The Hurlyburly's Husband by Jean Teulé Read Free Book Online

Majesty’s armies must capture and fortify a little Kabyle port: Gigeri. It looks just like your belly. Behind, like your breasts, the arid peaks of the Montagne Sèche descend gently in terraces to the sea.’
    Beneath his fair lady’s breastbone he drew with his thumb the round outline of her floating ribs.
    ‘Gigeri is at the entrance to a small but deep gulf, the Anse aux Galères.’
    Louis-Henri slipped between his wife’s legs then, starting with his head between her knees, moved up along her thighs.
    ‘We shall arrive through here. A fleet consisting of fifteen war vessels and ten transport ships carrying six thousand soldiers.’
    ‘Of whom many will die…’
    ‘If the life of a man lasted a thousand years, there would be cause for regret. But as it is so short, it matters little whether they lose it twenty years earlier or later.’
    The marquis’s lips brushed against a blond curly fleece.
    ‘The aim will be to establish and fortify a permanent military base in this strategic region and to overcome the formidable enemies who covet it. I read all of this in last week’s Gazette. ’
    The marquise felt her husband’s warm breath, so close to her. He had stopped moving. She closed her eyes.
    ‘’Tis said that France has no more navy, or, at least, that it is in a most pitiful state.’
    ‘The departure will not take place before two months have passed, and by that time the ships shall be made seaworthy. We must trust His Majesty.’
    The husband, with a jerk of his neck, gathered momentum to plant a deep kiss within his wife’s sex, but she stopped his brow with her palms and warned him that she had her menses: ‘The cardinal is in residence.’

6.

    His face was covered in blood and splattered with fragments of brain; it was a rout. On the beach of this legendary city and pirate stronghold which smelt of spices, Officer Montespan was kneeling in the sand beneath the stars. Nearby, swirls of light bounced off the corners of a building. As he encouraged his men in their regalia, he felt punch-drunk. A first line moved ahead fearlessly, fired and withdrew. A second line took its place, and so on. The sound of cannons added to the shooting, but the enemy were legion. Bullets and cannonballs were fired blindly and Louis-Henri’s men fell, the ranks growing thinner. Bombardments and exchanges of musket fire doubled in intensity. A burst of flames signalled the explosion, under heavy fire, of one of their defences. Their blackened chests now exposed, the marquis’s soldiers, once held close by fair demoiselles, fell together on the sand in a hideous parody of the act of love. And all around the thunder howled. The fire was fierce; nature unleashed death. The vaguely indecent strangeness of it all would haunt his dreams. The enemy slavered at the walls. They climbed and swarmed. All the disastrous sounds arced through the air over the glow of the battlefield: this was hell. The fire was everywhere, city walls were attacked, weapons were fired. Since eleven o’clock in the morning the situation had been untenable. After three months occupying the city of Gigeri, His Majesty’s army was suddenly pushed back to the sea, this evening of All Saints’ Day, 1664.

    Two days earlier, Montespan had attended the deliberations of the council of war, where he had stood off to one side. There had been much discussion about how to finish the wall built from west to east, from the sea at the foot of the Montagne Sèche to the Pointe du Marabout, forming a broken semicircle. Clerville, who was in charge of the fortifications, had called out plaintively to Gadagne, the commander of the troops on the ground: ‘It has suddenly become impossible to obtain the supplies of wood and limestone we need to manufacture lime! Why is this? Furthermore, you promised me that the natives would supply the materials to me. Where are they?’
    The commander of the ground troops, in his armour, did not know how to reply, so Beaufort had