# Chapter 8: The Waiting Maid, the Confession, and the Wild Heart
Hello everyone, it’s me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 8 of *Mistress Of The Sun free digital audiobook*. This chapter is a beautiful, aching turning point — part court comedy, part spiritual reckoning, and part rebirth through horses. It takes our young Petite from the cramped, smelly corners of royal service into the deeper chambers of her own soul. So settle in, because this is one of those chapters that quietly changes everything.
We begin with Petite learning what it truly means to be a waiting maid. Clorine explains the rules with the weary patience of someone who has already accepted court absurdity as normal. Petite is told she will stand behind the Princess’s *commodité de la conversation* — a chair, of all things — when the Princess is at table. She may eat what is left on the Princess’s plate after the Princess has finished. And then? Then she waits. Clorine shrugs and delivers the truth with a roll of her eyes: Petite is, after all, a waiting maid. Poor Petite. She can do many things passably well, but waiting is not one of them. Already we feel the tension between her restless spirit and the gilded cage she has entered.
The next morning, Princess Marguerite announces the first rule of her little kingdom: Petite is to call her “Little Queen.” Everyone does. The Princess seats herself on a necessary — a padded open seat over a tin chamber pot — as if it were a throne, and speaks of her destiny with absolute certainty. She will marry the King. She is ten now, and in four years, when she is fourteen, she will wed a twenty-year-old monarch. She was born with the sun in Leo. The astrologer said she will make a good queen because she is proud, dignified, commanding, and powerful. Petite, also a Leo but with a Cancer ascendant, listens and answers carefully, adding “Little Queen” to the end of her sentences like a password she must not forget.
There is something both funny and chilling in this scene. The Princess is a child playing at majesty, yet she already believes the world owes her a crown. Petite, meanwhile, remembers her own astrological report — sensitive, attuned to mystic vibrations, rational by nature, but with an “affective sensibility” that tended to overheat. Her mild manner, the astrologer warned, veiled a *voraginous* passion. Petite does not yet know exactly what that word means, but she suspects it has something to do with a whirlpool. And that, perhaps, is the perfect image for her: a calm surface hiding dangerous, pulling depths. The Princess cheerily declares that with Cancer ascendant, they shall never get along. It is said like a joke, but it lands like prophecy.
Then Nicole bursts in with gossip. The harlot from Tours is here — Mademoiselle de la Marbelière — and she has brought her son. The Princess’s half-brother. The bastard. Marguerite is horrified. Petite flushes, because she remembers a moment from Tours, when Sister Angélique shielded her from seeing this same woman in a passing carriage. The Princess sinks to the floor, her skirts wafting around her, and asks if the woman has come to see her father. Nicole leaps out to spy again. A maid of the wardrobe enters with a sable snug and a blue velvet cape trimmed with swan’s down. Petite tucks a soiled cloth under the pale green carpet of uncut pile, and then she is swept along, carrying the Princess’s train down stone stairs and through chilly arcades, sidestepping piles of dog feces. Royalty, it seems, does not make the world any less filthy.
In the chapel, Petite’s discomfort deepens. The Princess has her own balcony because she is the Little Queen. The younger princesses giggle and stick out tongues. Marguerite warns Petite that the Duchess says one must not smile or frown in chapel, but maintain a beatific expression. Petite tries, though her teeth are chattering. Abbé Patin, their tutor, strides up the aisle in a patched surplice, wearing riding boots with spurs that catch on the hem. The Princess calls him the Thunderer. He had a wench in Paris, she whispers, but the woman died of the Plague, and her servants had to cut off her head so she could fit into the coffin. When Marguerite is queen, she declares, there will be no Plague. The casual cruelty and childish grandiosity of the Princess are almost dizzying.
Nicole returns with news: Mademoiselle de la Marbelière talked to the Princess’s father, something about money. The three of them lean over the balustrade. The woman wears a straw hat in winter and holds a little boy’s hand. Petite studies her, trying to understand how one is supposed to tell a harlot from any other mother. What are the clues? The Princess says the woman should be put in stocks in the square, as sinners are. Below, Abbé Patin lifts the Host. The Duchess pays him extra to hold it up for three minutes, the Princess says. Watch, his arms will start to shake.
Then the chapter shifts to another household, another kind of pressure. The Marquis reflects on Easter Week and its relentless commotion. His days are fleeting, his private accounts are in decline, and all because of the commotion of acquiring a wife. A wife — and now a daughter too. He had hoped for more in the way of attendance. Was it too much to require a girl to sing from time to time? Music would be soothing to work to; it might even obscure his wife’s perpetual babble. But what he hears instead is far worse. His wife, Françoise, tells her daughter that the coming Easter would be an ideal time for something. The girl looks up from a book and says she has not been confirmed. The Marquis is stunned. Not confirmed? Of course not, his wife says — she wasn’t talking then. The Marquis clears his throat. Not talking?
In a matter of weeks, he has learned several unpleasant truths: his wife does not find his jokes amusing; she permits conjugal liberties only on Thursday nights at eleven, long past his hour of retiring; her daughter has no dowry and is malformed, the left leg shorter than the right; and now the girl is unconfessed. Françoise sends for Abbé Patin. When the Abbé arrives, he brings the smell of horse manure and a delicate problem. The Marquis knows that if it were discovered he had placed a heathen as waiting maid to Princess Marguerite, he could be dismissed. Françoise explains that her daughter didn’t speak for a period of time. The significant point, the Marquis interrupts, is that the girl was unable to make Confession and thus receive her First Communion, and so she has yet to be confirmed.
Abbé Patin asks Petite when it began. Françoise says about four years ago, the day of the King’s majority — the fifth of September, 1651. The day her father passed away. The Marquis asks if the Abbé can ameliorate this unintentional delinquency. Abbé Patin asks Petite if she wishes to make Confession. She says she doesn’t know. He raises his hand before the Marquis can object. “That’s a beginning,” he says. And in that small mercy, a door opens.
On the Saturday of the Easter Vigil, Petite enters the confessional. She brushes off the bench before sitting. She hears movement behind the grille and smells the stable. Abbé Patin greets her. She remembers to say, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Then she must find a sin. She admits she reads when she is supposed to be doing needlework. He asks what she reads. Xenophon’s book on Socrates, she says — *The Conversations* — in Latin, because it was her father’s book. She has been shocked to find her father’s familiar texts in the Duke’s library, his comments neatly printed at the back. The Abbé asks if she has read Xenophon’s *The Art of Horsemanship*. Yes, she says. It was one of her father’s favorite books. It is his favorite as well, he tells her kindly. Then he says she will have to come up with more sinful sins. She may kneel if she wishes.
Petite kneels. He guides her through the Rite of Reconciliation. He tells her to imagine that he is Christ. She closes her eyes, but it is her father’s face she sees — his gentle smile — and her eyes begin to water. She whispers the words. Her voice breaks. The Abbé is silent for a long moment, then tells her not to fear. Step by step, he says. She says this is her first Confession. He tells her to list her sins. And then Petite says the words that have been burning inside her: “I killed my father. One time.”
The Abbé shifts in his seat. He asks her to explain. She tells him about the Romas, who sold her father a wild horse, a White. Unbacked, but mean. Some said he was cursed. The village priest tried rituals, but nothing changed. Her father was going to kill the horse. But after the horse was gentled, her father agreed not to — and then he died. The Abbé asks if the horse died. No, Petite whispers. Her father. But the horse was wild, and then he was broken, the Abbé says. Yes, Petite says. She backed him. She was six years old. The horse was a stallion of about four years. The Abbé asks if she understands the difference between a falsehood and a truth. She does. She knows she is telling the truth, but she also knows there is more to it, that she alone did not gentle Diablo, that the Devil had a hand in it. She cannot say the words *bone magic*. She knows the Devil’s power.
She tells the Abbé how her father first saw her riding the horse and fell over as if dead. He did not die then, but he was sick for a time. Then the ploughman found him dead on the stable floor. The Abbé is silent again. Finally he gives her five Our Fathers and tells her she may take Communion in the morning. Then he adds that she is to help him in the stable, exercising some of the horses. Petite panics. She doesn’t ride horses anymore. He says he sensed that. Nonetheless, she is to be there tomorrow afternoon at four of the clock. She says she can’t. He tells her not to fear.
That night, Petite cannot sleep. When the village church rings for compline, she tiptoes to the window and eases open the shutter. The gardens are bathed in moonlight. The river is a silver ribbon below. Fields stretch beyond the stone stables. The moon hangs full, illuminating horses standing in groups, nose to head, head to nose. In the distance there is a glow — marsh gas, or possibly night spirits. A screech owl cries. Chilled and shivering, she slips back under her quilts, feeling with her toes for the warming pan.
The next day, she goes to the château stables. They are a sprawling stone and wood structure beyond the kitchen gardens. The air is fragrant with straw and horse dung. She walks from stall to stall, looking at the noble horses, their muscles hard and gleaming, their coats smooth and shiny. The head groom, Hugo, picks his teeth with a penknife and doubts she is big enough to ride a donkey. Then Abbé Patin arrives in riding clothes, his military-style jackboots reaching above his knees. The groom brings out the Abbé’s big charger, Eclypse, and a stable hand leads a young stallion, an unsaddled bay. The horse is uneasy. Petite runs her hand over his shoulder — deep and oblique, she notes, so he will be fast. She breathes into his nose and takes in his sweet breath. He turns his head to her, an invitation. He is about five years old, she thinks. Her father always said a colt must be a full five before his wildness could be claimed. Diablo had been only four. His name is Hannibal. The Abbé says he is not the horse for her, but Petite soothes the colt, checks his eyes and ears, and asks if he has ever been shod. Just last week, the groom says. He has been backed, the Abbé adds, but he bucks at a saddle, even with a straw pad. Petite says she could ride him without. The Abbé studies her, then agrees. They will start in the paddock, where he can keep an eye on things.
Petite selects a gentle bit and insists on putting it on the colt herself. She lets him sniff it before slipping it into his mouth. She leads him through droves of chicks and ducklings, the colt lifting his feet so as not to step on one. She mounts. She lets out a long breath. She arranges herself so she is sitting on her petticoat, her skirt falling freely to her ankles. The Abbé wants Hugo to lead her around, but Petite says she is fine. She takes up the reins and nudges the colt forward. Slowly, she takes him through the paces. One ear forward, the other back, he begins to relax. No prancing, no hopping sideways, no twirling, no rolling his eyes, no pawing, no snorting, not even one little buck. Soon she has him cantering, then pulling up short, his head bowed, ears cocked back, awaiting her command. She announces they are ready to head out. The truth is, riding feels good — like finding her voice again.
They set out into the hills, Abbé Patin on Eclypse, Petite on Hannibal, the groom and two outriders following. The feel of the warm horse under her brings tears to Petite’s eyes and conjures memories of riding Diablo. The Abbé asks if she would be all right with an easy hand-canter. Could they gallop? He tells her to call out if she gets in trouble and spurs his charger. Their horses surge up the trail. Petite’s colt flies into the lead. She cries out, jumping two hedges and a three-barred gate. Abbé Patin keeps his saddle, but the groom tumbles in the last attempt and falls behind with the straggling outriders. An hour later, as cows are brought in to milk, Petite and a mud-splattered Abbé Patin emerge from a belt of woodland. Petite is in the lead, slowing her horse to an amble. He is nicely lathered and breathing heavily. She strokes his damp shoulder. “Splendid,” the Abbé says with a sheepish grin. “There is nothing quite so thrilling as riding in fear for one’s life.”
The following summer, Princess Marguerite turns eleven and Petite twelve. In three years, the Princess informs all and sundry, she shall be queen. Weekly there is news of the King. He is comely. He refuses to wear a wig. He loves hunting, music, theater, and dances the lead parts in ballets. Before and after a ball he rides or exercises with a lance. He does not eat waterfowl, but has a great appetite for everything else, even salads of green herbs. He and his friends are known as *les Endormis* — the sleepyheads — because they stay out all night and sleep all day. When Marguerite is queen, she says, she shall not permit that.
Two years later, the King almost dies of a fever. He is only nineteen. For weeks, in every church, village, and hamlet, citizens fall to their knees and pray. The town crier calls out alarming news: the King has been given Last Rites at midnight; a detachment of soldiers has been sent from Paris to carry his body back; the King has been given antimony in wine. And then, miraculously, the King’s fever breaks. Church bells peal through the night, and towns glow with candles and torches. “He has been saved for me,” Princess Marguerite says fervently on the eve of her thirteenth birthday. “And soon we shall marry.” She flowered only the month before, but is already big-breasted. Petite, a year older, still looks like a girl — thin, gangly, and somewhat mystified by this obsessive interest in what is called love, an interest well fueled by the romances Nicole finds hidden in the Duke’s library.
Late that winter, Petite flowers at last. She is even courted by the bucktoothed son of a second steward. One of his letters is intercepted by her mother, and the budding courtship is put to a halt — somewhat to Petite’s relief. The spring is lush and warm. Buttercups and forget-me-nots come early. Petite continues to ride daily, schooling the young horses, exercising them with a skill that feels less like duty and more like the one language her heart still remembers.
### Reader’s Impressions & Star Rating
This chapter moved me more than I expected. It balances the ridiculous rituals of court life with the deep, private wound Petite carries. The Princess is amusing and awful all at once, a child drunk on destiny. But Petite is the soul of the chapter. Her confession is raw and heartbreaking, especially when she says, “I killed my father. One time.” The way Abbé Patin meets her without shock or condemnation is a quiet kind of grace. And then the riding scenes — oh, those riding scenes — become her resurrection. She does not just ride Hannibal; she reclaims something the grief had stolen from her. The writing makes the stable smell real, the horse’s breath warm, the gallop thrilling. I love how the chapter ends with spring, flowers, and Petite exercising young horses, as if life is slowly returning to her.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.8 / 5 Stars
### Next Chapter Prediction
I predict the next chapter will bring the royal marriage closer and push Petite deeper into the glittering, dangerous world of the court. Princess Marguerite’s obsession with becoming queen will grow more intense, and Petite’s talent with horses may attract attention from someone powerful — perhaps even the King himself or someone close to him. Her body and heart are awakening, but so is the “voraginous passion” the astrologer warned about. I think the next chapter will test her loyalty to the Little Queen, her buried grief, and her newly rediscovered freedom. A storm is coming, and it may arrive on horseback.
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