# Chapter 13: Nolo, Nolebam, Nolam — The Curious Way a Girl Escapes a Trap
Hello everyone, it's me again! How are you all doing today? I hope you've got a warm drink in your hand and a little quiet around you, because we are walking into one of the most deliciously tense, glittering, and quietly heartbreaking chapters of *Mistress Of The Sun free digital audiobook* so far. Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 13 — a chapter where Paris throws a party for a queen, a princess learns she is to be traded like a chess piece, and our dear Louise de la Vallière — "Petite" — finds herself standing at a window, staring down into the dark, with no idea that her whole life is about to turn on a hinge.
So sit back, relax, and let's step into the crowds of rue Saint-Antoine together.
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We open on the streets of Paris, and what a sight they are. Banners and tapestries hang from every window, flowers crowd every sill — the city has dressed itself in its finest for the ceremonial entry of the new Queen of France, Marie-Thérèse. And riding through it all, in a coach, sits our little trio: the sharp-tongued Princess Marguerite, practical Nicole, and our Petite, watching everything with those observant blue eyes.
Marguerite grumbles — she has to wear mourning black on a day like this, and she declares she will *never* forgive her father for dying. Oh, Marguerite. Petite, meanwhile, is taking in the world.
Through the carriage window she glimpses the Queen of England — *La Reine Malheureuse*, the Unhappy Queen — dressed entirely in black, still mourning the husband who was beheaded by his own people. And then out steps her daughter, the Princess Henriette: tall, thin, with that extraordinary flaming red hair that makes the gossips whisper. Petite, being Petite, immediately catalogues Henriette's flaws with a kind of tender solidarity: the princess looks younger than sixteen, and she has no chest at all. *Like me*, Petite thinks. That feminine instinct to find a sister in every awkwardness is one of the things I adore most about this girl.
And there, in the middle of the gossip, comes the note that sets the whole chapter humming: Henriette will marry the King's brother, Philippe. Marguerite has been passed over *again*. You can feel the small, permanent bruise of it.
The parade unfolds in glorious slow motion. Caparisoned mules, the Hundred Swiss, the marshals of France, the King's half-sister in her famous masculine hat, the giggling "bratchets," and then at last a glittering Roman-style chariot drawn by six Danish horses, carrying the new Queen, draped in black and gold, showered with rose petals and jasmine. Petite notices: she's *tiny*. A child in a cupid-adorned chariot.
And then — *he* comes.
The King.
He rides a handsome Spanish bay in silver brocade, a diamond brooch pinning white ostrich feathers to his hat, gems studded even into the harness. Petite cheers with the crowd. She likes that he wears no face paint, no wig. She likes that he has grown a mustache. She notices him untangle a rose from his lace collar and lift it to his nose, and she remembers — privately, possessively — how he once calmed a frightened colt at Chambord. *Her poacher. Her secret.* That little line lands like a heartbeat.
Days later, the glitter curdles. Marguerite returns from her twenty-minute interview with the Duchess absolutely incandescent: she is to marry Cosimo de Médicis, heir to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Florence. A foreign land of "unnatural habits," liars and cheaters — and no baths, as Nicole cheerfully points out, *we don't bathe either*. The comic bickering can't hide the real horror underneath: Marguerite has no say. The King wishes to bind Tuscany to France, and so a girl is a treaty. "I have no more freedom than a galley slave," she weeps. Petite and Nicole undress her, comfort her, read to her from *The Treasure of the City of Ladies*, and finally she sleeps with tearstained cheeks.
That night, walking the long gallery with a candle, Petite pauses before the painting of Marie de Médicis riding the White — and then rushes past the Devil in the next frame, that leering figure ready to leap. She hisses an old rat-charm to keep the crawling things away. It's a small, perfect portrait of this girl: brave enough to walk dark corridors alone, superstitious enough to recite a spell while she does it.
Her mother is waiting. And the news is bad. After the wedding, the Duchess will make "economies." Staff will be cut. Petite has no position anymore. And — the eternal wound — there is still no husband. Her mother has found a matchmaker with reasonable fees, who has one client: an elderly widower, in trade, seventy-six years old. "He's not a young man," her mother says, "so at least he wouldn't live long." Then she presses a dry, powdered cheek to her daughter's and leaves. My goodness, what a sentence to hand a seventeen-year-old girl.
Petite flees down the winding stairs to Nicole's dormitory, past the mud-plastered faces and curl-papers, into a little trunk room under the eaves, where she blurts out the truth. Nicole's response is pure Nicole: she's already planning to escape by telling the Duchess that both her parents are dying. "It makes a good story, don't you think?" And when Petite confesses the seventy-six-year-old merchant, Nicole sputters in horror. *A merchant?* Petite says she'd rather die than marry the addled old Duke of Lorraine. And she means it.
Nicole vanishes the very next day — a lie and a coach and gone.
What follows is the most deliciously scandalous little favor of the chapter. Marguerite pulls Petite into a window alcove. She needs a *private talk* with Prince Charles at seven. Which means Petite must leave — by the window, climbing down the tree, so everyone assumes the two of them are together. Our virtuous, obedient, terrified little Petite. Climbing out of a window in the dark.
So there she stands in the garden, alone under an eerie moon, in that strange stillness she secretly loves. And the thoughts come: Marguerite married off to a stranger. Nicole fleeing an old man's lust. Herself, trapped like the fox she once saw gnawing off its own leg to escape a snare. And so she recites her Latin verbs like a prayer against despair: *nolo, I am unwilling; nolebam, I was unwilling; nolam, I will be unwilling.*
*Nolo, nolebam, nolam.*
It's the quietest, most devastating refrain in the chapter. A girl conjugating her own refusal into the future tense.
Then footsteps. Then a growl. A night watchman and his mastiff, Bruno. Petite steps forward, cool as anything, and lies beautifully — she's Mademoiselle de la Valliére, Her Highness thought she heard something in the bushes, and *you may rest safely, Your Highness,* she calls up to the window, loud enough to warn Marguerite inside. Bravery disguised as obedience. I love her for it.
And then — the letter with the royal insignia. Petite is summoned before the Marquis and her mother, and for one awful moment she's certain her complicity has been discovered. Instead: the widower has declined. *Sing ye!* she thinks, while making her face appropriately mournful. But the matchmaker proposes to persevere — and providentially, a better alternative has appeared. Not a husband. A *position*. Maid of honor to the future Madame — to Henriette, the English princess with the flaming hair.
Petite is stupefied. Such places go to the daughters of the highest sword nobility. Her father was a mere knight. And yet — one hundred livres a year, and the Court, and Fontainebleau. And the King.
The next morning, Marguerite teases her: *who do you think got you the position?* Petite bows to the floor and nearly kisses her feet, and the Princess, practicing her regality, taps her on the head with a fan and commands her to rise. Then she presses into Petite's hands a cambric nose cloth embroidered in gold — "blessed with my own tears." And her price? Go out the window again — tonight.
Marguerite is married by proxy on the nineteenth of April, in the Louvre chapel, solemn and unhappy. Petite makes her reverence, then gives her parting gift: a small stoppered vial of pig's blood, so the Princess can stain her marriage bed and spare herself her husband's wrath. *Little Queen*, Petite calls her, blinking back tears. It is both tender and merciless — the older girl sold off to a stranger, the younger one arming her with a lie.
Then comes the farewell lecture. Her mother warns of the "riggish" court, of reputation as fragile as glass, of slaps and virtue and thinness and the dowry. "Don't let men know that you can read." And at the last, unexpectedly gentle, she presses into Petite's hand her father's worn wooden rosary — touched by Saint Teresa of Avila — and says, *May God go with you, little one.*
And then the carriage. The ancient berlin with its gilt nails. And inside it, taking the best seat, an elegant young woman with startling blue eyes in an iridescent lace-trimmed cape, who looks at our girl and smiles: *"Why — you could be my sister."* The Marquise de Rochechouart. *But I prefer to be called Athénaïs.* After the Goddess of Virginity, she says, toying with a pearl-encrusted cross.
Petite stammers out her own name, and thinks: perhaps now she'll go by Louise. Perhaps now she'll be someone new.
"Well, I'm not exactly a goddess either," Athénaïs laughs, a musical sound. And the wheels of the coach begin to roll.
Oh, friends. If only they knew.
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## Reader's Impressions & Star Rating
What I loved most about this chapter is how beautifully Sandra Gulland braids the public and the private. On one side, Paris throws a spectacle of diamonds and ostrich feathers and rose petals; on the other, three girls in a single household are being quietly disposed of like furniture — one married off to Florence, one fleeing on a lie, one handed to a seventy-six-year-old merchant. And yet the chapter never tips into bitterness. It stays warm, comic, and observant: the sweetmeat wrappers in the muff, the curl-papers, the Latin verbs chanted in the dark.
Petite's arc here is subtler than it first appears. She doesn't fight anyone. She lies for a princess, climbs out a window, recites conjugations, and stands her ground in front of a mastiff by sheer nerve. And when the widower declines, her relief comes wrapped in the beginning of something bigger: the Court, the King, the great glittering world she has only ever glimpsed from a rooftop or a carriage. The introduction of Athénaïs in the final scene is masterfully handled — the "sister" line is a wink of foreshadowing that made me shiver, because anyone who knows this era knows exactly what those two women will come to mean to each other.
My only small complaint is that Nicole's exit happens a touch abruptly — I would have liked one more beat with her before she vanished. But the chapter's momentum, its texture, and that haunting refrain of *nolo, nolebam, nolam* more than make up for it.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ **Rating: 4.8 / 5 Stars**
## Next Chapter Prediction
Everything now points toward Fontainebleau. Petite — perhaps soon to be Louise — is entering the Court as a maid of honor to Henriette, and the King will be there. I predict we'll see her first mortifying, dazzling days among the highest nobility, struggling with her raised-heel boot and her country manners, while Athénaïs watches her with that musical laugh and those appraising blue eyes. Henriette's marriage to Monsieur will likely be strained, and Louise's loyalty to her new mistress may complicate things fast. And somewhere in the glitter — a dance, a corridor, a hunt — the King will notice the shy fair-haired girl who once caught a poacher in his woods. The fox may have escaped the trap; the question now is whether she can survive the sunlight.
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