The Hurlyburly's Husband Read Online Free

senses.
    ‘As for the third petticoat,’ said Françoise with a peal of laughter, ‘it is the secret . Mine is sea blue!’
    Her dress and petticoats were now over her head revealing that, like all the women of her era, she wore no undergarments. Louis-Henri hurried behind her naked rump, bathed in the light from the window in the stairway as it turned right towards the servants’ garret beneath the roof, but then the naked rump veered to the left, into a room boasting an enormous bed. Its four twisting columns supported loosely tied curtains of green and red serge. The two bodies flung themselves on top of one another on the mattress, jostling the frame, whilst the curtains swayed open beneath the canopy then closed again, a barrier against the cold but also a shield for their conjugal intimacy.
    ‘What is this finger that has no nail?’
    That was what was heard by the new servant, a girl of eight, for the Montespans had not closed the door to their room. In the kitchen, standing by Madame Larivière, she looked at the ceiling as she heard the legs of a bed creaking, which annoyed the cook: ‘Ah, the marquise is a flame all too easy to ignite. I like to call her “the Cascade”, for she has a voracious appetite for pleasure. She knows how to make love and burn the besom.’
    For ’twas true that above their heads the masters were all a-tangle. Françoise breathed happiness from a time of fairy-tales, into her husband’s mouth, indulging the ever-delightful little gestures that titillated, the hundred thousand little moves that preceded the conclusion. Words and discourse complemented her actions.
    ‘Ah … Mmm … Oh!’
    On the floor below, Madame Larivière – frizzy black hair, olive complexion and spindly legs, not exactly kin with Venus – emptied the ashes from the stove into a jug she handed to the servant child.
    ‘Here, Dorothée, rather than listen to them at their game of tousing and mousing, go and sell this ash to the launderer at the end of the street. You may keep the money for yourself, and save it to buy yourself a blanket, for the servants’ rooms are never heated. And then, so as not to come back empty-handed, take this bucket and fill it at the well in the courtyard. The water fountain is nearly empty,’ she said, tapping her nails against a hollow-sounding copper basin with a lid and a spigot.
    Dorothée, to her distress, discovered on the steps the large chestnut wig that the marquis had torn from his head. It lay there, a mass of curls, like a dead animal.
    The lodgings, which were always dark, were not in fact a very pleasant place to live, but up there, under the sheets, the exquisite line of Françoise’s back undulated and, in the shadow of the curtains, their breathing rose, rhythmic and light. The marquise’s senses sought, everywhere, endlessly, the bliss of knowing her husband’s lip, his hand, all of him. How divine, too, Louis-Henri’s pleasure as he pushed aside his wife’s shift, and her honour. To elicit a saucy shiver, she extended her neck in a vaguely unseemly manner. And then there was a prolonged kiss. What would happen next? Gad! All reason and morality would take flight. Now for nuptials without restraint, a merriment of vice and cruelty.

3.
    ‘Ah, the young must do as the young will do …’
    On a starry June night the Montespans’ carriage rattled to a halt at the top of a hill in the gently rolling countryside around the chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The coachman sitting on the outside seat resigned himself philosophically to the shaking: ‘I don’t know where they find the energy.’
    He was jostled and shaken, by the jostling and shaking inside the carriage. The marquis was taking the marquise doggy style ( more canino ). Kneeling the length of the seat, with her cheek flat against the window in the door, Françoise could watch the avenues lit with countless torches and the slow meandering of gondolas on tranquil waters that were part of the royal