Before Versailles by Karleen Koen Read Free Book Online Page A

the court ballet Madame was presenting in July, her idea, this ballet, and the court poet would walk from group to laughing, talking group as he gathered ideas for the poems about the noble performers that it was his task to write for the ballet. Philippe’s wife had become the light of court. Everyone adored her.
    Wouldn’t it be fun, she had said to Louis in her perfect French, her head tilting to one side, and again he was amazed that he’d ever thought her unattractive, wouldn’t it be fun if we gave a ballet, you and me and Monsieur and her majesty? Don’t you think that would be great fun?
    Yes. Yes, he did think that would be great fun. There was almost nothing he liked better than music, listening to music, playing music, composing music, hearing music someone else had composed, singing the words to the music. And dance was the beautiful sister of music, his second favorite thing, to dance. He had an innate ear, an innate talent for both. They fed his soul. He was the best dancer of the court. Everyone knew. And they didn’t say it simply to flatter him.
    “You’re too good to me,” said Maria Teresa, and startled, his mind a million miles away, Louis took her hand and raised it to his lips.
    “So I hope always to be,” he said, his way of speaking gentle and courteous. Courtesy had become his mask to hide a growing dismay with himself, with her. He had vowed to love no others, but others were in his mind, all the time now.
    Hauteur in her glance, Maria Teresa cut her eyes to Olympe as if to say, he’s mine.
    Outside in the antechamber, Louis rapped out a quick command to his secretary. “Have a fan made with the Louvre as its subject and one of Saint-Germain, and one of Fontainebleau. The most skilled painter in Paris. For her majesty. And have him paint fleurs-de-lis on the end sticks.” The Louvre was his primary palace, and fleurs-de-lis were the lilies of France, an emblem, a symbol of French royalty.
    To remind her where her home is, he thought, striding through his throne room and down a set of stairs, his gentlemen and bodyguards following, out into the sun, which he loved. It was kind of the viscount to send her a fan. And clever. Playing upon her homesickness. How had he known of her homesickness? Who in her household is his spy? Louis wondered. The viscount’s spies were everywhere. Someone his dear cardinal trusted had told him so, but he hadn’t quite believed it at first. Now, he had begun to feel that he couldn’t sneeze without the viscount, this powerful minister whom his court treated so deferentially, knowing it and sending an embroidered handkerchief. Or, was he on his way to becoming as sick with suspicion as his father had been?
    Louis’s face showed a certain hawkish sharpness, and the men nearest him fell back a little, wondering if they’d displeased. Odd, they’d say to themselves later, how we didn’t used to care so much. Louis had been king for a long time. But the cardinal had also been alive, and in the cardinal, true power had lain.
    God, I despise myself, thought Louis, striding across his private courtyard and through the massive arch of a gatehouse out into open grounds behind the palace to where there was a long landscape canal and he could take a decent walk before he held his morning council meeting. He meant to be good to his wife, meant never to hurt her, but his heart was hungry, like a tiger’s. He’d wanted to lay that heart at her feet, wanted to love in the way men loved women in the romances, in the troubadour’s ballads. In his mind was a ballad: Off with sleep, love, up from bed, this fair morn, see for our eyes the rose-red, new dawn is born, now that skies are glad and gay in this gracious month of May, love me, sweet, fill my joy in brimming measure, in this world he hath no pleasure that will none of it.
    He could have sent her ladies from the chamber and climbed into bed with her, whispering that ballad to her as his hands roamed her body,