The Courtier of Versailles

~One~-1

~One~“Are you ready, mon cher?” Uncle Jules asked, voice obscured by his protective headgear.

Jeanne nodded; her own helmet—nothing more than a tin plate with peepholes—wobbling precariously.

Jules raised his sword before his face, aiming it straight up like a finger pointing to the heavens, and bowed slightly but respectfully to his niece, the graceful move revealing a glimpse of the swordsman's prowess.

Jeanne mirrored her uncle's salute and waited, willing her lungs to do their job, to breathe deeply in and out, storing air for what was to come.

“En garde!” Jules barked.

Jeanne dropped into a crouch, half-extending her sword arm, protecting the waist with the elbow and the chest with the wrist. Her left arm hung high in the air behind her head, the forearm gracefully bent and the wrist curled, a counter-weight.

Quadricep muscles twitching with strain as they bore the brunt of her weight, biceps and triceps burning with rage at the repetition of the position for the tenth time that morning.

Her own breathing echoed back to her as it bounced against the crudely constructed helmet; the scent of the peach she'd eaten that morning still clinging to each vapor.

Jules moved. Left foot over right. Jeanne mirrored his pattern.

“Come at me, girl. Come and get me,” Jules bellowed at her, teasing her with the tip of his fine rapier.

Jeanne moved, a sequence of aggressive footwork.

“Bon, bon, good, good,” her uncle encouraged. “Now…advance!”

Lifting the toes of her front foot, she curled it up to slip both feet forward.

“Advance!”

Same move again.

“Advance, advance!”

Again. Twice. First step, a quick one.

“Bon. Now…get ready.”

Sweat dripped down her forehead, burned as it rolled into her eyes. She dare not spare a second to wipe it away. More trickled down her spine, annoying her blood-engorged skin. She dare not take a moment to blot it.

Her forearm burned red hot, muscles controlling her grip on the pommel refusing to give way.

Another parry, another thrust. She moved two steps closer.

The clangs of sword meeting sword echoed as the thin rapiers came together time and time again, reverberating in the hollow, stone chamber. Jeanne panted now.

The old empty chamber in the basement of the grand chateau of Versailles became a void in time and place, their bodies and grunts of exertion all that existed.

Jeanne listened, as vital to swordsmanship as their grip on the pommel. She listened and waited, parrying to keep her uncle moving. There it came. Just the right sshing that spoke a good s***h…a grunt from her uncle. She had him on the defense. If he grunted more than she it was a good day; today could be such a day.

A feint, a parry…she pressed him almost to the wall.

Today, she thought. Maybe today shall be the day of my victory…for I am a Musketeer.

The smallest grin tickled the corner of her mouth. Parry, thrust, lun—

The chapel bells gonged; their vibration rose through the soles of their thin, flexible shoes.

The combatants froze.

“Is that—,” Jeanne began.

“The chapel calls!” her uncle cried, pulling off his headgear, his white mantle of hair falling upon his shoulders.

“I am lost!” Jeanne threw off her helmet, chocolate brown hair spilling out as gear hit stone with a thud.

Jeanne tossed her sword to Jules who caught it deftly by its grip.

“Our secret, mon uncle?”

Her uncle tossed his niece a tart glance. “You need ask?”

With a small grin and a slight shake of the head, Jeanne bolted for the door.

“Tomorrow, dear man, oui?”

“Of course, ma petite.” Jules shooed her with a wave and a fond smile at her quickly retreating back.

Down the hall and around two corners, up one flight of stairs and down three hallways, to the closest latrine Jeanne ran. From the basement of the main building—the small one that had been Louis XIII's hunting lodge—to the back side of the south wing—just one of the many expansions made by his son—she flew. She loosened the small ribbons and strings holding her costume together as she ran, impelled by long strides of well-trained legs.

Jeanne Yvette Mas du Bois thanked the good Lord she'd spent much of her childhood in the labyrinth of a castle; she knew every winding inch of it. Yet she cursed it as she ran. It was 1682, for goodness sake. Two decades of improvements and still very few privies and most on one side of the massive palace.

In the abandoned corridor, she reached the water closet, her water closet. She slammed the door behind her and instantly felt trapped; no more than a box in the wall containing a wooden bench with a crudely covered hole from which emanated the foulest of odors, her chest heaved as she gasped for breath depleted by the long and convoluted trek. She breathed only through her mouth.

Dropping to her knees, she pulled up two boards from the crude wood flooring, retrieving the bundle of clothing sequestered beneath. Sloughing off the old knickers, shirt, and bucket-top boots that once belonged to her brother, she bundled and tied them, stashing them where the other clothes had been, the appropriate if rumpled morning gown.

“Millions of louis he spends on Aubusson and Gobelin tapestries,” Jeanne mumbled as she began to dress herself, “but hardly enough privies for half the people living here. A glorious sink hole, indeed.”

Uncounted were the drunken nobles or lost visiting diplomats urinating, defecating, or vomiting in any private corner of the mazelike corridors, staircases, or window embrasures, their struggle to reach a privy or chaise percée in time proving fruitless.

The drunks were the worst, their inebriated state dissipating any inhibitions for public elimination. They behaved quite raucously about the whole endeavor. Their obnoxious laughter disgusted Jeanne as did their hygiene habits.

Yet, somehow, the chateau remained clean; accidents disappeared quickly at the hands of the thousands of servants indentured for just such service. Louis XIV insisted Versailles, now La Maison du Roi as well as the seat of France's government, be kept immaculate. An adult response to the squalor he had lived in as a child in the Louvre.

Almost dressed, the feminine and frilly stockings and undergarments of a wealthy young noblewoman soaked up the sweat still flowing from her pores, stuck to her skin. There was naught to be done; to not appear, as she must every morning, at the King's Chapel Royale, would be to provoke certain misfortune, and there remained but a minute since the first gong of the bell.

Still lacing up the front of her bodice, Jeanne kicked open the door, banging it with a crash against the hallway wall. In the empty corridor, she ran; the hard heels of her bow-festooned shoes clanked against the hardwood floor, the lacy fontange on her head bounced with each step.

Up two flights of turning stairs, she emerged next to the Hall of Battles on the ground floor and burst through the door leading out into the crowded courtyard. She blundered about, instantly blinded by the blazing light of the hot August sun reflecting off the white marble outer walls of the chateau.

It would be unseemly to run; her feet fluttered in the fastest walk possible. Upon her face a practiced smile firmly in place as she returned greetings to the multitude whose faces were but a blur. Colors and shimmers, but not a one did she see.

Back into the building, the north wing now, through the small corridor filled with courtiers and commoners—there for a glimpse of their sovereign—quickly to the door of the chapel.

Mon Dieu! The words a scream in her head.

The King led the precisely contrived procession up the aisle; the ducs, marquises, and comtes already across the threshold, the barons poised to enter.

She had missed her place! She—the daughter of the Comte de Moreuil, Gaston du Bois—must enter before the barons. To break this code of conduct, one imposed by the King himself, could bring the harshest of punishments.

She must do what she must. Wringing her hands, Jeanne bit her bottom lip, lowered large chocolate brown eyes, dipped her head, and pushed past the barons and their wives, tight-lipped women scowling at her.

If she had not already been, Jeanne would now be the juiciest tidbit on the tip of every wagging tongue today; gossip the second most preferred pastime of the courtiers, a short step behind currying favor.

She slipped into the pew where her mother and father sat; grateful the Comtesse de Cordierer and her daughter separated them.

The King, now firmly ensconced in his tribune, took no notice of her late arrival; the same could not be said for her father. She dared not turn or glance in his direction for the ire in his eye would surely burn her to the bone. The heated waves of his wrath found her.

Mademoiselle le Thibault, the comtesse's daughter stared rudely at them, wide eyes bouncing between Jeanne and her father, a spectator at a highly entertaining game.

Jeanne berated herself for giving one such as this fodder for her lurid mill. She did her best to still her twitching hands and shuddering foot. Taking deep breaths of incense-laden air, Jeanne calmed.

Father Herbert, the parish priest of Versailles, took his place at the balustrade font, vestments of mulberry tenting over his vast paunch, tall miter giving the false impression of height. Raising his arms wide as if to embrace the entire congregation, he launched into his sermon with a booming voice.

“The people of the noble land of France must thank God and the King for the greatness in which we reside. It is by their power and by their hand that we grow and prosper with such exuberance.”

He made no reference to the pope or to Rome; no priest serving the crown had any desire to spend the rest of his days in the Bastille. This sermon would serve no more purpose than to praise the King. Louis championed Gallicanism, the purely French movement whose intent meant to diminish papal authority and increase the power of the state, specifically the power of the Sun King.

“Look around you, I pray, for in these very walls is built the power of our great sovereign.”

The chapel was a paradigm of Louis' affluent dominance: the gilded scrollwork, the beautiful caryatids and atlantes sculptures, and, most especially, the altar painting. Almost as long as the wall upon which it hung, Meal at the House of Simon the Pharisee had come as a gift from the Republic of Venice in 1664, a testament to how far reaching Louis' fingers of power stretched.

Louis XIV sat tall in his velvet seat, large dark eyes raised innocently to the heavens, lids fluttering prettily now and then as the priest spoke so eloquently of him, the shy smile upon his face that of a child being praised. He craved such praise like a starving child, like the many starving who lived in his realm, craving food, any food. No matter the truth of them, words of homage thrilled him.

The expounding priest banged his fisted hand on the pulpit before him, voice rising to the heights of a screech.

“We must do whatever our King and our Lord ask, for to serve them is our only purpose in this mortal life!” The flush on Father Herbert's face spread and darkened like the culmination of his oration.

Louis slumped in his high-backed armchair, shoulders slumping, clearly disappointed the sycophantic sermon ended. He lowered his face, the self-deprecating grin slipping off the corners of his mouth.

Jeanne's hands, poised peacefully upon her lap during the sermon, began to wring once more like a washerwoman wrings a drenched cloth. Silently she cursed the brevity of the thirty-minute service. With a sidelong glance down the pew, she dared a glimpse of her father's countenance.

Like the priest's, his face burned crimson as if all the blood in his body congealed beneath is thin, white carapace. From brow to the hairline of his white wig, a dark vein pulsed with each rapid beat of his heart.

A growl rose from Jeanne's stomach, the painful knot of foreboding twisting within her. She knew what lay in store, knew with assurance it would be terrible, for she had suffered her father's wrath many times, too many. She couldn't avoid the coming storm, but she could try to outrun it.