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| Masks |
Part 2: A wounded heart
Climbing the stairs leading to the second floor four steps at a time, Oscar at first let off as much steam as she could in one go: her room's door and then her officer's jacket paid the price for it, both swung with equal fury. Goddamn! The hell if she could get anything of it!! Andr�, her most reliable, her most loyal friend was suddenly behaving like... like Madame Du Barry! Ah no, really! What had gotten in his head that idiot! What was he thinking? That she didn't notice his little intrigue ever since...
The young woman suddenly stopped her furious movements and closed her eyes: �...since that cursed evening.� she completed her thought and her fists clenched until they became white along her body while the memory of that evening flooded her mind.
She didn't see any of the splendours of Versailles, nor any of the sparkling golds of the chandeliers like every time there was a ball at the Court; also she barely realized that she was dragging behind her all the looks of admiration since she entered the Grand Salle. After all, what did it matter to her those hundreds of eyes that riveted on her beauty which she had still ignored the very existence of an instant before.
Nothing mattered anymore, nothing existed anymore but the ardent happiness of revealing finally her true nature to the only eyes that were by now keeping her heart prisoner, those pale-dawn eyes in which sparkled unfathomable sadness. How she would like to reheat them with her love and be able to reign over them uncontested.
Since several weeks that had been her secret obsession, her most sweet madness: not to lie anymore, never again, not to have to defy God and the mankind with the terrible imposture that the destiny had imposed on her. Yes, what a sweet, wonderful madness, was it to entrust her life and her future to the one she had learned to know and esteem more, day after day! And to love, at the end. A man who she had seen suffer as well, dying of an impossible love for another woman while she as well was equally moribund for him.
But after all, don't two wounded hearts have mysterious remedies known only by them to heal each other, have they? �Oh, yes, Fersen, my sweet friend, I will make you forget the Queen, I swear it!�
And while she advanced in that ballroom, relying on her certainties and beautiful as an angel, her heart jumped at seeing suddenly the tall and seductive silhouette interposing.
Him... him finally! He who was looking at her intensely with ardour, already jealous of all to whom this young stranger could deign to grant a glance! If only she appeared to him like that long before, she thought, how many torments could have spared their two hearts. Because she won (had won), she was absolutely sure of it at seeing him devouring her with his eyes, literally bewitched. In those eyes, the Queen didn't have anymore any place.
And yet... what was this agitation that was clouding her mind? Why couldn't she return his smile and begin the subtle seduction game she had decided to engage with him? Hadn't she come for this, had she?
With a foggy mind she realized that she was on the contrary going on her way, away from him with a gait full of grace and self assurance she was very far from feeling.
And she heard his voice.
That wonderful, incomparable voice slightly coloured with strange and caressing inflections coming from Sweden, that so particular timbre in which vibrated the concern that the young beauty could decline his request. �Oh, Fersen, how could I refuse you this minuet? Don't you know that since a long time my strength has been leaving me at the sound of each of your words? Your voice, unique among all, that lulled me, inebriated me certainly more than the dance while I was in your arms ... "
She couldn't get tired of hearing it, again and again while he was talking to her about a person with a very strange destiny, a woman-soldier, condemned by the madness of his father to become the only male heir he never had, a woman whose beauty rivalled her courage.
She was startled. Without realising, he had just given her the most beautiful of gifts: so he had been feeling a real affection, a sincere admiration towards her, despite her masculine appearance.
Mad with love she had raised her eyes, wishing to scream the wonderful truth ... Without knowing that she was going to receive the cruellest of wounds.
He was finishing describing this person who seemed look alike to her: "because in spite of the clothes without grace that she is forced to wear, I can assure you, Madame, that there isn't a more beautiful best friend."
In an instant, she exploded in billions of particles of desperation, cut off by those six thorns dipped in a violent poison: friend ...
Friend! So this was what she was, what she would be forever before his eyes! Although fascinated by her feminine appearance, he couldn't therefore offer her anything other than a simulacrum of feelings!
The taste of nausea had risen to her mouth while the minuet gradually seemed to turn into a hellish dance.
She would have fallen. If he hadn't firmly grasped her she would have fallen to the ground, as she was hurt to the depths of her soul, cut to the quick. Had it happened just a second before, she would have cried with joy feeling so boldly embraced, suddenly so close to one another, but now she was horrified for this sudden approaching which allowed those grey eyes to immerse in hers and gradually to understand ... to unmask her ... to recognise her!
Resuming her furious movements, Oscar wiped rigorously a burning tear, furious with herself for her weakness. She had died that evening, and so what! A heart was nothing else than an organ, it was possible, after all, to tame it, to submit it to the discipline as could be done to a stomach!
A heart, her heart, by now she had to control it by the cold reason, without leaving it even again to the grip of the miserable pangs of passion. The woman in her was by now already dead, leaving the place to the most insensitive, to the most ruthless of the soldiers.
And since a month that was what she was in fact, throwing herself headlong into her military duties with a desperate rage, pushing her soldiers, as well as herself to go beyond the limits of physical endurance. But she would win this thing, this excruciating pain mixed with shame, insidiously hidden, she would be successful as she had always been able to overcome one by one the obstacles that her father had put on her way in order to make a man out of her. Yes. Thanks to that formidable education, she would manage to do it, at the cost of getting shattered into pieces.
And then there was something more urgent: spiking Andr�.
Andr� and his grotesque pink and green shirts! She will show him, pink and green! And even with all the colours! Scoundrel! Wretch! He will soon realize what he was playing at by making fun in that way of the Colonel Oscar Fran�ois de Jarjayes!
She ran into the young man close to the fountain, east of the property, his back turned because he seemed more interested in the big oak tree that he was observing attentively, with a hand raised like a visor to protect himself from the last sunbeams of the day.
"Look Oscar, I think that some tomtits have made their nest and..."
�YAAAAAHHH!!!�
Now the little birds!
Andr� had just the time to fend off the ferocity of the attack. Unbridled, Oscar got even more furious as she discovered what he was wearing under the jacket that he had taken off. A relative of the previous aberration, a shirt somehow seemingly the first cousin of the piglet one. But in blue.
The assault continued for a good half minute before a cry of pain tore the air.
"So what! What�s wrong with you, I've barely touched you!" Exclaimed Oscar with ferocious joy, breathless despite the brevity of the fight because of the fury she had put into it.
"Ouch! Oscar, are you crazy? You ... you have broken me a nail!"
Breathless, the young woman opened her eyes wide on a decidedly nightmarish reality. Well then, it was the end of everything ...
But Good Lord, then what was happening here, there was really something rotten in the realm of Jarjayes!!! Nanny ... it was absolutely necessary that she talked to her to see what was wrong with her grandson.
Turning once again on her heels, mad with anger she was about to rush into the kitchen, when a new cry stopped her rush. And it was just out of consideration of many years of friendship and complicity that she agreed to turn around, because the sight of Andr� who was sucking his little finger made her stomach turn!
"What now?!"
"The Count of Girodel came this morning. He wanted to see you ab. .."
"And you tell me that only now?"
"But for Heaven's sake, calm down! I ask myself what's wrong with you today..."
"What did he tell you!" she brutally interrupted him, as she didn't have desire to clash again with the bad faith of his friend.
"That he would like to see you tomorrow morning for a rather urgent and delicate question or so it seems." The young woman thought for a minute.
Curious. Girodel, her lieutenant at the troops of His Majesty, knew perfectly well that she was busy since dawn with the military exercises at Fontainebleau. If there had been urgency it would have been easy to call her to Versailles, at least if it was about military intendancies, since they had the habit of discussing about it together.
"Did he give you any explanation?" she persisted, filled with curiosity.
"No".
"And didn't you try to find out more about it?" She grew impatient, but above all perplexed by seeing a totally unknown Andr� who she apparently could no longer count on, as she had always done.
"Stop telling me off! I told you, no, I didn't! But, between you and me, I don't know what could be more serious than what I saw this morning ..."
"What, what do you mean?" she asked, full of concern.
"My God... if you had seen what was wearing Victor-Cl�ment!"
"Huh?! You ... you call him Victor-Cl�ment now?!" Oscar choked, red with indignation.
"Ah, but it was too serious" the young man excused himself. "Imagine: wearing a kind of brownish jacket with such a complexion! And that hair! Believe me, blood rushed to my head. So I said: "Listen, Victor-Cl�ment, you know that I like you but come on, this is not possible. Dressing so badly when one is such a handsome man... Isn't it a crime? Yes, it is!"
"You .. You have t ..."
A nightmare, it definitely was. Everything depended on knowing whether she would wake up from it one day...
"Violet! This is the colour that will make him stand out in the eyes of those ladies! You can believe me Oscar, Count de Girodelle will break many hearts at the Court and... but where are you going?"
Sickened, the young woman rushed toward the building. It was not Nanny that she would go to see, but Girodel, and immediately. Let alone the fact that there was urgency, she had to finally talk to someone rational.
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