I stared. “And I am to conclude that you believe me somehow to have had a hand in this?”
“Don’t play games with me, sir. You showed Madame la Duchesse the prince’s letter!”
My mind stumbled. All became dark about me. “I did! And why should I have done that?”
“Wasn’t it your agreement? You’re not the only man who has been a willing tool of Madame la Duchesse. My poor cousin Savonne was heartbroken when he learned of your treachery.” She raised her hand sternly as I stepped forward in shock. “It was his term, sir, not mine. And I very much doubt if he will wish to see you again. He may even decide to take holy orders. I shall have to be sure, of course, that he has a proper vocation and is not taking so drastic a step in the heat of temporary emotion.”
“Madame, I beg you to listen to me. I...”
“That will be all, Monsieur de Saint-Simon. You have interfered in a matter that concerned a member of the royal family who is very dear to me. I simply wanted you to know that I knew.”
***
Half-distracted, I wandered in a daze through the corridors of the palace, failing to acknowledge nods or bows. Gabrielle was crossing the great gallery with two ladies. The moment she saw me she must have sensed that something was wrong, for she left her friends and hurried across the floor to me.
“What’s wrong? You have the most ghastly pallor! Are you ill?”
I looked at her in horror. “You betrayed me! You betrayed me to Madame la Duchesse!”
She glanced quickly to her left and right. “Let us go home,” she whispered.
“No! Here! I must talk to you here!”
Gabrielle was quick to accept situations and make the best of them. She walked at once to the emptiest portion of the gallery and turned to face me, her back against one of those immense silver guéridons supporting two tall silver candelabra, which framed her patiently resolute countenance. I remember that the stems of the candelabra were wrought in the forms of naked wrestling men. Gabrielle struck me, even at such a moment, as affecting a pose of female superiority to such idle muscular strife.
“You gave Conti’s letter about Spain to Madame la Duchesse!”
Gabrielle’s unaltered expression disclosed to me now that she had been prepared for my outburst. Despite her calm, I suspected that her heart must have been beating faster than usual.
“Was that not your agreement with her?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“That you would show her everything the prince had written?”
“Only what he had written about herself. And then only at my discretion. Good God, do you know what you’ve done?”
“Perfectly. I’ve done exactly what the prince wanted.”
“Woman, you’re mad!”
“Be calm, my dear, I beg of you. The prince was desperate to find a way to come home. Why else would he blab his intention to controvert the king in his most cherished scheme? One whiff of that at Versailles, and the Polish venture was done for! Oh, don’t you see it?” Gabrielle’s eyes were desperately earnest now; she had even clasped her hands. “And he is home, without disgrace—for there was no treason in a Polish king not wanting a Bourbon on the Spanish throne—and reunited with his adored duchess. If you weren’t so blinded by your ideas of Conti’s greatness, you’d admit I’d done a good day’s work. Anyone can see he’d have made the most ghastly sovereign!”
I was beside myself. “Don’t give me such rot! You just didn’t want to go to Poland yourself! Admit it!”
Gabrielle looked down at the floor. It came across to me suddenly that she was not in the least afraid—nervous, but not afraid. “Ah, now, you want my real motive. Very well, you shall have it.” She looked up and fixed her eyes with sudden sternness on mine. “I would have been glad to go to Poland. I would have been glad to go to the ends of the earth with you—if it would have made you happy. But there’s only one place in the world where you can be happy, and that’s right here. At court.”
“It’s the only place in the world where I’m utterly miserable!”
“It’s where you’re alive, anyway. You accuse me of reading your letters. I plead guilty! And not only your letters. I’ve read all your notes, your memoranda, even your journal! I’ve read every scrap of paper in our whole house. And I know what you are at last. What you really are. You’re not really a duke or a soldier or even a courtier. You’re a writer!”
What was most extraordinary about this revelation was that I had no clear idea of whether or not Gabrielle thought this was an honorable thing to be. I somehow received the impression that what she was trying to say was that it was her duty to find out what was my real profession and then to support me in it. But there it was again, the idea that Gabrielle perhaps shared with my mother: that whatever a man did decide to be would probably be a bit ridiculous. And I could now see by the glint in her eyes that she fully expected to be forgiven for what she had done. Perhaps even applauded!
“Gabrielle!” I cried in exasperation. “Do you realize you may have destroyed a man’s career? That you may have twisted history?”
“Oh, don’t you think things come out pretty much the same, no matter what one does? I never really believed the prince was going to be elected, did you?”
“Of course I did!”
“Well, what does it matter who’s king of Poland?”
“Gabrielle...” I stopped, too outraged, too flabbergasted, to go on. I might as well have been talking to the candlesticks. It was so evident that she, like my mother, would never, never believe that reality and normality, and probably even Utopia, were not what she had before her very eyes in Versailles, on that day, under the great king, living in the great century. Of course, she did not believe in God! She believed only in the here, the now. And then my anger, even part of my sorrow, seemed to ebb away into the swelling, bubbling stream of the evident futility of it all. “At least you can write to Savonne and tell him whose fault it was,” I growled. “The poor man thinks I betrayed him.”
“Oh, I’ll be happy to do that!” Gabrielle replied briskly, delighted to find so practical a way out of what threatened to be a hopeless impasse. “In fact, I’ll go and do it this very minute!”
And she left me staring into my silly countenance in the great, smoky, silver-framed mirror behind her.
6
AS I STATED at the commencement of this exercise, my purpose is to give some explanation, or at least some account, of how I came to write my memoirs. So I am deliberately selecting the events, or episodes, of my life that have most bearing on that, which means that I shall shortly have occasion to skip over some dozen years. It was not, I cannot too much emphasize, that these skipped passages of time were unhappy or even unfruitful; it is simply that they were not relevant, at least in my opinion, to the chosen topic.
At the time of the failure of Conti’s Polish aspirations, I had resolved to eschew the life of political action for that of a historiographer, and I remained more or less faithful to this resolution from 1697 the year of the marriage of the king’s third legitimate grandson, the due de Berry, to which I shall advert in a near chapter. During all these dozen or more years I stayed at court, noting everything, recording everything, and trying my hand at essays and tracts on various subjects, such as the story of certain ducal houses or the rights of peers in the parlements. I had not decided what form my ultimate work would take, but I had an idea that it would be extensive: a history of the peerage, or a history of our kings, or maybe even a history of France itself. But whatever the end result, everything at court was happily relevant to it, either in the light that it shed on the past or in the light that it shed on the present. My research was without limits and without waste.
I always like to tie up loose ends; I was never a dangler; so I shall fill in here the unhappy balance of my poor friend Conti’s short life, which lasted until the year of Berry’s marriage, when (quite coincidentally) I again turned my thoughts to political action. But before I
do this, let me trace something of my own and Gabrielle’s domestic development in those same years.
It took me a long time to accept what I sometimes regarded as her perfidy, and sometimes as her simple perversity, in the matter of Conti’s letter. She always insisted that she had merely carried out my own declared policy of transmitting all of his correspondence to Madame la Duchesse, and that, as a trustworthy agent, she should have been given the discretion to ignore the single, improper exception that I had quixotically insisted upon. When I pointed out that she at the time had supplied a different motive, namely, her wish to keep me from going to Poland, she would shrug and repeat that we were duty bound by our agreement with the lovers to relay all the correspondence. Obviously, she had decided, after due reflection, that this was the best possible face to put on her betrayal of my confidence, and with this decision made, womanlike, she made it the truth for herself. I had either to accept it or to face the misery of a domestic life where my wife was no longer my ally.
I accepted it. I had reached the point where I could no longer endure the prospect of court life without a confidant, a supporter, a sharer of pangs and joys. Savonne was not deep enough to understand me; Conti and Chartres were too much above me in rank; Beauvillier was too old. I had no end of friendly acquaintances, and, because I knew how to listen well, I was the repository of the secrets of half the court, but all that was not the same as intimacy. I had never had intimates, perhaps because I could never tell my own secrets to anyone but myself—or to Gabrielle. Yes, I had told Gabrielle everything because I had taken for granted, with the seeming docility of her acceptance of my masterhood, that she was another version of myself. I suppose many men have made that same mistake and then have awakened to find that the keys of the fortress have been surrendered, not to the enemy surely, but to another occupant of the citadel, and that the siege of oneself, which is what life is all about, is being defended by a new captain, whose strategy seems only sometimes well taken.
The most I could hope for in our new settlement was an equal partnership. Gabrielle was always perfectly respectful to me in her outward demeanor, both in company and in private—she avoided the vulgarity of adjusting herself to the public stare—but she had given up being silent when she disagreed with me on points of any importance. She would never interrupt, and she was never, thank goodness, shrill; she would not even raise her voice. She would simply wait until there was a proper pause, and then she would state, just once and with perfect clarity, her view. Oh, yes, considering the viragos one had seen at court, I had much to be thankful for!
My mother once pointed out to me that at court the sexes were equal. There were no battles to be fought there, no bread to be won, and the emphasis on clothes and etiquette certainly offered no particular advantage to males. My tools were my eyes and ears, and Gabrielle’s were every bit as acute as mine. If I alone had access to the levers and couchers of the king, she could penetrate to areas where I could not follow: the boudoirs of Madame de Maintenon and the duchesse de Bourgogne. It only made sense that we should operate as a team. Of course, it was painful to me to suspect that many of my values Gabrielle did not share. She was much more inclined than I, for example, to accept the authority of the king in matters of precedence, and she was certainly more tolerant of the low state of morals at court. She proclaimed herself, in short, a realist. But there was no basic reason, I supposed, that a realist and an idealist should not work together.
A good home is based on compromise, and I compromised. I gave up trying to conform Gabrielle’s views to my own. I listened carefully to her advice, without always taking it. In return, she accepted my decisions. She never nagged, never recriminated, and, best of all, never said “I told you so.” And about our three children, our unhappily undersized sons (now two) and daughter, we never had the smallest disagreement. There were times when I suspected that this was the result of a certain maternal indifference on Gabrielle’s part, but she performed all her outward duties to her offspring with the greatest propriety. As for myself, did she love me or did she own me? Perhaps a little of each. She never, at any rate, gave the least indication of not being content with her lot. There have surely been millions of worse marriages.
The terrible war that Conti had predicted over the Spanish succession broke out at last in 1702, with England, Holland and the German empire arrayed against us to determine whether or not the dauphin’s second son, the due d’Anjou, should reign in Madrid as Philippe V. Conti himself managed to serve briefly in the campaign in northern Italy, but he was recalled at the instigation of his jealous fellow general, the due de Vendome, another royal bastard, or at least the descendant of one, being a great-grandson of Henri IV and Gabrielle d’Estrée. It was Conti’s doom, like that of our fair land, to be brought low by the illicit spawn of royalty. One wondered if there would ever be an end to it. He idled his remaining years away at court, drinking more, dissipating more, doing more of everything than he should have done, until his death at forty-five in 1709, just before the hectic business about the due de Berry’s marriage.
I shall not linger unduly over the sad story of my poor friend’s decomposition. I saw him less frequently in these years, as it became evident that there was little or nothing that I could do for him. At first I used to lecture him. I would spend whole mornings in his apartment, warning him of the folly of his course, begging him to apply to the king for any post abroad, even an embassy, although such was beneath his rank, but it was all to no avail.
“Give it up, Saint-Simon,” he would say with his sad smile and melancholy eyes. “Give it up, and give me up. I’m not worth it. I’m through. Don’t you think a man of my intelligence knows when he’s through?”
“No!”
But much good my vehemence did me. I appealed to everyone. I appealed even to Madame la Duchesse. I was mad enough to think that she might allow him to leave her again, and I was bold enough to strike the note that only with the challenge of some post away from court would he be able to preserve what was left of his manhood.
“There is enough of it left for me, Monsieur de Saint-Simon,” she replied, with snapping eyes. “Even if there is not enough for you.”
But, alas, she begged the very question I was putting. For Madame la Duchesse was a fascinating and at times horrible combination of a beautiful woman and a praying mantis. She was perfectly, almost sublimely, capable of every contradiction. She wanted her lover here at Versailles, quite at her disposal, and at the same time with the reputation of a warrior and hero. She would share him with wine bottles and page boys, the temptations of idleness, but not with soldiers at the front. There were moments when I felt that she almost welcomed his degradation as ensuring her own possession, and other times when she may have fancied that he was eluding her, oozing out between the grasp of her fingers through the liquid properties of his vices. Perhaps she simply wanted to destroy him in order that no one else should have him.
Certainly the worst thing that she did to him was her affair with her sister’s husband, my old friend Chartres, or Orléans, as he was styled after the death of Monsieur. Of course, part of her motivation in this may have been to score a point over a younger sister who had had the good fortune to marry a higher-ranking prince, but I believe an equally strong one was her perverse desire to torture Conti for letting himself become less of a man than Orléans. For the reluctant bridegroom of Mademoiselle de Blois (“Madame Lucifer,” as we called her because of her insufferable pride) was, for all his failings, very much a man. Sometimes I thought of him as the only man in the whole court. Except, perhaps, the king, who, incidentally, was the only man of whom Orléans was afraid, despite all his surly bluff and apparent defiance.
When I protested to Orléans that he was not only undoing himself fatally with the king by sleeping with two of his daughters at once, but cruelly wounding our old friend Conti, he took up my first point first, answering me in his usual crude, blunt manner.
“I thought you’d congra
tulate me, Saint-Simon! We’ve lost the war against the bastards in the salon; let us win it in the bedchambers. My uncle has married all his bastards into the royal family; he wants to have them screwed by Bourbons in wedlock. Well, I’m arranging to have them screwed by a Bourbon out of wedlock! I’ve even put the dowager Conti on my list, but she’s a tough piece of meat to handle.”
I should explain here that Conti’s deceased older brother had married the king’s oldest bastard by the Vallière. The dowager princesse de Conti, although in my opinion still a fine-looking woman, was some years older than Orléans and myself.
“I don’t see how you can give a good account of yourself to a woman you dislike,” I observed, with a grimace.
“I don’t dislike Madame la Duchesse,” he retorted with a growl. “She’s a damn fine creature. I disapprove of her, that’s all.”
“You mean that the ‘damn fine creature’ happens to be a...?” I paused to raise my eyebrows.
“A bitch. Exactly.” Orléans was not one to leave an i undotted. “It can be great fun to have an affair with a bitch. You ought to try it some day, Saint-Simon. It might take your mind off the all-absorbing question of whether you shouldn’t be the thirteenth instead of the fourteenth ranking duke of the realm.”
“What does Madame Lucifer say to all this?” I demanded, ignoring his last observation.
“Well, it’s very odd, but I think she prefers to have me confine my infidelities to the royal family. You know what they say about my wife, don’t you? That she’s a princess, even on...” He waited, smiling, for me to finish.
“Even on her closed stool? You do hear everything.”
“Well, I pick up the smut while you pick up the gossip. But, seriously, to come back to our friend Conti, I thought it might do him good to see his lovely duchess as she is. For don’t think I’ve been her only diversion. Far from it! I even figured that the king might send me back to the Spanish front to get rid of me. And maybe I could persuade Conti to go along. It might be the saving of him.”
The Cat and the King Page 10