Description: A Heart of Gall Ch'teau de Cazeneuve, Gascony, France June 1666 I had always been a great talker and teller of tales. 'You should put a lock on that tongue of yours. It's long enough and sharp enough to slit your own throat,' our guardian warned me, the night before I left home to go to the royal court at Versailles. He sat at the head of the long wooden table in the chateau's arched dining room, lifting his lip in distaste as the servants brought us our usual peasant fare of sausage and white-bean cassoulet. He had not accustomed himself to our simple Gascon ways, not even after six years. I just laughed. 'Don't you know a woman's tongue is her sword? You wouldn't want me to let my only weapon rust, would you?' 'No chance of that.' The Marquis de Maulévrier was a humourless man, with a face like a goat and yellowish eyes that followed my sister and me as we went about our business. He thought our mother had spoilt us, and had set himself to remedy our faults. I loathed him. No, loathe is far too soft a word. I detested him. My sister, Marie, said, 'Please, my lord, you mustn't mind her. You know we're famous here in Gascony for our troubadours and minstrels. We Gascons love to sing songs and tell stories. She means no harm by it.' 'I love to tell a gasconade,' I sang. 'A braggadocio, a fanfaronade . . .' Marie sent me a look. 'You know that Charlotte-Rose will need honey on her tongue if she's to make her way in this world.' 'Sangdieu, but it's true. Her face won't make her fortune.' 'That's unfair, my lord. Charlotte-Rose has the sweetest face . . .' 'She might be passable if only she'd pluck out that sting in her tail,' the Marquis de Maulévrier began. Seeing that I had screwed up my face like a gargoyle, waggling my tongue at him, he rapped his spoon on the pitted tabletop. 'You'd best sweeten your temperament, mademoiselle, else you'll find yourself with a heart of gall.' I should have listened to him. Palais de Versailles, France January 1697 Full of regret, I clung to the strap as my carriage rolled away from the Palais de Versailles. It was a bleak and miserable day, the sky bruised with snow clouds. I was sure my nose must be red; it certainly felt red. I drew my fur-edged cloak closer about me, glad that I would not, at least, arrive at my prison looking like a pauper. I still could not believe that the King would order me to a nunnery. Apparently, it was in punishment for some impious Noëls that I had written, but all the women of the salons made subtle mock of the church. It seemed a harsh punishment for such a petty crime. Surely the King did not believe the rumours that I was having an affair with his son? The Dauphin and I were friends, drawn together by our love of art and music and novels, and our hatred of the King. Perhaps I had been too bold in expressing my views. Perhaps my tongue and my quill had grown a little sharp. I had thought myself safe under the Dauphin's protection. The Dauphin always said, though, that the one way for him to ensure his father punished someone was to beg his father to offer that man a favour. Perched on the other seat, my maid, Nanette, gazed at me unhappily but I would not meet her eyes. 'It's all a great misunderstanding,' I said. 'The King will soon summon me back.' I tried to smile. 'Couldn't you have gone to him and begged his pardon, Bon-bon?' Nanette asked. 'I did try,' I answered. 'But you know the King. He must be the most unforgiving man in Christendom.' 'Bon-bon!' 'It's no use scolding me, Nanette. I'm simply telling the truth.' 'But to be locked up in a convent. To become a nun.' Nanette's voice was faint with horror. 'Your parents must be rolling in their graves.' 'What were my choices? Exile or the convent. At least, this way, the King will still pay my pension and I'll be on French soil, breathing French air. Where else could I have gone? What could I have done to support myself? I'm too old and ugly to walk the streets.' Nanette's face puckered. 'You're not old or ugly.' I laughed. 'Not to you, perhaps, Nanette. But, believe me, most people at Versailles consider me a hideous old hag. I'm forty-seven years old, and not even my closest friends ever thought I was a beauty.' 'You're not a hideous old hag,' Nanette protested. 'Not beautiful, no, but there's better things than beauty in this world.' 'Belle laide, Athénaïs calls me,' I replied with a little shrug. The expression was usually used to describe a woman who was arresting despite the plainness of her looks. My guardian had spoken truly when he said my face would never be my fortune. Nanette made a little tsk tsk with her tongue. 'You're worth twice the Marquise de Montespan. Don't you listen to a word she says. And don't you go thinking you're a hideous old hag either. I wouldn't permit anyone to say that about me, and in my case it's true.' I smiled despite myself. Nanette was not the most attractive of women. She was tiny and gaunt, dressed always in black, with sparse white hair screwed back into a knob at the back of her head. Her face and body were so thin that you could see all the bones underneath her withered skin, and she had lost quite a few teeth. Her black eyes were fierce, but her hands were always tender and her brain quite as nimble as it had ever been. Nanette had been my maid ever since I was weaned from my wet-nurse. As a child, I would lie in my vast shadowy bed, a flame floating in the old glass lantern, and sleepily listen as she sang, 'You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.' Nanette was like the Lord in that psalm. Before a word was on my tongue, she knew it completely. She hemmed me in behind and before, and her hand held me fast. 'You'd best write to your sister straightaway and let her know what's happened,' Nanette went on. 'Marie's not clever like you, but she's got a good heart. She'll beg that fat husband of hers to petition the King.' 'I'll write to the Princesses too,' I said. 'They'll be furious with their father. He simply cannot go around banishing all the most interesting people from court, can he?' Nanette humphed, but the thought of the King's three pipe-smoking, bastard-born daughters lifted my spirits a little. Born of two of the King's mistresses, they had been legitimised and married off to various dukes and princes, and they enlivened the court with their scandalous love affairs, their extravagance, their gambling and their constant bickering over precedence. Although they were much younger than me, we had become good friends, and I often attended their soirées and salons. My smile slowly faded. The Princesses de Conti were no longer in favour with the King and his reigning mistress, Françoise de Maintenon, who had been queen in all but name for more than fifteen years now. Some even whispered that Louis had married her in secret. Yet Françoise had none of the beauty and brilliance of the King's earlier mistresses. Not only was she over sixty, but she was also rather plain and dumpy, and altogether too pious for the King's bastard daughters. Remembering the Princesses, it occurred to me that their mothers, the royal mistresses, had all ended their dazzling careers within the austere confines of a convent. Louise de la Vallière, the King's first mistress and mother of Princess Marie-Anne, had been transformed into Sur Louise de la Miséricorde. Athénaïs, the Marquise de Montespan, mother of Princess Louise Françoise and Princess Françoise Marie, had been forced to the nunnery by scandal and rumours of black magic and poison. The frivolous Angélique de Fontanges, the girl who had supplanted Athénaïs in the King's affection, had died in a convent at the age of twenty. Poisoned, it was said. I was a fool. Why would the King hesitate to banish me to a nunnery, when he had no problem sending his discarded mistresses, the mothers of his children? Women were locked up in convents all the time. Younger daughters sent as babies, so their parents did not have to pay so rich a dowry as they would for their wedding day. Rebellious young women, cloistered away to punish them for disobedience. Widows, like my poor mother, banished by the King to a convent, even though she was a Huguenot and so feared and hated the Roman Catholic Church with all her heart. Even though I was pretending not to care, my stomach was knotted with anxiety. I knew little about convents except that once a woman disappeared inside, she stayed inside. Nanette had often told me the story of how Martin Luther's wife, a former nun, had only been able to escape by hiding in an empty fish barrel. Certainly, I had never seen my own

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