Виктория Холт - The Road to Compiegne

She would never forget her coming to France and those first months of the King’s undivided attention, when they had been lovers and she had appeared to him to be the most beautiful woman in the world.

It was not easy even for the most virtuous of women to love others – even though they were her own daughters – who could please the King as she so longed to do, and never could.

Adelaide violently mourned her sister and shed stormy tears. Victoire sat in her bergère and was more melancholy than usual. Sophie watched first Adelaide then Victoire as though to decide how long it was necessary for her to mourn her sister.

Louise-Marie was heartbroken. She did not storm nor weep, she simply said: ‘If they had left me a little longer at Fontevrault I should never have known Anne-Henriette. Oh, why did they not leave me at Fontevrault?’

And Sophie suddenly ceased to wonder how much Adelaide expected her to mourn her sister, and ran away into a quiet corner to cry alone.

* * *

In the streets of Paris the death of Madame Seconde was freely discussed.

The verdict was that the loss of this beloved daughter was God’s vengeance on the King for his dissolute way of life.

‘How could it be otherwise?’ the people asked each other in the cafés and the markets. ‘God would punish him for his neglect of his people and his absorption with the Marquise. This is his just reward.’

‘This is the result of offending God and displeasing the people. God has taken from him the daughter he loved best.’

The Church party encouraged such observations. The sooner the King was made to realise how offensive was his conduct in the eyes of God – and the Church party – the better.

There was hope in the apartments of the Dauphin.

‘Such a disaster could bring about the dismissal of the Marquise,’ said the Dauphin.

Louis himself was very apprehensive. He was beginning to wonder whether there was some Divine warning in this loss. She was a young girl. It was true that she had been frail; but she was too young to die.

His doctors had told him that she had no will to live, that she had refused their medicines; she had refused the food which had been prepared for her; she had turned from all her family and friends to look beyond them into the unknown.

He dared not think of her unhappiness. There were many who would say that she had died of a broken heart. Twice she had loved, and twice been frustrated. Marriage with the Orléans family had been distasteful to Fleury and therefore had not taken place. Her love for Charles Edward Stuart had been deeper perhaps, but how could the King of France give his consent to their marriage after the defeat of the ’45? That had happened nearly seven years ago. Had she mourned a Prince, who was not even faithful, all that time?

She died because she had no wish to live. They were tragic words to describe the passing of a young woman. It distressed him and there was only one person who could cure him of sadness such as this; yet the mood which had been engendered by the people of Paris and certain members of his Court led him to doubt whether he should seek that solace.

Death . . . so close to them all! Who would be its next victim? What if it should strike at him, and he should suddenly pass from this world to the next – an unrepentant sinner?

He wanted to confess his sins, but he knew that before he could receive absolution he must swear to sin no more.

The Marquise occupied the suite of Madame de Montespan now, but she was still known as his mistress. He knew that the confessors and the bishops, aided and abetted by the Dauphin and the Church party, would withhold the remission of his sins until he had dismissed Madame de Pompadour from the Court.

He sent for Adelaide; he embraced her warmly and they wept together.

The King looked at this vivacious but unaccountable young woman. She was twenty years old and her beauty was already beginning to fade, but he still found her company stimulating.

From Adelaide he could take comfort which at the moment he felt too apprehensive to take from the Marquise.

‘You must fill your sister’s place,’ he told Adelaide. ‘You must be both Adelaide and Anne-Henriette to me now.’

‘Yes, Father,’ cried Adelaide; and there was no mistaking the adoration he saw in her eyes.

‘You shall have an apartment nearer to mine,’ said the King. ‘We will rebuild a part of the Château. It will mean destroying the Ambassador’s staircase . . . but we will do it . . .’

Adelaide knelt awkwardly and embraced her father’s knees.

‘I will be all that you ask of me,’ she cried; and her eyes were gleaming with triumph; she had already forgotten the death of Anne-Henriette.

Death seemed to be hovering over Versailles that year. The hot summer had come and the King with Madame de Pompadour was staying at his château of Compiègne for a spell of hunting.

One morning early the Dauphine awoke with a sense of foreboding, perhaps because it had been a restless night. Several times she had awakened to find the Dauphin muttering in his sleep; and when she had spoken to him he had answered incoherently.

Touching his forehead she had thought it to be over-hot; thus she had spent a very disturbed night; and as soon as the light was strong enough she sat up in bed and studied the sleeping Dauphin.

His face was flushed, and she had no doubt now that he had a fever. She rose, called his servants and sent for his physicians.

In a few hours, the news spread through the Palace and beyond. The Dauphin is suffering from small-pox.

There was scarcely a disease more dreaded – highly contagious, swift in action, it had been responsible for the end of thousands.

The Dauphine was terrified. She could not imagine her life without her husband; and she was fully aware of the danger in which he lay.

The physicians told her that she must leave the apartments. Already she may have caught the disease. She must understand that by remaining at her husband’s bedside she was courting death; and even if she escaped death she might be hideously marked for the rest of her life.

She said firmly: ‘It is my place to be at his side. More than any other I belong here, and here I shall remain.’

She would allow no one to dissuade her and, dressing herself in a simple white dress, she performed all the necessary menial and intimate duties which were required. Her lips were firmly set; she had not wept, but she constantly murmured prayers as she moved about the apartment, and again and again she said to herself: ‘If I do everything for him I shall save him, for I shall do these things better than any other. I must, because I love him so much.’ Then she began to say: ‘I will save him. He shall not die.’ And with that a great peace came to her because she believed that anyone who wanted to succeed so much and who put every effort into her task could not fail.

Again and again she was warned to leave the sickroom; again she was reminded of the horrors of the disease, of its terrifying results; and she merely smiled wanly.

‘What price would be too great to pay for his recovery?’ she asked.

And after that they knew it was no use trying to dissuade her.

The news was carried to Compiègne and reached the King when he had returned to the château after the hunt.

Louis was horrified. ‘I must return at once to Versailles,’ he declared.

The Marquise ventured: ‘My dearest Sire, there is great danger at Versailles.’

The King answered sadly: ‘Madame, my son, the Dauphin, lies near to death.’

The Marquise merely bowed her head. ‘We will prepare to leave immediately,’ she said.

Death! thought the King. It is like a spectre that haunts me. It hangs over my family – a grey shadow from which we cannot escape. Only in February I lost my dearest daughter; am I now to lose my son?

He was glad that he had built a road from Compiègne to Versailles. At such a time the covert looks which implied ‘this is the retribution’ would have been intolerable. The people would attribute the illness of the Dauphin to the same Divine wrath to which they had credited the death of Anne-Henriette. No, at such a time he could not bear the sly triumph of his people.

If the Dauphin were to die, the heir to the throne would be the baby Duc de Bourgogne. And if he, Louis, himself died, there would be another boy King of France. The Dauphin must not die.

The Marquise sought to comfort him on that journey back to Versailles.

‘I have heard,’ she said, ‘that a doctor named Pousse knows more about small-pox than any man living. Would Your Majesty consider sending for him? He is a bourgeois and will know nothing of Court manners and procedure, but since he is considered to have saved more from small-pox than any other doctor, would Your Majesty have him brought to Versailles?’

‘We must seize every opportunity,’ agreed the King. ‘No matter what this man’s origins are, let us send for him.’

‘I will order him to come without delay,’ said the Marquise.

* * *

Louis sat at the Dauphin’s bedside. He had waved aside all those who would have reminded him of the risk he ran.

My son, he thought. My only son! I wish that we could have been better friends.

How deeply he regretted those differences which had grown up between them. He tried to remember at what stage they had begun to grow apart. He saw himself going into the royal nurseries in the days of the Dauphin’s boyhood, and he remembered how the little boy would fling himself into his arms.