So it went. For a while I continued screaming as if suffering great discomfort, but as the minutes wore on, I changed over to moans of pleasure. It seemed to go on for much longer than a quarter of an hour. I lay down on a rolled-up carpet and tore at my own clothes, pulled the ribbons and braids from my hair, and breathed as heavily as I could, to make my face flushed and sweaty. Towards the end, I closed my eyes: partly to block out the hellish things I was beginning to see in the middle of the room, and partly to play my role more convincingly. Now I could clearly hear the courtiers in the gallery.
“She’s a screamer,” said one of them admiringly. “I like that, it makes my blood hot.”
“It is most indiscreet,” said another scornfully.
“The mistress of a King does not have to be discreet.”
“Mistress? He’ll throw her away soon, then where will she be?”
“In my bed, I hope!”
“Then you had best invest in a set of earplugs.”
“He had best learn to fuck like a King before he’ll need them!”
A drop of moisture struck me on the forehead. Fearing that it was a splash of blood, I opened my eyes and looked vertically upwards into the face of Father Edouard de Gex. He was indeed all spattered with the blood royal, but what had fallen on me was a bead of sweat from his brow. He was glaring straight down into my face. I have no idea how long he had been watching me thus. I glanced over towards the bench and saw blood everywhere. The chirurgeon was sitting on the floor, drained. His assistants were packing rags between the King’s buttocks. To stop all of a sudden would be to give the ruse away, and so I closed my eyes again and brought myself to a screaming-if simulated-climax, then exhaled one long last moan, and opened my eyes again.
Father Edouard was still standing there above me, but his eyes were closed and his face slack. It is an expression I have seen before.
The King was standing up, flanked between a pair of assistants who stood ready to catch him if he should faint. He was deathly pale and tottering from side to side, but-somewhat incredibly-he was alive, and awake, and buttoning up his own breeches. Behind him other assistants were bundling up the bloody sheets and drop-cloths and rushing them out through the back door.
Here is what the King said to me as he was leaving:
“Nobles of France enjoy my esteem and confidence as a birthright, and make themselves common by their failures. Commoners may earn my esteem and confidence by pleasing me, and thereby ennoble themselves. You may please me by showing discretion.”
“What of d’Avaux?” I asked.
“You may tell him everything,” said the King, “so that he may feel pride, inasmuch as he is my friend, and fear, inasmuch as he is my foe.”
Monseigneur, I do not know what His Majesty meant by this, but I am sure you do…
To Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
29 September 1685
Doctor,
The season has turned and brought a noticeable darkening of the light.*In two days the sun will sink farther beneath the southern horizon as I journey with Mme. la marquise d’Ozoir to Dunquerque at the extreme northern limit of the King’s realm and thence God willing to Holland. I have heard that the sun has been shining very hot in the South, in the country of Savoy more on this later.
The King is at war-not only with the Protestant heretics who infest his realms, but with his own doctors. A few weeks ago he had a tooth pulled. Any tooth-puller chosen at random from the Pont-Neuf could have handled this operation, but d’Aquin, the King’s doctor, got it wrong, and the resulting wound became abscessed. D’Aquin’s solution to this problem was to pull out every last one of the King’s upper teeth. But while he was doing this he somehow managed to rip out part of the King’s palate, creating a horrendous wound which he then had to close up by the application of red-hot irons. Nonetheless, it too abscessed and had to be cauterized several more times. There is another story, too, concerning the King’s health, which I will have to tell you some other time.
It is nearly beyond comprehension that a King should suffer so, and if these facts were generally known among the peasantry they would doubtless be misconstrued as an omen of Divine misfavor. In the corridors of Versailles, where most but not all! of the King’s sufferings are common knowledge, there are a few weak-minded ninehammers who think this way; but fortunately this chateau has been graced, for the last few weeks, by the presence of Father Edouard de Gex, a vigorous young Jesuit of a good family when Louis seized the Franche-Comte in 1667 this family betrayed their Spanish neighbors and flung open their gates to his army; Louis has rewarded them with titlesand a great favorite of Mme. de Maintenon, who looks to him as a sort of spiritual guide. Where most of our fawning courtier-priests would prefer to avoid the theological questions raised by the King’s sufferings, Father Edouard has recently taken this bull by the horns, and both asked and answered these questions in a most forthright and public way. He has given lengthy homilies at Mass, and Mme. de Maintenon has arranged for his words to be printed and distributed around Versailles and Paris. I will try to send you a copy of his booklet. The gist of it is that the King is France and that his ailments and sufferings are reflections of the condition of the realm. If various pockets of his flesh have become abscessed it is a sort of carnal metaphor for the continued existence of heresy within the borders of France-meaning, as everyone knows, the R.P.R., the religion pretendue reformee, or Huguenots as they are known by some. The points of similarity between R.P.R. communities and suppurating abscesses are many, viz…
Forgive this endless homily, but I have much to tell and am weary of writing endless descriptions of gowns and jewels to cover my traces. This family of Fr. de Gex, Mme. la duchesse d’Oyonnax, and Mme. la marquise d’Ozoir have long dwelt in the mountains of Jura between Burgundy and the southern tip of the Franche-Comte. It is a territory where many things come together and accordingly it is a sort of cornucopia of enemies. For generations they looked on with envy as their neighbor the Duke of Savoy reaped a harvest of wealth and power by virtue of sitting astride the route joining Genoa and Lyons-the financial aorta of Christendom. And from their chateaux in the southern Jura they can literally gaze down into the cold waters of Lake Geneva, the wellspring of Protestantism, where the English Puritans fled for refuge during the reign of Bloody Mary and where the French Huguenots have enjoyed a safe haven from the repressions of their Kings. I have seen much of Father Edouard lately because he pays frequent visits to the apartments of his cousines, and I have witnessed in his dark eyes a hatred of the Protestants that would make your flesh crawl if you saw it.
This family’s opportunity finally came when Louis conquered the Franche-Comte, as I said, and they have not failed to take full advantage of it. Last year brought them more good fortune: the Duke of Savoy was forced to take as his wife Anne Marie, the daughter of Monsieur by his first wife, Minette of England, and hence the niece of King Louis XIV. So the Duke-hitherto independent-became a part of the Bourbon family, and subject to the whims of the patriarch.
Now Savoy also borders on that troublesome Lake and it has long been the case that Calvinist proselytizers would come up the valleys to preach to the common folk, who have followed the example of their Duke in being independent-minded and have been receptive to the rebel creed.
You can almost finish the story yourself now, Doctor. Father Edouard has been telling his disciple, Mme. de Maintenon, all about how Protestants have been running rampant in Savoy, and spreading the infection to their R.P.R. brethren in France. De Maintenon repeats all of this to the suffering King, who even in the best of times has never hesitated to be cruel to his subjects, or even his own family, for the good of the realm. But these are not the best of times for the King-there has been a palpable darkening of the light, which is why I chose this hexagram as my encryption key. The King has told the Duke of Savoy that the “rebels” as he considers them are not merely to be suppressed-they are to be exterminated. The Duke has temporized, hoping that the King’s mood will improve as his ailments heal. He has proffered one excuse after another. But very recently the Duke made the error of claiming that he cannot carry out the King’s commands because he does not have enough money to mount a military campaign. Without hesitation the King generously offered to undertake the operation out of his own pocket.