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work to prepare the main meal of the day. ‘Eight years it took them. What a scandal. They say Louis couldn’t get it up. Un mauvais fouteur ! Can you imagine, the King of France a hopeless fuck?’ Marie shrieked so loudly that Cook scuttled in to see what the hilarity was about.
    ‘Perhaps it is not the King’s fault,’ I said, recalling Maman’s tales of barren ladies. ‘Maybe the Queen can’t have children, like the Marquise?’
    ‘Ah, the reason the Marquise has no children,’ Marie said with a snigger, ‘is because she refuses her husband.’
    ‘Refuses her husband? Surely that’s not allowed?’
    ‘Maybe not,’ Marie said, ‘but the Marquise refuses her husband because she is a tribade .’
    I frowned. ‘ Tribade ?’
    Marie’s tongue curled about her teeth. ‘A woman who loves the sex of another woman.’
    ‘Oh … oh!’ I shivered with gooseflesh, finally understanding.
    ‘But the Marquis doesn’t care a bit,’ Marie went on. ‘There are hundreds of places for the pleasure of a noble man — mistresses, bordellos …’
    Marie flicked her gaze from me as we sat down to eat at the kitchen table, and to keep an eye on the family’s simmering meal of roast beef with chestnuts.
    Cook dined with the other servants in the communal dining hall, while the Marquis de Barberon and his wife took their meal, as always, in the oak-panelled dining parlour, except when the Marquis dined out.
    They sat at the fireplace end of the long table lit by two candles, the Marquis reciting le Bénédicté before they ate.
    ‘Such a grand table for only two people,’ I said to Marie, waving a hand in the direction of the dining hall. ‘They dine like the King and Queen.’
    ‘Oh, you think that’s extravagant,’ Marie said. ‘Well let me tell you, it is nothing compared with the meals of the King and Queen. Don’t you know anything about Versailles, Victoire?’
    ‘All I know of Versailles is the stories my father would bring home from his travels, or what passing journeymen told us.’
    ‘Well,’ Marie said, her eyes glittering, ‘their tablecloth is of damask, their crockery silver, with gilded cutlery, and the meal — five courses — begins when the maître d’hôtel enters the room holding a long staff crowned with a fleur-de-lys .’
    ‘ Five courses?’ I could not imagine such extravagance. ‘How can they eat so much?’
    ‘They don’t,’ Marie said. ‘Well, not the Queen. She eats only a sparrow’s portion but the King, well he gobbles the lot. I’ll have you know, one morning before going to his stables he ate four cutlets, a whole chicken, a plateful of ham, half a dozen eggs and drank a bottle of champagne. You’d think all his reckless galloping through forests, hunting stag and boar, might keep the King trim, but no, he eats like the worst pig and is getting fatter and fatter!’
    ‘ Oh là là ,’ I said. ‘What gluttony. When thousands across the country are starving.’
    ‘Don’t be silly, Victoire, he’s the King! But you know what I would really love,’ Marie went on, a dreamy look in her eyes, ‘is to wear one of the Queen’s dresses. Just for a day.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘You know she buys a hundred and fifty different ones every year, from the great Rose Bertin’s boutique.’
    I shrugged. ‘However can one person wear a hundred and fifty different gowns? Besides, court dress must be like a walking gaol, with those hoops and trains and stiff brocades. They even have to walk sideways, to get the panniers through doorways.’
    ‘Oh I wouldn’t mind, I really wouldn’t,’ Marie said. ‘Give me armoured trimmings any day, over these shapeless aprons and unflattering caps.’
    Once the family meal was over and we’d washed dishes, scrubbed work benches, scoured stoves, sinks and pots, and swilled the floors, I was relieved to have my free hour. Marie flitted off to flirt with one of the coach boys and I traipsed into Cook’s small room, off the