His trainers squeaking on seventy-three metres of polished parquet floor, Stanley paced the Hall of Mirrors under a ceiling that spanned an awesome twelve metres in height. He felt hushed and reverential as he counted seventeen French windows on one side, matched by magnificent arcaded mirrors on the other. The room shone and reflected and chandeliers hung all the way down, like bunches of ice sculptures. La Galerie des Glaces, he decided, was the acme of sophistication. The woman who brought him here should be at his side.

I would breathe down his neck

had I any oxygen to expel.

Hearing other tourists enter, he turned around to discover that they had not. A warm prickle rose on his neck. He scratched it. He looked into a mirror. Was Versailles visited by the spirits his mother had seen? No sooner had he asked the question than the answer came in the form of a woman standing behind him. Dressed in a nun’s habit and wimple, she was no more than five feet in height and her tiny plump hands were folded over each other with a quiet confidence. When he swung around, she vanished. When he returned to the mirror, she was once more in view. Hers was a métisse face – not quite one thing, not quite the other, yet complete in itself. She watched him through clear, calm eyes, and her words tinkled like silver cutlery and delicate glassware at a banquet.

‘There were no assemblies in the convent, except to hear the words of the Faith. No joy, except the singing of psalms. No warmth in winter. No decorative arts or fine foods. I did not choose a life of poverty and silence, monsieur. It was conferred on me at birth.’ Her voice did not come from her lips, which were as shapely and solidified as those on the marble busts around him.

‘Whispered down these long corridors was my name: Louise-Marie, the Little Mooress, the Black Nun of Moret. It was at the Convent of Moret, with its cold stone walls, that I lived out the whole of my life. My mother, Queen Marie-Thérèse, visited when she stayed at Fontainebleau; otherwise I would never have known the art of conversation, such as she practised it.

‘When the royal household moved to Versailles, she told me of the many festivals, the foreign emissaries, how music accompanied every moment of every day. Then I could think of nothing else. My own bedchamber, ladies-in-waiting, the prettiest gowns, all the young princes requesting my hand from the King.

‘My mother told me that he was a countryman at heart who loved riding to hounds, he loved driving his horse at full gallop. He craved the forests, the hills, the rivers. Maybe one day, I prayed, the King will allow me a little cottage and garden.