Barbara Cartland - Love Me Forever

The crystal goblets from which the guests drank were engraved with gold, the tablecloth was embroidered with gold thread and everywhere there was an exhibition of wealth and beauty, luxury and opulence that was amazing to contemplate.

And the Duke saw, as he watched, managing to eat sparingly despite the abundance of the repast, that part of the danger from the Duc de Chartres came from the fact that he had, and there was no doubt about it, a grandiose idea of his own omnipotence.

His father, Philippe le Gros, the fourth Duc, was not yet dead, but lived with his mistress in retirement at Bagnolet, where he hunted in spite of being enormously fat and often falling off his horse. He loved gambling better than conversation and had a horror of anything serious. He had not even been perturbed by the behaviour of his wife, the beautiful Louise-Henriette de Bourbon-Conte who died when she was only twenty-three. The doctors said the cause of her death was consumption, but everyone else knew it was due to debauchery.

Philippe had been the child of his parents’ first passionate and unrestrained affection. In fact the eagerness of their amorous behaviour was so uncontrolled that the Duchesse de Tollard remarked that they had at last discovered the method of making marriage indecent.

There was a striking family resemblance in all the Orleans line. Father to son there was the same heavy figure, the same over-sexed temperament, the same love of war and pleasure, the same debauchery, gout and apoplexy.

With such a heritage Philippe Duc de Chartres was not prepared to find life dull. He went up in a balloon, he went down into a mine, he made Horse Racing popular, he took as a mistress the Governess of his children and his gambling and extravagance brought him to the verge of bankruptcy.

It was then that he had a shrewd and brilliant idea. He had been living in his father’s Palace in Paris, now he developed and then commercialised the courtyard and the gardens of the Palais Royal into a colossal centre of gambling and prostitution. This ambitious speculation was a great financial success. It took some years to complete and there was a considerable amount of opposition, but when it was finished the Duc de Chartres became, overnight as it were, the richest man in the Kingdom of France.

The conversation at déjeuner was witty, yet at times a bitter malice underlay the most trivial remarks. The Duc de Chartres and his guests were at pains, the Duke noted, to avoid speaking directly of the Queen, but there was a poisoned fang behind the most innocuous words.

They related scandals at Court, they chattered as people always will of their friends and people they know and yet the Duke noted that the blackest stories, the nastiest anecdotes and the most unpleasant innuendoes were always related about those at Versailles who were in close association with King Louis and Marie Antoinette.

The insidious poison was all the more deadly because the people who spread it were themselves amusing, clever and not without charm.

One of the women present, who had been introduced as Mlle. Lavoul had, the Duke now suspected, been singled out for his delectation. She certainly made it obvious where her interests lay and had his attention not been directed by more important matters he might have enjoyed or even been amused by the very undisguised way that she set out to captivate him.

She certainly was very attractive, with dark hair that was in almost startling contrast to the whiteness of her skin and strange green eyes that slanted a little at the corners and gave her almost an Oriental appearance. Her figure was exquisite and her dress was cut low in the bodice so that the laces and ribbons with which it was decorated revealed rather than concealed her charms.

Mlle. Lavoul was at the Duke’s side throughout the whole of the afternoon. Once or twice he thought he caught a glance of unhappiness on Amé’s face, but it was impossible for him to pay her any attention or to look more often than was necessary in her direction.

On the pretext of sending her to his room for a handkerchief the Duke managed to dismiss her early in the evening but when he went upstairs to change before dinner a strange valet was in attendance and the Duke was unable to have any private conversation with her.

The Duke’s coach always carried a small trunk in case the Berlins with his other baggage were delayed. This was fortunate for he could change into more elaborate clothes than those which he had worn for travelling. Amé, on the other hand, was forced to wear the same velvet suit that she had assumed that morning in the inn at Chantilly. The trunk that she had obtained from Adrian Court had gone with the other baggage and by now would have arrived in Paris.

She wondered what would happen when the staff with the luggage arrived at the Duke’s mansion and there was no sign of their Master. The Duke, as it happened, was wondering the same thing but he knew that it was unlikely that Hugo would make any commotion about his nonappearance, that was one of the penalties one must pay for being erratic and changing one’s plans easily and for resenting what he called, ‘an unnecessary fuss’.

A charming smile, a glance from a pair of dark eyes had tempted him very often to postpone a departure or to delay an arrival. Once on his way back from racing at Newmarket a face at a coach window had led him from the highway along many twisting lanes and strange unfrequented paths.

She had been a most charming widow at whose house he then had rested for three days while Hugo waited anxiously and sent postilions in every direction in search of him. He had cursed his cousin then for being an interfering busybody and he now knew that he must pay for this folly. When he did not arrive in Paris, Hugo would do nothing, at least not for a long time.

He considered the valet who was undressing him, a voluble, excitable little Genoese with, as the Duc had boasted, a genius for tying a cravat. There was, the Duke decided, not the slightest chance, of persuading him to any disloyalty to his Master. He thought him wonderful and extolled his praises all the time he was dressing the Duke’s hair.

“I have often said, Your Grace, that if my Master were the King of France things would be very different from what they are today. The people are hungry. It’s no use sayin’ that they are not and the taxes!” The little man raised his hands in horror. “And all to pay for diamonds for an Austrian throat and a lot of shepherds and shepherdesses at the Petit Trianon . The money that is spent there! They say one might as well try to fill the Seine with gold as to stem the extravagance of Her Majesty!”

It was gossip of the worst kind, the type that the Duke was sure was being spread all over Paris and yet he wisely made no attempt to check the valet. Best to note what was being said and to learn all he could.

“It is not only at the Trianon that Her Majesty spends fortune after fortune,” the valet continued. “There is Madame Rose Bertin, for instance, she receives millions of francs a year. It is not everyone who admires the costumes she creates either. All Paris is laughing at her latest designs. Her Majesty chose a gown from her only last month and when she showed it to the King he said, ‘Pah! It be the colour of a flea’. But was Madame disconcerted? Not she! She seized on the idea and now all Paris is clamouring to be dressed in the hue that the King himself has baptised.

“She has launched the ultra-fashionable tones of ‘flea’s thigh’, ‘flea’s belly’, ‘sick flea’, ‘young flea’ and even ‘decrepit flea’. It makes one laugh, Your Grace, to see what fools people can be.

“But you may be sure, because people laugh, that nothing is cheaper. In fact such notoriety merely makes Madame Bertin’s bills jump higher! And who pays? The people!”