The Hurlyburly's Husband. Jean Teule

gaped open, possibly accidentally, then she entered the dark stairwell. Louis-Henri smiled. ‘As lovely as the day, with a devilish-fine spirit!’

      Her proud rounded breasts gave off the only true perfume: her very own scent. Louis-Henri extended a hand towards the radiant bosom.

      ‘Oh, my! Take heed, Monsieur!’ The marquise pretended to be offended. ‘Do not forget it is scarcely two years since I left the convent.’

      ‘And so?’

      ‘Let me see, first of all, what your face is like: your chin is too long, your nose is too big, your eyelids droop, you have freckles. Taken separately, all of that is hardly handsome, but all together rather pleasing. All right. You may go up …’

      Her moiré skirt flowed like a tide over the first steps of the stairway. Louis-Henri, standing by the copper ball of the newel post, played the sulking husband.

      ‘I’m not sure now … With a wife who is from the noblesse de robe, I don’t know … I could have found many others who would have better suited my position, in the matter of the dowry, for I am from the old nobility! Montespan … my noble family goes back to the Crusades, to the battles between the Comtes de Bigorre and the Comtes de Foix, or against Simon de Monfort! Whereas a Mortemart … a mistress made for moonlight, a woman of secret trysts and borrowed beds … Yes, really I hesitate …’

      ‘You’re right,’ laughed Françoise. ‘To marry for love means to marry disadvantageously, carried away by a blind passion. Let us speak of it no more,’ she concluded, climbing a few more steps with an exaggerated sway of her hips.

      The marquis’s pupils dilated at the thought of the beauty of her body beneath the silk of her deep-pleated dress. Like a horse, he began to breathe through his nose whilst the fair woman began a recital of her attractions.

      ‘Do you know that I am wearing three petticoats? Observe the first one, this pale-blue thing, it is known as the modesty,’ she said, lightly lifting the back of her dress to reveal a skirt that she then raised in turn. ‘The second, dark blue, is called the saucy…’

      Louis-Henri would have liked to seize his wife round the waist but she slipped through his fingers. Her flexibility, her agility, were admirable. The newlyweds’ apartments had been divided up vertically over three storeys – a nonsensical distribution due to the narrow plots allotted in Paris, which obliged the inhabitants to build upwards. Such comings and goings in the stairway! The firewood stored in the cellar had to be carried up, as had the water, in buckets drawn from the well in the courtyard. The marquis was suddenly lustful, and ogled his wife, roaring comically and rolling his eyes.

      ‘I have done all I can not to offend God and not to succumb to my passion,’ he explained, climbing a few steps. ‘But I am forced to confess that it has become stronger than my reason. I can no longer resist its violence, and I do not even feel inclined to do so … Raah!’

      ‘Help!’ Madame de Montespan fled up the stairs, pursued by her husband who galloped after her traitorous petticoats, which she raised too high, offering the tempting vision of the fruit. All her petticoats were very light indeed and lifted at the slightest breeze, wafting a perfume of tuberose and waxed wood inside the dark stairwell.

      On the first floor, to the left, a door opened onto a salon modestly furnished with folding seats made of webbing and heavy canvas, a mirror from Venice and a gaming table with several drawers. On a green-painted wall hung a framed tapestry from Rouen, mere cotton threads now, but representing the story of Moses. Louis-Henri chased after Françoise in a clattering of steps. There was a bulge in the front of his grey satin breeches. The marquise turned round, saw it and cried, ‘Dear Lord!’

      On the second floor was the kitchen with a brick oven, cast-iron spits and frying pans, pitchers, pots and stone-ware terrines. Food was stored inside boxes covered in wire netting to protect it from mice and flies. Salt meat hung from the ceiling above Madame Larivière and the new servant. Sitting side by side on a little bench, they were eating soup from earthenware bowls on their laps using wooden spoons. They watched as their masters scurried by, but their masters did not notice them, so intent were they on their celebration of the senses.

      ‘As for the third petticoat,’ said Françoise with a peal of laughter, ‘it is the secret. Mine is sea blue!’

      Her dress and petticoats were now over her head revealing that, like all the women of her era, she wore no undergarments. Louis-Henri hurried behind her naked rump, bathed in the light from the window in the stairway as it turned right towards the servants’ garret beneath the roof, but then the naked rump veered to the left, into a room boasting an enormous bed. Its four twisting columns supported loosely tied curtains of green and red serge. The two bodies flung themselves on top of one another on the mattress, jostling the frame, whilst the curtains swayed open beneath the canopy then closed again, a barrier against the cold but also a shield for their conjugal intimacy.

      ‘What is this finger that has no nail?’

      That was what was heard by the new servant, a girl of eight, for the Montespans had not closed the door to their room. In the kitchen, standing by Madame Larivière, she looked at the ceiling as she heard the legs of a bed creaking, which annoyed the cook: ‘Ah, the marquise is a flame all too easy to ignite. I like to call her “the Cascade”, for she has a voracious appetite for pleasure. She knows how to make love and burn the besom.’

      For ’twas true that above their heads the masters were all a-tangle. Françoise breathed happiness from a time of fairy-tales, into her husband’s mouth, indulging the ever-delightful little gestures that titillated, the hundred thousand little moves that preceded the conclusion. Words and discourse complemented her actions.

      ‘Ah … Mmm … Oh!’

      On the floor below, Madame Larivière – frizzy black hair, olive complexion and spindly legs, not exactly kin with Venus – emptied the ashes from the stove into a jug she handed to the servant child.

      ‘Here, Dorothée, rather than listen to them at their game of tousing and mousing, go and sell this ash to the launderer at the end of the street. You may keep the money for yourself, and save it to buy yourself a blanket, for the servants’ rooms are never heated. And then, so as not to come back empty-handed, take this bucket and fill it at the well in the courtyard. The water fountain is nearly empty,’ she said, tapping her nails against a hollow-sounding copper basin with a lid and a spigot.

      Dorothée, to her distress, discovered on the steps the large chestnut wig that the marquis had torn from his head. It lay there, a mass of curls, like a dead animal.

      The lodgings, which were always dark, were not in fact a very pleasant place to live, but up there, under the sheets, the exquisite line of Françoise’s back undulated and, in the shadow of the curtains, their breathing rose, rhythmic and light. The marquise’s senses sought, everywhere, endlessly, the bliss of knowing her husband’s lip, his hand, all of him. How divine, too, Louis-Henri’s pleasure as he pushed aside his wife’s shift, and her honour. To elicit a saucy shiver, she extended her neck in a vaguely unseemly manner. And then there was a prolonged kiss. What would happen next? Gad! All reason and morality would take flight. Now for nuptials without restraint, a merriment of vice and cruelty.

       3.

      ‘Ah, the young must do as the young will do …’

      On a starry June night the Montespans’ carriage rattled to a halt at the top of a hill in the gently rolling countryside around the chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The coachman sitting on the outside seat resigned himself philosophically to the shaking: ‘I don’t know where they find the energy.’

      He was jostled and shaken, by the jostling and shaking inside the carriage. The marquis was taking the marquise doggy style (more canino). Kneeling the length of the seat, with her cheek flat against the window in the door, Françoise could watch the avenues lit with countless torches