"No less," he admitted. "But there is the greater miracle to come—the transmutation of base metal into gold."
"And you will perform it?"
"Let me but conquer the secret of solidifying mercury, and the rest is naught. I shall conquer it, and soon."
He spoke with easy confidence, a man stating something that he knew beyond the possibility of doubt. The Marquise became thoughtful. She sighed.
"You are the master of deep secrets, Vanens. Have you none that will soften flinty hearts, make them responsive?"
He considered this woman whom Saint-Simon has called "beautiful as the day," and his smile broadened.
"Look in your mirror for the alchemy needed there," he bade her.
Anger rippled across the perfect face. She lowered
"I have looked—in vain. Can you not help me, Vanens, you who know so much?"
"A love-philtre?" said he, and hummed. "Are you in earnest?"
"Do you mock me with that question? Is not my need proclaimed for all to see?"
Vanens became grave.
"It is not an alchemy in which myself I dabble," he said slowly. "But I am acquainted with those who do."
She clutched his wrist in her eagerness.
"I will pay well," she said.
"You will need to. Such things are costly." He glanced round to see that none was listening, then bending nearer: "There is a sorceress named La Voisin in the Rue de la Tannerie, well known as a fortuneteller to many ladies of the Court, who at a word from me will do your need."
La Montespan turned white. The piety in which she had been reared—the habits of which clung to her despite the irregularity of her life-made her recoil before the thing that she desired. Sorcery was of the Devil. She told him so. But Vanens laughed.
"So that it be effective. . ." said he with a shrug.
And then across the room floated a woman's trilling laugh. She looked in the direction of the sound and beheld the gorgeous figure of the King bending—yet haughty and condescending even in adoration—over handsome Madame de Ludres. Pride and ambition rose up in sudden fury to trample on religious feeling. Let Vanens take her to this witch of his, for be the aid what it might, she must have it.
And so, one dark night late in the year, Louis de Vanens handed a masked and muffled lady from a coach at the corner of the Rue de la Tannerie, and conducted her to the house of La Voisin.
The door was opened for them by a young woman of some twenty years of age—Marguerite Monvoisin, the daughter of the witch—who led them upstairs to a room that was handsomely furnished and hung with fantastic tapestry of red designs upon a black ground—designs that took monstrous shapes in the flickering light of a cluster of candles. Black curtains parted, and from between them stepped a short, plump woman, of a certain comeliness, with two round black beads of eyes. She was fantastically robed in a cloak of crimson velvet, lined with costly furs and closely studded with double-headed eagles in fine gold, which must have been worth a prince's ransom; and she wore red shoes on each of which there was the same eagle design in gold.
"Ah, Vanens!" she said familiarly.
He bowed.
"I bring you," he announced, "a lady who has need of your skill."
And he waved a hand towards the tall cloaked figure at his side.
La Voisin looked at the masked face.
"Velvet faces tell me little, Madame la Marquise," she said calmly. "Nor, believe me, will the King look at a countenance that you conceal from me."
There was an exclamation of surprise and anger from Madame de Montespan. She plucked off her mask.
"You knew me?"
"Can you wonder?" asked La Voisin, "since I have told you what you carry concealed in your heart?"
Madame de Montespan was as credulous as only the very devout can be.
"Since that is so, since you know already what I seek, tell me can you procure it me?" she asked in a fever of excitement. "I will pay well."
La Voisin smiled darkly.
"Obdurate, indeed, is the case that will not yield to such medicine as mine," she said. "Let me consider first what must be done. In a few days I shall bring you word. But have you courage for a great ordeal?"
"For any ordeal that will give me what I want."
"In a few days, then, you shall hear from me," said the witch, and so dismissed the great lady.
Leaving a heavy purse behind her, as Vanens had instructed her, the Marchioness departed with her escort. And there, with that initiation, as far as we can ascertain, ended Louis de Vanens's connection with the affair.
At Clagny Madame de Montespan waited for three days in a fever of impatience for the coming of the witch. But when at last La Voisin presented herself, the proposal that she had to make was one before which the Marchioness recoiled in horror and some indignation.
The magic that La Voisin suggested involved a coadjutor, the Abbe Guibourg, and the black mass to be celebrated by him. Madame de Montespan had heard something of these dread sacrificial rites to Satan; sufficient to fill her with loathing and disgust of the whitefaced, beady-eyed woman who dared to insult her by the proposal. She fumed and raged a while, and even went near to striking La Voisin, who looked on with inscrutable face and stony, almost contemptuous, indifference. Before that impenetrable, almost uncanny, calm, Madame de Montespan's fury at last abated. Then the urgency of her need becoming paramount, she desired more clearly to be told what would be expected of her. What the witch told her was more appalling than anything she could have imagined. But La Voisin argued:
"Can anything be accomplished without cost? Can anything be gained in this life without payment of some kind?"
"But the price of this is monstrous!" Madame de Montespan protested.
"Measure it by the worldly advantages to be gained. They are not small, madame. To enjoy boundless wealth, boundless power, and boundless honour, to be more than queen—is not all this worth some sacrifice?"
To Madame de Montespan it must have been worth any sacrifice in this world or the next, since in the end she conquered her disgust, and agreed to lend herself to this horror.
Three masses, she was told, would be necessary to ensure success, and it was determined that they should be celebrated in the chapel of the Chateau de Villebousin, where Guibourg had been almoner, to which he had access, and which was at the time untenanted.
The chateau was a gloomy mediaeval fortress, blackened by age, and standing, surrounded by a moat, in a lonely spot some two miles to the south of Paris. Thither on a dark, gusty night of March came Madame de Montespan, accompanied by her confidential waiting-woman, Mademoiselle Desceillets. They left the coach to await them on the Orleans road, and thence, escorted by a single male attendant, they made their way by a rutted, sodden path towards the grim castle looming faintly through the enveloping gloom.
The wind howled dismally about the crenellated turrets; and a row of poplars, standing like black, phantasmal guardians of the evil place, bent groaning before its fury. From the running waters of the moat, swollen by recent rains, came a gurgling sound that was indescribably wicked.
Desocillets was frightened by the dark, the desolate loneliness and eeriness of the place; but she dared utter no complaint as she stumbled forward over the uneven ground, through the gloom and the buffeting wind, compelled by the suasion of her mistress's imperious will. Thus, by a drawbridge spanning dark, oily waters, they came into a vast courtyard and an atmosphere as of mildew. A studded door stood ajar, and through the gap, from a guiding beacon of infamy, fell a rhomb of yellow light, suddenly obscured by a squat female figure when the steps of the Marchioness and her companions fell upon the stones of the yard.
It was La Voisin who stood on the threshold to receive her client. In the stone-flagged hall behind her the light of a lantern revealed her daughter, Marguerite Monvoisin, and a short, crafty-faced, misshapen fellow in black homespun and a red wig—a magician named Lesage, one of La Voisin's coadjutors, a rogue of some talent who exploited the witches of Paris to his own profit.