Read Online The French Mistress by Susan Holloway Scott - Free Book Online
Authors: Susan Holloway Scott
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out into the palace’s gardens, and the bright morning sun.
“A beautiful day, Louise, isn’t it?” Madame said, breathing deeply of the icy air. “I cannot fathom why anyone would wish to lie abed by choice on a morning such as this.”
“Nor can I, Madame,” I said, glad to be outside and away from the too-close quarters of my shared lodgings as well. The gardens behind the Palais-Royal were the princess’s favorite place in Paris, and she lavished much time on her gardeners planning the beds and bushes. She claimed that this interest came from her English blood, that all people from Great Britain loved their gardens, though I doubted that so rough and wild a country ever produced a garden as precise and formal and overwhelmingly French as one belonging to the Palais-Royal.
“Mark this, Louise: the air’s so cold, it shows my breath.” To prove it, she puffed up her cheeks and slowly blew out, making a small cloud before her face like one of the four winds cartographers draw on the corners of maps.
I laughed, pleased to see how my breath, too, showed before me. I was the only maid of honor who chose to rise early with our mistress (who, with her usual kindness, did not make these walks a requirement for her ladies), and I’d left them all still noisily asleep, snuffling and mumbling with their hair tied in rags to curl and their faces slick with various potions designed to enhance their beauty. Being country-bred near the sea, I believed my skin benefited far more from walking out-of-doors than from any foul-smelling unguents, the most popular one at that time being distilled from the piss of small dogs.
For all the suffering Madame had endured in her life, she was still but twenty-five, and liked to set a brisk pace. Her other two constant ladies-in-waiting were older, and perfectly content to let me be the one who squired Madame between the clipped hedges and parterres.
But there was more than rosy cheeks to these walks with Madame. As we walked side by side, the princess began to confide in me as a trusted companion, and spoke to me of whatever filled her head. Part of her love for her gardens was because of their vast size, and the certainty that this was the one place she’d not be overheard by her husband’s spies, and thus I was told many things of a most private nature. I heard more of Monsieur’s infidelities and barbarous treatment of her, of how she’d wept when Louis had wed not her, but a Spanish princess; and how wounded she’d been when not once, but twice, he’d taken her maids of honor for new lovers.
I won’t claim that I contrived this familiarity. I was only eighteen, and I hadn’t yet curried my cleverness to that extent, or my ambition, either. I was lonely, and Madame was kind to me. In the beginning, it was as simple, and as complicated, as that.
But her tales saddened me no end, for I had come to love her not just as a mistress, but for her own sweet self. To see her treated so ill, with no recourse, was a sorry thing indeed. Who would have guessed that the life of a royal princess could be so unhappy?
There were but two topics that served to raise her spirits. The first (albeit the less interesting to me) was her daughter, Marie-Louise, six years of age and the only one of several infants to have survived. The second was far more fascinating: her oldest brother, Charles Stuart, the English king.
To hear Madame describe him, Charles was everything in both a king and a man that Louis was not: generous, charming, witty, and impulsive. Both cousins had suffered as impressionable boys at the hands of their subjects, surviving civil wars and injustices that had threatened their thrones. The uncertainty of the Fronde had made Louis innately suspicious of Paris and determined to rule implacably and at a distance from his people, while the far greater sufferings of Charles—the beheading of his father, King Charles I, the scattering of his mother and brothers and sisters while
“A beautiful day, Louise, isn’t it?” Madame said, breathing deeply of the icy air. “I cannot fathom why anyone would wish to lie abed by choice on a morning such as this.”
“Nor can I, Madame,” I said, glad to be outside and away from the too-close quarters of my shared lodgings as well. The gardens behind the Palais-Royal were the princess’s favorite place in Paris, and she lavished much time on her gardeners planning the beds and bushes. She claimed that this interest came from her English blood, that all people from Great Britain loved their gardens, though I doubted that so rough and wild a country ever produced a garden as precise and formal and overwhelmingly French as one belonging to the Palais-Royal.
“Mark this, Louise: the air’s so cold, it shows my breath.” To prove it, she puffed up her cheeks and slowly blew out, making a small cloud before her face like one of the four winds cartographers draw on the corners of maps.
I laughed, pleased to see how my breath, too, showed before me. I was the only maid of honor who chose to rise early with our mistress (who, with her usual kindness, did not make these walks a requirement for her ladies), and I’d left them all still noisily asleep, snuffling and mumbling with their hair tied in rags to curl and their faces slick with various potions designed to enhance their beauty. Being country-bred near the sea, I believed my skin benefited far more from walking out-of-doors than from any foul-smelling unguents, the most popular one at that time being distilled from the piss of small dogs.
For all the suffering Madame had endured in her life, she was still but twenty-five, and liked to set a brisk pace. Her other two constant ladies-in-waiting were older, and perfectly content to let me be the one who squired Madame between the clipped hedges and parterres.
But there was more than rosy cheeks to these walks with Madame. As we walked side by side, the princess began to confide in me as a trusted companion, and spoke to me of whatever filled her head. Part of her love for her gardens was because of their vast size, and the certainty that this was the one place she’d not be overheard by her husband’s spies, and thus I was told many things of a most private nature. I heard more of Monsieur’s infidelities and barbarous treatment of her, of how she’d wept when Louis had wed not her, but a Spanish princess; and how wounded she’d been when not once, but twice, he’d taken her maids of honor for new lovers.
I won’t claim that I contrived this familiarity. I was only eighteen, and I hadn’t yet curried my cleverness to that extent, or my ambition, either. I was lonely, and Madame was kind to me. In the beginning, it was as simple, and as complicated, as that.
But her tales saddened me no end, for I had come to love her not just as a mistress, but for her own sweet self. To see her treated so ill, with no recourse, was a sorry thing indeed. Who would have guessed that the life of a royal princess could be so unhappy?
There were but two topics that served to raise her spirits. The first (albeit the less interesting to me) was her daughter, Marie-Louise, six years of age and the only one of several infants to have survived. The second was far more fascinating: her oldest brother, Charles Stuart, the English king.
To hear Madame describe him, Charles was everything in both a king and a man that Louis was not: generous, charming, witty, and impulsive. Both cousins had suffered as impressionable boys at the hands of their subjects, surviving civil wars and injustices that had threatened their thrones. The uncertainty of the Fronde had made Louis innately suspicious of Paris and determined to rule implacably and at a distance from his people, while the far greater sufferings of Charles—the beheading of his father, King Charles I, the scattering of his mother and brothers and sisters while
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