Avon Modern Short Story Monthly #36 — page 31: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

- HISTORICAE NIGHTS’ ENTERTAINMENT 31 “You will feed to. Such things are costly.” He glanced round to see that none was listening, then bending nearer: “There is a sorceress named La Voisin in the Rue deta°Tannerie, well known as a fortune- teller to many ladies of the Court, who at a word from me will do ~ “your need.” La Montespan turned white. The piety in which she had been reared—the habits of Avhich clung to her despite the irregularity of her life—made her recoil before the thing that she desired. Sorcery was of the Devil. She told him so. But Vanéns laughéd. “So that it be effective . . .” said he with a hae And then across the room floated a woman’s trilling laugh. She looked in the direction of the sound.and beheld the gorgeous figure of. the King bending—yet haughty and condescending even in adoration —over handsome Madame de’ Ludres. Pride and ambition rose up in sudden fury to trample on religious feeling. Let Vanens take her to this witch of his, for be the aid what it might, she must have it, And so, one dark night late in the year, Louis de Vanens handed a masked and muffled lady from a coach at the corner of the Rue de Tae $ Tannerie, and conducted her to the house of La Voisin. The door was opened for them by a young woman of some alone years of age—Marguérite Monvoisin, the daughter of the witch- -who led them upstairs to a room that was handsomely furnished arid hung with fantastic tapestry of red designs upon a black ground-—designs that took monstrous shapes in the flickering light of a cluster of candles. Black curtains parted, and from between them stepped a short, plump woman, of a certain comeliness, with two round. black beads of eyes. She was fantastically robed in a cloak of crimson velvet, lined with costly furs and closely studded with double-headed eagles in fine gold, which must have been worth a prince’s ransom; and she wore red shoes on each of which there was the same eagle design ‘in gold. “Ah, Vanens!” she said familiarly. He bawedk “T bring you,” he announced, “a lady who has need of your skill.” And he waved a hand towards the tall cloaked figure at his i La Voisin looked at the masked face. “Velvet faces tell me little, Madame la Marquise,” she said calmly. Eomichbooks.co >=