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Hi,
Thank you to let me know what you what you think about this
:
Memoirs of Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart-Mortemart, marquise
de Montespan, written by the marquise de Montespan.
Chapter XL - Volume
III : The Queen Has a Black Baby.
"I have already told how the envoys of
the King of Arda, an African prince, gave to the Queen a nice little blackamoor,
as a toy and pet. This Moor, aged about ten or twelve years, was only
twenty-seven inches in height, and the King of Arda declared that, being quite
unique, the boy would never grow to be taller than three feet.
The King
could never put up with this little dwarf, albeit his features were comely
enough. To begin with, he thought him too familiar, and never even answered him
when the dwarf dared to address him.
Following the fashion set by her
Majesty, all the Court ladies wanted to have little blackamoors to follow them
about, set off their white complexions, and hold up their cloaks or their
trains. Thus it came that Mignard, Le Bourdon, and other painters of the
aristocracy, used to introduce negro boys into all their large portraits. It was
a mode, a mania; but so absurd a fashion soon had to disappear after the mishap
of which I am about to tell.
The Queen being pregnant, public prayers
were offered up for her according to custom, and her Majesty was forever saying:
"My pregnancy this time is different from preceding ones. I am a prey to nausea
and strange whims; I have never felt like this before. If, for propriety's sake,
I did not restrain myself, I should now dearly like to be turning somersaults on
the carpet, like little Osmin (2). He eats green fruit and raw game; that is
what I should like to do, too. I should like to--"
"Oh, madame, you
frighten us!" exclaimed the King. "Don't let all those whimsies trouble you
further, or you will give birth to some monstrosity, some freak of nature." His
Majesty was a true prophet. The Queen was delivered of a fine little girl, black
as ink from head to foot. They did not tell her this at once, fearing a
catastrophe, but persuaded her to go to sleep, saying that the child had been
taken away to be christened.
The physicians met in one room, the bishops
and chaplains in another. One prelate was opposed to baptising the infant;
another only agreed to this upon certain conditions. The majority decided that
it should be baptised without the name of father or mother, and such suppression
was unanimously advocated.
The little thing, despite its swarthy hue,
was most beautifully made; its features bore none of those marks peculiar to
people of colour.
It was sent away to the Gisors district to be suckled
as a negro's daughter, and the Gazette de France contained an announcement to
the effect that the royal infant had died, after having been baptised by the
chaplains.
The little African was sent away, as may well be imagined;
and the Queen admitted that, one day soon after she was pregnant, he had hidden
himself behind a piece of furniture and suddenly jumped out upon her to give her
a fright. In this he was but too successful.
The Court ladies no longer
dared come near the Queen attended by their little blackamoors. These, however,
they kept for a while longer, as if they were mere nick-hacks or ornaments; in
Paris they were still to be seen in public. But the ladies' husbands at last got
wind of the tale, when all the little negroes disappeared."
Monsieur,
You ask me what I think of this. All this is total nonsense,
fables, false stories, just as false as those Memoirs, Monsieur.
Louis
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