SIXTEEN

“Your first visit to court,” said the sorceress contentedly. Her cats rubbed at her skirts as she sat in the armchair in her cabinet. I had been offered the stool. Moving up, I thought silently. Someday, she will offer the armchair. “I read it in your future. You will climb high. Would you care for another marzipan?” I took a big one. She smiled. At that moment, I would have liked to trade it for the smaller one, but it was too late. Besides, I liked marzipan. “I can, of course, advise you. I have been to the court at Saint-Germain, Fontainebleau, and at Versailles. But the Queen—You have done very, very well so soon. I am gratified.” As soon as I had eaten the first marzipan, I started thinking of the next one. I won’t look at the plate, I thought.

She got up suddenly and poked at the fire, which had almost extinguished itself. While her back was turned, I took another marzipan. A little one that wouldn’t be noticed. The sorceress took out a ledger from the locked cupboard to consult. She turned and looked at me as she replaced the book. “Enjoy yourself among the golden ones, my dear. Learn their secrets, keep their confidences. Remember, I am always here to assist you, and them, with my little ‘confidential services.’” She sat down again. Her eyes narrowed as she noticed the plate. “Now, when will you be visiting Versailles?” She went on as if she had never noticed the missing marzipan. “I have a little package I would like delivered there. And one thing I must remind you of—why, I think of myself almost as your mother and want only your good—never show weakness to them. They are like gilded wolves. If they sense the slightest hesitation, they will turn on you and eat you in a flash. Audacity! Boldness! They only wish to be dazzled. Rely on your wits. Trust no friendships: a nest of vipers is more generous than the court of the Sun King.” Considering the source, I was impressed with the advice.

“You’ll need court dress,” she announced, “though what you have will do for now, until you earn more money.” She laughed. “Would you like to see mine? The embroideries are absolutely exquisite. And well they ought to be, since the gown alone cost five thousand livres.” I wondered why she went to court. It certainly wasn’t to watch the King dining in public as the tourists did.

Upstairs in her bedroom, La Voisin opened the locked armoire where ranks of clothes were hung, hidden beneath muslin shrouds. She lifted one of the protective sacks to display a silk gown in aurore lined with pale green. From another, an array of heavy, brightly colored petticoats in taffeta burst out.

“Oh, beautiful.” I pretended to sigh. I could see her calculating eye. She was whetting my appetite for the grand life.

“Our profession is welcomed at every court on earth—providing we are not uncouth, like the vulgar La Bosse. Mind your manners and remember my lessons, and you will have a dozen gowns like this.”

“And that? The red velvet?” I pointed to the corner of a heavy, rich robe embroidered with double-headed gold eagles that was peeping from beneath one of the muslin covers.

“Never,” she said, carefully rearranging the muslin. I got a glimpse of sea-green lace before the gown vanished from sight. “This is an emperor’s robe. The only way you would ever have one is if you became Queen.” She tilted her head and looked at me anew with her black, black eyes. “My, what calculating gray eyes you have, my dear. You certainly have the brains to become Queen—and so few do—but you entirely lack the character to make a good witch. I think I need not stay up at night worrying, eh?” She shut the armoire door and turned the key in the lock with a click.

I thought of the Stoics. I thought of Monsieur Descartes. Here I was offended that I’d been told I wasn’t crazy enough to be a real sorceress. Father, the lover of ironies, would have laughed.

A knock on the bedroom door broke the moment.

“Madame, the girl you sent for is waiting below, and your husband has returned with the package.”

“Oh, excellent, Margot. How many did Samson give him?”

“Four this time, Madame. Will you be drying them here, as usual?”

“Of course. Bring the package in.” She turned to me with a cool look, as if she were assessing me. “I have no secrets from the little marquise here,” she said in an arch tone. “The coals in the oven have burned quite low enough now.” So I was right; I thought I’d noticed an unusual heat from behind the tapestry on the bedroom wall.

As Margot left, La Voisin turned to me. “I’ve found you a lovely little maid. She’s ever so knowledgeable about the court. She can inform you about the people you meet and keep you from embarrassing yourself. Suppose, for example, you knock at a door instead of scratch—you won’t live down the disgrace. But she can tell you which doors to knock at and which to scratch at…when to open a half door to a visitor and when to open a full door. It’s a matter of precedence. Precedence and court etiquette. It’s important you don’t go wrong. Oh, yes. And you should start to grow a long fingernail on the little finger of your left hand; all the courtiers do, for scratching at doors.” She looked pleased with herself and went on: “How very fortunate I was to acquire her…she was in the household of La Grande Mademoiselle until she attracted the notice of the wrong man. A few weeks in the Sâlpetrière caused her to repent of her life and send for me. And I, out of the kindness of a too-generous heart, arranged for her departure and am giving her a new start in life.”

Interesting. The only way a girl like that could expect to get out of prison was if she was transported for life to the colonies. So La Voisin’s reach extended into the jails and “hospitals” of the city. How had she arranged the escape? And now she had another loyal follower, and a spy to report my every movement. Ah, philanthropy. It becomes a way of life. “You are too generous,” I said, and she shot me a hard look, before turning to her husband who had entered through the bedroom door.

“So there you are at last—I can’t imagine why you’ve been so slow! How long does it take to go only down the street? It’s not as if Samson lives across town, after all!” Antoine Montvoisin was, for once, not in his dressing gown but in a shabby gray homespun suit and a wide-brimmed, untrimmed felt hat drooping forlornly over a moth-eaten goat’s-hair wig.

“He made me…hic…wait…for a long time,” Montvoisin said in a weak voice. His wife pulled aside the tapestry to reveal the oven door in the stone wall. Montvoisin stood, all drooping, his thin frame occasionally shaken by another silent hiccup.

“Unwrap them and put them on the drying rack—and don’t let them drip this time. For heaven’s sake! Can’t you stop that infernal hiccupping?”

“It’s you who…hic…caused it, so if you’re offended, it’s…hic…your own fault. Next time keep your toad powder…hic…for your clients.”

“How dare you insult my profession when you live by it? Oh, those are dreadfully damp; they’ll take forever. Couldn’t Samson get us any older ones?” La Voisin was scurrying about like a housewife at preserve-making time. With a rising sense of nausea, I recognized the objects that her lover Samson, the executioner of Paris, had sent her. They were human hands.

“Doesn’t the smell offend you—I mean, right here in the house?” I was trying to sound cool, offhand, as if I often saw things like that. But my voice came out smaller than usual. Maybe I really wasn’t cut out to be a witch, after all.

“That?” answered La Voisin. “Oh, it’s no worse than curing hams. Besides, it’s the smell of prosperity. That never bothers me. Pardon, but you’re turning green. Do you need to sit down?” I sat down suddenly on the bed.

“Don’t you stain my carpet. Use the slop jar. You? At court? You’re a weakling still.”

“What…what are they for?”

“Hands of glory. They attract hidden treasure to the owner. Half the court has them. Ladies keep them sewn in their skirts, men in their pockets. Guaranteed to bring luck at the gaming tables. You needn’t look so queasy. They’re quite compact and free of mess once they’re all dried out. They curl up, you see. I buy them from the executioner; the people were already dead. It’s not as if I killed them. The King did; the courts did. Why shouldn’t someone at least get a little benefit from it? I see myself as creating good from evil. I make money from something that would otherwise go to waste—that’s the advantage of understanding housewifery. Nothing should ever be wasted. Learn from me, and you will be able to turn others’ wickedness to your own advantage.”

I wondered what the Romans did for nausea. They probably never tried vomiting wearing corsets, either.

“Antoine, go hold her head. I won’t have her dripping down that good dress I paid for. Nerve! Hah! You haven’t got any, Mademoiselle. You? Want vengeance? You couldn’t kill a mouse. I don’t know when I’ve met a girl so lily-livered. It’s a good thing I’ve found you a maid who’s got more backbone than you, or you wouldn’t last a week among the Great Ones.”

As she shut the oven door with a clang, Antoine Montvoisin offered me his arm to escort me downstairs.

“She may be the powerful one, but…hic…no matter what she tries, my soul is screwed fast to my body. There’s a virtue in…hic…sticking power. But I recommend to you…hic…not to make her angry, or if you do, don’t take…hic…food or drink in this house. And where you’re going…hic…it’s useful to know a few things. Keep…hic…antipoison with you, or failing that, drink a great deal of…hic…milk if the soup tastes…hic…odd. I found it…hic…to be most efficacious, though it’s…hic…left me with these…hic…accursed hiccups. I’m telling you this because…hic…you seem to have more of decency…hic…about you.”

That night, I had dreadful dreams. The room turned into a tall, glittering dining room, and I was seated with an elegant company around a great table with a white linen cloth. Silver candelabra stood among heavily laden silver platters, and the talk was witty. There was a lovely pâté on one of the platters. A man reached out to cut it with his knife, to offer some to his lady dining companion. The pâté groaned with a human voice.

“Oh, how offensive!” the lady exclaimed, and as he hastily drew back his knife, I could see the horrid thing was bleeding where it had been cut.

“They should know better than to invite things like that to dinner,” observed a lace-bedecked gentleman. A lackey filled my glass full of a rich, green cordial.

“Oh, no more for me,” I said. “I’ve had too much already.” Too much. Too much. Whom did I know at this table? I looked to each side. The three friends of the rue des Marmousets were seated on either side of me, Lamotte in ribbons, Griffon in fawn-colored velvet, and d’Urbec, as pale as a ghost, in black silk.

“Tell me,” said Griffon, “does the pâté publish?”

“Isn’t it sufficient that it speaks?” asked d’Urbec in that pointed way he had. His dark eyes, somehow sunken in his head, glittered with a strange bitterness and mockery I had not seen before.

“Monsieur Lamotte, take me from this dinner party. I am fatigued,” I begged. Somehow, he seemed to be the one who had brought me.

“Oh, you can’t leave,” cried a man eating oysters. “You are supposed to pay for the dinner.”

“But I can’t—” My desperate protest was interrupted by a woman’s indignant shrieks: “You have to. What do you expect?” And with that the company began to argue about who would pay, growing louder and more quarrelsome by the minute.

“Mademoiselle Pasquier, I can’t leave just now,” Lamotte confided in a low voice. “I’m filling my pockets for tomorrow’s breakfast. Poet’s privilege.” He took more rolls, a dozen or two vanishing beneath the table. Then he folded up a huge soup tureen into a tiny napkin and slipped it beneath his shirt. But d’Urbec looked at me with that strange, intense look that seemed to see everything.

“It offends you,” he said, throwing his napkin over the pâté. “Although if you had read the sixth chapter of my Observations on the Health of the State more carefully, you would not have been astonished at all. Come, let us leave before their quarreling sets the hall on fire.” And as the first blows sent the dishes rattling to the floor and the lighted candelabra rolling and sputtering across the fine linen cloth, he took my arm and we fled unnoticed into the night.

Sweating and terrified, I lay frozen still, waiting for the dawn. What could they mean, these dreams? Or did they mean anything at all?

And so it was that within the week I found myself hurtling along behind six matched grays in Madame la Maréchale’s heavy carriage on the road to Versailles. My new maid, bold and henna-haired, sat across from me on the back-facing seat, clutching my hatbox and squeezed in between the Maréchale’s personal maid and one of her poor relative lady-companions. Madame herself and Mademoiselle d’Elbeuf were on the seat beside me. Not so far from the château, where the road divides to go to Marly, we heard the sound of cries and the crack of whips behind us.

“How many horses?” Madame asked, as her maid leaned out the window to see who was coming. We would not defer for a four-horse equipage.

“Six, Madame,” responded the maid.

“And what color are their liveries?”

“Blue and silver, Madame de Montespan’s.”

“Then by all means, tell my coachman to pull over, or we will be overturned in the ditch.” As our coach pulled to a halt on the grassy bank beside the road, a heavy carriage rolled past, the lathered horses at full canter, mud spattering from their hooves. Inside I could see three women and the pale face of a little boy. We pulled back onto the road behind them only to be halted again a mile farther on. The great coach was stopped in the center of the road, the blue-and-silver-clad postillions arguing with the coachmen, while in the road, two of the women from the carriage were weeping and exclaiming over the mangled corpse of a poor vine cutter, crushed by the carriage and horses. The huge bundle of sticks with which he had been laden was scattered all about him. Beside the road, members of his family had gathered, staring silently. A plumpish blond woman with a protruding nose and receding chin leaned out of the carriage window.

“Get back in, I say. What good is your sentimental wailing? Pure hypocrisy! You wouldn’t carry on so if it had happened out of your sight! It’s not as if my postillions didn’t warn him. Everyone knows that a woman in my position drives fast—my equipage cleaves the wind.” One woman wiped her nose; the other started to wail even louder at this speech. “Oh, do be quiet!” the woman in the coach shouted at this new impertinence. “It was his own imprudence that he did not remove himself from my path. One has a right to continue in such circumstances.”

“That’s Madame de Montespan,” whispered my maid. Ah, the King’s newest maîtresse en titre, promoted from her position as maîtresse en delicat by the forced retirement of the former official mistress, La Vallière, who had been driven by a thousand humiliations into a convent.

“Your servants are at fault, and you don’t even blame them?” one of the women on the ground, the dark-clad, weeping one, said. She stood up beside the body and addressed the blue-and-silver-clad lackeys fiercely. “If you belonged to me, I would soon settle you.”

“That’s the Duc de Maine, Madame de Montespan’s oldest son, in the carriage, and that’s Madame de Maintenon there, in the black and gray, on the ground. She’s the children’s governess. And the other woman—she’s the Marquise d’Hudicourt.” The Marquise d’Hudicourt continued to wail and wring her hands, as the growing crowd applauded Madame de Maintenon’s fierce speech.

“Vive Madame de Maintenon!” they cried.

“Be good enough to get in, Mesdames. Will you have me stoned?” the woman in the carriage commanded. But the weeping ladies would not be dissuaded until the King’s mistress had given them her purse to hand to the poor relations of the dead man. With that, they remounted, and the carriage clattered off in a spatter of spring mud.

“Oh my goodness,” said the lady-companion, “the man’s eyes were entirely out of his head. I shall require a cup of chocolate when we arrive; it is simply too painful otherwise.”

“Surely, Mademoiselle, such sentiment is misplaced on a stranger. After all, it was not a premeditated assassination,” said Madame d’Elbeuf coolly.

I sat silently for the rest of the ride.

At Versailles I was shown into the Queen’s presence by Mademoiselle d’Orléans, Princesse de Montpensier. “I want to know whether my coming child will be a girl or a boy,” the Queen announced in her heavy Spanish accent. I looked at her. She was seated in a large, brocade-covered armchair with gold fringes and gilt-silver legs, a fan of carved ivory half open in her hand. She was about forty, with the prematurely aged look of a weak, inbred constitution. So many lines of princes culminating in this short, sallow blond woman with the bulging eyes and strange features—almost like a gargoyle—that her flattering portraits never quite recorded. I couldn’t but marvel. She had several severe, dark-clad Spanish ladies with her, three of her favorite dwarves—two men shorter than myself but very square, with huge heads, and a perfectly formed, tiny, wrinkled woman—and a good half dozen flat-faced, hairy little lapdogs of great ugliness.

“I pray daily for another son,” she went on. She didn’t look pregnant to me, but then, I wasn’t experienced in these matters. I’d have to trust the glass. I looked about the immense, airy room for a suitable table. Gold on gold, panels of rare inlaid wood, heavy, elaborately formed furniture of precious metals—despite every luxury, the room seemed cold and devoid of soul. At last I realized why. These were rooms through which wit and learning never passed. The Spanish queen was one of the stupidest women in the entire realm, her conversation dismal and spiritless. My eye lit on a table of solid silver that sat beneath a huge, dark Spanish tapestry. I gestured to it, and they brought a heavy little cushioned stool, made of gold inlaid on silver, for me to sit on. I’d brought one of my nicest orbs with me and requested that they fill it with water. I rolled out my little cabalistic cloth and set out a nice selection of rods. Her Majesty looked on approvingly as I chanted and stirred with the glass rod. Suddenly I understood why. The ladies that crowded around me were all wearing old-fashioned Spanish farthingales, not unlike my own. Half the people in the room were shorter than I, and the rest not much taller. I fit right in with the freaks of the Spanish court that she still kept around her after all these years in France.

The reflection was clear. She was not pregnant. I didn’t dare tell her. I did a second reading and had her put her hand on the glass. I saw an illness and a vase of late-spring flowers in the room. Quickly, my mind worked.

“Your Majesty, I regret to say that in the late spring you will have a serious illness and lose the child.”

“Lose the child? Lose the child? I must have another child. That dreadful woman, that odious La Montespan, holds him with her youth, her children. It is I who am Queen, not she, and yet she would rule in my place. Ah, God, too late I regret La Vallière, who was at least ashamed of what she was doing. But now, this sin with a married woman—this shameless harlot with the brazen tongue…I tell you, this whore will be the death of me—” She broke off into Spanish, which I did not understand, and her ladies rushed to console her. I shall never make my fortune here, I thought. I can’t give her good news. With deep curtseys I retreated from the royal presence.

I stalked from the entrance to the Queen’s apartments in what I hoped was a dramatic manner, thumping my tall walking stick with each step. My black gown whispered and rustled about me as I descended the extraordinary staircase of multicolored inlaid marble that led from the Queen’s apartments and entered the wide marble corridor beneath it. There I met with a press of lackeys, chairs, and tourists exactly as if I were in the main street of a large town. The only difference was that at Versailles, the avenues were paved with marble and decorated with gold, like the streets of paradise.

In fact, the palace at Versailles was exactly like a city, with the corridors serving as streets. Porters carried the courtiers in chairs from place to place, for the women, at least, were incapable of walking twenty feet in their heavily corseted court gowns and flimsy satin shoes. Besides, the corridors were not always clean enough to tread safely while wearing a gown whose cost represented the annual income of a thousand peasant families, for impatient courtiers often relieved nature in the corners or against the walls. The chairs threaded their way through a crowd of lackeys of every description, of sightseers and foreigners come to see the public rooms of the château, of petitioners, soldiers, and mountebanks. It was hard to imagine that all of it—the furniture, swarms of courtiers, curiosity seekers, servants, cooks, theatrical troupes—everything, could be packed up in the twinkling of an eye and put on the road for another of the King’s palaces whenever he had a mind to change residences. Yet for all his seasonal moving about, he did not return to Paris, the ancient capital, and he had ceded the Palais-Royal to his brother. And so the ostlers of Paris gave special feed to the new breed of vicious, heavy coach horse that could keep the carriages rumbling at top speed to Versailles, to Saint-Germain, to Marly, to Fontainebleau. Grandmother said it was a sin, and Kings should live in the Louvre, among the people of their principal city, as the monarchs of old did. It was a highly unfashionable idea that I did not borrow for the Marquise de Morville.

The marquise was getting to be an old friend of mine. She lived in my head, offering comments on my daily life, bothering me at night when I didn’t find sleep easy. A shrewd, sharp-tempered old lady, she coined aphorisms and told lies about her girlhood to me. She bothered me with horrid observations on my character and activities, denounced courtiers with impunity, and cackled at my annoyance. When I was placed into the heavy corset and the preposterous bell-shaped petticoat of hoops was lowered over my head, she shut Geneviève in the closet with a firm “There, now! Waiting will be good for you. In my day, we waited a lot more than young people now—and we were polite about it, too!” And she would stalk off thumping her tall walking stick to tell the world a thing or two, by way of setting it straight.

Now she stalked down the corridors of Versailles, a shriveled-up, disapproving little figure in the black of a previous century, a mysterious black veil concealing her features. She disapproved of the smell in the corridors, peered through her veil in an offended fashion at the bared bosoms of two ladies-in-waiting who were hurrying past, sniffed at the suit of a rustic-looking lordling fresh from the provinces in a manner that made him blush.

“In my day, a man took off his hat to a lady of rank, not merely touched it as if it had grown into his hair,” she said to a slender, olive-skinned gentleman in baggy black velvet trousers and embroidered gray silk jacket. The man looked back at her with a steady gaze. Visconti, the fortune-teller. The marquise was not bothered by other fortune-tellers. Especially Visconti, who lacked at least one hundred and twenty-five years of her experience.

“Good day, Monsieur Visconti. You have fully repaired my estimation of you with your second attempt.” Visconti had taken off his hat with several complex flourishes, making an elaborate court bow.

“My dear Marquise, I am delighted to have met you by this happy coincidence. My powers tell me that you have just been consulted by the Queen in the matter of her pregnancy.”

“How odd. My powers tell me the same about yourself. I presume you predicted the son she wanted.”

“No, because I wish to retain my reputation at court after her miscarriage in April.”

“That was wise. You will go far, Visconti.”

“I already have, little vixen. Last night I was taken to the King’s petit coucher. Consume yourself with envy. Though why the greatest nobles in the land would pay a hundred thousand écus for the privilege of seeing the King sit upon his chaise percée before he retires, I cannot imagine. You French are an insane nation, are you not? And the King is obliged to sit on it whether nature requires it or not because it is expected of him; there he conducts business.”

“Monsieur Visconti, you presume upon being a foreigner. Everything our monarch does is perfection itself, including sitting upon his chaise percée at the ceremony of the petit coucher.”

“I never said it was not perfection. Tell me, have you sold any more of your youth ointments now that you have risen to such rarefied heights?” Our conversation had carried us to the corridor before the cour des princes. On the far side, great doors opened into the garden. Two lackeys were holding open the door for their master to escort a woman outside to a waiting calèche for a tour of the gardens.

“Here I do readings; it is more in demand—Oh, who is that?” I was glad I was veiled. The Marquise de Morville fled in confusion, leaving Geneviève rooted to the spot, her mouth open.

“The Duc de Vivonne, La Montespan’s brother. She has made him a powerful man. Surely, you must know him—or perhaps you mean the girl who has just been helped into the calèche? She is lovely, isn’t she? That’s La Pasquier, his latest unofficial mistress. Quite a find, isn’t she? I hear she came from nowhere—a baker’s daughter, some say, but then, they may be jealous. Have you heard how he stole her from the Chevalier de la Rivière? Scandal itself. He won her in a card game—and I know for a fact he cheated! I suppose he’s brought her to see the sights. He is renowned as a connoisseur of beauty. They say he’s given her a carriage and horses and a little villa in the rue Vaugirard.”

It was Marie-Angélique, my sister. La Voisin had predicted it all that long time ago, that steaming hot summer day in her tall black fortune-telling parlor. But the thing that had shaken me was that Monsieur le Duc had on a sky-blue brocade coat and an immense, curling blond wig.

Now that I had told the Queen’s fortune, my readings became all the rage at court. The bored, the worried, the ambitious—they all sought me out, men and women, chambermaids and counts. Their fears, their passions, their avarice—I heard it all. Rumors started that I knew a secret that would cause the owner to win at cards; I was besieged. “The secret has a curse; to reveal it is death,” I whispered mysteriously and watched in awe as they promised to pawn their jewelry and face sure death just to own it anyway. Another rumor started that I was in fact immortal and dated from the Roman empire. I suppose I had quoted Juvenal once too often. Now strange whispers accompanied my travels up and down the corridors, and at the sight of my shrunken, black-clad figure and tall walking stick, even battle-tried soldiers drew back. Even my saucy, roving-eyed maid had fallen in with the game, walking deferentially behind me carrying my things, as if my power horrified her. Behind my back, she took bribes from people anxious to gain my secrets. It was a good thing I was at least a hundred and thirty years older than she, otherwise she’d have tried to run everything. My little philosophical notebooks and my cash went into a locked coffer, and I never let the key leave my person. Now the word went around that I kept the key to a secret chamber in a castle in the Holy Land, where the secret of the philosopher’s stone was kept.

I kept my secrets to myself. Each night in the tiny rented room in the attic of an overcrowded inn in the village of Versailles, I wrote out my coded list of clients and my predictions, still searching for the true meaning of the pictures in the oracle glass.

“Why do you sit up writing accounts every night?” Sylvie, my maid, would ask when she brushed my hair. “If I had a racket half as good as yours, you wouldn’t find me sitting up and writing. I’d be dancing, or making the bed bounce with that good-looking fellow that came to you for the secret of the cards yesterday.”

“That’s just the sort of thing that would ruin my image. My stock in trade depends on mystery and terror. People who go dancing and flirting have neither.”

“But what do you write?” she wheedled.

“I intend to become very rich someday, and one must start with the correct foundation, records and logic. The Romans—”

“Oh, bother the Romans. Sometimes I actually believe you’re as old as they say. Who else but an old lady would come to a place full of beautiful young men and rich old ones and spend her nights doing accounts? The best way to become rich is the easy way: marry a man with money. Or find a buried treasure. A woman can’t get rich by herself—that’s a law of nature.”

She unlaced my corset and helped me on with my nightgown. It was exquisite. A waterfall of fine embroidery and lace on linen as thin and pale as if it had been woven of spiders’ webs. All my things were nice now. The truth was, I was indifferent to Madame de Morville’s clothes, as long as I had my books, but La Voisin encouraged the wearing of luxurious things; it impressed my clients and was supposed to be the lure that drew me deeper into the fortune-telling business. She never understood that for me the best lure was watching the extraordinary assortment of human characters that revealed itself to me each day. It was my reward for a solitary childhood hidden in corners when the guests came.

The only dress I really wanted I was having made in secret; Monsieur Leroux, the draper, had procured the silk for me at a great bargain. But it was not a dress for the old Marquise, and that is why it had to be made secretly, safe from La Voisin’s spies. It was a dress for a young girl, not yet twenty. It had a rose bodice and skirts, turned back to show an ivory taffeta petticoat and a stomacher embroidered with flowers like a garden in spring. La Voisin would have hated it. I wanted to walk with André Lamotte in the orangerie in it. I wanted to smell the heavy perfumed blossoms and hear him say “I never understood it before; you are really very beautiful. All that time I was looking at the wrong face in the window.” I knew I was a fool, but I couldn’t bear not to be. It had to happen. It just had to. With magic, with money, I would make it happen.

“Just how rich do you intend to be?” Sylvie’s voice broke into my thoughts.

“Unbelievably rich. I intend to repeal that law of nature of yours.” Rich enough to revenge myself on Uncle and the world for making me what I had become, I thought silently.

“Well, you can start tomorrow with the Countess of Soissons. She ought to be a repeat client, the way she runs to fortune-tellers. She sent the most delicious little page, all covered with ribbons, when you were gone this afternoon. If you could have seen him blush when I pretended to pull up my garter!”

Olympe Mancini, the Countess of Soissons—another of the nieces of the late Cardinal Mazarin, and said to be a widow by her own hand.

“Don’t get yourself in trouble, Sylvie, teaching pages about nature.”

“Trouble? There’s no problem with that. Madame Montvoisin arranges everything.”

“I hope you don’t mean what I think you do—”

“Goodness, where have you been living—the moon? Madame Montvoisin provides the best service in the city. I recommend her to everyone. Safe and silent. Not like those others. They make a mistake, and voilà! Your body is dumped in the river. Madame does not make mistakes. You’re safer with her than with the King’s own surgeon. Her organization includes all the best ones in the city; they work on commission. All the society ladies go to her. How else could they live the gallant life at court? You ought to know; you’ve sent her enough business yourself.”

Oh, Geneviève, how could you have been so simple? La Voisin is not like you, enchanted with playing the game of deception. How could you have ever believed for a minute she didn’t offer real services, not flimflam, for all the money she gets? Here it was, as plain as could be before my very nose, and I hadn’t recognized it. She was an angel maker, a high-society abortionist, and the fortune-telling was a cover. The penalty was torture and death—for her, for her associates, for the women who employed her services. Suddenly I saw it all clearly. The secret signals, the terrified faces. A silent network of women, all tied together by fear and the possibility of mutual blackmail, was hidden behind the shining facade of gallantry and jewels, of elegant gowns and velvet masks. Hairdressers, perfumers, ladies’ tailors, all organized into a secret business cartel that covered the city like a web. “Have you a problem, my dear? I know the cleverest woman who can fix it. No one ever need know.” And I was in the center of it all. As I blew out the candle, I asked, “And La Bosse?”

“She’s a filthy woman. Only whores go to her.”

That night I couldn’t sleep, despite the medicine. And as I twisted and tangled in the sheets, I felt the eerie warmth of the oven behind the tapestry, and saw the desperate eyes of the women in the waiting room, and heard Uncle laughing, because he was a man, and could do anything he wished.