The La Motte Woman by Mary Martin Devlin

Author:Mary Martin Devlin [Devlin, Mary Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sort3
Publisher: Cuidono Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The next day, despite the deep snow along the paths and the biting chill in the night air, the Cardinal, his thoughts in dismal confusion, left his palace for a walk in the garden. Peace muffled the street beyond the garden walls. The Cardinal’s feet thundered along the ice-encrusted pathway, sinking into the snow. For a while, he floundered around like a noisy drunk, then stopped and laughed out loud. What a fool I am, he said to himself, to allow my heart to slap me around like an unruly child! He took a deep breath and tried to clear his thoughts. He had to laugh at himself. Bon sang! What a clown he had become! Getting so worked up that his thoughts chased around and around in his head like a dog trying to bite the fleas tormenting his tail. He took another deep breath. How beneficent the crisp, unforgiving air of winter. Despite his heavy cloak he could feel the hair on his head stiffening with frost.

He wished he could be more like Jeanne—cool, controlled, yet vivacious, gay, full of wild, animal spirits. She was irresistible. He could not believe the ferocity of their coupling today. All those months of separation. Sometimes it frightened him to need her so much.

“I’ve come here to seduce you all over again,” she had said after he kissed her, lifting her little chin like a naughty actress. And, mon dieu, she had succeeded in doing just that. Looking back, he could not remember when she had been in a more lubricious mood. Diable! It was wonderful!

He stuffed his hands up the sleeves of his cloak. Oh, God, he said to himself, here comes my heart again, battering me with recriminations.

But, no, it was only the acid of bitterness seeping into his heart, poisoning drop by drop his innocent adoration of the Queen. Like a novice acrobat he kept falling from the impossible heights he set for himself. Or, rather he was forever being pushed from them, he thought miserably.

He pulled himself up straight and began to walk again. Enough of such self-pitying nonsense. Jeanne was good for him. A stiff dose of reality. Thank God, he had been wise enough not to confide in her what he had assumed the Queen would ask of him. Jeanne would have laughed herself silly. Covert diplomacy, international intrigue, he and the Queen in fetching disguises engaging in nocturnal negotiations with a Viennese courier in some deserted farmhouse near the Trianon, or in a moldering cellar in Paris somewhere near the Opéra. Ah, what a melodrama of intrigue and erotic longing his wretched heart had woven . . .

He should have suspected something less than grand from the boisterous way Jeanne disported herself when she came to him that morning.

“Her Majesty informs me that you, my child, will provide the key to the enigma. You know, this secret negotiation, this delicate mission that she wishes to entrust to my care,” he had said to her as soon as they had dispensed with the formalities of greeting each other after such a long absence.

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