The French Mistress Read Online Free PDF Page A

himself down to the lowest maidservant in the scullery or groom in the stable. There are no secrets here.”
    “None?” I asked, skeptical of such certainty.
    “None,” she repeated with relish, the coral beads of her earrings bobbing against her cheeks. “One never knows what advantage might come from a certain scrap of knowledge. You saw how it was with Françoise—that is, Mademoiselle de Fiennes. She wouldn’t have dared make such a fuss about your age unless she already knew your family possessed little influence with the king, or anyone else of note at Court. She knew there’d be no consequences if she teased you.”
    “But why did she do it?” I asked.
    “For sport.” Gabrielle paused at one of the tall arched windows that lit the hallway, gently pushing aside the heavy brocade curtains with her fingertips to glance at the street below to see who might be new arrived, and thus be the first who knew: a passion, I learned later, that she shared with nearly every courtier. “For amusement. Françoise is like that, you see. All of us maids have felt the prick of her cruelty at one time or another. She finds pleasure in the torment of others.”
    “That’s wicked,” I declared solemnly. “Why doesn’t Her Highness make her stop?”
    “Because of who she is,” Gabrielle said, letting the curtain fall from her fingers as she turned. “Who she is, and who she lies with.”
    I stopped, determined to sort this out. “But she is unwed,” I said, my voice falling into a whisper. “And she’s also a maid of honor, which means she must be a—a virgin.”
    “Truly you are an innocent, Louise, if you believe that,” Gabrielle said, her tone pitying. “There are as few true maids among the maids of honor as there are constant wives among the ladies-in-waiting, and the gentlemen are even more profligate. Françoise intrigues with the Chevalier de Lorraine, who in turn is the favorite lover of Monsieur, Madame’s husband.”
    I shook my head. “That is not possible. How can two gentlemen be lovers?”
    “They can if they are sodomites,” she said, with as little concern for decency than if she were discoursing upon the weather. “There are a number of Court gentlemen who prefer to find pleasure with other men rather than with women, while there are also others, like Monsieur, who are true libertines, and amuse themselves with both sexes.”
    I shook my head in denial, unwilling (or perhaps truly unable) to comprehend such behavior. And here I’d believed adultery to be the greatest sin of Louis’s court!
    Yet Gabrielle understood my confusion. “I didn’t believe it myself, when I first came to Court, but I swear by all that’s holy that it’s the truth,” she said. “These rogues follow the Italian manner for their spending, and take each other in their mouths, or in their bottoms. You’ll learn soon enough which gentlemen are so inclined. Not only do they paint and patch their faces like courtesans, but they will also make a show of sitting daintily on down-stuffed cushions, all the while boasting about the size of what they’ve recently accommodated within their nether regions.”
    “But that—that is an abomination, a perversion!” I stammered, sickened at the very notion of such acts. Surely my mother and father had not known of these activities, else they’d never have permitted me to come to Paris. “An act so debauched is a disgrace to God.”
    “It’s also a capital crime against the Crown that can cost the participants their heads on the block,” Gabrielle said wryly. “But though His Majesty loathes the practice, he can say nothing to stop it, not when his brother is the most grievous offender of them all.”
    She held her hand up before her, using her fingers as markers to tick off the steps to her argument. “Thus the king pretends he does not see, and Madame, though she knows that Françoise intrigues with the chevalier, also pretends ignorance for the sake of keeping the