BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis (8 page)

§
CHAPTER SIX §

La Salpêtrière was a vast, gray-brick enclosure on the Seine that had first been a saltpeter-powder magazine. Louis XIV had converted it into a home for beggars, the aged, and mentally afflicted men and women. Soon a prison for incorrigible and undisciplined women and girls was added.

Now it was a prison for women criminals only, as well as for the debauched and the insane. Seven thousand women were crowded inside it, two thousa
nd of whom were prostitutes. Natalie found herself confined to the better section known simply as the Prison, reserved for those women interned by royal order.

Those first few days, she sat listlessly in her ten-foot-square, cell-like room, part of the outer western wall of the dungeon. When she stirred herself, it was to curse Claude Fabreville quietly with a venom of which she had not suspected she was capable.

At least, she consoled herself, Philippe was still alive and not far away in the Bastille. She told herself that she could be worse off. The governor of La Salpêtrière was a portly old gentleman, who, for a slight commission, permitted the prisoners certain comforts of home.

With the jewels she had bee
n wearing when she was incarcerated, she was able to have her own books, furniture, and linen in a private cell. However, the windows were mere apertures, and within days she became obsessed with the need for light, particularly sunlight. Come sunset, a smidgen of wintry, bleak light slid rapidly down the wall and soon vanished.

No provision had been provided for heating, and she suffered greatly from the cold. So she did not trade her velvet and ermine cloak for superfluous items. She often wondered how many times she had worn the luxurious cloak and taken its warm ermine trimming for granted.

Warmth and sunlight, those things she would never again take for granted. When she and the other seventy-eight women interned by royal order went for their afternoon exercise in the bare courtyard once a day, she would toss back the cloak’s hood and turn her face up toward the gray, winter sunlight.

Closing her eyes, she would pretend that she was at Maison Bellecour, walking through the maze of the boxed gardens or among its classic statues . . . feeling the cool breeze off the Loire that played with the loose tendrils of her hair . . . trailing her fingers in one of the mirror ponds . . . wandering through the
orangerie
, smelling the sweet, sultry scent of cape jasmine, her favorite flower.

“The sun is bad for your skin,
ma petite
."

Natalie’s eyes snapped open. She recognized the woman from her first year at court. Madame Madeleine Remoneaux had been sent to La Salp
étrière by royal letter after the duc had tired of her. The middle-aged woman had a natural redhead’s sallow complexion. She now resorted to henna to cover the gray strands that had invaded her hair.

“On the contrary, I shall shrivel and die without the sunlight,” Natalie replied, politely but sadl
y. She really didn’t want to establish any relationships. It would be an acknowledgment of a permanency there at La Salpétrière.

By the second month, loneliness drove her to talk to the others, most of whom were courtesans like Madeleine Remoneaux, though a few unfortunate daughters, sisters, and wives also occupied the private cells. Natalie sought out Madeleine more often than the others, for the woman seemed th
e least bitter about her circumstances.

“I try to look at the worst that could happen,” Natalie said one evening. The two were having dinner together in Madeleine’s
cell, which was elegantly swathed with heavy red drapes to keep out the insidious cold drafts. “I judge I’ll be imprisoned here two years at the most. By that time, Louis will turn thirteen and come into his majority, and the duc’s reign as regent will end. Surely then the
lettre de cachet
will be revoked.” She sighed and rubbed her slender hands together for warmth. “But that seems like a long time.”

She noticed the middle-aged woman, who continued to paint her face each morning, lower her lids, seeming to concentrate on chewing the cold
salmis.

“What is it?” Natalie asked her.

The courtesan shrugged her shoulders and took a sip of the sparkling wine. “The time will pass quickly enough—with the comforts of home to sustain you.”

Natalie laid down her fork. Her appetite had dwindled such that she had to force herself to eat for the sake of the unborn child. “If I’m careful, I think I can stretch the money I’ve received for my jewelry.”

“Expenditures here can eat up the money rapidly,
ma petite
. More rapidly than you realize.”

“How have you managed after four years in this—this place?” Natalie looked about her. Despair choked at her throat. “Fou
r years!” she whispered. “
Ma  foi
!”

Madame Remoneaux’s eyes twinkled, and she smiled. Her teeth were terrible. “I write pornography.”

“What?”

“
Oui
. When I realized that I might be here for many years— and that the little money I had wouldn’t keep me in the style to which I was accustomed, I bought pen and ink and paper. I sell my stories to a press in Amsterdam.”

A smile wormed its way onto Natalie’s tightly pressed lips, then she laughed merrily. “If I could, I would, but I fear my imagination is sadly lacking.”

“Ah,” the older woman said, “you’ve only had one man?”

Natalie blushed. “
Ou
i.”

The woman looked pointedly in
the direction of Natalie’s midsection, which was gently straining the limits of the satin-covered buttons. “You are
enceinte
?”

Natalie nodded.

The woman set down her wine glass. “Do you know what happens to the
bebés
born at La Salpêtriére?”

The tone in the courtesan’s voice, the pity . . . Natalie couldn’t force herself to ask. The
cbocolat à triple à vanille
she had just consumed suddenly weighed heavily in her stomach. Eyes wide with dread, she simply waited for the revelation.

“The child is taken from you and reared in the portion of the prison reserved for indigents—the Great Prison.”

A mother’s protective instinct came to life in Natalie with a mighty force. She was an awakened feline, ready to defend her cub. She sprang to her feet. “Then I will go with my child.” Madeleine shook her head, her orange-red curls quivering with the movement, and looked up at the bow-taut woman. “You do not know what you are saying. The Great Prison is a living nightmare. The habitual women criminals are also kept there: prostitutes infected with disease, poisoners, thieves, counterfeiters, the insane. You would be one against many. Your child— should it survive infancy—will become a plaything for the more depraved.”

Slowly, Natalie sank into her chair. For the first time since her arrest, she buried her face in her hands and truly cried, great, heaving sobs that wracked her body. “Dear God, dear God, what am I to do?”

Madeleine rose and, coming to the younger woman’s side, knelt and put her arm about Natalie’s shoulder. “I have no words of comfort—except that life is better than death. Always. You must try to fortify yourself to withstand whatever happens.”

Natalie gritted her teeth. The chocolate dessert threatened to thrust its way up past her esophagus. “I will find a way before I let them take Philippe’s child from me. This baby is all we have left of each other.”

As the weeks passed and Natalie’s condition became more obvious, no solution to her predicament presented itself. The apparent laxity of surveillance in that part of the prison was an illusion. Should she make her way past the heavy patrols to the large courtyard, where the females held under royal order were permitted to exercise, there were still the portcullis, which was always guarded, and the moat to negotiate.

Her imagination, which she had told Madeleine was quite lacking, now exerted itself incessantly by day and night. Nightmares left dark shadows beneath her eyes. She would awaken in the morning with her pillow we
t and not remember weeping. Madeleine told her that she sometimes cried Philippe’s name in the throes of her dreams.

She longed for him terribly. In the four years of their marriage, they had not spent one night apart. She had to console herself with the knowledge that at least he was incarcerated in the best of prisons. Most of the inmates in the Bastille, imprisoned for debt or some amorous intrigue, had their own cooks and valets, received visitors, and even gave banquets.

Winter crept along at its interminable pace. Sometimes Madeleine read a problem passage from her writing, but Natalie was always too embarrassed by the lurid descriptions to offer suggestions.

Her waistline expanded more quickly, so she had to let out her clothing. “If you insist on having this child,” Madeleine declared one afternoon as they walked in the courtyard, “I shall act as your midwife. Why, I was witness to the Dauphin’s birth in the queen’s oval chamber. There didn’t look that much work to the task. The royal bed was covered in crimson for the birth, but when the queen went into labor, she was moved to the smaller bed. All the while, more than two hundred members of the court waited in the antechamber, trying to watch from the doorway. With the windows closed, it was so hot that I thought the queen would faint.”

Natalie really didn’t want to hear the details, but Madeleine blithely continued on. “Then, when her time came, she was seated in a chair. The midwife squatted before her on a stool. Imagine, ma petite, after the Dauphin was born, the midwife drank some wine and spewed it into the infant’s mouth!”

The story should have bee
n diverting, but Natalie was reminded of her own plight. Rather than bring the child into a world of horror, she was at the point of asking Madeleine to smother it at birth. Yet, she couldn’t quite take that final step. Something would happen, surely.

It did ... in the form of Herv
é Bertin.

La Salp
êtriére’s governor had decided to relieve the austerity of the courtyard, and apparently his own grim life there, by adding a fountain. Men from La Force Prison were marched in to construct the fountain, the building of which was overseen by a dandified little man whom Natalie took to be the fountain’s designer.

The guards prodded their pikes at the laboring men as if they were beasts of burden. Maybe they were, but they entered and left La Salp
êtriére regularly, something she could not do.

Herv
é Bertin stood out from the other male prisoners. Though only of average height, he was robust, with a barrel-like torso; in comparison, the others were pale and skeletal. The women inmates talked about him, and the male prisoners from LaForce as well, with excitement. Most of the women had been too long without a man, and they flirted openly with the men, casually walking in groups as close to the working site as the guards would allow.

Natalie, too, watched, but for a different reason. She noted the way the blond man’s massive muscles rippled beneath the too tight tunic as his pick dug away the dirt for the pipes or the way they bunched into knots when he unloaded the heavy carved stones from the wagon onto his behemoth shoulders.

It was more than just his uncommon strength that intrigued her. The blond Atlas swaggered with confidence. Time and fear had not yet stooped his shoulders or demoralized his spirit. If anyone, he could succeed in helping her to escape.

But how?

During the allotted hours of exercise, she observed everything: the routine of the guards, the movements of the male prisoners. Even if she could disguise herself as one, she would never get pass the portcullis, for she knew the men were counted each day before they were marched from the courtyard.

As the fountain began to take shape, stone by stone, she knew her chances for escape were dwindling. Maybe two—possibly three more days before the fountain would be completed.

The following afternoon, when Hervé Bertin approached the wagon once again to heft another stone, she noted the tool chest. Almost the size of a coffin.

“Madeleine,” she said that evening, “I’m going to try to escape the day after tomorrow. Will you help me?”

“No.”

Natalie laid aside the threaded needle she plied through a seam she was letting out. “I had thought we were friends.”

Madeleine continued to write without looking up from her manuscript. “We are. That’s why I won’t help you.”

Natalie yanked the quill from Madeleine’s grip. “Look at me! I will not let my child come into a world of depravity. But rather than kill it, I would as soon kill myself. Do you understand? I will commit suicide first.” She picked up the sewing scissors and rubbed her fingertip across their points. “It would be easy enough.”

“Suicide or escape?” Madeleine asked.

“You will help then?” she said with a hopeful little smile. Madeleine sighed. “Natalie, if your escape fails, you will find yourself interned, this time in La
Salpêtriére’s Great Prison.
Canaille
—the scum of the underworld—inhabit it. Better you commit suicide than find yourself there.”