Teulé The Hurlyburly's Husband

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-634-1
Verlag: Pushkin Vertigo
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

The Marquis de Montespan and his new wife, Athénaïs, are that very rare thing: a true love-match. But love is not enough to maintain their hedonistic lifestyle, and the couple soon face huge debts. Then Madame de Montespan is offered the chance to turn their fortunes round, by becoming lady-in-waiting to the Queen at Versailles.Too late, Montespan discovers that his ravishing wife has caught the eye of King Louis XIV. Everyone congratulates him on his new status of cuckold by royal appointment, but the Marquis is broken-hearted. He vows to wreak revenge on the King and win back his adored Marquise.At once comic and poignant, Jean Teulé's extraordinary novel restores a ridiculed figure from history to his rightful position of hero: a man who loved his wife and dared challenge the absolute power of the Sun King himself.

Jean Teulé lives in Marais with his companion, the French film actress Miou-Miou. An illustrator, filmmaker and television presenter, he is also the prize-winning author of ten books including one based on the life of Verlaine. In researching that book he discovered that a group of nineteenth-century poets had founded a review called The Suicide Shop and this inspired his novel. He has also written biographies of Rimbaud and François Villon.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Teulé, Jean

Weitere Mitwirkende

Anderson, Alison

Leseproben

1.

On Saturday, 20 January 1663, at eleven o’clock in the evening, two young men burst out of the Palais-Royal where Monsieur, the King’s brother, was hosting a great ball. Six others immediately followed. They began to heap insults upon one another, in a blaze of feathers and lace.

‘Son of a priest!’

‘Mewling vassal!’

A tall fellow in a flamboyant diamond-encrusted outfit, his lips stretched over his gums, shoved a short potbellied man in a black wig, who seemed to be standing on stilts so very high were his heels. In his many rings and bracelets, he staggered on his shoes and choked, ‘Vassal? La Frette, how dare you compare me to a slave – me, the Prince of Chalais?’

‘Prince of inverts, you mean – sodomite! Like Monsieur, you prefer a young squire to a chatty wench. And I have an aversion to that kind of vice. Let them indulge such things in Naples!’

‘Oh!’

During this altercation, the door to the well-lit ball-room, filled with music, fumes and the movements of the dancers, closed again, and the eight fine fellows found themselves in the icy darkness of the street.

A hunchback crouching against a column, holding a pole with a large lantern on the end of it, stood up, went over to them and called out, ‘A lantern-bearer to accompany you to your homes, Messieurs?’

He was limping and swaying, having one leg shorter than the other. His hair lay flat against his skull, tied at the nape of his neck like a well rope, and he circled around them, casting the light of his lantern.

Little Chalais slapped La Frette; his shaken head exuded a cloud of periwig powder. Humiliated, the tall fellow snapped his mouth shut over his teeth, which he had adorned in the Dutch style, plugging the cavities in his incisors and canines with butter. He had been stretching his mouth wide over his lips to keep his dairy plaster fresh and prevent it from melting but now, in his rage, he pursed his lips, puffing his cheeks out. He was burning with resentment. When he opened his mouth again, his teeth were oozing. ‘Did you see, Saint-Aignan? He slap—’

‘Did you smack my brother, vassal?’

A cruel-looking chevalier of nineteen years of age, with a hat decorated with very long feathers, and one eye ravaged by smallpox, planted himself before Chalais. The lantern-bearer scurried to offer his itinerant lighting services to them both, explaining, ‘At night, gentlemen, there are rascals, purse-snatchers and rapscallions who lie in wait for passers-by out late and hurrying to their homes …’

Divided into two groups, the eight bewigged youths cursed, scowled at each other and tore at the silks and ribbons of each other’s garments. The lantern-bearer raised his luminous bladder. One of the youths, who had just been referred to as ‘Flamarens, you filthy whore’, was pale of face. With a paintbrush he had traced false lines of blue, the colour of nobility and purity of blood. The lantern-bearer lowered his beam onto the shining shoes and cobblestones. The oil of his lamp was smoking.

‘Five sols to take you thither! What are five sols to gentlemen who wear the red heels of aristocrats, like your good selves!’

Chalais’s friend Noirmoutier unsheathed a dagger; it flashed treacherously and left a wound upon a surprised face. The wounded gent’s hand reached for his sword: he would stick Noirmoutier like a pig. The one Noirmoutier called d’Antin – ‘D’Antin, don’t meddle!’ – intervened all the same in the fast-degenerating quarrel: ‘Zounds, be reasonable!’

The lantern-bearer concurred wholeheartedly: ‘Aye, be reasonable … The darkest, most deserted forest in the realm is a place of safety compared to Paris …’

La Frette spat the rancid butter from his rotten stumps into Chalais’s face.

‘Fat harlot of a tripemonger, I will see you on the field of honour, tomorrow morning!’

D’Antin looked dumbfounded. ‘The field? Are you mad? The edicts—’

But the offended party, tall La Frette, standing next to Saint-Aignan, ordered, ‘Arnelieu, Amilly, we’re going now.’

Four of them left in the direction of the lighted windows of the Tuileries, and the other four headed the opposite way. As for the lantern-bearer, he shuffled and swayed along Rue Saint-Honoré. The light of his bladder cast a hunchbacked dancing shadow onto the walls, whilst he memorised the names: ‘La Frette, Saint-Aignan, Amilly, Arnelieu … and Chalais, Flamarens, d’Antin, Noirmou …’

At first light of the silent dawn, through the thick fog shrouding the field, d’Antin heard the silver-buckled shoes of the Chevalier de Saint-Aignan crunching over the frozen puddles. He turned to his neighbour Noirmoutier for his flask of Schaffhausen water, excellent for treating apoplexy.

The cockerel had not yet crowed, and there was not a sound in all of Paris. Standing in a row against a hedge of frozen hazel trees, the supporters of the offending party, Chalais, discerned the pale misty figures of La Frette’s clique emerging from a vast hay barn. They, too, moved forward in a row, straight towards their adversaries.

Soon they would be a breath away, for the rectangular field was narrow. To the right were sleeping mansions. To the left, the charterhouse of Boulevard Saint-Germain, with its cloisters and cells, and the monks whom they must not alert by shouting pointless invectives.

In any event, there was no more to be said. They had moved beyond words; this was a duel to the death, and d’Antin, beneath his heavy curled wig, was not feeling well. Yet, he struck a fine pose in his scarlet cloak, which was thrown over one shoulder, and his black hat, its brim turned up in the Catalan style, placing one foot forward, his hand on his hip. But his fingers were trembling. As soon as the duel had been called, his eyelids had started to swell and an erysipelatous rash had broken out on his forehead. His ears oozed, a fearsome scab had appeared on his neck, and beneath his chin and armpits he itched with scurf.

Chance had paired off the golden youths. La Frette would confront Chalais, Amilly would face Flamarens. Noirmoutier would take on Arnelieu, and d’Antin saw the Chevalier de Saint-Aignan striding towards him.

He was like a human bird with his mane of Greek curls and his splendid plumage, despite the eye lost to contamination by the whores in the brothels. He looked his adversary up and down, never slowing his pace through the fog, and his confident face betrayed no fear. He was most impressive as, sword in hand, he prepared to avenge his brother’s honour. He took long strides, thumbing the blade of his weapon. D’Antin wondered when he would stop and stand on guard, but the other fellow continued on his way as if he intended to go through the hedge of hazel trees. Thwack! D’Antin felt the bone of his forehead burst under the tip of the sword as it passed over his entire head. It dragged his wig behind his skull, and he tried to catch it – how stupid … How stupid to die like this in the frosty dawn, falling flat on his back in his pearl-grey breeches and pink silk stockings fastened with garters, when all around there was nothing but carnage. To his right, his three partners were moaning in the grass. Their adversaries departed.

Little Chalais got to his feet, twisting his ankles because of his thick soles. Bleeding profusely, he slapped a hand to his belly. Flamarens dragged a bloody leg behind him and hobbled towards the pale outline of a carriage. Noirmoutier, with a torn shoulder, ran in the opposite direction, to his horse.

‘Where will you go?’ asked the other two.

‘Portugal.’

The cockerel crowed. Cartwrights, blacksmiths, carters, weavers and saddlers opened the shutters of their little workshops. The fog lifted. The sun rose above the roofs of the mansions, to reveal a body lying on the ground …

At noon, the vertical shadows were sharp, and fell in triangles on the crowd from the roofs all around Place de Grève. The silence was impressive; windows had been rented at auction. Guards stood neatly in order around a platform.

‘That makes six!’

The hooded executioner’s axe fell so swiftly and cleanly that Saint-Aignan’s head remained poised on the block. For a moment the executioner believed he had missed and would have to strike a second time, but then the head collapsed onto the other five scattered on the floor of the platform, like a pile of cabbages. It looked as if, reconciled at last, they were kissing one another – on the forehead, the ears, the lips (and that is what they should have done in the first place, in their lifetime). The executioner wiped his forehead and turned to speak to someone just below the platform.

‘Monsieur de La Reynie, six in a row, that’s too much! I am not the Machine du monde, after all…’

‘Don’t complain. There should have been eight,’ sniggered the lieutenant of the Paris police, the prosecutor in cases of duelling, as he walked away towards the Châtelet.

*

‘Monsieur le marquis, there is no greater violation, no greater sacrilege of the laws of heaven than the frenzied rage of a duel. Do they not teach you that in your native land of Guyenne?!’

The young Gascon thus roundly admonished in the courtroom at the Châtelet gazed through the window at the late-afternoon sun … The only person seated in one of the courtroom’s chairs, he sighed, ‘You may say that to me, yet I am not involved, for I am not of a quarrelsome nature. Nor was my brother, for that matter—’

‘And yet he took part in a duel!’ La Reynie interrupted, brutally. ‘The nobility must cease, absolutely, from drawing their...