“Because I was given a letter of introduction to him before I left England,” Roger lied; “and I have so far failed to discover his present address.”
“You might try the Palais Royal,” suggested de Périgord. “I do not go there often these days, but it chanced that I was there last week, and as I was on my way in to His Highness’s cabinet I passed de St. Huruge on his way out. Possibly one of the secretaries may be able to tell you where he lives.”
The fact that the villainous de Roubec’s sponsor had been seen coming from an interview with the Duc d’Orléans in his Paris home was no proof that he was necessarily an Orleanist himself; but it certainly lent considerable support to Roger’s theory that he might be. And in view of de Périgord’s evident reluctance to discuss d’Orléans he felt that he had been lucky to pick up this little piece of information. Having thanked the Bishop for his suggestion, he added:
“However, since I should still have to enquire of his whereabouts from a third party, I fear I shall not have time to find and wait upon him; as I am leaving Paris quite shortly.”
“Indeed!” De Périgord raised his eyebrows. “I am most sorry to hear it. You have been absent from Paris for so long; I was particularly looking forward to the renewed enjoyment of your society.”
As Roger bowed his acknowledgment of the graceful compliment, the Bishop went on: “Really; you should at least remain to witness the opening of the States. It will be vastly interesting; and I should be happy to introduce you to all the deputies of my acquaintance.”
“I thank Your Grace for your kindness, and most tempting offer.” Roger’s voice held genuine regret. “But, alas, I must decline it. Her Majesty’s disapproval of duelling did not manifest itself in my case only by her causing me to spend a night in the Bastille. When I was released this morning the Governor informed me of her further order, that within forty-eight hours I was to leave Paris.”
“What childish tyranny!” exlaimed the Bishop with some petulance. “Whither are you going?”
“To Provence. I have never seen your great cities there or the Mediterranean; and I am told that the coast in those regions is particularly lovely at this time of year.”
De Périgord took snuff again. “You are no doubt wise to keep out of the way for the next few weeks. But I should not let any fear of that order deter you from returning by June if you wish to do so. The royal authority has already become so weakened that it has almost ceased to count. And once the States have been sitting for a little the Court will be plaguey careful not to irritate them unnecessarily by forcing the observance of such arbitrary commands.”
“You feel confident, then, that the States will still be sitting; and that the King will not dismiss them after a few abortive sessions, as he did the Assembly of Notables?”
“He dare not, if he wishes to keep his crown.” A sudden note of hauteur had crept into the Bishop’s deep voice. “At present the King is still respected by the whole nation, and even beloved by the greater part of it. But the States will represent the very blood, brains, bone and muscle of France; and if he attempted to dismiss them he would become the enemy of the whole kingdom overnight. By his decision to call the States he has delivered himself bound into the hands of his subjects; for once they are assembled they will never dissolve except by their own will. I am positive of that.”
Chapter VI
The Affaire Reveillon
As Roger drove back to Paris he felt that he had good reason to be pleased with himself. Much that the Bishop of Autun had told him he had known before, but he had also learnt a lot, and on no previous occasion had he heard a forecast of coming events from anyone approaching de Périgord for knowledge of affairs, political acumen and subtlety of mind. In addition, he had succeeded in putting over such a skilfully distorted account of the Queen’s treatment of him, that it would be all to the good if it did get about; as it was likely to do, seeing that de Périgord was an inveterate gossip. No one but the Governor of the Bastille was in a position to deny that he had been imprisoned for most of the night there, and his imminent departure to Italy would confirm the story that he had been banished. In future, therefore, he would be counted among those who bore the Queen a grudge, but no one would be surprised to see him free again; and de Périgord had himself advised him to return to Paris in a few weeks’ time.
Half an hour’s amiable converse about mutual friends, and the general state of Europe, had succeeded Roger’s political talk with the Bishop; and he had left the charming little house at Passy with the firm conviction that if there was one man in France who would succeed in fishing to his own benefit in the troubled waters of the States General, he was its wily owner.
On re-entering his hackney-coach Roger had told its driver to take him to the inn where he had slept and breakfasted, as it was then nearly five o’clock, and he had decided to sup there rather than at a restaurant in central Paris, where he might run into some acquaintance and feel obliged to give again his fictitious account of the outcome of his recent arrest. Moreover, he was still a little uneasy about the possibility of an Orleanist spy knowing that he had the Queen’s letter; and he did not want to be recognised and followed.
He had much to do that night, and his thoughts were already occupied with his projected labours. By the time the coach reached the Tuileries Gardens he barely took in the fact that a column of infantry was issuing from them and heading east at an unusually rapid gait; and he gave little more attention to the sight of another regiment hastily forming up outside the Louvre. But when the coach turned south to cross the Seine the sound of distant shots, coming across the river from the eastern quarter of the city, suddenly impinged upon his consciousness. The shooting was mainly spasmodic, but now and then punctuated by fusillades of musketry, so it seemed evident that something serious was afoot.
As the coach was temporarily brought to a halt by a block at the entrance of a narrow street on the far side of the river, Roger thrust his head out of the window and shouted to a group of loungers on the corner: “What is the cause of that shooting? What is going on over there in the Faubourg St. Antoine?”
Seeing the gold lace on his hat most of the group gave him only dumb, surly looks; but a big fellow, bolder than the rest, shouted back: “They have unearthed an agent of the Queen—one of the pigs she pays to force down the workers’ wages—and are burning his house about his ears. May the flames consume him!”
The suggestion that the Queen employed agents to force down wages was, to Roger, palpably absurd; but he felt quite sickened by the episode because the big fellow had an open, honest face, and obviously believed what he had said.
On, arriving at his inn he enquired again what had caused the trouble, but could get no coherent account from anyone. Apparently it had started the previous night as a factory dispute and had flared up again early that afternoon into a major riot, to quell which it had proved necessary to call out the troops. None of the people he spoke to could tell him why the Queen should be involved in such a matter, but most of them were convinced that she was at the bottom of it.
Irritated and disgusted by their ready acceptance of these evil, unsupported rumours about her, he ordered supper, ate it in morose silence, then went up to his room.
Having unpacked the things that he had bought at the stationer’s that afternoon, he spread them out on the table and sat down to it. Then he took the Queen’s letter from the capacious pocket of his coat and got to work.
The task he had set himself was no easy one, as his object was to form a cypher within a cypher; so that should the despatch fall into the hands of anyone who already knew Madame Marie Antoinette’s private code, or be given to someone as clever as Mr. Pitt’s cypher expert, they would still not be able to decipher it in the first case, or break it without extreme difficulty in the other. Yet the process must be accomplished according to a set of rules simple enough for him to carry in his own mind; so that on delivering the re-coded copy to the Grand Duke he would be able t
o tell him how to turn it back into the Queen’s cypher. A further complication was that he dared not make any drastic alteration in the symbols or formation of the letter, as if he did and the re-coded copy was stolen from him by someone who knew her cypher at sight, they would immediately recognise it as a fake.
For over an hour he tried out various transpositions, until he had formulated one which he felt was as good as any he could devise; then he began to write on his parchment, forming each letter with great care, so that when he had done the re-coded copy had a superficial resemblance to the original. Having finished, he uncorked a bottle of wine he had brought up with him, had a drink, and attended to certain other matters he had in mind; after which he inserted his copy in the thick envelope that had previously contained the Queen’s letter, warmed the underside of the wax seals that he had lifted and carefully resealed it.
The job had taken him the best part of five hours, so it was now well after midnight; but he had no thought of bed. Instead, he sat down to the table again and commenced a letter to Mr. Pitt. He had already sent one despatch, before leaving Paris for Fontainebleau, making a general report on the situation as far as he could then assess it. But since that he had had his invaluable interview with de Périgord, spoken personally with the Queen, and spent a whole evening listening to the views of a group of noblemen who were among her most intimate friends; in addition he had to explain the reason why he was temporarily abandoning the work he had been given to undertake a mission to Italy; so there was much to say.
Fortunately he possessed the gift of expressing himself as fluently on paper as in speech, so his pen moved without hesitation while filling page after page with fine writing; but, nevertheless, it was close on three in the morning before he finally rose from the table and began to undress.
In consequence he slept late, but even when he woke he did not hurry to get up; and, having rung for his breakfast to be brought to him, he found his mind turning to the Señorita d’Aranda.
He had not given her a thought since they had parted two nights before, but now her long, oval face and striking black eyebrows reappeared in his mental vision with extraordinary vividness. Idly, he wondered what would have transpired if she had been remaining on at Court, and on his return from Italy he had followed his impulse to develop her acquaintance. Although that acquaintance had been very brief, from the beginning she had made no effort to disguise her interest in and liking for him. She was clearly no coquette but a straightforward person, so if he had laid siege to her it seemed highly likely that an affaire would have developed between them.
Roger had no desire to marry, but even had he felt that way inclined, he knew that there could be no question of making Isabella d’Aranda his wife. For him it would have been a brilliant match, as she was the daughter of the greatest man in Spain after King Carlos, and her family were immensely wealthy. But for that very reason they would never have countenanced her marrying a simple gentleman of modest means such as himself. Moreover, as a Spaniard she would certainly be a Catholic, while he was a Protestant, and mixed marriages at that date were still regarded by both sides with abhorrence.
He knew well enough that no platonic affaire would have kept him interested for long, and wondered if he could have made her his mistress. As she had been so long in France, and high society there indulged in perpetual immoralities covered only with a graceful cloak of elaborately observed conventions, it was quite possible that she had been the mistress of one or more men already; and, if so, her seduction would not prove very difficult. On the other hand she was unmarried, and so by convention still forbidden fruit to the more scrupulous courtiers; and the Queen was known to regard any immorality on the part of her ladies with great severity. All things considered, Roger thought it unlikely that Isabella had as yet taken a lover.
But she would, of course, as soon as she was married. All women of her rank married whoever their parents chose for them, so love did not enter into such alliances; and it would have been considered unnatural in them had they failed to take a succession of lovers afterwards. Somehow, though, Roger did not see Isabella going to bed with one man after another. She was too intense to become promiscuous. He thought it much more likely that she would become desperately enamoured of some man who possessed brains as well as looks, probably someone considerably older than herself, and remain faithful to him, perhaps for life, or at all events as long as he remained faithful to her. Then, after he died or left her, she would be heartbroken for a while, but eventually get over it and find solace in her children.
If that were so, it would have proved no easy matter to make her his mistress, had he had the chance, and he knew that he would not have attempted to do so had he found her to be still a virgin. All the same, her very intensity was a sign that once aroused she would be capable of great passion; and Roger, having known Georgina, greatly preferred really passionate women who met a man half-way, to the kind that pretended to faint, then suffered an attack of conscience and wept copiously afterwards.
Still, the question of whether Isabella’s hidden fires had yet led her to indulge herself in gallantry, or not, was of no moment now. If she had left Fontainebleau the day before, as she had said she intended to do, she would by now have accomplished the first stage of her long journey to Spain. At a rough calculation he estimated that she would have spent the night at Pethiviers, or even perhaps have got as far as Orléans. In any case when he took the road to Italy their ways would diverge further apart each day, so it was waste of time to speculate further about her.
Dismissing her from his mind he finished his breakfast, then made a leisurely toilette. At a quarter past ten he left the inn and, as on the previous day, finding no hackney-coach in the vicinity took an omnibus down to the Pont Neuf. Then he once more walked along the Quai de Louvre and crossed the Jardin des Tuileries. On its far side he entered a small café, sat down at a table and ordered a glass of Jerez wine. It was now close on eleven o’clock and he had come there to keep a rendezvous he had made the previous day.
If, while posing as a Frenchman, he had been noticed going into the British Embassy on several occasions by any of his acquaintances, or a police-agent stationed in the quarter, that might have aroused most unwelcome suspicions; but he had to keep in touch with it, both for drawing funds from time to time and to send in his reports, so that they might be despatched to London in the security of the Embassy bag.
To get over the difficulty, he had arranged with Mr. Daniel Hailes, who, apart from the Ambassador, was the only member of the Embassy Staff who knew of his secret activities, a simple code. They had selected a number of quiet cafés, each near one of the public gardens. If Roger sent an envelope to Mr. Hailes containing chestnut leaves it meant: “meet me at the café in the Palais Royal”; if oak leaves, the café on the edge of the Bois de Vincennes; if plane tree leaves the café opposite the Tuileries, and so on. The number of leaves, designated the hour; the addition of one twig, “tomorrow”, of two twigs “the day after tomorrow”, etc. As Mr. Hailes went every morning to Monsieur Aubert to be shaved, it was simple for Roger to leave an envelope there any time during the day with the certainty that, even if the next day was a Sunday, Mr. Hailes would be given it first thing in the morning.
In this way they could meet without the necessity of Roger having to put anything at all on paper; and in the event of somebody at Monsieur Aubert’s opening the envelopes they would not have the faintest idea what the leaves and twigs meant; so no spy could be sent to the meeting places with orders to try to overhear something of the highly secret conversations which took place at them.
Roger had not been seated for many minutes in the café when the portly, middle-aged Mr. Hailes appeared and, giving him a friendly nod, sat down at his table. The diplomat had the rather prim appearance of a wealthy merchant and he was dressed more soberly than was customary with foreigners of his status who were attached to the Court. But he and his chief, the Duke of Dorset, formed a long-standing par
tnership that accounted for the particular efficiency of the British Embassy in Paris at that date. The Ambassador was a man of wit, wealth and fashion; he was extremely popular in French society and even the Queen frequently attended his thés dansant, which had become a regular feature of the Paris winter season. The First Secretary, on the other hand, kept in the background, but little escaped him, as he was both intelligent and extremely shrewd. So while His Grace stayed up all night, winning good will, Mr. Hailes worked all day, providing the brains and direction of policy.
Roger and Mr. Hailes greeted one another in French, and as though they had met purely by chance; then when the latter had ordered himself a drink, he said with a sly smile:
“Well, my dashing Chevalier? What is it you wish of me now? Not more money, I trust; for I furnished you with five hundred écus no longer ago than last week.”
“You have guessed it in one,” Roger replied with a grin. “To console you a little I will confess that I still have most of that five hundred, but I shall require at least a further thousand, and I would prefer it in bills of exchange to coin, as I am about to set out for Italy.”
“And why, may I ask?”
“The matter concerns a lady, and one of the most beautiful I have ever met.”
“I congratulate you,” said Mr. Hailes dryly. “But in such a case I fear you must look elsewhere for your expenses.”
“On the contrary. Indirectly, this is very much the King’s business, so I consider myself fully entitled to ask you, as His Majesty’s representative, to supply me with funds.”
“May one enquire the lady’s name?”
Roger lent forward and lowered his voice. “ ’Tis Marie Antoinette.”
Mr. Hailes did not blink an eyelid; he simply said: “Pray continue, I am all attention.“
Without further ado Roger launched out into an account of his recent experiences. Then, producing his report and the Queen’s letter, he handed them over.
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