“Confound you, what do you wait for?” André said irritably. “Fetch the horse at once if you don’t want to taste a rogue’s fare with your mistress in prison.”
And as he rode through the woods it was little comfort to remember that he had won his wager with Henri, Comte de St. Benôit.
CHAPTER VII
THE KING’S HANDKERCHIEF
In December the Duchesse de Châteauroux, the maîtresse en titre of the King of France, had died, some said of poison, some of a broken heart at her treatment at Metz when she had been driven by her enemies from the sick King’s bedside and from the Court, a few because she had caught a chill and even maîtresses en titre were mortal. Would Louis select another lady to take her place? Who would she be? That was the question. France was at war—that dreary war called in the books the “War of the Austrian Succession”—and this spring—1745—under the Maréchal de Saxe, (the son of a king and Aurora von Konigsmarck, himself the idol of women of quality as he had been the idol of Adrienne Lecouvreur) great efforts were to be made to drive from the Low Countries the red-coated English and white-coated Austrians, to win for the Fleurs-de-Lis the boundaries that, since the days of Henri IV., God, nature, and French genius had destined to be French. Was not Louis, Le Bien Aimé, himself going to the campaign with the flower of his nobility and with his son and heir? Yes, surely great things would be accomplished before the September winds shook the apples off the trees in the orchards of Normandy or they trod the wine-vats on the sun-clad slopes of Gascony. Paris was in a fever of excitement; the Court was still en fête for the marriage of Monsieur le Dauphin to a Saxon princess. But would there be a successor to the hapless Duchesse de Châteauroux? That was the only question about which the Paris that counted really cared.
André of course went to tell St. Benôit how he had won his bet, and he found him gossiping in the salon of the Comtesse des Forges.
“The King has already chosen,” Madame remarked, fanning herself placidly. “But Monseigneur the Archbishop and the royal confessor are still able to work on his remorse, so for the present His Majesty affects to play at being a dévot.”
“I don’t believe it,” St. Benôit retorted. “The King will be a dévot for one day in the week and a lover for the other six, as all kings of France and their subjects, too, ought to be. Naturally he does not wish to shock Madame la Dauphine, but wait till the campaign is over; Mars will give way to Venus, and then we shall have one of the De Nesles back again.”
Whereat Madame lifted her heavy-lidded eyes, of which she was so proud, and said contemptuously, “Pooh!”
“I have won the wager,” André interposed, “and I will undertake to win another. I will bet that it will not be a De Nesles, but a bourgeoise that the King will select.”
“Impossible!” both St. Benôit and Madame cried, genuinely shocked. “A bourgeoise at Versailles! It would be a scandal, unheard of, monstrous, not to be tolerated.”