Gates of Gold

A Season of Rain

That afternoon, Cécile walks the dogs back to the apartment. She finally gathers the courage to ask Madame about the doctors who once served at court, hoping to learn something of a Dr. Revel. Madame launches instead into an opinion she has clearly held for years. She believes that if more people took walks and breathed fresh air, there would be less illness at the palace. Being German herself, she complains that so many French fear that outside air harms the body. She insists that the women who retreat into the little dark resting nooks built into the palace walls would do better to step outside, get some exercise, and loosen their waists besides.

Only when Cécile steers her back to the question does Madame pause, tap her well-padded cheek, and remember him after all. She recalls that Dr. Fagon, the king’s own physician, once knew a Dr. Revel. He was a man of deep conviction who believed in fresh air, brisk walks, and drinking plenty of water, much like Madame herself. He favored these over the bloodletting and purges practiced at court, which she suspects did more to kill people than to cure them.

Madame says she admired Dr. Revel for holding fast to his beliefs no matter the cost. Then she changes the subject just as suddenly. Cécile knows better than to press her further. She tucks the words away, though she isn’t ready to draw the conclusion they point toward.

The weather turns before long. Rain settles into a steady drizzle that doesn’t let up for weeks. Mildew creeps into the halls and corners of the palace. Tempers sour along with the walls. Even Madame’s dogs refuse to set a paw outside, leaving Cécile to tug them out and coax them back in again, hour after hour.

One rainy afternoon, a page delivers a note from Marie-Adélaïde’s apartments. Bretagne refuses to study until he sees Stabdille again, and the dog is wanted at once. Madame rolls her eyes but relents, keeping the other dogs for company and sending Cécile off with an escort. Madame grumbles that under Madame de Maintenon’s own rule, royal children are never disciplined, only spoiled.

The page assigned to guide her, a boy named Philippe, confides that he, too, came from the countryside. He explains that pages live and train above the stables. They study not just horsemanship but science, literature, history, and etiquette, since a page might someday carry messages to the battlefront. He hopes to become Master of the Horse himself.

When Cécile admits there’s nowhere for a girl like her to study, he mentions Saint Cyr, a school for girls of nobility. She understands at once it was never meant for her. She wonders: escape to what? She isn’t ready to think about marriage. Serving Madame already feels like more kindness than she has any right to expect. By the door, Philippe turns pink in the cheeks and hurries off before she can thank him.

Marie-Adélaïde’s apartment is reached by a grand staircase over black-and-white marble. It’s gilded enough to make Cécile squint, even with rain streaking the windows. The princess, whose charm and laughter have won over nearly everyone at court, including the king and Madame de Maintenon, holds court from the center of a semicircle of chairs. Bretagne watches from his own miniature sedan chair through its tiny glass window. The moment Cécile lifts Stabdille to the glass, boy and dog greet each other nose to nose. Bretagne pulls him onto his lap, singing to him, while Cécile settles nearby, pretending not to listen to the women’s talk.

At first the women gossip and tease a woman for her gluttony, joking that not even the doctor’s purges can cure her overeating. But the gossip soon turns to a certain Dr. Revel, once the court’s second physician. Some called him brilliant, others a lunatic, before the king finally sent him away. Without warning, the women turn to Cécile. They ask where Papa learned his medical training that allowed him to help Madame after her fall. Cécile answers honestly that she doesn’t know, though the question lodges deep inside her.

Marie-Adélaïde asks gently whether this banished doctor could possibly be Papa. Cécile blurts that Papa is at home, not in prison. But Madame de Maintenon corrects her. Dr. Revel served only eighteen months in the Bastille before he was released and banished from the palace forever after. In Cécile’s head, the pieces click into place. Papa speaks his mind exactly as this doctor once did. He settled quietly in Rileaux, where Cécile was born, at just the time a disgraced physician would have needed somewhere new to live.

“My father is a peasant, nothing more,” Cécile says, though the words leave her hollow.

Madame de Maintenon looks satisfied, remarking that it’s fortunate. She notes that a daughter of such a man’s mind might be suspected of wrong thinking, when her duty is to serve the king. She dismisses Cécile with a nod. “Très bien. You may go.” Cécile curtsies and slips away, ashamed of how quickly she denied Papa to protect her place at court.