Love Birds

Men did not know whether Madame de Villars has always been bad. Or that it was him who led her here.

It had began on a familiar gambling table strewn with cards and expensive Bordeaux, full of her usual cutthroat companions and former lovers, who bartered as usual on frivolous things, on each other's rich wives, on ruining other's lovers. The usual snipes. They would laugh, and she with them, it was all fun and as she knew too, of no meaning as usual, such was their way in love and play.

Until one introduced the proud, handsome, and banished Chevalier de Rohan, whose battlescars and great disdain for the Sun King made him most liberal and thus forward with his plot against the King. Just needed like minded comrades, their weights against this tyrant, and some foreign cohorts, and France would be saved from its King. Of course, he would pay all with gold, all of his gold, his father's gold handsomely. Kidnap the Prince, make the King carve away Normandy, kill the King.

And of course, they all laughed, in their usual ways full of jokes and lies. No, but she could tell, it was not the Bordeaux that made him say those words. There was no joke in his being. There was just sadness and straightness. Which, as he sat there, didn't belong, only more sadness because of his straightness.

Then he dropped a queen of diamonds, and like a great loser bent forth to picked it up.
But, to his widened eyes, it was her naked foot which picked it up, perched it between her dainty toes beneath the table, and put it back to his amazed rough hands.

Why not? Was what she thought that night. Or perhaps it was the Bordeaux. Why not him? Why not this gold, his bull cock, his unequal fight? So she went with him riding out, first to pledge in his conspiracy. Was it the Bordeaux dreg in her mouth? Or was it part of her always? Or herself, finally?

And so it was paid, jingling bags for Netherlandish spies, bullion for the Spanish mercenaries, vulgar favors for other traitors, her bed for Rohan's nights. And it was also these that, when unveiled to Kings and beggars alike in France, damned each and all of them in one.

Ah, the men sighed, "With trademarks of vanity and her coquetry. Haughty in blood and sex by nature she was a most licentious woman, voluptuary, with all the tawdry arts of wantonness. Such a pretty face consigned to waste to a skull upon a spike, along with all gorgeous limbs she had to molder in her nubile most. Such a head upon a gate." They would of course nod with each other, and when no one's near, would smile a rather strange smile. Less that a woman like her would be punished, but there was such a woman at all.

The honor of dying first was granted to her, as per custom and the law's favor. She insisted to go last. Rohan came first with the the sound of the chains of the drawbridge. He was beheaded first near the high noon outside the Bastille. A dozen minutes later came his woman in the conspiracy.

They never knew why, in the footsteps of the headless Rohan, she came in such a state of pink cream and ivory- She was dressed up in her cutthroat abandon, scandalous and vain, as if to outshine death. So bereft, barefeet and so poor, that there was not even a coffin. Some said she had given to pagan shamelessness, why else would so came thus, especially after hearing her last mass? 

Some said that seeing all hope ‘of life was now departed, she abandoned all to gambling in her cells and lost all her jewels and vanities to the dice, even her garter and stockings. Some others said she had resigned to her impoverished death thus gave all she could strip away to her brother M. de Brie's family, tore off her shoes and stockings and thus too would not fall to the headsman's lecherous hands and be stripped off her soft nubile legs ignominiously after an already wretched death.

When she saw the traces of execution that had been made, she gave several brands of weakness, where Rohan's head still regarded her still with grim foreboding eyes. Then she rallied forth her spirits. The Jesuit priest Bourdaloue who stood beside the headsman greeted her and she understood everything contained in his console, and said in a soft tone and firm: "You do not bear me unknown, sir, I honor your character and you befriend me, by the Office that you will complete: one of my wishes for death will be done, my body will not be exposed in the streets. I bequeath to that served me in prison all the clothes that are in my house. I bless my sweet children... And now that my will is done, it only remains for me to adjust my last account with my conscience." Bourdaloue held out a wooden crucifix and blessed the head that would soon roll. She kissed it with her vermillion lips, a firm imprint upon its gild.

She kissed the crucifix and knelt beside the blood spattered block where Rohan died.
Of course, as she bent, it was mingled with the heckles of "Kiss him!" "Kiss him now!" "Kiss him while you still can!" It was their way in love and play, full of mirth and lies. There was nothing but memories laced with Bordeaux, or the life she once felt buzzing in her fingertips, or the empty apertures in her soul.

She only imagined Rohan benting foward, and, like a gift, she flirted back with all she had. Her pledge between her dainty toes.

Lost in the moment Madame de Villars never hear the fell of the headsman's sword.

The block resounded, A gout of blood fountained from the transfixed neck, dousing the crowd and ran bright down the stump's front. Her hands clenched, her spooked legs goosed, and the ample barely contained figure slide off spraying blood across the wooden boards. The crowd's eyes stayed on her dying head as the life drained from her face, dazzled by her sensual bloodied lips, their eyes indulged every twitch, each finger's twists. Gradually Madame de Villar's oval face lost its expression of pain, her mouth opened slightly as her jaw muscled relaxed, as her tongue hang out and unrolled upon the dirtied boards. Her bloodied eyes lost focus as her pupils slowly dilated...As she lost control of face, her inner muscles, her body's last fibers of dignity as her bladder relaxed in a thin wail against the silken bustle of her dress.

Then, patiently waiting until the woman's dying heart finished pumping, the headsman's aides smothered a sponge over her pulpy neck and wiped her running hips. A rainproof tarp fell over the bloody remains and the valets placed the woman's supple corpse in a gravedigger's cart.

A stranger threw two pistoles at the executioner, a few crowns to the other valets of the scaffold, and a few silvers at the gravedigger. The people sighed...The last traitor was taken; the traitors finished. The crowd prayed then scattered, repeating halfhearted recountings and compared notes with each other. It had been...a most impressionable sight.

The dead lecherous woman’s slackened face was then affixed above the scaffold at the center of Paris to ensure no one would miss the grisly display. Her red gore- slicked esophagus fitted snuggly onto the top of the pointed rusted shard, slid down until it cracked deep through the roof of her mouth and through her dead brain. In time, the once- arresting Marquise de Villar's head would decompose right beside her criminal lover, exactly both the law and she had wished.

A woman, and a mother no less, the Madame's comely head stood out amongst the row of traitor's heads. Her powdered blonde coiffure practically glowed in the sunlight that blasted the Place de Greve. Her half-lidded eyes and full, slightly parted lips left her with a seductive expression, silently welcoming anyone who came upon her, and who came up close to scrutinize her famous mouth and tongue. Just like the others, she was a warming and one properly left to rot as a further warning, but the look of satisfaction on her dead face, and the frozen moan hinted that some how, her last fibers in this world crested on the feathery pleasures she left shining on those foul boards.