘The king lives there,’ I told my son. ‘With his courtiers and servants. It’s the biggest palace in Europe. Quite possibly the biggest in the world.’

His eyes were wide as he stared at the huge baroquefronted palace, with its almost circular courtyard in front, dotted with the dark specks of carriages. A long walk with wide paths either side of an immense strip of grass led to a huge fountain on a vast and crowded terrace, and where the terrace ended an ornamental lake began. We looked down on the nearest edge of lake and I realised the distance was greater from the fountain to the lake than from my chateau to the village. Hearing the cry of a wild animal and remembering the menageries I realised what it was I saw.

A human zoo built by a king to keep his courtiers captive.

It was not even a prison. Those in prison know that’s where they are. That must be true. Animals born to a zoo know no other life; for them captivity is all the life there is and all there has ever been. Looking down at that edifice I knew I could never live there no matter what honour was offered. There was, however, something I wanted to see.

We rode into the courtyard an hour later, having been met by dragoons and escorted to a barrier across the road that lifted only after my identity had been established. A single dragoon rode with me to the next stopping post where I waited until word came that I should be allowed through. Even then there was another barrier. It was captivity so perfect that mechanisms were needed to keep people out. Finally, with a dragoon officer at my side, and his sergeant riding behind Manon’s carriage, we reached the courtyard in front of the wide facade and I knew we were but flyspecks to anyone looking down from the hill.

The door under a heavy arch opened and Jerome strode through, his gut bigger than ever and his grin wide enough to make the dragoon officer stare. Jerome grabbed me before I could fully dismount, folding me into a bear hug and pounding my back until I was forced to push away. ‘This is your son?’ Jerome demanded.

I nodded.

A moment later Laurant was airborne, thrown up and then caught and thrown up again. When Jerome put him down again the boy was quivering with excitement and trapped between laughter and tears.

‘He looks just like you.’

‘More like his mother.’

Jerome shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘that expression. He looks like you.’ The dragoon officer was looking between us and I could see him wondering if we’d been treated with enough respect and if his men had been sufficiently polite. I thanked him for his help and he withdrew gratefully, saluting before he went.

‘You’re important,’ I said.

My old school friend grinned widely and shrugged. ‘I keep the keys to the honey larder and only I may unscrew the pots. In the best interests of His Majesty, of course. France needs the money and these appointments help fill his purse.’ He saw my face and his mouth opened, although he stifled his laugh. Stepping closer, he said, ‘You knew all the appointments were paid for? That it costs to have a position in this place?’

I shook my head. ‘I thought the king gave them.’

‘He does,’ Jerome said simply. ‘But you give something first.’

‘To the king?’

‘To His Majesty, of course. To his secretary. To the master of the household. To me . . . There are others possibly, depending on the position. What did you have in mind?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I came because Virginie suggested it.’

His face stilled and I knew he’d heard rumours of her illness or her madness or her unhappiness, who knew what her affliction had become by the time it reached the court. ‘Let me show you some of the palace. What would you like to see?’

‘Lions,’ Laurant said loudly. ‘I want to see the lions.’

Manon dropped to a crouch beside him and spoke softly. When she stood, Laurant was biting his lip and looking serious. Turning to Jerome, he bowed. ‘If it is allowed and you don’t mind I would like to see the lions.’ He said the words so carefully I knew that Manon had put them into his mouth.

Jerome bowed in his turn.

A pair of women turned to look at the comptroller of the palace bowing to a small boy while trying to stifle a grin and one of them smiled, caught my eye and did so again, only this time it was a very different smile. She drifted across, as a ship might drift in the wind if it slipped its moorings, and waited for Jerome to introduce her.