Part 29
And gracefully gathering up the long folds of their silk gowns, they lightly crossed the space that lay between the pond and the most shaded part of the park.
Montalais, light as a doe, Athénaïs, ardent as a young she-wolf, bounded across the dry grass, and now and then some bold Actaeon might have caught sight, in the half-light, of their pure and daring leg outlined beneath the thick contour of their satin skirts.
La Vallière, more delicate and more modest, let her robes float; delayed thus by the weakness of her step, she soon begged for mercy.
And, remaining behind, she forced her two companions to wait for her.
At that moment, a man, hidden in a ditch full of young willow shoots, swiftly climbed up onto the bank of that ditch and began to run in the direction of the château.
The three women, for their part, reached the edges of the park, all of whose paths were known to them.
Great flowering avenues rose around the ditches; closed barriers on this side protected the walkers against the encroachment of horses and carriages.
Indeed, one could hear rolling in the distance, upon the firm ground of the roads, the coaches of the queens and of Madame. Several horsemen followed them with the noise so well imitated by the measured verses of Virgil.
A few distant strains of music answered the sound, and, when the harmonies ceased, the nightingale, a singer full of pride, sent to the company it felt gathered beneath the shade the most complicated, the sweetest, and the most learned songs.
Around the singer, in the black depth of the great trees, shone the eyes of some tawny owl sensitive to harmony.
So that this festival of the whole court was also the festival of the mysterious guests of the woods; for assuredly the doe listened in her fern, the pheasant on his branch, the fox in his burrow.
One guessed at the life of all that nocturnal and invisible population by the sudden movements that abruptly stirred the leaves.
Then the nymphs of the woods gave a little cry; then, reassured at once, laughed and resumed their walk.
And they thus arrived at the royal oak, a venerable remnant of an oak which, in its youth, had heard the sighs of Henri II for the beautiful Diane de Poitiers, and later those of Henri IV for the beautiful Gabrielle d'Estrées.
Beneath this oak, the gardeners had piled moss and turf, so that never had a circular seat better rested the weary limbs of a king.
The trunk of the tree formed a rough backrest, but sufficiently wide for four persons.
Beneath the branches that slanted toward the trunk, voices were lost, filtering toward the heavens.
Chapter CXV — What Was Said Beneath the Royal Oak
There was, in the softness of the air, in the silence of the foliage, a mute invitation for these young women to change at once their playful conversation into a more serious one.
She whose character was the most merry, Montalais, for example, inclined toward it first.
She began with a deep sigh.
“What joy,” said she, “to feel ourselves here, free, alone, and entitled to be frank, especially toward ourselves!”
“Yes,” said Mlle de Tonnay-Charente; “for the court, brilliant though it be, always hides a falsehood beneath the folds of velvet or beneath the fires of diamonds.”
“I,” replied La Vallière, “never lie; when I cannot tell the truth, I am silent.”
“You will not be in favor long, my dear,” said Montalais; “it is not here as at Blois, where we told old Madame all our resentments and all our desires. Madame had her days when she remembered having been young. Those days, whoever spoke with Madame found a sincere friend. Madame told us of her loves with Monsieur, and we, we told her of her loves with others, or at least the rumors that had been spread about her gallantries. Poor woman! so innocent! she laughed at it, we too; where is she now?”
“Ah! Montalais, laughing Montalais,” cried La Vallière, “see, you are sighing again; the woods inspire you, and you are almost reasonable this evening.”
“Mesdemoiselles,” said Athénaïs, “you must not regret the court of Blois so much as not to find yourselves happy with us. A court is the place where men and women come to talk of things that mothers and guardians, and confessors above all, forbid with severity. At court, one says these things under the privilege of the king and queens; is that not agreeable?”
“Oh! Athénaïs,” said Louise, blushing.
“Athénaïs is frank this evening,” said Montalais; “let us take advantage of it.”
“Yes, let us take advantage of it, for tonight one could tear from me the most intimate secrets of my heart.”
“Ah! if M. de Montespan were here!” said Montalais.
“You believe I love M. de Montespan?” murmured the beautiful young girl.
“He is handsome, I suppose?”
“Yes, and that is no small advantage in my eyes.”
“You see.”
“I will say more: he is, of all the men one sees here, the handsomest and the most…”
“What is that we hear?” said La Vallière, making a sudden movement on the mossy bench.
“Some deer fleeing among the branches.”
“I fear only men,” said Athénaïs.
“When they do not resemble M. de Montespan?”
“End this raillery… M. de Montespan is most attentive to me; but that commits to nothing. Have we not here M. de Guiche, who is attentive to Madame?”
“Poor, poor boy!” said La Vallière.
“Why poor?… Madame is beautiful enough and great lady enough, I suppose.”
La Vallière shook her head painfully.
“When one loves,” said she, “it is neither the beautiful nor the great lady; my dear friends, when one loves, it must be the heart and the eyes alone of him or her one loves.”
Montalais burst into loud laughter.
“Heart, eyes, oh! sweetness!” said she.
“I speak for myself,” replied La Vallière.
“Noble sentiments!” said Athénaïs with a protective but cold air.
“Have you not them, mademoiselle?” said Louise.
“Perfectly, mademoiselle; but I continue. How can one pity a man who pays attentions to a woman like Madame? If there is disproportion, it is on the side of the count.”
“Oh! no, no,” said La Vallière, “it is on the side of Madame.”
“Explain yourself.”
“I explain myself. Madame does not even have the desire to know what love is. She plays with that sentiment as children do with fireworks whose single spark would set a palace ablaze. It glitters, that is all she requires. Now, joy and love are the fabric of which she wishes her life to be woven. M. de Guiche will love this illustrious lady; she will not love him.”
Athénaïs broke into a disdainful peal of laughter.
“Does one love, then?” said she. “Where are your noble sentiments of a moment ago? Is not a woman's virtue in the courageous refusal of any consequential intrigue? A well-organized woman, endowed with a generous heart, ought to look upon men, make herself loved, even adored, and say once at most in her life: ‘See here! it seems to me that, had I not been what I am, I should have detested that one less than the others.’”
“Then,” cried La Vallière, joining her hands, “is that what you promise M. de Montespan?”
“Eh! certainly, to him as to any other. What! you said I granted him a certain superiority, and that would not suffice! My dear, one is a woman, that is to say a queen during all the time nature gives us to occupy that royalty, from fifteen to thirty-five years. You are free to have heart afterward, when you have nothing left but that.”
“Oh! oh!” murmured La Vallière.
“Perfect!” cried Montalais; “there is a masterful woman. Athénaïs, you will go far!”
“Do you not approve of me?”
“Oh! with hands and feet!” said the mocking girl.
“You are joking, are you not, Montalais?” said Louise.
“No, no, I approve all Athénaïs has just said; only…”
“Only what?”
“Well! I cannot put it into action. I have the most complete principles; I make resolutions beside which the projects of the Stadtholder and those of the King of Spain are child's play; then, the day of execution, nothing.”
“You weaken?” said Athénaïs with disdain.
“Shamefully.”
“Unhappy nature,” resumed Athénaïs. “But at least you choose?”
“My faith!… my faith, no! Fate delights in crossing me in everything; I dream of emperors and I find…”
“Aure! Aure!” cried La Vallière, “for pity's sake, do not sacrifice, for the pleasure of a word, those who love you with such devoted affection.”
“Oh! for that, I care little: those who love me are happy enough that I do not drive them away, my dear. So much the worse for me if I have a weakness; but so much the worse for them if I take my revenge upon them. My faith! I do take my revenge!”
“Aure!”
“You are right,” said Athénaïs, “and perhaps you will arrive at the same end. That is called being a coquette, you see, mesdemoiselles. Men, who are fools in many things, are so above all in this, that they confound under this word of coquetry a woman's pride and her variability. I am proud, that is to say impregnable; I rebuff suitors, but without any sort of pretension to retain them. Men say I am a coquette, because they have the self-love to believe I desire them. Other women, Montalais, for example, have let themselves be touched by flatteries; they would be lost without the blessed spring of instinct that pushes them to change suddenly and to punish him whose homage they lately accepted.”
“Learned dissertation!” said Montalais in the tone of a connoisseur delighting therein.
“Odious!” murmured Louise.
“Thanks to this coquetry, for this is the true coquetry,” pursued Mlle de Tonnay-Charente, “the lover, swollen with pride an hour ago, shrinks in a minute of all the inflation of his self-love. He was already taking victorious airs; he retreats; he was about to protect us; he prostrates himself anew. It results therefrom that instead of having a jealous, troublesome, accustomed husband, we have a lover always trembling, always covetous, always submissive, by this sole reason that he finds, he, a mistress always new. That is so, and be persuaded of it, mesdemoiselles, that is what coquetry is worth. It is thereby that one is queen among women, when one has not received from God the so precious faculty of holding in check one's heart and one's mind.”
“Oh! how skillful you are!” said Montalais, “and how well you understand the duty of women!”
“I arrange myself a particular happiness,” said Athénaïs with modesty; “I defend myself, like all weak lovers, against the oppression of the stronger.”
“La Vallière says not a word.”
“Does she not approve of us?”
“I, I do not even understand,” said Louise. “You speak like beings who were not called to live upon this earth.”
“Your earth is pretty, indeed!” said Montalais.
“An earth,” resumed Athénaïs, “where man incenses woman to make her fall stunned, where he insults her when she has fallen?”
“Who speaks to you of falling?” said Louise.
“Ah! there is a new theory, my dear; indicate to me, if you please, your means of not being vanquished, if you let yourself be carried away by love?”
“Oh!” cried the young girl, raising to the black sky her beautiful humid eyes, “oh! if you knew what a heart is; I would explain it to you and convince you; a loving heart is stronger than all your coquetry and than all your pride. Never is a woman loved—I believe it, and God hears me; never does a man love with idolatry unless he feels himself loved. Leave to old men of comedy the belief that they are adored by coquettes. The young man knows, he; he is not deceived; if he has for the coquette a desire, a ferment, a rage—you see I leave you the field free and wide; in a word, the coquette may drive him mad, never will she make him fall in love. Love, you see, such as I conceive it, is an incessant, absolute, entire sacrifice; but it is not the sacrifice of only one of the two united parties. It is the complete abnegation of two souls who wish to melt into one alone. If I ever love, I shall beg my lover to leave me free and pure; I shall tell him, as he will understand, that my soul is torn by the refusal I make him; and he! he who will love me, feeling the painful grandeur of my sacrifice, in his turn will devote himself like me, he will respect me, he will not seek to make me fall in order to insult me when I have fallen, as you were saying just now in blaspheming against the love I understand. That, for me, is how I love. Now, come tell me that my lover will despise me; I defy him to, unless he be the vilest of men, and my heart warrants me that I shall not choose such people. My glance will pay him for his sacrifices or impose upon him virtues he would never have thought to have.”
“But, Louise,” cried Montalais, “you tell us this and you do not practice it!”
“What do you mean?”
“You are adored by Raoul de Bragelonne, loved on bended knees. The poor boy is victim of your virtue, as he would be, even more than he would be, of my coquetry or of Athénaïs's pride.”
“This is simply a subdivision of coquetry,” said Athénaïs, “and Mademoiselle, as I see, practices it without suspecting it.”
“Oh!” said La Vallière.
“Yes, that is called instinct: perfect sensibility, exquisite search for sentiments, perpetual show of passionate impulses that never lead anywhere. Oh! it is very skillful too and most effective. I should even, now that I reflect upon it, have preferred this tactic to my pride for combating men, because it offers the advantage of sometimes making one believe in conviction; but, from this moment, without wholly passing sentence upon myself, I declare it superior to the simple coquetry of Montalais.”
The two young girls began to laugh.
La Vallière alone kept silence and shook her head.
Then, after an instant:
“If you were to say a quarter of what you have just said to me before a man,” said she, “or even if I were persuaded that you think it, I should die of shame and grief upon this spot.”
“Well! die, tender little one,” answered Mlle de Tonnay-Charente; “for, if there are no men here, there are at least two women, your friends, who declare you caught and convicted of being a coquette by instinct, a naïve coquette; that is to say the most dangerous species of coquette that exists in the world.”
“Oh! mesdemoiselles!” answered La Vallière, blushing and near to tears.
The two companions burst into fresh laughter.
“Well! I shall ask information of Bragelonne.”
“Of Bragelonne?” said Athénaïs.
“Eh! yes, of that great fellow courageous as Caesar, fine and witty as M. Fouquet, of that poor boy who has known you for twelve years, loves you, and who nevertheless, if we are to believe you, has never kissed the tip of your fingers.”
“Explain this cruelty to us, you the woman of heart?” said Athénaïs to La Vallière.
“I shall explain it in a single word: virtue. Will you deny virtue, perchance?”
“Come, Louise, do not lie,” said Aure, taking her hand.
“But what is it you wish me to tell you?” cried La Vallière.
“Whatever you will. But say what you will, I persist in my opinion of you. Coquette by instinct, naïve coquette, that is to say, I have said it and I repeat it, the most dangerous of all coquettes.”
“Oh! no, no, I beg you! do not believe that.”
“What! twelve years of absolute rigor!”
“Oh! twelve years ago I was five. The surrender of a child cannot be counted against the young girl.”
“Well! you are seventeen; three years instead of twelve. For three years you have been constantly and entirely cruel. Against you are the mute shades of Blois, the rendezvous where one counts the stars, the nocturnal sittings beneath the plane trees, his twenty years speaking to your fourteen years, the fire of his eyes speaking to you yourself.”
“Be it so, be it so; but it is thus!”
“Come now, impossible!”
“But, my God, why impossible!”
“Tell us credible things, my dear, and we shall believe you.”
“But finally, suppose a thing.”
“Which? Let us see.”
“Finish, or we shall suppose far more than you would wish.”
“Suppose, then; suppose that I believed myself in love, and that I do not love.”
“How, you do not love?”
“What would you have! if I have been otherwise than others are when they love, it is that I do not love; it is that my hour is not yet come.”
“Louise! Louise!” said Montalais, “take care, I am going to turn your word of a moment ago against you. Raoul is not here, do not overwhelm him in his absence; be charitable, and if, on looking very closely, you think you do not love him, tell him so himself. Poor boy!”
And she began to laugh.
“Mademoiselle was just now pitying M. de Guiche,” said Athénaïs; “could one not find the explanation of this indifference for the one in that compassion for the other?”
“Overwhelm me, mesdemoiselles,” said La Vallière sadly, “overwhelm me, since you do not understand me.”
“Oh! oh!” answered Montalais, “temper, sorrow, tears; we laugh, Louise, and are not, I assure you, quite the monsters you believe; look at Athénaïs the proud, as she is called, she does not love M. de Montespan, it is true, but she would be in despair that M. de Montespan did not love her… Look at me, I laugh at M. Malicorne, but that poor Malicorne at whom I laugh knows well when he would have my hand pass over his lips. And then the eldest of us is not twenty; what a future!”
“Mad girls! mad girls that you are!” murmured Louise.
“That is true,” said Montalais, “and you alone have spoken words of wisdom.”
“Certainly!”
“Granted,” answered Athénaïs. “Thus, decidedly, you do not love that poor M. de Bragelonne?”
“Perhaps!” said Montalais; “she is not yet quite sure of it. But, in any case, listen, Athénaïs: if M. de Bragelonne becomes free, I give you a friend's advice.”
“Which?”
“It is to look well at him before deciding for M. de Montespan.”
“Oh! if you take it that way, my dear, M. de Bragelonne is not the only one one may find pleasure in looking at. And, for example, M. de Guiche has his worth.”
“He did not shine this evening,” said Montalais, “and I know from good source that Madame found him odious.”
“But M. de Saint-Aignan, he shone, he, and, I am certain, more than one of those who saw him dance will not soon forget him. Is it not so, La Vallière?”
“Why address that question to me? I did not see him, I do not know him.”
“You did not see M. de Saint-Aignan? You do not know him?”
“No.”
“Come, come, do not affect a virtue more wild than our prides; you have eyes, have you not?”
“Excellent.”
“Then you saw all our dancers this evening?”
“Yes, more or less.”
“There is an ‘more or less’ very impertinent toward them.”
“I give it to you for what it is.”
“Well! see then, among all those gentlemen you more or less saw, which do you prefer?”
“Yes,” said Montalais, “yes, of M. de Saint-Aignan, of M. de Guiche, of M…”
“I prefer no one, mesdemoiselles, I find them all equally well.”
“Then in all that brilliant assembly, amid that court, the first in the world, no one pleased you?”
“I do not say that.”
“Speak then. Come, let us share your ideal.”
“It is not an ideal.”
“Then it exists?”
“In truth, mesdemoiselles,” cried La Vallière, pushed to the limit, “I understand nothing of it. What! like me you have a heart, like me you have eyes, and you speak of M. de Guiche, of M. de Saint-Aignan, of M… who knows? when the king was there.”
These words, thrown with precipitation by a troubled, ardent voice, instantly caused to burst from either side of the young girl an exclamation of which she was afraid.
“The king!” cried Montalais and Athénaïs together.
La Vallière let her head fall into her two hands.
“Oh! yes, the king! the king!” murmured she; “have you ever seen anything comparable to the king?”
“You were right to say just now that you had excellent eyes, mademoiselle; for you see far, too far. Alas! the king is not of those upon whom our poor eyes, ours, have the right to fix themselves.”
“Oh! it is true, it is true!” cried La Vallière; “it is not given to all eyes to look the sun in the face; but I shall look at him, I, though I be blinded thereby.”
At that moment, and as if caused by the words that had just escaped La Vallière's mouth, a noise of leaves and silken rustlings rang out behind the neighboring thicket.
The young girls rose in fright. They distinctly saw the leaves move, but without seeing the object that moved them.
“Oh! a wolf or a wild boar!” cried Montalais. “Let us flee, mesdemoiselles, let us flee!”
And the three young girls rose, seized with an unspeakable terror, and fled by the first avenue that offered itself, and stopped only at the edge of the wood.
There, breathless, leaning one upon another, feeling mutually their hearts palpitate, they tried to recover, but succeeded only after some moments. At last, perceiving lights on the side of the château, they decided to walk toward the lights.
La Vallière was exhausted with fatigue.
“Oh! we had a narrow escape,” said Montalais.
“Mesdemoiselles! Mesdemoiselles!” said La Vallière, “I greatly fear it is worse than a wolf. As for me, I say it as I think, I would rather have run the risk of being devoured alive by a ferocious animal than to have been listened to and heard. Oh! mad girl! mad girl that I am! How could I think, how could I say such things!”
And thereupon her brow bent like the head of a reed; she felt her legs give way, and, all her strength abandoning her, she slipped, almost lifeless, from her companions' arms onto the grass of the avenue.
Chapter CXVI — The King's Uneasiness
Let us leave poor La Vallière half-fainting between her two companions, and return to the vicinity of the royal oak.
The three young girls had not made twenty paces in fleeing, when the noise that had so frightened them redoubled in the foliage.
The form, delineating itself more distinctly by parting the branches of the thicket, appeared on the edge of the wood, and, seeing the place empty, broke into a laugh.
It is useless to say that this form was that of a young and handsome gentleman, who forthwith signaled to another who appeared in his turn.
“Well! Sire,” said the second form, advancing with timidity, “has Your Majesty made our young lovers flee?”
“Eh! my God, yes,” said the king; “you may show yourself freely, Saint-Aignan.”
“But, Sire, take care, you will be recognized.”
“Since I tell you they have fled.”
“Stories of the world, in your language.”