# Chapter 27: The Enchanted Palace and the Shadow at the Feast
Hello everyone, it’s me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 27 of "Mistress Of The Sun free digital audiobook". In this chapter, Versailles grows from a secret wilderness into a dazzling stage, and Petite learns that a festival built for love can also become a trap of politics, jealousy, and grief. So settle in, because this one is glittering, dangerous, and heartbreaking.
Louis was calling his hunting lodge “The Little Palace,” but he already saw more. “Soon to become an enchanted palace,” he told Petite, unrolling drawings of the grounds. He loved building projects, poring over every detail as if he could shape the future with his own hands. The wilderness that had once belonged only to them was changing fast. A menagerie rose to house ostriches, pelicans, Arabian ducks, Indian geese, and hogs from the East Indies. The road to the château was leveled, the avenues lined with trees. Two new buildings formed an outer court, and an orangery sheltered thousands of orange trees taken from Fouquet’s confiscated estate at Vaux. Louis loved to sit among those orange trees, breathing their sweetness, often playing his theorbo there.
Petite looked at the drawings with one hand on his shoulder and thought, *Our Versailles.* For so long it had been their secret place, the one corner of the world where they could be free of prying eyes. Now the entire Court was invited. The new work was dramatic, innovative, beautiful—yet she could not banish a tinge of regret. She did not voice it. Louis took pride in the work. He was doing it for her, he said.
The festival in her honor was meant to be the finest ever experienced. Louis recruited the greatest artists of the age: Périgny and Benserade for madrigals, Lully for music, Molière for theatrical events, and Vigarani for spectacular effects. Le Nôtre, who had designed Fouquet’s gardens at Vaux, supervised massive earth-moving machines called Devils. Gautier, overseeing the festival, was frantic. The King had invited six hundred guests, but everyone would bring servants. Where would they all sleep? What about the actors, musicians, clowns, and stagehands? “There should be more room once the stables and kitchens are completed,” Petite suggested. “And you can put some people in the menagerie.” Gautier looked at her. “With the elephant?” There was also a bear. And a camel. The King’s imaginings, it seemed, had no limit.
Petite and Gabrielle rode down to Versailles in a gilded carriage, enjoying rare time alone together. Gabrielle was amiable, young, and trustworthy—a relief to Petite, who had so few people she could speak to freely. They gossiped about Françoise’s heartbreaking refusal even to speak of Petite; about baby Charles, now four months old and charmingly jolly; about Gabrielle’s frustrating attempts to conceive; about Petite’s own attempts not to conceive; about Henriette and Petite’s changed duties; about Court ladies plotting to seduce Louis; about Athénaïs, beautiful and unlucky in marriage. Petite also worried privately. Her courses were eleven days late. She feared she might be with child again.
The road was improved, but the journey still took all day. The entire Court seemed to be moving at once, coaches loaded with trunks for the weeklong festival. By the time they arrived, the roads were too congested to get close to the château. Petite and Gabrielle had to walk. The château was crowded and chaotic. Many courtiers had no place to sleep. Athénaïs appeared on a stairwell, teasing, toying with the cross and silver key at her bodice. “Do you know where my brother might be?” Petite asked. “No,” Athénaïs answered with a laugh, “but do you know where my husband is? Not that I really want to know.” Then Louis passed, and both women bowed. Petite nearly tripped over her boot. Louis caught her by the arm and smiled. “Our King is a gentleman, is he not?” Athénaïs said, making teasing eyes over her fan.
There was not room for everyone, just as Gautier had predicted. Some courtiers slept in cottages and stables; others in their carriages. Actors, musicians, grooms, carpenters, and workmen ran about in panic. Molière rehearsed in a stuffy attic and worried because the costumes had not arrived. A circle of grass for tilting at the ring was one truckload short of sod. Four thousand torches were needed, but only three thousand two hundred were ready. The camel and elephant arrived safely. The bear, heavily sedated, could not be woken. Yet by morning, discomfort had become amusement. Life at Court had turned into an adventure. What would their young King think of next?
Two hours before sunset, the courtiers gathered for the first enchantment: tilting at the ring. Servants dressed as demons, fairies, and ghouls. Louis and ten knights in armor attended their horses near the woods. Jean’s page fitted him into new black armor, and trumpets and drums sounded. Gabrielle gave Jean a purple silk scarf from her bodice. He tucked it under his coat of plates and lumbered off, promising he would win for sure.
Petite and Gabrielle joined the ladies in the stands. Athénaïs waved them over, and they sat on velvet cushions. Gabrielle shared her good news, and Athénaïs regarded her own plump belly with disgust. The Queen was pregnant too. Madame Henriette was also well along in a second pregnancy. “A fruitful Court,” Athénaïs said, while Petite thought anxiously of her own condition. Louis entered dressed as a Greek warrior on a handsome Aragonese horse. Jewels flashed from his silvered breastplate. He saluted the Queen, and the crowd cheered. Petite took off her red neckscarf and waved it—their sign. He noticed and put his hand to his heart.
His horse reared, and the crowd applauded as if it were intentional, but Petite was concerned. The prize mount was only five years old and still skittish. Steadiness was what mattered. Louis was first to run at the ring. He spurred his mount, and the horse bucked and raced wildly. Petite watched with her hands over her mouth. At last Louis controlled him, sat back, steadied his lance, and caught the ring. The crowd roared. Jean followed and caught his ring cleanly. The rings grew smaller, contestants fell, and in the end it came down to Louis and Jean. Petite was proud of them both. Louis checked his horse and caught the tiny ring neatly. Jean ran full bore and caught it as well. The judges deliberated, then announced the winner: the Marquis de la Vallière. Although His Majesty had shown superior mastery, Jean’s speed had been greater. Petite told Gabrielle not to applaud, her voice low behind her fan. The Queen awarded Jean a diamond-encrusted gold sword and buckler.
Then the sky turned golden. Lully’s musicians played as “Spring” entered on a Spanish charger, followed by gardeners with preserves. “Summer” arrived on an elephant, “Autumn” on a camel, and “Winter” on a now-too-awake bear. The charger shied at the camel; the elephant had to be pushed aside. Fifty costumed servants danced in unison as a crescent-shaped table was unveiled. Hundreds of pages with wax torches stepped forward and twirled. Molière, as Pan, announced the feast. The Queen Mother took her place at the head of the table, Louis on her right, the Queen on her left. Torches blazed, casting magical light over the scene. Citizens cheered from the terrace. Petite looked up at the nearly full moon, illuminating the château, fountains, and canal. *It’s going to be grand,* Louis had told her. It pleased him to see an army of men working with pickaxes and shovels. Somewhere, a horse whinnied, and another answered. Petite looked out over the great dark wilderness beyond—their wilderness no longer.
The next day, after a hunt in which Petite made one clean boar kill, a wind came up. Louis ordered tapestries hung on the west side of the outdoor theater, and an impromptu fabric dome kept torches and candles from blowing out during Molière’s comedy. Petite sat with the ladies in raked benches. Louis’s armchair was directly before the stage, his wife and mother on either side. He caught Petite’s eye, smiled slightly, then turned to the Queen. The Queen Mother looked at Petite and frowned. Then the Queen turned, following her gaze. *They know,* Petite thought as the curtains parted.
The play, *The Princesse d’Elide*, began innocently: a fairy-tale prince in love with a princess driven mad with love-longing. But the princess loved horses with a passion and would not be wooed. She loved the hunt, the music of deep forest glens. “Like someone I know?” Athénaïs whispered, tapping Petite with her fan. Petite watched with trepidation. The play was about Louis—and her. She sat very still, hardly breathing, overcome with uneasy delight.
On the third night, the Court assembled for a musical performance at the end of the Allée Royale. The royal family sat on a dais facing the basin of Apollo. Opposite them was a castle surrounded by water. This was the enchanted lake, and this the enchanted palace. As Lully raised his baton, Petite, Jean, and Gabrielle were led to seats four rows back. Jean protested, “*We* are the royal family.” Then came the sorceress. A barge shaped like a marine monster glided on the dark water. Torches lit, revealing evil Alcina in scanty gauze. With a wave of her wand, her palace lit up. Demons, dwarves, and giants danced from the shadows. The innocent knight appeared, ready to storm the palace. Music soared for the battle between good and evil. Alcina and her subjects were winning, but the knight had a magic ring—a ring with power to destroy enchantment. Petite watched, captivated but troubled, knowing the power of magic, its dark side, knowing it was not so easily vanquished. Then a volley of shots startled her. Everyone roared as Alcina’s palace was destroyed in a thundering blaze of fire rockets.
The enchantment ended, evil was vanquished, yet the fete continued for three more days: jousting in the dry moat, a tour of the menagerie, a lottery, and every night a comedy by Molière. On the last night, hooded and cloaked, Louis finally came to Petite’s room like a thief. “At last,” he said, removing his mask. The festival may have been in her honor, but they had hardly had a chance to speak. The hunts had been public, and every afternoon he had been in meetings about a new addition, with foundation work scheduled to begin as soon as the Court departed. “I feel like an idiot skulking about like this,” he said, pulling off his boots. “My subjects parade their mistresses alongside their wives and nobody thinks a thing of it.” Yet because of his mother, he had to sneak around.
In the months that followed, as the Court traveled from Fontainebleau to Paris, to Villers-Cotterêts, to Vincennes, and back to Paris, Louis became increasingly annoyed with his mother’s rule. In Paris, in the little house overlooking the Palais Royale gardens, he and Petite enjoyed a measure of freedom: long afternoons reading, dancing, playing music, making love, and once an enchanting hour with baby Charles. But even so, he could not place Petite beside him at entertainments. She could walk with him in the gardens, ride with him on a hunt, but she could not join him in a dance or sit with him at the gaming tables in his mother’s withdrawing room.
“Come to the Louvre tonight,” he told her one afternoon. “I’ll call for you in my mother’s antechamber at ten of the clock.” Petite objected. The queens would be there. It would be an insult for her to appear in the Queen Mother’s salon. She was six months along; even corseted, it was difficult to disguise. “They won’t be there,” Louis said. “My mother’s ill, and my wife stays with her.” Still Petite protested. They would know. They would find out. “I’m not going to hide you any longer!” Louis said. Petite asked why now, when she would soon go into confinement. Louis reminded her that King Francis I had an official *maîtresse en titre*, as had Henry II and Henry the Great. “My wife’s father has sixteen, for God’s sake.” Petite pleaded that the Queen was with child and would be distressed. But Louis was angry now. “I will not be ruled on this! When they dishonor you, they dishonor me.”
Louis appeared at the entry to the Queen Mother’s antechamber precisely at ten, accompanied by Gautier, Lauzun, ten Swiss guards, and a quartet of violinists. He wore a feathered and jeweled hat. Gautier stepped forward. “Mademoiselle de la Vallière? His Majesty requests your company.” Taffeta rustled as the women turned to stare. Lauzun did a funny cat hop and bowed extravagantly. Careful not to reveal even a hint of a limp, Petite followed Louis into the Queen Mother’s winter apartment. She felt like a soldier following a commander into battle—a battle for the King’s right to be with the woman he loved.
The carved doors opened upon a glittering scene. Courtiers rose from gaming tables. Musicians put down their instruments. Petite saw Yeyette, Claude-Marie, Athénaïs, and the Duchesse de Navailles. “Step,” Lauzun murmured, nudging her forward. Everyone bowed as Louis approached a gaming table by the fire. Philippe motioned to the armchair on his right. Louis acknowledged his brother, tipped his hat to Henriette, who curtsied. Petite was not sure what to do. A reverence was called for—but how deep, and how many? She curtsied to the ground. *Does my belly show?* she worried. She prayed not.
Louis pulled out the chair opposite his. “Will you be my partner in a game of Karnöffel, Mademoiselle de la Vallière?” Everyone was ominously silent. “Yes, Your Majesty.” Petite made another reverence, and they sat: Louis, Philippe, Henriette, and lastly Petite. Louis signaled the musicians, and laughter slowly resumed. Philippe dealt. “Hearts trump,” he announced with an ironic smile. Petite’s hands were clammy. The cards were slippery and new. Henriette told her husband she had a two and a four trump. Louis told Petite he had the six of hearts, the Pope card. Petite had the seven of hearts. Seven in the trump suit had special powers, she recalled. The game had been forbidden in her childhood as anarchistic: the King could be beaten by a low card, the Pope by an under-knave. Then she remembered. “I have the Devil card,” she said, and a sick feeling came over her.
The next day, learning of the affront, the Queen Mother raged. The Queen took to bed with a sudden high fever. *I warned him,* Petite thought angrily, shuffling through damp yellow leaves. She entered a silent little church. The thin tapers at the altar were bowed, as if burdened by an invisible weight. Petite lit a candle for the Queen and placed it before a statue of Mary holding the baby Jesus—a baby Jesus with old, sad eyes. *O Mary,* she prayed, *the Queen must not suffer for my sin.* Behind her, the door opened in a burst of damp wind. The candle guttered and went out.
In spite of vomitives, purges, and bleedings, the Queen’s fever did not abate. Almost a full month early, her labor began. Church bells chimed three times, then silence. “It’s a girl,” Clorine said sadly. Petite sent her to find out how the Queen was doing. Clorine returned. “She’s in a fever still. The baby’s hairy and dark—and ugly as a toad.” Petite crossed herself. A demon child. Night had fallen when Clorine ran into Petite’s chamber. “Come to the window. Quick.” There, in the starry night, was a streak of light. “A comet,” Petite said, turning away. She was full with child and should not look at such a thing. “Someone’s going to die,” Clorine said, falling to her knees.
Five days later, Clorine told Petite: the newborn had died. “Oh, the poor Queen.” “The poor King. They say he wept.” Somewhere, Louis is grieving, Petite thought. If only she could be with him. “Imagine shedding tears for an ugly little monster like that.” Petite pressed her hands to her belly, frightened by a stillness within her.
The day after King’s Day—the coldest day of a bitter January—Petite went into childbed. This time, Louis was with her. She tore his lace collar to shreds, so violent was her pain. He stayed until the infant was born, another son. Philippe, Louis named him. “We’ll call him Filoy.” “Yes,” Petite murmured, her baby pressed to her heart. Little rascal, son of a king. “Colbert’s valet will come for him after nightfall,” Louis said. “He’s to be baptized in the morning.” Petite nodded, feeling the infant’s soft skull with her lips. The secret arrangements had again been carefully made. Colbert would wait in a coach at the gate. At the crossway of the Hôtel Bouillon, he would give the baby to Monsieur François Derssy, husband of Marguerite Bernard, a former servant of the Colbert household. The baby would be baptized as their son. “I know,” Petite said. The infant had been born whole, straight, and strong. For that alone she should be grateful.
After a month of bed rest, Petite could walk again, but with difficulty. Her left leg was weak and unsteady. “I’m fine,” she lied to Louis, who was overwhelmed looking after his ailing mother. Early in April, Petite was strong enough to begin attending Henriette. The Princess was with child again and asked Petite to read aloud in the long afternoons—Thomas Aquinas, works by Boccaccio. It helped lighten the melancholy hanging over the Court. The Queen’s recovery after the death of the “monster baby” had been slow; she wore a bed robe night and day. Doctors discovered that the Queen Mother had cankers in one breast—a cancer, they called it. She cried out often and needed help to walk. A madman dressed in devil horns followed the royal carriage. Courtiers displayed charms to ward off demons.
The news from afar was grim. Thousands died each day of the Plague in London. Few such deaths had come to Paris, yet fear had taken hold—no one embraced, no one dared touch. Henriette’s brother, the Duke of York, was reported killed in battle. The report proved false, but it caused the Princess to go into convulsions. Early in July, listening to Petite read from Madame Scudéry’s novel *Ibrahim*, Henriette began to weep. “I haven’t felt movement for two days,” she confessed, hands on her belly. Her eyes looked hollow, her breath rank. The midwife was called. The Princess’s breasts were slack, her belly cold at the navel. Her water, which stank, was thick. The midwife wet her hands in warm water and rubbed the Princess’s big belly. There was no movement. “Oh dear God,” Henriette moaned. She had been having dreams of the dead.
Nine days later, Clorine told Petite, “They got the baby out of her.” It had taken a long time. A girl. Petite’s eyes searched. “How did it go?” Clorine pulled her earlobe and looked away. The midwife had tried everything: sage and pennyroyal in white wine, hyssop in hot water, even an eagle-stone held to Madame’s privy parts. Nothing drew it out. In the end, the midwife had to cut the child asunder and pull it out by pieces, four gagging footmen holding the Princess down. Mercifully, she had fainted dead away. “She was even baptized, I’m told,” Clorine said, feigning cheer. Petite frowned. “But the child was not alive.” Clorine returned to sweeping. A dead royal baby got baptized no matter what, she guessed—even a cut-up baby so dead it was rotten—so it could be buried in the regal tombs at Saint-Denis, not with the suicides in the north corner of some desolate graveyard like all the other unbaptized stillborns.
Death did not tire that fall. In September, the King of Spain died—the Queen’s father, the Queen Mother’s brother. The Court was again draped in black, the royal family in deepest purple. Louis turned gaunt and ashen, as if something in him were dying. His mother was not responding to treatments, and he would not accept the inevitable. He embraced and consumed Petite with a fierce hunger, crying out as he spent, as if in pain. He returned to her daily, and daily it was the same. Few words, an explosive release, then he would lie staring, cloaked in tense silence.
Even trips to Versailles failed to soothe him. The grounds were ravaged by workmen, rubble everywhere. Louis hunted indifferently, spearing boar, shooting hart, preoccupied by his mother’s suffering. A regime of enemas, weekly bleedings, senna and rhubarb purges failed to restore the balance of her humors. Doctors sliced into her diseased breast, sticking in bits of meat to feed the tumor—to stop it from feeding on her—but to no avail. *Let me be,* the Queen Mother begged him. *I am ready to die.* But he could not let her go. He found a village priest from the Orléanais who performed miracles. The cleric vowed on the Bible that his mixture of belladonna and burnt lime would harden the diseased breast to marble, but it too failed. Then a new doctor from Lorraine offered a cure—an arsenic paste that would kill the diseased tissue so it could be cut away. For weeks the suffering Queen Mother endured this operation daily, without result. “She is rotting alive,” Louis told Petite with tears in his eyes, visibly exhausted from sleeping at the foot of his mother’s bed. “Can nothing be done?” Petite asked, wrapping her arms around him. “I wish I believed in miracles,” he said sadly.
The church bells of Paris were silent as the statue of Saint Geneviève was solemnly paraded through the streets, followed by a press of courtiers and citizens praying for the life of the Queen Mother. Veiled, Petite joined the procession. The next day, Louis did not call on her at his customary time. “The Queen Mother has had Last Rites,” Clorine informed Petite. At daybreak, funeral bells began to peal: the Queen Mother was dead. Petite fell to her knees, praying for the Queen Mother’s soul. Praying that this would be the end of it, that Death would be sated, the curse lifted.
The Court journeyed to Fontainebleau that summer, to its primeval woods. Petite followed the hunts from a carriage—for she was, yet again, in a delicate condition. Louis was pleased: both Charles, now two and a half, and Filoy, a year younger, were healthy, fine-looking boys, the product of love and strong seed. On a hot Saturday in July, the driver stopped at a crossroads and listened for the horns. A man appeared on horseback from behind. “Good afternoon, Monsieur Colbert,” Petite called out. She had come to like the humorless man. “I didn’t know you enjoyed the hunt.” He was flushed, sitting his horse uncomfortably. His mouse-colored Frisian mare pawed the dirt. “I have a message for the King,” he said, looking into the distance. Horns sounded and dogs brayed—a hart had been put to bay. Colbert spurred his horse and took off, holding his hat with one hand. “Must be urgent,” Clorine said. “Must be confidential,” Petite said. It was unusual for the hardworking minister of finance to leave his desk. She suspected it had to do with preparations for a possible war. Spain had yet to pay the Queen’s dowry, giving Louis the right to claim Spanish territories to the north—by force, if need be. Louis had been holding military reviews since early spring.
They headed toward the sound of the horns, the hounds in full cry. Soon they saw a trio of men approaching. “It’s His Majesty,” Petite said. Louis was riding at a steady gallop, his big hunter lathered in sweat. He held the reins loosely in one hand, his other hand pressing his plumed hat to his heart. “Stop,” she commanded her driver. The driver pulled up the horses, throwing them forward. Petite unlatched the carriage door. Louis’s cheeks were wet with tears. Alarmed, she let herself down.
Reader's Impressions & Star Rating
This chapter is a masterclass in contrast. It opens with the glitter of Versailles and the thrill of a King building a wonderland for the woman he loves, then slowly pulls back the curtain to show the cost of that love. The tilting at the ring, the enchanted palace, the fire rockets—all of it is gorgeous. But the real power lies in the quiet moments: Petite realizing the play is about her, the Devil card in the game of Karnöffel, the Queen’s fever, the comet, the secret baptism of baby Philippe, and the horrific stillbirth of Henriette’s child. The chapter captures how public splendor and private grief can exist in the same breath. It is lush, tense, and deeply human. I felt Petite’s helplessness, Louis’s mounting desperation, and the cold hand of death that refuses to loosen its grip on the Court.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.8 / 5 Stars
Next Chapter Prediction
That urgent message from Colbert and Louis’s tears suggest a turning point that will shake both the kingdom and Petite’s place in it. I predict the next chapter will bring news of war, a death, or a political crisis that forces Louis to step fully into his role as absolute King—perhaps pushing him toward the Spanish territories and away from the secret rooms where he has been happy with Petite. Petite may be forced to confront what it means to love a King who belongs first to France, and the fragile hope that Death has finally been sated may prove false. The next chapter will likely test whether their love can survive the weight of the crown.
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