“I bring you,” he announced, “a lady who has need of your skill.”
And he waved a hand towards the tall cloaked figure at his side.
“Velvet faces tell me little, Madame la Marquise,” she said calmly. “Nor, believe me, will the King look at a countenance that you conceal from me.”
There was an exclamation of surprise and anger from Madame de Montespan. She plucked off her mask.
“Can you wonder?” asked La Voisin, “since I have told you what you carry concealed in your heart?”
Madame de Montespan was as credulous as only the very devout can be.
“Since that is so, since you know already what I seek, tell me can you procure it me?” she asked in a fever of excitement. “I will pay well.”
“Obdurate, indeed, is the case that will not yield to such medicine as mine,” she said. “Let me consider first what must be done. In a few days I shall bring you word. But have you courage for a great ordeal?”
“For any ordeal that will give me what I want.”
“In a few days, then, you shall hear from me,” said the witch, and so dismissed the great lady.
Leaving a heavy purse behind her, as Vanens had instructed her, the Marchioness departed with her escort. And there, with that initiation, as far as we can ascertain, ended Louis de Vanens's connection with the affair.
At Clagny Madame de Montespan waited for three days in a fever of impatience for the coming of the witch. But when at last La Voisin presented herself, the proposal that she had to make was one before which the Marchioness recoiled in horror and some indignation.
The magic that La Voisin suggested involved a coadjutor, the Abbe Guibourg, and the black mass to be celebrated by him. Madame de Montespan had heard something of these dread sacrificial rites to Satan; sufficient to fill her with loathing and disgust of the whitefaced, beady-eyed woman who dared to insult her by the proposal. She fumed and raged a while, and even went near to striking La Voisin, who looked on with inscrutable face and stony, almost contemptuous, indifference. Before that impenetrable, almost uncanny, calm, Madame de Montespan's fury at last abated. Then the urgency of her need becoming paramount, she desired more clearly to be told what would be expected of her. What the witch told her was more appalling than anything she could have imagined. But La Voisin argued: