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Updated: June 18, 2025
"I used to think that the Marquis de Ronquerolles was one of his friends " the Duchess began sweetly. "I have never heard my brother say that he was acquainted with him." Mme de Langeais did not reply. Mme de Serizy concluded from the Duchess's silence that she might apply the scourge with impunity to a discreet friendship which she had seen, with bitterness of soul, for a long time past.
Under the circumstances they naturally followed out the old family policy; and Mlle Antoinette, a beautiful and portionless girl, was married to M. le Marquis de Langeais only a few months before the death of the Duke his father.
The General's face grew white; he was about to spring to her side, when Mme de Langeais rang the bell, the maid appeared, and, smiling with a mocking grace, the Duchess added, "Be so good as to return when I am visible." Then Montriveau felt the hardness of a woman as cold and keen as a steel blade; she was crushing in her scorn.
She longed to love him more, and to pity him. But Langeais did not seem to stand in much need of pity: and a suspicion, more dreadful even than the first, crossed the girl's heated imagination, that her father knew nothing, but that it suited him to know nothing, and that, so long as he were allowed to go his own way, he did not care. Then Jacqueline felt that she was lost.
On the 13th of December, 1491, the contract of marriage between Charles VIII. and Anne of Brittany was drawn up in the great hall of the castle of Langeais, in two drafts, one in French and the other in Breton. The Bishop of Alby celebrated the nuptial ceremony.
Mme de Langeais waltzed that evening with a sort of excitement and transport which redoubled Montriveau's lowering looks. He stood in front of the line of spectators, who were amusing themselves by looking on. Every time that she came past him, his eyes darted down upon her eddying face; he might have been a tiger with the prey in his grasp.
She reached the Boulevard d'Enfer, and looked out for the last time through falling tears on the noisy, smoky city that lay below in a red mist, lighted up by its own lamps. Then she hailed a cab, and drove away, never to return. When the Marquis de Montriveau reached the Hotel de Langeais, and found no trace of his mistress, he thought that he had been duped.
Mme de Langeais did not so much as rise, nothing was visible of her but her face, her hair was loose but confined by a scarf.
The Duchesse de Langeais, a Navarreins by birth, came of a ducal house which had made a point of never marrying below its rank since the reign of Louis XIV. Every daughter of the house must sooner or later take a tabouret at Court. So, Antoinette de Navarreins, at the age of eighteen, came out of the profound solitude in which her girlhood had been spent to marry the Duc de Langeais' eldest son.
Almost everywhere the women denied the facts, but in such a manner that the report was confirmed; the men one and all believed it, and manifested a most indulgent interest in Mme de Langeais. Some among them threw the blame on Armand. "That savage of a Montriveau is a man of bronze," said they; "he insisted on making this scandal, no doubt."
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