by Robert Merle
There is a game that the urchins in Paris play in the street in which one of them dresses up in a crown of paper and a large tattered garment in place of an ermine gown, carrying a wooden sceptre and an orb made of rags, and sets up his thrown on a stone marker, pretending to be the king. Gradually his “subjects”—the other urchins, all dirty and snotty—walk up to him, genuflect and call him “sire” or “Your Majesty”, and decorate him with other titles. Each one, however, as he backs away from the “king”, robs him of one of his ornaments: one will take his crown, another his sceptre, the next his orb and yet another his great gown. In the end, the poor king, as honoured as he is, finds himself entirely naked.
This trick, which I’ve often observed at various crossroads on my way from my lodgings in the rue du Champ-Fleuri to the Louvre, and which these ragamuffins seem to adore, is called “the farce of the fleeced king”.
Now on Tuesday, 7th July, as the king was preparing to mount his horse to return to Paris, Guise came up to him to take his leave of him, kissed his hands almost on both knees, with much bowing and scraping and great repeated protestations of his zeal to serve him and promises and guarantees of the subjection of the members of the League to his throne—compliments that all of those present, including myself, considered so exaggerated as to be injurious, but that the king suffered in courteous silence and with a benign air.
When the duc had left, at the head of a suite of almost royal proportions in terms of number, array and splendour, Épernon frowned and said to the king, with his hand on his dagger:
“What’s the duc playing at?”
“Don’t you know?” replied Henri with clenched teeth. “He’s playing the farce of the fleeced king.”
And with an unusual glint in his black eyes, he added these three words, which I, and all of us, have reason to remember:
“But have patience!”
After this, with a grimace, as if he regretted having said too much, he turned to his retinue and shouted in a strong, clear voice:
“Gentlemen, saddle up!”
*
We got back to Paris around nightfall, and, taking leave of His Majesty, I hurried to my lodgings with Miroul, the darkness rendering the Paris streets less safe; and, once arrived at my door, I was happy to see Mérigot, faithfully watching from his post at the needle shop across the street.
Everyone had already gone to bed when I reached my rooms, but seeing no candlelight I assumed that my Angelina had gone to sleep; so, not wishing to trouble her, I undressed in the little cabinet adjoining our room, where I lit a small oil lamp. When I entered our room, I slipped between the sheets, where I found the warm and smooth body of my beloved, but was careful not to touch her to avoid troubling her sleep. Sighing in relief after all the riding and fatigue of my trip, and happy to be in this bed, where I had never known anything but sweet delight, I was about to blow out the lamp, when I heard a very sad sigh.
“But, my Angelina,” I said, taking her sweetly in my arms and trying to see her face through her dishevelled hair, “you’re crying! What’s the matter? Why are you so sad?”
“You know all too well,” she said in a mournful and muffled voice, her body heaving with convulsive sobbing.
“I know all too well?!” I repeated, astounded. “Angelina what are you saying? Have I done something that has wounded you? If I have, you must tell me immediately so I can make it better!”
“This wound,” she managed to gasp between her convulsive sobs, “you won’t be able to sew up like you do your wounded patients!”
“What?” I protested, greatly alarmed, but trying to laugh at her confusion. “What can be so terrible? Have I committed some capital and grave fault towards you that you should treat me so bitterly?”
“Indeed you have!” she moaned.
But nothing else would she say, for, her sobs at an end, and despite my insistent questions, protests and the tenderness inspired by my immutable love for her, she refused to say another word; instead, pushing me away, she turned her face from me so that I could only see it in profile, and remained as silent as if she’d turned into a statue of salt, her eyes staring into emptiness, her body stiff. I spent the next hour attempting to coax her out of this mournful immobility, but I began to suspect that her grief had to do with a jealousy that she had too much self-respect to admit. It suddenly occurred to me that she might have got wind of my travels with Alizon to Boulogne, since I had this adventure very much on my conscience, and thus I began to damn myself for engaging in a scenario that might well have cost me the love of my life.
Not knowing what else to do or to say after all my useless supplications and prayers to confide in me, and tired of turning over and over in my bed as if already I could feel the flames of hell licking at me (which are always inside us and come not from God, who is too merciful to have created a hell), I decided to get up and, going to get my clothes, dressed without a word, my throat so dry I could hardly breathe, and headed downstairs to seek the comfort of my little study, where I’d at least have the relief of my books.
Angelina was so surprised at my behaviour that she recovered her voice all of a sudden and said very bitterly:
“What are you doing? Where are you going? Are you returning to London?”
Sometimes it happens in life that you have something to hide from your lover and, when accused in the heat of an argument, you discover with infinite relief that she believes you to be innocent where you are not, and guilty where you are innocent (and can prove it). One can imagine how Angelina’s words immediately undid the knot of anguish that was caught in my throat.
“What?” I said, laughing almost uncontrollably. “England! So you’ve heard stories about the beautiful Lady T. and me!”
“Beautiful!” cried Angelina in the tumult of her anger. “Do you dare use the word beautiful to my face?”
“But she is,” I said, still laughing, “and what’s more, she’s very virtuous, and so faithful to her queen that she consented under orders from Elizabeth to lodge me and pretend to be having an amorous relationship with me that had neither marrow nor substance.”
“Are you mocking me?” said Angelina, raising herself on her elbow, the better to look at me. “What on earth would be the interest or need for such a pretended connection?”
“It was of capital importance for my safety, since I was supposed to meet with the queen in secret and provide her an account of the king’s plans without Bellièvre and his gentlemen getting wind of it. Which is why I couldn’t stay at the inn with them.”
Innocence is infinitely comforting in that it provides a great strength that keeps you from protesting too much—quite the opposite of lying, which has a tendency to feed on itself and multiply itself in unwel-come sprouts. My laughter was a relief, and my affirmation of Lady T.’s beauty (something that a guilty husband would have denied out of cowardice), the reticence I had to maintain about the object of my mission (a silence my wife was quite used to) and, above all, the ease with which I cleared myself, all convinced Angelina that the gossipmongers of the court had abused her, and she all but apologized for having doubted my faith and loyalty, an apology that I nipped in the bud by kissing the lips that might have uttered it.
We talked for another full hour of the charms and worries of our domestic life, of our children, who, thank God, were beautiful and healthy, of our plan to knock through the wall of the house next door, which I’d bought to house Giacomi—both as part of the strategy of retreat that Miroul and I had conceived in the event of some popular uprising, and to please my spouse, who loved the idea that, now that she was married, after the past ten years of cruel deprivation, she would have her twin sister nearby. Ultimately, quieted and reassured, she fell asleep in my arms; and I, by the light of the little paraffin lamp, looked, with a combination of tenderness and a little remorse, at those beautiful cheeks, on which the tears had now dried. But, alas, as everyone knows, the bad thing about our bodies is that though they give us much they
also take much away: sadly, you can’t fall asleep in your lover’s arms without your entwined members in time growing tired and stiff, and so, eventually, it was necessary to let go and move away from her.
My thoughts of her also wandered away; I found myself thinking about the interview at Meaux and was excessively chagrined that the hypocritical party of war (ah, Guise’s beautiful eyes, so clear, so blue, so lying) had carried the day once more against my master’s basic humanity and worries about his poor subjects in this doleful kingdom. Well, I just have to say it again: everything seemed so ugly and base in the Magnificent! What a cockroach’s soul inhabits that lordly envelope! What honeyed mendacity in his eyes, his voice, his thought and his word, he who had dared beg the king to “cast his eyes on the dying religion”. Papism is dying? Can one possibly articulate such a palpable fallacy without batting an eye? God grant that papism might exist in this world with a little less health, corpulence and bloodthirstiness! It would think less about bleeding our poor Huguenots, whom the sword, jail and execution have so assailed in this country these last forty years!
If you press this handsome duc, the only thing that comes out are falsehoods like pus out of a boil! It’s almost as if he were claiming that it was the Catholic Church that was being persecuted in our country! Moreover, such a thing has already been claimed!
If your steps happened to take you to the Saint-Séverin cemetery during that torrid July, you would have seen, among the thronging crowds, a great painting that Madame de Montpensier had ordered to be displayed there to whip up popular sentiment for war from a credulous people. You could see represented there in hideous colours the cruel torments and strange inhumanities that were supposed to have been committed by Queen Elizabeth against her Catholic subjects. You could see pincers, the brodequin, the strappado, impalement, dismemberment, castration, hanging—all the means of torture were there, not to mention images of women being raped and children roasted alive. To look at these horrors, which I never saw a trace of in London, our poor wenches in Paris wept and our good boys gnashed their teeth, and when they got home, they sharpened their knives to use on the Huguenots. There was even a fellow there with a pointer, who gave a commentary on this sublime painting, and repeatedly told his audience—and did so as if it were gospel—that there were 10,000 Huguenots hiding in the slums of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, waiting only for a signal from Navarre (who had been conniving, he claimed, with the king) to throw themselves on the Parisians!
* “Thoughtfulness.”
† “When the body is too heavy with the excesses of yesterday, it weakens the mind” (Horace).
11
IN AUGUST 1587, although I can’t remember the exact day, the king sent me to Sedan to carry a message to the prince of that town, the young Duc de Bouillon. This was a very secret mission, which, because of its nature, put the messenger in great danger, and so the king ordered Fogacer to circulate the rumour that I had retired to Saint-Cloud at the home of the Baron de Quéribus in order to attempt to cure a sickness that carried a high risk of infection—this to keep the spies of the League from sticking their noses into the business. And so I left, ostensibly for Saint-Cloud, quasi-prostrate in my coach and swabbed with ceruse to appear as pale as possible (Miroul telling our neighbours that I was in extremis), but accompanied by a large escort provided by Quéribus, made up of the men who’d already accompanied me to Boulogne, and whose loyalty I’d ensured by the means I’ve previously recounted.
The king having spared no expense for this mission, I remained in Saint-Cloud long enough to purchase three good horses, knowing that the countryside around Sedan was infested with Guise’s troops, who, though not explicitly laying siege to the town, kept a close watch on it despite the fact that the king had several times ordered him to withdraw his forces from that area since their continued presence was creating problems for him. You see, the king was ostensibly supporting the Duc de Bouillon, though the duc was a Huguenot, as he didn’t want his small duchy to fall into the hands of Guise. This last had already seized Toul and Verdun (but had failed to capture Metz), with the design of closing the border by which the German princes might come to the aid of either the Huguenots or the king of France.
The reason I wanted very healthy, lively and spirited mounts was that if we met any of Guise’s men as we approached Sedan, I thought our only hope would be to outrun them. This calculation proved to be correct not once but twice, in encounters in which we barely had time to discharge our pistols before turning tail and, thanks to our horses’ strong legs, quickly leaving our enemies for dust.
The young Duc de Bouillon, Prince de Sedan, was barely twenty years old, and he would have exuded charm and vigour had not his health been so compromised, leaving him feverish and congested, as I’d already heard and was confirmed by my first glance. Which led me—since there were in his entourage a number of very suspicious-looking faces that I immediately distrusted—to announce myself as Dubosc, one of the king’s physicians, whom His Majesty had commanded to come to see if I could cure the duc’s malady. In this way I was able to examine him in private, sheltered from the prying ears of his retinue, and to transmit the secret message from the king, to wit: that he should take control of the great army of reiters, of which he shared the command with the Prussian Fabien de Dhona; that this army should stop in Lorraine and pillage that duchy; and that they should not continue their invasion beyond that point, but instead try to attract and defeat the army of the Duc de Guise, knowing that if, unhappily, they did not succeed, they could easily escape back to their German bases, since they were so near the border.
“Well!” said the young duc, who assuredly was not lacking in intelligence. “That’s all very clear and well presented! And I would certainly wish to oblige my king, who protected me from being ripped apart by the violent oppression of the Duc de Guise. But I doubt I could succeed in what you’re asking, since Fabien de Dhona would never accept the command of anyone other than a member of the royal family, and neither Navarre nor Condé would venture this far east. Dhona would never accept my command nor listen to my advice, since he’s almost twice as old as I am and thinks I’m wet behind the ears, which is true, and brainless, which is not true. Brains have nothing to do with age!”
“But, Monseigneur,” I urged, “you could tell him that it is the express desire of the king of France, who, should the reiters be defeated, will guarantee their safe return to their country. It is of the greatest consequence that you understand, Monseigneur, that my master has distributed his forces in such a way as to allow him to remain in control of the situation. On the one hand, he had to provide Guise with a fairly large army, strengthened even further by the forces of the League. This is the army that you and Dhona will have in front of you in Lorraine, if your wisdom prevails and you accept this command. On the other hand, since Joyeuse has gone over to the League, he has fallen from the king’s favour and Henri has provided him with a force too weak to defeat Navarre, but strong enough to contain him. The king has set up camp along the Loire with the greater part of his army to prevent Navarre from joining the reiters, if Joyeuse can’t stop him, and will thus be able to dictate the terms of peace to all involved if, as he hopes, Guise is beaten in Lorraine and Navarre is stopped in Gironde.”
“What a Machiavellian plan!” smiled the Duc de Bouillon. “And one that does honour to my beloved cousin the king of France, who manages to treat his adversaries as friends, and his friends as adversaries!”
“Which assuredly they are, Monseigneur. Who could doubt it? And who is ignorant of the fact that the king of France conducts this extremely distasteful war with reluctance, since he fears almost as much winning as losing? If Guise won in Lorraine or Joyeuse in Gironde it would shake his throne.”
Two days later, I left the Duc de Bouillon, so handsome, so amiable and so mortally sick.
In taking my leave, I doubted he’d live more than a few months, or even manage to stay on horseback during the campaign, or even tha
t he’d be able to convince Fabien de Dhona to remain in Lorraine, since the latter’s appetite for plunder would doubtless attract him and his troops to Paris, a veritable magnet for the armour of the reiters.
As the king and I had agreed, I didn’t return directly to my lodgings in the rue du Champ-Fleuri, but went back to Quéribus’s house in Saint-Cloud, arriving after dark so that no one would see me on horseback. As I was dismounting, I asked Quéribus how my Angelina and children were, and he replied that the king had ordered them to be taken to my estate of the Rugged Oak, since, during my absence, my house in Paris had been attacked one night by a good dozen ruffians, who’d tried to break in, taking axes and sledgehammers to the doors and attempting to set fire to the place with petards, which thankfully Miroul had extinguished by throwing water from the roof. From his window in the needle shop, Mérigot had fired on them with two arquebuses (his wench recharging one while he fired the other). Giacomi had joined in from his lodgings with two pistols, and ultimately the rascals had fled, carrying off their wounded and leaving their dead behind. However, one of those left for dead survived, and confessed to Nicolas Poulain that their company had been paid by the major-domo of a great house. This convinced Mosca (or Leo) that Guise had had a hand in this attempted massacre.
Upon hearing this story, which Quéribus told him the next morning, the king began trembling for my safety, especially since he’d just heard the day before that the brave Grillon, who had replaced Monsieur de Bernay as governor of Boulogne, had miraculously escaped an assassination attempt that the Duc d’Aumale had financed. Henri thus concluded, on the one hand, that the League had not swallowed the fable of my illness and believed—perhaps without knowing exactly where—that I was on a mission for His Majesty, and, on the other, that the princes of Lorraine had taken up again their plan of assassinating one by one his most faithful servants and officers to strike terror into the survivors and thereby create a void around him.