The Oracle Glass (17 page)

“Get back in, I say. What good is your sentimental wailing? Pure hypocrisy! You wouldn't carry on so if it had happened out of your sight! It's not as if my postillions didn't warn him. Everyone knows that a woman in my position drives fast—my equipage cleaves the wind.” One woman wiped her nose; the other started to wail even louder at this speech. “Oh, do be quiet!” the woman in the coach shouted at this new impertinence. “It was his own imprudence that he did not remove himself from my path. One has a right to continue in such circumstances.”

“That's Madame de Montespan,” whispered my maid. Ah, the King's newest
maîtresse en titre
, promoted from her position as
maîtresse en delicat
by the forced retirement of the former official mistress, La Vallière, who had been driven by a thousand humiliations into a convent.

“Your servants are at fault, and you don't even blame them?” one of the women on the ground, the dark-clad, weeping one, said. She stood up beside the body and addressed the blue-and-silver-clad lackeys fiercely. “If you belonged to me, I would soon settle you.”

“That's the Duc de Maine, Madame de Montespan's oldest son, in the carriage, and that's Madame de Maintenon there, in the black and gray, on the ground. She's the children's governess. And the other woman—she's the Marquise d'Hudicourt.” The Marquise d'Hudicourt continued to wail and wring her hands, as the growing crowd applauded Madame de Maintenon's fierce speech.

“
Vive
Madame de Maintenon!” they cried.

“Be good enough to get in, Mesdames. Will you have me stoned?” the woman in the carriage commanded. But the weeping ladies would not be dissuaded until the King's mistress had given them her purse to hand to the poor relations of the dead man. With that, they remounted, and the carriage clattered off in a spatter of spring mud.

“Oh my goodness,” said the lady-companion, “the man's eyes were
entirely
out of his head. I shall
require
a cup of chocolate when we arrive; it is simply
too
painful otherwise.”

“Surely, Mademoiselle, such sentiment is misplaced on a stranger. After all, it was not a premeditated assassination,” said Madame d'Elbeuf coolly.

I sat silently for the rest of the ride.

***

At Versailles I was shown into the Queen's presence by Mademoiselle d'Orléans, Princesse de Montpensier. “I want to know whether my coming child will be a girl or a boy,” the Queen announced in her heavy Spanish accent. I looked at her. She was seated in a large, brocade-covered armchair with gold fringes and gilt-silver legs, a fan of carved ivory half open in her hand. She was about forty, with the prematurely aged look of a weak, inbred constitution. So many lines of princes culminating in this short, sallow blond woman with the bulging eyes and strange features—almost like a gargoyle—that her flattering portraits never quite recorded. I couldn't but marvel. She had several severe, dark-clad Spanish ladies with her, three of her favorite dwarves—two men shorter than myself but very square, with huge heads, and a perfectly formed, tiny, wrinkled woman—and a good half dozen flat-faced, hairy little lapdogs of great ugliness.

“I pray daily for another son,” she went on. She didn't look pregnant to me, but then, I wasn't experienced in these matters. I'd have to trust the glass. I looked about the immense, airy room for a suitable table. Gold on gold, panels of rare inlaid wood, heavy, elaborately formed furniture of precious metals—despite every luxury, the room seemed cold and devoid of soul. At last I realized why. These were rooms through which wit and learning never passed. The Spanish queen was one of the stupidest women in the entire realm, her conversation dismal and spiritless. My eye lit on a table of solid silver that sat beneath a huge, dark Spanish tapestry. I gestured to it, and they brought a heavy little cushioned stool, made of gold inlaid on silver, for me to sit on. I'd brought one of my nicest orbs with me and requested that they fill it with water. I rolled out my little cabalistic cloth and set out a nice selection of rods. Her Majesty looked on approvingly as I chanted and stirred with the glass rod. Suddenly I understood why. The ladies that crowded around me were all wearing old-fashioned Spanish farthingales, not unlike my own. Half the people in the room were shorter than I, and the rest not much taller. I fit right in with the freaks of the Spanish court that she still kept around her after all these years in France.

The reflection was clear. She was not pregnant. I didn't dare tell her. I did a second reading and had her put her hand on the glass. I saw an illness and a vase of late-spring flowers in the room. Quickly, my mind worked.

“Your Majesty, I regret to say that in the late spring you will have a serious illness and lose the child.”

“Lose the child? Lose the child? I must have another child. That dreadful woman, that odious La Montespan, holds him with her youth, her children. It is I who am Queen, not she, and yet she would rule in my place. Ah, God, too late I regret La Vallière, who was at least ashamed of what she was doing. But now, this sin with a married woman—this shameless harlot with the brazen tongue…I tell you, this whore will be the death of me—” She broke off into Spanish, which I did not understand, and her ladies rushed to console her. I shall never make my fortune here, I thought. I can't give her good news. With deep curtseys I retreated from the royal presence.

I stalked from the entrance to the Queen's apartments in what I hoped was a dramatic manner, thumping my tall walking stick with each step. My black gown whispered and rustled about me as I descended the extraordinary staircase of multicolored inlaid marble that led from the Queen's apartments and entered the wide marble corridor beneath it. There I met with a press of lackeys, chairs, and tourists exactly as if I were in the main street of a large town. The only difference was that at Versailles, the avenues were paved with marble and decorated with gold, like the streets of paradise.

In fact, the palace at Versailles was exactly like a city, with the corridors serving as streets. Porters carried the courtiers in chairs from place to place, for the women, at least, were incapable of walking twenty feet in their heavily corseted court gowns and flimsy satin shoes. Besides, the corridors were not always clean enough to tread safely while wearing a gown whose cost represented the annual income of a thousand peasant families, for impatient courtiers often relieved nature in the corners or against the walls. The chairs threaded their way through a crowd of lackeys of every description, of sightseers and foreigners come to see the public rooms of the château, of petitioners, soldiers, and mountebanks. It was hard to imagine that all of it—the furniture, swarms of courtiers, curiosity seekers, servants, cooks, theatrical troupes—everything, could be packed up in the twinkling of an eye and put on the road for another of the King's palaces whenever he had a mind to change residences. Yet for all his seasonal moving about, he did not return to Paris, the ancient capital, and he had ceded the Palais-Royal to his brother. And so the ostlers of Paris gave special feed to the new breed of vicious, heavy coach horse that could keep the carriages rumbling at top speed to Versailles, to Saint-Germain, to Marly, to Fontainebleau. Grandmother said it was a sin, and Kings should live in the Louvre, among the people of their principal city, as the monarchs of old did. It was a highly unfashionable idea that I did not borrow for the Marquise de Morville.

The marquise was getting to be an old friend of mine. She lived in my head, offering comments on my daily life, bothering me at night when I didn't find sleep easy. A shrewd, sharp-tempered old lady, she coined aphorisms and told lies about her girlhood to me. She bothered me with horrid observations on my character and activities, denounced courtiers with impunity, and cackled at my annoyance. When I was placed into the heavy corset and the preposterous bell-shaped petticoat of hoops was lowered over my head, she shut Geneviève in the closet with a firm “There, now! Waiting will be good for you. In my day, we waited a lot more than young people now—and we were polite about it, too!” And she would stalk off thumping her tall walking stick to tell the world a thing or two, by way of setting it straight.

Now she stalked down the corridors of Versailles, a shriveled-up, disapproving little figure in the black of a previous century, a mysterious black veil concealing her features. She disapproved of the smell in the corridors, peered through her veil in an offended fashion at the bared bosoms of two ladies-in-waiting who were hurrying past, sniffed at the suit of a rustic-looking lordling fresh from the provinces in a manner that made him blush.

“In my day, a man took off his hat to a lady of rank, not merely touched it as if it had grown into his hair,” she said to a slender, olive-skinned gentleman in baggy black velvet trousers and embroidered gray silk jacket. The man looked back at her with a steady gaze. Visconti, the fortune-teller. The marquise was not bothered by other fortune-tellers. Especially Visconti, who lacked at least one hundred and twenty-five years of her experience.

“Good day, Monsieur Visconti. You have fully repaired my estimation of you with your second attempt.” Visconti had taken off his hat with several complex flourishes, making an elaborate court bow.

“My dear Marquise, I am delighted to have met you by this happy coincidence. My powers tell me that you have just been consulted by the Queen in the matter of her pregnancy.”

“How odd. My powers tell me the same about yourself. I presume you predicted the son she wanted.”

“No, because I wish to retain my reputation at court after her miscarriage in April.”

“That was wise. You will go far, Visconti.”

“I already have, little vixen. Last night I was taken to the King's
petit coucher
. Consume yourself with envy. Though why the greatest nobles in the land would pay a hundred thousand écus for the privilege of seeing the King sit upon his
chaise
percée
before he retires, I cannot imagine. You French are an insane nation, are you not? And the King is obliged to sit on it whether nature requires it or not because it is expected of him; there he conducts business.”

“Monsieur Visconti, you presume upon being a foreigner. Everything our monarch does is perfection itself, including sitting upon his
chaise
percée
at the ceremony of the
petit
coucher
.”

“I never said it was not perfection. Tell me, have you sold any more of your youth ointments now that you have risen to such rarefied heights?” Our conversation had carried us to the corridor before the
cour
des
princes
. On the far side, great doors opened into the garden. Two lackeys were holding open the door for their master to escort a woman outside to a waiting
calèche
for a tour of the gardens.

“Here I do readings; it is more in demand—Oh, who is that?” I was glad I was veiled. The Marquise de Morville fled in confusion, leaving Geneviève rooted to the spot, her mouth open.

“The Duc de Vivonne, La Montespan's brother. She has made him a powerful man. Surely, you must know him—or perhaps you mean the girl who has just been helped into the
calèche
? She
is
lovely, isn't she? That's La Pasquier, his latest unofficial mistress. Quite a find, isn't she? I hear she came from nowhere—a baker's daughter, some say, but then, they may be jealous. Have you heard how he stole her from the Chevalier de la Rivière? Scandal itself. He won her in a card game—and I know for a fact he cheated! I suppose he's brought her to see the sights. He is renowned as a connoisseur of beauty. They say he's given her a carriage and horses and a little villa in the rue Vaugirard.”

It was Marie-Angélique, my sister. La Voisin had predicted it all that long time ago, that steaming hot summer day in her tall black fortune-telling parlor. But the thing that had shaken me was that Monsieur le Duc had on a sky-blue brocade coat and an immense, curling blond wig.

***

Now that I had told the Queen's fortune, my readings became all the rage at court. The bored, the worried, the ambitious—they all sought me out, men and women, chambermaids and counts. Their fears, their passions, their avarice—I heard it all. Rumors started that I knew a secret that would cause the owner to win at cards; I was besieged. “The secret has a curse; to reveal it is death,” I whispered mysteriously and watched in awe as they promised to pawn their jewelry and face sure death just to own it anyway. Another rumor started that I was in fact immortal and dated from the Roman empire. I suppose I had quoted Juvenal once too often. Now strange whispers accompanied my travels up and down the corridors, and at the sight of my shrunken, black-clad figure and tall walking stick, even battle-tried soldiers drew back. Even my saucy, roving-eyed maid had fallen in with the game, walking deferentially behind me carrying my things, as if my power horrified her. Behind my back, she took bribes from people anxious to gain my secrets. It was a good thing I was at least a hundred and thirty years older than she, otherwise she'd have tried to run everything. My little philosophical notebooks and my cash went into a locked coffer, and I never let the key leave my person. Now the word went around that I kept the key to a secret chamber in a castle in the Holy Land, where the secret of the philosopher's stone was kept.

I kept my secrets to myself. Each night in the tiny rented room in the attic of an overcrowded inn in the village of Versailles, I wrote out my coded list of clients and my predictions, still searching for the true meaning of the pictures in the oracle glass.

“Why do you sit up writing accounts every night?” Sylvie, my maid, would ask when she brushed my hair. “If I had a racket half as good as yours, you wouldn't find
me
sitting up and writing. I'd be dancing, or making the bed bounce with that good-looking fellow that came to you for the secret of the cards yesterday.”