Free Emilie's Voice by Susanne Dunlap

return?” he asked the count.
    St. Paul smiled. “Whenever she likes!”
    Marcel stared down at the floor. He could think of no more excuses to hold out. “Well, if you really think it would be best.”
    The matter was settled. To seal the bargain, St. Paul gave Madeleine a purse full of copper coins and a surreptitious pat on the behind, and Marcel the promise that Monsieur Lully, the court composer, would purchase five of the Atelier Jolicoeur’s best violins for his famous ensemble.
    About a week after she had fallen ill, Émilie was carried, still semiconscious, to St. Paul’s coach, where she was tucked into a corner and transported to Versailles. She was not in a condition to see her mother and father waving as the coach drove away over the bridge and across the Île.
    That same evening, Marcel stood at the end of the bed in which his daughter had so recently lain, hovering between life and death. Madeleine had wanted to take away the linens and turn out the straw, wishing to eradicate the sickroom smell from her home, but he would not let her—not yet. He imagined his daughter beneath the blankets, her head cradled on the pillow, her blond hair darkened by perspiration, cheeks stained with the unnatural roses of illness. While he was lost in this private reverie, he saw something poking out from beneath the pillow, something dark. He drew closer and realized it was a bit of fine cloth, which he teased out from its hiding place. It took him a moment to recognize it as a length of velvet ribbon that Émilie had shown them the day that Charpentier took her to the dressmaker’s. Marcel remembered how his daughter’s eyes had shone when she took the ribbon out of her pocket. It was exquisite, but Madeleine had refused to look at it. Now it was crushed and matted and almost unrecognizable. Without telling Madeleine, Marcel tucked the ribbon in his pocket.

Seven
    One is never so happy, nor so unhappy, as one imagines.
    Maxim 49
    The widow Scarron’s black silk gown rustled as she strolled around her sitting room. When she reached the window, she paused for a moment and looked out over the now barren gardens. “So, Monsieur de St. Paul, you have brought her here.”
    “As we arranged, Madame.” St. Paul bowed.
    “And Monsieur Lully has been instructing her these few weeks now.”
    “Of course. He agrees with me. Her voice is simply unequaled.” St. Paul took a pinch of snuff.
    “I looked in on her dancing lesson yesterday. She is very young, as you said.” Madame de Maintenon was often described as handsome rather than beautiful, with her strong, placid features and dark brown eyes. She had a way of speaking that made her seem very intimate, and yet wholly separate from the world. There was something in the tone of her voice and the expression on her face that conveyed great humility and boundless pride at the same moment. It had taken her all her life to develop this extraordinary ability to act so that her financial inferiority and her spiritual superiority were apparent in equal measures at all times. It was what had helped her triumph over the almost insurmountable adversities of her past, a past that included being born in prison, marrying a brilliant but impoverished writer, becoming a widow at a young age, and being given charge of the infants who were the result of the king’s immoral activities. Through an astounding process of personal alchemy, she had become the most respected—and the most feared—woman at court.
    St. Paul paused to indulge in a hearty sneeze. “That is the beauty of it. A child, really.”
    “Yes, that is fortunate. And her parents? Were they difficult?”
    St. Paul smiled. “I know how to handle such people. It was only the matter of a few gifts, a few promises. And your idea, to make her appear more dangerously ill than she really was by using the drops to keep her unconscious—”
    Madame de Maintenon turned her head abruptly and looked at St. Paul over her shoulder, her