Free The Sisters of Versailles by Sally Christie Page B

good family, of course, an ancient one, and someone who will have only the king’s interests at heart. Someone who has no greed or ambition, and who will bring no complications.”
    The music stops, and suddenly the meaning of this meeting becomes clear. “You wish my help in finding the king a mistress?” I say, looking between the two charmers.
    Fleury looks at Charolais, who makes a small grimace, as if to say, I told you so. She turns back to me with a dazzling smile. “You are very perceptive, dear Louise. As always. It is true in a way that we wish your help, and who better to help us than the one we wish would help us the most?”
    I am not sure I understand. At Versailles in such situations, it is always best to remain silent.
    Fleury steps in: “I think we need to talk plainly, and simply. Clearly. Louise, we think you should be the king’s mistress. For the king, and for France.”
    “Imagine, Louise, the chance to be a royal mistress.” Charolais almost licks her lips but curls her tongue in at the last minute. Her lips are dyed carmine and rather cracked. “You could be the new Agnès Sorel or Diane de Poitiers.”
    I look blankly and Fleury raises his eyebrows. “I see your education is as lacking as they say. Try this, my dear: you could be the new Madame de Montespan, or Madame de Maintenon.”
    He speaks of the last king’s most famous mistresses. Of course those ladies I do know—Athénaïs de Montespan, the beautiful love of the king’s youth, supplanted in his affections by the devout Marquise de Maintenon, the companion (and secret wife!) of the king’s later years. I know well of their fame and their beauty, and of the power they had over that most powerful of men. I don’t think I am one such as they, but Charolais and Fleury, two of the most influential people at Court, seem to think I am. It is flattering, of course, but still . . . the queen. And Philogène.
    “Puysieux.” The cardinal flicks at his sleeves as though to flick the idea of my lover from my mind. “The Marquis de Puysieux,the man you call Philogène, is a nobody. We are offering you the king.”
    “Think on it, dearest Louise. Think on it in your dreams.” Charolais pats me and a feather wisps against my wrist, a little tendril of temptation.
    But of course that night I can’t sleep.

    The next day they find me in my apartments. Fleury is brusque and invokes my family name and the chance to do a great service for France. “Your forefathers served their kings on the battlefield,” he says, “and now we wish you to serve your king in the royal bed.”
    “Why me?” I have the courage to ask. “There are prettier and . . . ah, more experienced ladies than I at this Court.”
    Charolais rattles off the reasons: “Louise, you are pretty and pure and virtuous, at least for Versailles. You have no ambitions to meddle in politics, I can see that, and all your friends know you only suffer gossip because you can’t get away from it. It is your very virtue, in fact, that has made us decide that you are the perfect woman for our king to love.”
    They have put a lot of thought into this. “You talk of my virtue, but what you propose is immoral—”
    “Puysieux? Was that—is that—not immoral as well? You mounted that ladder very well .”
    Suddenly I feel like crying. “Well . . . I may have already sinned, but the king has not. I would be an adulteress, encouraging him to stray from his wife. And the queen would be devastated.”
    “No, Louise,” says Charolais firmly, rising and coming toward me. She puts her hands over mine. I stare at her gray gloves, delicately embroidered down the back with a row of little purple flowers. I should get some like that, I think. I wish I wasn’t having this conversation. I wish I were somewhere else. I really do.
    “You must not think like that. You cannot think like that. Because if you do not rise to this challenge, someone else will; someonewho might harm the