Angelique - Part 1. Marquise of the Angels Chapter 1 - Read online

“NOUNOU,” inquired Angelique, “why did Gilles de Retz kill so many children?”
“To please the devil, my child. Gilles de Retz, the Ogre of Machccoul, wanted to be the mightiest lord of his day. His castle was chock-full of retorts and phials and cauldrons brimming with scarlet broths and fearful vapours. The devil demanded that the heart of a little child be of fered him as sacrifice. That’s how his crimes began. And terrified mothers would point to the black turrets of Machecoul, around which the ravens circled continually, the dungeons were so full of innocent corpses.”
“Did he eat them all?” asked Madelon, Angelique’s little sister, in a trembling voice.
“Not all of them, he couldn’t have,” answered the nurse.
Bending over the stewing-pot in which the bacon and cabbage were cooking, she stirred the soup in silence for some moments. Hortensc, Angelique and Madelon, the three daughters of the Baron dc Sance de Monteloup, waited anxiously for the rest of the story, their spoons arrested in mid-air beside their bowls.
“He did worse,” continued the nurse at last in a bitter tone. “First he would send for a poor little mite, who would cry piteously for his mother. The lord reclining on his bed would revel in the child’s terror. Then he’d have the child hung on the wall by a sort of bracket that squeezed his chest and neck and almost strangled him, but not enough to kill him. The child would struggle like a strung-up fowl, with choking screams and eyes bulging out of his head, till he turned blue. And the vast hall resounded with the laughter of cruel men and the groans of the little victim. Then Gilles de Retz had him taken down, sat liim on his knees, propped the little angel’s head against his chest, and talked to him gently, reassuringly.
“All this wasn’t in earnest, he would explain. They’d only wanted to have fun, but now it was over. The child would have sweetmeats, a soft feather-bed, a satin costume like a little page. The child trusted him. A light of joy glistened in his tearful eyes. Then suddenly the lord would plunge a dagger into his throat.
“But even more frightful,” the nurse went on, “was what happened to the very young girls he kidnapped.”


“What did he do to them?” asked Hortense.
At that moment, old Guillaume, who had been sitting in a comer of the fire-place scraping a carrot of tobacco, intervened, grumbling into his yellow beard:
“Hold your tongue, old madwoman! I’ve been through the wars and yet you manage to make even my stomach turn with your nonsense.”
Big Fantine Lozier veered round to face him angrily.
“Nonsense!’. . . Easy to see you weren’t born in Poitou, but a long way of f, Guillaume Liitzen. You need but go north towards Nantes and you’ll soon come upon the accursed castle of Machccoul. Those crimes were committed two centuries ago, but the people still cross themselves when they pass close by. But you don’t hail from here, you know nothing of the ancestors of this land.”
“Fine lot of ancestors, if they’re all like your Gillcs de Rctz!”
“Gillcs de Retz did evil on such a vast scale that no country other than Poitou can boast of a criminal like him. And when he died, after being tried and sentenced at Nantes, but confessing his sins and beseeching God’s forgiveness, all the mothers whose children he had tortured and eaten put on mourning.”
“Now that’s too much!” exclaimed old Guillaume.
“That’s how we are, we people of Poitou. Great sinners, great for givers!
The nurse grimly set soup plates on the table and hugged little Denis with fervour.
“To be sure,” she went on, “I didn’t get much schooling, but I know the difference between fireside tales and true stories of bygone days. Gillcs de Retz really did exist. Perhaps his soul is still roaming around Machecoul, but his body has mouldered in this earth. That’s why you can’t talk of him lightly, as of the fairies and goblins that frolic around the big stones set up in the fields. Though one shouldn’t make too much fun of those evil sprites ...”
“And may one make fun of ghosts, Nounou?” asked Angelique.
“Better not, my pretty one. Ghosts arc not wicked, but they arc sad and touchy, so why add mockery to the torments of those poor creatures?”
“Why docs the old lady weep, the one who wanders around this castle?”
“Who knows? Last time I met her, six years ago, between the old guard-room and the long corridor, I think she was no longer crying— perhaps because of the prayers his lordship your grandfather had said for her in the chapel.” ,
“I heard her walk on the stairs in the tower,” added Babctte the servant-girl.
“It was a rat, more likely. The old woman of Monteloup isn’t noisy and doesn’t like to make a fuss. Maybe she was blind. That's what people think, anyway, because she always keeps her hands stretched out. Or else she may be searching for something. Occasionally she comes close to sleeping children and passes her hand over their faces.”
Fantine’s voice dropped and became lugubrious.
“She is looking for a dead child, perhaps.”
“Your mind, good woman, is more gruesome than the sight of a charnel-house,” protested old Guillaume again. “It may be that your Lord of Rctz was a great man whom you are proud to call your fellow- countryman—across the distance of two centuries—and maybe the Lady of Monteloup was quite respectable, but I say it’s wicked to frighten those pretty ones to such a point that they forget to fill their little bellies.”
“Ha! You’re a fine one to act squeamish, you brute of a soldier and devil’s henchman! How many such pretty bellies did you run through with your pike when you were serving the Emperor of Austria in the fields of Germany, Alsace and Picardy? How many cottages did you smoke out, shutting the door on entire families to be roasted inside? Didn’t you ever string up poor country folk? So many that the branches of the trees broke under the load. And didn’t you rape women and girls till they died of shame?”
“Just like the rest of them, my good woman. That’s a soldier’s life. That’s war. But the lives of these little girls arc made up of games and pleasant ‘tales.”
“So long as the soldiers and brigands don’t come darkening the country-side like a cloud of locusts. Then the life of little girls becomes the life of the soldier, a life of war, misery and fear.”
The nurse grimly uncovered a big stone dish filled with hare-pie and started buttering slices of bread, which she doled out.
“Listen to me, little ones—to me, Fantinc Lozier.”
Hortcnse, Angcliquc and Madclon, who had turned this argument to account by scraping their bowls clean, raised their noses again, and their tcn-ycar-old brother Gontran left the dark corner where he had been sulking and came closer. This was the hour of war and looting, of robbers and drunkards, all mingling in the glow of fires, the clash of swords and women’s screams. . . .
“Guillaume Liitzcn, do you know my son, who is a carter of our lord the Baron dc Sancc dc Monteloup in this very castle?”
“I know him; lie’s a very handsome fellow.”
“Well, all I can tell you about his father is that he was in the army of . Monscigneur the Cardinal Richelieu, when he moved down against La
Rochelle to exterminate the Protestants. Personally, I never was a Huguenot and I always prayed to the Virgin to keep me pure till my marriage-day. But by the time the troops of our Most Christian King Louis ХШ had passed through the country, the best I can say is that I wasn’t a virgin any longer. And I named my son Jean the Cuirass in memory of all those devils, one of whom was his father, whose cuirasses were so studded with nails that they tore to shreds the only skirt I owned at the time.
“As for the bandits and highwaymen whom hunger has so of ten let loose on the roads, I could keep you awake a whole night through with tales of what they did to me on the straw in the barns, while they were grilling the feet of my man over the hearth to make him spew up where he’d hidden his savings. And me thinking on account of the smell that they were roasting the pig.”
Thereupon big Famine burst out laughing, then poured herself a tumbler of apple-brandy to refresh her tongue, which had become dry with so much talking.
In the nurse’s veins flowed a little of the Moorish blood which the Arabs, in the eleventh century, had brought right up to the confines of Poitou. Angelique had suckled with her milk this compound of passion and dreams which had gone into the making of the ancient spirit of her province, a land of forests and marshes, opening like a gulf on to the warm ocean winds. She had imbibed willy-nilly a world of drama and fairy¬tales. It had appealed to her and given her a sort of immunity against fear. She looked down with pity on trembling little Madclon or on her elder sister Hortense, sitting stiffly, prim-faced yet dying to ask Nounou what exactly the bandits had done to her on the straw.
Angelique, at eight, guessed pretty shrewdly what had happened in the barn. How many times had she led the cow to the bull or the goat to the billy? And her friend, the young shepherd, Nicholas, had explained to her that, in order to have children, men and women did the same thing. And that’s how Nounou had had Jean the Cuirass. But what troubled Angelique was that Nounou’s voice, when talking of these tilings, alternated between languorous rapture and a very genuine horror.
However, there was no point in trying to understand Nounou, her silences, her rages. It was enough that she was there, vast and bustling, with her strong arms, her lap, beneath her dress of fustian, a wide-open basket where you could nestle like a little bird and hear her sing you a cradle-song or talk to you of Gilles dc Rctz.
Much simpler was old Guillaume Liitzen, who talked slowly with a rough accent. He was said to be Swiss or German. It was nearly fifteen years since he had come limping and barefoot along the Roman road that leads from Angers to Saint-Jean-d’Angely. He had walked into the castle of Monteloup, asked for a bowl of milk, and stayed on ever since, a jack- of -all-tradcs, repairing, tinkering, pottering about. The Baron de Sance made him carry letters to neighbouring friends, or receive the Sergent-des- Aides when he came to collect taxes. Old Guillaume would listen to the sergeant patiently and then answer in his mountain dialect, either Swiss or Tyrolese, and the other would go away discouraged!
Had he come from the battlefields of the north or the east? And why had this foreign mercenary apparently been travelling south from Brittany? All that anyone knew of him was that he had been at Liitzen under the command of the war-lord Wallenstein, and that he had had the honour of piercing the paunch of the stout and magnificent King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, when the latter, losing his way in the fog during the battle, had fallen among the Austrian pikemen.
In the attic where he slept you could see the sunlight shine through the cobwebs on his old armour and ЬЦ helmet, out of which he still drank his mulled wine or sometimes ladled his soup. His enormous pike, three times as tall as he, served to knock down the walnuts in season.
But above all, Angelique envied him his little tobacco-grater, made of tortoise-shell and inlaid wood, which he called his 'grivoise, according to the custom of the German military in French service, who were themselves called ‘grivois9.
In the castle’s vast kitchen, doors opened and closed all through the evening. Some led into the night, whence emerged, with a strong smell of compost, grooms and serving-maids and the carter, Jean the Cuirass, as swarthy as his mother. The dogs, too, slipped through—the two long greyhounds, Mars and Maijolaine, and the badger-dogs baked to their eyes with mud. From inside the castle, the doors opened to let through the sprighdy Nanette, who was training to be a chambermaid, while hoping to acquire sufficient good manners to leave these hard-up masters and enter service with the Marquis du Plessis de Belliere, a few miles from Monteloup. To and fro passed also the two little footmen, with shaggy manes over their eyes, carrying logs for the big hall and water for the bedrooms.
Then the Baroness appeared. She had a kindly face, wasted by the country air and her numerous childbirths. She wore a grey serge dress and a black woollen hood, for the air in the main hall where she sat between her father-in-law and old aunts was damper than in the kitchen. She asked if the herb tea for the Baron would soon be ready and if Baby had given any trouble in feeding. She stroked Angelique’s cheek in passing. The little girl was half asleep, antHier long hair of burnished gold spread over the table and glowed in the light of the hearth.
“Time to go to bed, girls! Pulchcrie will take you upstairs.”
And Pulcherie, one of the elderly aunts, appeared with her usual docility. Since neither husband nor convent had been found to take her without a dowry she had decided to assume the role of governess to her nieces. And because she made herself useful instead of moaning and making tapestries all day long, she was treated with a little scorn and rather less consideration than the other aunt, fat old Jeanne.
Pulchcrie assembled her nieces. The nurses would put the younger ones to bed, while Gontran, the tutorlcss boy, could retire to his straw pallet in the attic whenever he liked.
Following in the steps of the skinny old maid, Hortcnsc, Angcliquc and Madelon reached the hall, where the hearth-fire and three candle-sticks hardly dispelled the massed shadows that had accumulated through the centuries under the high medieval vaults. A few tapestries covered the walls, in an attempt to protect them from moisture, but they were so old and worm-eaten that the scenes they represented had become indistinguish¬able, except for the mournful eyes of some wan figures who seemed to stare reproachfully.
The little girls curtsied before their grandfather, who was seated in front of the fire-place in his black greatcoat trimmed with mangy fur. But his white hands on the pommel of his cane were truly royal. He wore a huge, black, felt hat, and his square-cut beard, like that of the late King Henri IV, rested on a small fluted collarette, which Hortcnsc secretly considered appallingly old-fashioned.
A second curtsy for Aunt Jeanne, whose sulking lips would not deign to smile, and then up the big stone staircase, which was as damp as a cavern. The bedrooms were icy in winter but cool in summer. The bed in which the three girls slept loomed like a monument in the corner of a bare room, all the furniture having been sold by previous generations. The stone tiles, covered with straw in winter, were broken in many places. A short step-ladder of three rungs led up to the bed. Aftc putting on their night-gowns and bonnets and getting down on their knees to thank God for His blessing, the three little damsels of Sance de Monteloup clambered into their good feather-bed and slipped under coverlets full of holes. Angeliquc promptly sought the hole in the sheet that corresponded to the one in the counterpane, through which
she could pass her rosy foot and wriggle her toes to make Madelon laugh.
The little girl was more fearful than a rabbit as a result of the stories that Nounou told. So was Hortense, though, being the eldest, she did not say anything. But Angelique relished her fear with a thrill of pleasure. Life was made up of mysteries and discoveries. The mice could be heard gnawing the woodwork, and the owls and fox-bats fluttering under the eaves of the two towers, with their shrill screeching. The greyhounds whimpered in the courtyard, and a mule scratched its hide audibly against the base of the walls.
And sometimes, on snowy nights, you could hear the wolves howling, as they came out of the wild forests of Monteloup towards the castle. Or again, beginning with the first spring nights there came floating up to the castle the songs of the villagers dancing a rigadoon in the moonlight.
One of the walls of the castle of Monteloup gave on to the marshes. This was the oldest part, built under the Seigneur dc Ridoue de Sance, a companion of Du Gucsclin’s in the twelfth century. It was flanked by two stocky towers, with their rampart-walks in wooden tiles. When Angelique climbed up there with Gontran and Denis, they had fun spitting into the machicoulis, those openings through which the soldiers in the Middle Ages used to pour pails of flaming oil on their assailants. The walls were built on a small limestone promontory beyond which extended the marshes. In olden times this had been an inlet of the sea. The receding waters had left a network of rivers and canals and pools, now filled with verdure and willows, the realm of cel and frog, where the peasants could only get about in boats. The hamlets and huts were built on the former islands of the inlet. After roaming through this watery province when staying with the Marquis du Plcssis one summer, the Due de Tremoille, who prided himself on his exotic tastes, had called it ‘a green Venice*.
This vast liquid meadow, the sweet marshes, stretched from Niort and Fontenay-lc-Comtc to the sea. Just before Marans, Chaille and even L119011, it merged with the bitter marshes, the still salty lands. And finally there rose the white barrier of precious salt, for which Customs men and smugglers contended fiercely.
If the nurse disdained the stories of salt-tax collectors and smugglers which thrilled the marshlands, the reason was that she sided with the firm ground and scorned all those who lived with wet feet and who were all Protestants, anyway.
On the landward side the castle of Monteloup presented a more recent facade, lightened by many windows. An old drawbridge with rusty chains, a-flutter with chickens and turkeys, barely separated the main
entrance from the meadows where the mules grazed. On the right hand was the seigneurial dovecot with its round-tiled roof and, beyond it, a farm. The other farms were on the far side of the moat. Still farther one could see the steeple of the village of Monteloup.
And beyond that began the forest with its tight clusters of oak and chestnut. That forest could lead you without the least glade or opening to the north of Gatine and the Bocagc of Vendee, almost up to the Loire and the county of Anjou, provided you felt inclined to cross it from end to end and had no fear of wolves or bandits.
The nearest forest, that of Nieul, belonged to the Lord of Plcssis. The people of Monteloup sent their pigs to root there, and this meant endless lawsuits with the Marquis’s steward, the rapacious Monsieur Molines. In the forest, too, lived some clogmakers and charcoal-burners and an old witch, Melusine. She would sometimes emerge from the wood in winter to come and drink a bowl of milk on the doorstep in exchange for medicinal plants. Following her example, Angelique picked roots and flowers, dried, boiled and ground them, then enclosed them in little bags in a secret hiding-place that only old Guillaume knew. Pulchcrie could call her for hours without her reappearing.
Pulcheric cried sometimes when she thought of Angelique. The girl represented for her not only the failure of what she regarded as a traditional education but also the decline of her race and nobility, fast losing their dignity through poverty and want. No sooner did dawn break than the girl would rush of f, with flying hair, and hardly more clothes on than a peasant-wench: a shirt, a bodice and a faded petticoat. Her little feet,'as dainty as those of a princess, were hard as horn, for she would send her shoes flying into the first shrub she came across so as to skip more freely. If she was called, she would hardly turn her round, sun-tanned face, in which shone two eyes of a greenish blue, the colour of the plant that grows in the marshes and which bears her name.
“She’ll have to be sent to a convent,” sighed Pulchcrie.
But the Baron de Sance, taciturn and racked by worries, shrugged his shoulders. How could he put his second daughter into a convent, when he was not even able to send his eldest one there? His annual income amounted to not quite four thousand livres, out of which he had to pay four hundred for the education of his two elder sons, who were with the Augustine monks in Poitiers.
In the marshes, Angelique had a friend in Valentine the millgr’s son. And in the forest there was Nicholas, who was one of the seven children of a labourer, and was already working as a shepherd for Monsieur dc Sanc£.
With Valentine she would go boating on the waterways bordered with forget-me-nots, mint and angelica. Valentine would pick whole branches of this tall, thick, exquisite-smelling plant. He would then go and sell it to the monks of the Abbey of Nieul, who used its roots and flowers for a medicinal liqueur, and its stalks for sweetmeats. In exchange, he obtained scapulars and rosaries which he would hurl at the heads of the Protestant village children, who would flee screaming, as if the devil himself had spat into their faces. His father, the miller, deplored this strange behaviour. Although a Catholic, he prided himself on his tolerance. And what business had his son, anyway, to peddle bunches of angelica when some day he’d inherit the miller’s charge and could set himself up in the com¬fortable mill, built on piles at the water’s edge?
But Valentine was a boy hard to understand. Of ruddy complexion and, despite his twelve years, already built like a Hercules, he was as silent as an oyster and had a vague stare, and people who envied the miller said the boy was almost a half-wit.
Nicholas, the garrulous, bragging mule-herd, would take Angeliquc along to pick mushrooms, blackberries and blueberries. She’d gather sweet chestnuts, and he’d cut pipes for her out of hazel-nut switches.
Those two boys could have murdered each other out of jealousy for Angeliquc’s favours. She was already so pretty that the peasants regarded her as the living incarnation of the fairies who lived in the big dolmen on the witches’ field.
She had ideas of grandeur. “I am a Marquise,” she’d declare to whoever would listen to her.
“Really? I low’s that?”
“Because I’ve married a Marquis,” she’d answer.
The Marquis would alternately be Valentine or Nicholas, or one ot the other scamps, no more wicked than birds, whom she dragged along after her through fields and woods.
She would also say with a funny face:
“I am Angeliquc, I am leading my little angels to war.”
From this she got her nickname: the little Marquise of the Angels.