Emilie's Voice Read Online Free PDF Page A

appetites from the marquise? She had swept in, practically annihilating her predecessor, the demure Duchesse de La Vallière. If there was any weakness at all, any chink where one might find a place to drive a wedge, it would be within the character of Madame de Montespan herself. She had one flaw: her temper. If he could find a way to make her use it to her detriment, then there was the faintest glimmer of hope that they might be able to succeed.
    But first, St. Paul thought, it was necessary to eat, drink, and pay his tailor. As his carriage drew up to the door of the Hôtel de Guise, he adjusted his features into a suitably obsequious smile, straightened his brocade coat, and prepared to spend a boring day playing cards with his elderly godmother.
     
    What Émilie did not realize when she agreed so readily to becoming Monsieur Charpentier’s pupil was that learning how to sing would be only one of the tasks the composer would set her. Parisian society was elegant and sophisticated. The ladies and gentlemen were well read, appreciated art and music, knew how to dance the minuet flawlessly, and possessed sharp wits and knowledge on a vast variety of subjects. For Émilie to make her mark in that setting would require more than just a pretty voice. Half of every day was, therefore, devoted to other lessons: dancing, drawing, elocution, etiquette, and—most difficult of all—reading.
    At first, when Charpentier realized Émilie found the reading and writing so daunting, he tried to make it a game. He would reward her with cakes and tea if she could learn the words he set her and use them in sentences. The results were not spectacular. When the lesson did not end successfully, Émilie stared longingly at the treats she was to be denied, until Charpentier relented and let her have them anyway. He could not bear it when her radiant smile faded, when her eager, dancing eyes turned away from him and tears gathered beneath her lashes.
    It was another matter altogether when they turned to Émilie’s singing lesson. Sometimes the look that spread over Émilie’s face when she was lost in the music almost took Charpentier’s breath away. That, and the magnificent sound that gave him chills, made him forgive her just about everything else.
    And there were a few things to be forgiven. Émilie had never met an adult who was so eager to please her, who, for fear of losing her trust, did not discipline her. At first she was a little suspicious. But it did not take long for her to realize that in Charpentier’s apartment, she was the one with the power.
    “I’m not sure I feel like reading today,” Émilie said, when Charpentier’s insistence that she attend to a passage from a small book of children’s stories was beginning to annoy her.
    “Are you unwell?” Charpentier asked, immediately putting down the book with such an expression of concern that Émilie could not help laughing.
    “I’m sorry, really, I feel fine. But I truly don’t want to read anymore. When can I sing?”
    Charpentier looked at Émilie from across the table. “I too wish that you could sit here and sing to me all day long. But that is not what will give you success, not that alone. I don’t know what else to say to you to convince you that this is very, very important. It is worth the effort.”
    “My mother said it is idle foolishness to teach me to read, that I won’t need to read in order to keep a household and raise children.” Émilie knew she was testing Charpentier, knew in her heart what he would say to that, but she wanted to hear it from him.
    Charpentier leaned forward. “If you do as I ask, you will not have a life like your mother’s. You will be admitted to the highest circles. You will be showered with costly gifts. But most of all, you will spend your life perfecting the art that God meant you to practice, or he would not have given you such a voice.”
    Charpentier’s look melted Émilie’s determined resistance. He had eyes