Pocket of Sorrow
Louis XIV Versailles Words: 3.317 *Trigger warnings* grief, power imbalance, sexual tension, implied intimacy, manipulation, emotional distress, death references, reputational risk
You arrive at Versailles in the black silk of a newly minted widow, and the palace swallows you whole. It is a creature with a thousand eyes—mirrors, painted ceilings, polished floors—each reflecting your loss back at you until you learn the most essential lesson of court: walk forward as if the world were a corridor that leads only to the sun.
Your late husband’s apartments are reassigned before the wicks on the condolence candles have finished weeping. Reputation, like perfume, does not linger long at Versailles unless constantly reapplied. You know this; you were raised among the rituals. You understand that grief must be handled like porcelain—displayed, dusted, and never allowed to chip.
So you manage your mourning carefully. You wear the veil and refuse the morning routs, but you take your place in the Queen’s antechamber, folded into a chair like a pressed flower, composed, silent, irreproachable. When you speak, you do so with the exact number of syllables required; when you smile, you show no teeth. The women nod, reassessing you—this young widow who will either fade or blaze. They hope for the first. They prepare for the second.
The King notices you on a Thursday, when the weather turns itself out in diamond light and the Hall of Mirrors becomes a furnace of small suns. You are passing the farthest window, intent on the chessboard of your future, when a shadow intersects your path. His Majesty walks with his brother, with ministers trailing like loyal moons; he speaks of embankments and musketeers, of canals and comets. He is the axis on which the elaborate clockwork of Versailles turns. He is also, you discover in the moment you raise your eyes, a man of dangerous attention.
“Madame,” he says, his voice pitched low enough that it does not disturb the conversation but cuts cleanly through your thoughts. “You have returned to court.”
You curtsy, not quite deep enough to be humble, not so shallow as to be insolent. “Your Majesty.”
“Was your journey tedious?”
“Not when the destination is Versailles.”
He laughs—brief, a single sunlit strike—and then the river of courtiers carries him forward and the current pulls you back. But the King’s glance has left a ribbon tied around the day; you feel it tug whenever you turn your head.
News travels in Versailles like fire along dry reeds. By supper, your name has been tabled. In the Queen’s circle, Madame de Montespan arranges her fan to conceal the small cut of a smile. Louise de La Vallière lowers her gaze; she has learned the economy of being overlooked and profits from it. Other ladies calculate your dress allowance, your dowry, the number of prayers you are rumored to recite at dawn. There is a chart inside every woman at Versailles where she marks, with pins, who is ascending and who is in decline.
You mark your own course with care. You avoid corners where intrigue gathers like dust. You attend mass where the King’s devotions are visible and unassailable. You become efficient at absence: instead of refusing invitations, you send notes written so simply that no malice can adhere to them. You do not hunt favor. You allow favor to hunt you—if it must.
It must.
You discover that the King enjoys walking late, when the orange trees exhale a dusky sweetness and the fountains lose their audiences and acquire their souls. You do not discover this by accident. A friend in the kitchens, a maid in Madame’s household, a gentleman with ambitions but no map—information in Versailles is a currency; you spend a little and make more. You adjust your route from chapel to apartment by a margin of twenty paces and a turn of one hedge instead of another.
The first night, you encounter him near the pool where Apollo rises, his stone horses flinging water into a circle of applause. He is almost alone. A guard at the far end; a valet in the middle distance. The King holds his gloves like a man who has decided he does not need gloves.
“Madame,” he says again, with the word’s distance and its promise.
“Sire,” you answer, and the night opens like a fan.
He asks you of your husband, and you discover that grief is easier to carry when someone you are not expected to love asks to help with the weight. You speak of the fever and its bitter heat, of the physicians with their remedies like punishments, of the last hour measured by the clock your husband had bought to keep time honest. The King listens, and when he speaks, it is not in the grand patrician register of decrees but in the voice of a man who has lost and kept walking.
“Versailles,” he says, and his mouth twists, “does not make room for sorrow. We must carve it ourselves.”
You look at his hands. They are ringed, perfumed, well managed. Yet there is a bluntness about them, an old discipline. You have heard the histories—all of France is bound together by the known, the retold, the embellished. You know he has slept in armor. You know he is an early riser. You know he believes himself the sun because, for the moment, he is.
“Then let us agree,” you say softly, “that we will not look for a room. We will keep a pocket.”
His eyes lift to yours, surprised into amusement. “A pocket?”
“For sorrow,” you tell him. “Sewn where we can touch it when necessary and forget it when the dance requires two free hands.”
“Practical,” he says, and you realize that this is what your voice has become since you were married at sixteen: something useful to men who command the world.
You leave him before he leaves you. This is not a rule you announce, only one you obey. You do not curtsy as low this time. You do not look back, not even once. Versailles breeds backward glances like mushrooms after rain, and you are determined to be drought-resistant.
The next day, you position yourself at the terrace that overlooks the parterres just as the King’s hunting party begins to assemble. You know, because your maid knew, because the stable boy spoke to her when the grooms laughed, that His Majesty will ride out by the eastern gate. You instruct your feet to drift. Your veil is gray today, the better to absorb sunlight without reflecting it.
The horses clatter. Pages run and collide, bounce off one another like thrown balls. Musketeers polish their gallantries with smiles. The King is already in the saddle, a figure carved in movement, a blade in scabbard. He guides his stallion toward the slope with a touch that is both command and caress.
And then he sees you.
It is a single second. Less. But it folds the morning. He slows as if to consider the breeze, and his horse answers to the suggestion like a well-phrased argument. The King lifts two fingers from the rein—no more—and the gesture feels intimate as a whisper in an empty room.
“Sire,” you say when he draws abreast, your voice firm but pitched to the wind. “May Saint Hubert guard your pursuit.”
“And may Our Lady keep you in hers,” he replies, and the line is so elegant, so polished, so perfectly public that no one can fault it. And yet you feel the flint-strike behind it, the small ignition.
They all see. Of course they do. Versailles is a theater with insufficient curtains. Madame de Montespan, resplendent in carnation silk, tilts her head by two degrees and downs a private draught of vinegar. Louise de La Vallière pretends to be adjusting her glove; her fingers tremble. Even the Queen notices, and in noticing, refuses to notice again. The Queen has cultivated the virtue of selective blindness until it shines like a saint’s relic.
You do not send for anyone. They come anyway. Notes dressed as bouquets. Visits arranged as consolations. An accidental brush on a stair that leaves perfume clinging to your skin like a lie you did not tell. From the beginning, the women who orbit the sun calibrate their approach. Their methods differ. Their objectives converge.
Madame de Montespan prefers strategy that can be embroidered. She invites you to a small supper where the dishes are named after myth and the wine tastes like something a poet would invent. She speaks to you with affection that has edges, as if you are a bolt of fabric she intends to cut on the bias.
“You must not tire yourself,” she says, eyes generous, mouth less so. “Grief can be so… hungry.”
“Mine is a poor eater,” you answer. “It nibbles.”
“A relief,” she murmurs. “I have seen grief with an appetite.”
Louise de La Vallière, meanwhile, comes to you like a prayer you forgot you knew. She speaks of charity, of the children she patronizes with coins and soft words. She brings you a small cross made by a village goldsmith who wanted to understand the sun and made only a star.
“Wear it,” she asks, cheeks pink with the audacity of asking. “If only for a day.”
You do. You always did specialize in kindness at little cost. But you are not a fool. You understand the ledger you have opened. You measure each entry with care.
Night is the fairest auditor. When the palace thins and quiet becomes possible, you slip to the long galleries where moonlight rehearses itself on the parquet. You have learned the private geography of the court, its arteries and hidden rooms. And often—more often than you will confess, even to yourself—you find the King there, not by design, of course not, and yet your steps discover his steps as if a map had been smuggled into your shoe.
You speak of things that do not belong to an altar: the cost of marble, the temperament of architects, the habit of ministers when contradicted. You learn how his mind moves, ladder to roofbeam, beam to sky. He asks you about books and bishops, about whether the Queen’s Spanish temper will ever yield to French weather, about music that lifts the body as well as the soul. He is surprised that you answer without flattery. He is more surprised that he prefers you when you do not try to please him.
One night, as you stand with him at a window that opens to a darkness chased with silver, he reaches for your hand. It is not the sovereign’s gesture—no ring extended for the ritual brush of lips. He simply takes your hand like a man that has remembered he has one.
You let him.
It is the smallest touch, but it writes itself along your skin with impossible eloquence. Your pulse takes on a new grammar. He does not squeeze; he does not stroke; he does not own. He holds until the holding becomes a fact and then releases you before the court’s invisible stenographers can fasten the moment into a sentence.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
You could say that tomorrow belongs to God. Instead, you select a word with fewer witnesses. “Yes.”
The hunts become a liturgy. You stand where he will see you, and he looks. Sometimes he speaks a line fit for the open air, a phrase that will look good when overheard. Sometimes he only inclines his head, and the air around you tightens like a corset pulled a notch too far. The women keep score because the court always does. They align their assets—wit, beauty, rumor—like regiments on a field.
It cannot last. In a way, you do not want it to. There is a kind of cowardice in endless beginning. You know that the danger of Versailles is not sin; it is drift. You will not drift. If this is to be a battle, you will choose the ground.
It happens on a Sunday, after mass, when the scent of incense has not yet lifted from the tapestries. Madame de Montespan has gathered a salon of philosophies—men who mistake conversation for invention—and she places you by the window, as if you are part of the arrangement of roses. The King is expected. The King is late. The woman’s fans rustle like wings.
“Tell me,” Madame de Montespan says, a sweetness that makes your teeth ache, “do widows sleep better?”
You feel the room lean forward. You think of your husband’s last night, of the way he clutched at life as if life were a rope that had already burned his hands. You keep your face smooth.
“Sometimes,” you say. “Sometimes we do not sleep at all.”
Before the barbs can be dressed as laughter, the King enters. Sunlight decides to accompany him. He crosses to you with a directness that damasks itself as etiquette.
“Madame,” he says, and your name in his mouth sounds like a sovereign decree and like something else entirely. “Walk with me.”
There is a murmur. There is always a murmur. You stand, and the room scrapes its chairs against the floor of history. Madame de Montespan’s smile calcifies. Louise de La Vallière watches you go and does not try to stop you. She is past stopping anyone. She is, you think suddenly, a woman who has learned that love at court is a season with unpredictable frosts.
You walk with the King through antechambers and past the polite astonishment of men who wield ministries and pretend not to see. You reach a smaller salon where music practices in the corner, a viol one string short of perfect. He closes the door with a care that is exactly the amount of care the act requires.
“Majesty,” you say, and in the tightness of the word is everything: danger, ceremony, invitation, refusal.
He looks at you as if palaces were human inventions and you were not. “I am tired of the stage,” he says. “Stay a moment.”
“We have remained many moments,” you answer. “Shall we set a price?”
He almost smiles. “You frighten me when you talk like Colbert.”
“I will try for Racine next,” you murmur, and the laughter breaks him. He steps toward you, not quite close, just near enough that you can feel the heat the world ascribes to him. He does not touch you. Not yet.
“Every man,” he says slowly, “believes he is the architect of his own destiny. I am told, repeatedly, that I am more than a man. Yet in this—” he lifts his hand, lets it fall “—I am merely that: a man who finds a woman compelling and seeks to be in the same air.”
You have rehearsed a hundred answers to a declaration you were not certain would come. None of them serve. Your mouth, traitor, chooses honesty. “I have sought your air as well.”
Something eases in him. The muscles behind the august mask relax. “Then let us be unoriginal together.”
You could surrender. You could lay down your reputation like a cloak at his feet and hope the next season’s fashion is forgiveness. You could refuse and watch him choose another hand to hold in the moonlight—he is a king; he is not a monk. What you do instead is what you have always done best: you architect the terms.
“Two conditions,” you say.
His eyebrow inclines, amused and wary.
“First,” you continue, “no lies to the Queen. She has enough. She must not be asked to inventory ours.”
He inclines his head. “And the second?”
“This will be… not private, never that. But ours.” You choose the next words with care: “No humiliations. No displays that cost me the currency I need to live here.”
He studies you, and you understand why men flatter him; his attention is a reward. “You would not enjoy being paraded as the latest hymn?”
“I would prefer to be the pause between verses.”
He laughs with a kind of delight that makes you forget that he can order a man to the scaffold and sleep that night. Then, finally, he reaches—an unhurried, inevitable gesture—and touches you again at the wrist, where the skin is thin and the pulse is nearly a secret. His thumb rests, light as breath. Your heart reveals itself anyway.
“Agreed,” he says. “We will be as discreet as Versailles permits.”
Which is to say, you think, not at all. And yet it is something. It is a pocket.
The weeks thereafter become a choreography. Stolen touches when propriety looks away. A hand on your back as you pass through a door first, as if you are a priority and not a possibility. Late-night talks where he forgets to perform and you forget to guard. Walks that are not accidental but are timed to the minute so that accident can be feigned. You meet him on the hunting slope with the right blessing on your tongue. You leave him before he leaves you.
The women adapt; they always do. Madame de Montespan sharpens. Louise de La Vallière retreats further into the virtue of pain. The Queen does not look and therefore sees everything. Ministers begin to include your name in calculations they do not say aloud. A cousin you barely knew before offers you a lake house as if it is a compliment; a bishop offers you counsel as if it is a sacrament. You accept nothing but the nights.
And then, one evening when the heat has climbed the walls and hangs panting beneath the frieze, you arrive at your small, hard-won private room to find a parcel wrapped in plain paper. No seal. No note. Inside, a pair of riding gloves, soft as some imagined morning. They are for a man; they are not new; they smell faintly of orange blossom and leather.
You take them to the window, where the light knows its business. You touch the stitching with a fingertip and feel how your life has changed: not loudly, not obviously, but stitch by stitch, until the garment bears a different name.
You do not put them on. They are not yours to wear. You hold them until the sun recedes and candles must be called to finish the day. Then you place them in a drawer you reserve for belongings that feel like decisions.
Later that night, as you stand with him at the edge of the long reflecting pool, its surface slick with moon, you say, “I received your… argument.”
“Argument?” He glances over, smiling. “I am fond of my arguments being well made.”
“They fit,” you say simply. “Even unworn.”
He takes your hand again, fully this time, palm to palm, and your fingers decide to belong. The mirrors of Versailles are asleep; the eyes of Versailles pretend to be. You are not sleeping. You are awake in the oldest sense.
The King draws a breath that is not for the world and not for France and not for glory, but for you. “Tomorrow,” he says.
“Yes,” you answer, and feel the word move through you like a procession.
You do not know the ending. Versailles writes endings with malice and music. You know that the jealous will bargain and the pious will judge and the practical will profit. You know that seasons will turn and so will favor. But here in the deliberate night, with your grief sewn where you can find it and your joy daring to press its hands against the silk of your life, you believe in the pocket you negotiated, in the stolen touches, in late talks, in “accidental” walks that are as deliberate as prayer.
You believe, briefly and entirely, that the sun has found a way to set without burning you—and that when it rises again, it will know your name.