Fortunes of France 4: League of Spies

by Robert Merle

  “Helped along by a good and devout poison,” observed the king with a smile, as he presented his hand to the cardinal.

  Seeing this, the cardinal had no choice but to kiss the hand and take his leave, which was indicated so graciously and with such regard that the king actually accompanied him all the way to the door and patted him affectionately on the shoulder as he left.

  The king seemed cheered by this conversation, which had distracted him from his sombre concerns, and returned smiling to the group of noblemen whom I mentioned (all of whom were visibly amused by this little comedy that His Majesty had enacted with his “heir apparent”). When he caught sight of me, however, he remembered that he’d begged me to visit him, and so he came over to me and I rose, doffed my merchant’s cap and knelt before him, thinking he would present me with his hand. And, indeed, he was preparing to do so when Chicot, who’d been standing by the window giving onto the courtyard, observed in his usual humorous way:

  “Who is this I see coming on foot, escorted by the queen mother in her chair? He looks as big as ever but a good deal less natural. Who else but the Duc de Guise?”

  At this the king dropped the hand he’d extended towards me, paled and cried in fury:

  “Chicot, if you’re lying, I’ll beat you with my bear hands!”

  “Henrikins,” said Chicot without budging an inch, “I’d much prefer to be beaten and kicked by you than to see what I see! But it is, alas, the Magnificent! There’s no doubting it.”

  At this, everyone ran to the windows to see whether the fool was telling the truth.

  “Sire, it’s him!” said Alphonse d’Ornano in his loud voice, placing his right hand on his sword. “And he’s only escorted by five or six gentlemen.”

  The king staggered over to a little table, put his hand on it to steady himself, then sat down on the trunk that I’d just abandoned and covered his face with both hands—a gesture that he always made in moments of great anguish. Du Halde claims that he heard him say quietly, “He’ll die for this,” but I don’t know whether he merely imagined this afterwards, since I was quite close to His Majesty and heard nothing of the sort, and can only report that his visage was distorted by a furious expression when he pulled his trembling hands away from his pale face.

  “Sire,” said Alphonse d’Ornano in his brusque loud voice, “has someone injured you?”

  “That’s an understatement,” replied the king, who was, little by little, regaining his colour. “But the problem is this, my Corsican. I forbade Guise to return to Paris, and now, disobeying my orders, he has dared to come, knowing full well that his presence in Paris will set off an explosion.”

  “Sire,” replied Alphonse d’Ornano, squaring his powerful shoulders, his voice as resonant as an organ, “if it please Your Majesty to give me the orders, I will today throw Guise’s head at your feet before any man can move or prevent it.”

  At this, the king, his head and eyelids lowered, reflected for a moment, no doubt sorely tempted to acquiesce, but held back from saying yes by the thought of the unpredictable consequences such an execution would have in a city (and a kingdom) that idolized the duc—not to mention in Spain, where it could well furnish Felipe II with the pretext he needed to invade France and, at the same time, conquer England. For it must be said that there were few men in this month of May 1588 who in their wildest dreams imagined that Queen Elizabeth could ever resist the Invincible Armada, whose arrogant galleons and superb sails could be seen weighing anchor behind the tall silhouette of Guise as he crossed the courtyard of the Louvre, apparently without any other escort than five or six gentlemen, but supported by the zeal of the innumerable clergy and the adoration of an uneducated people, in addition to the inexhaustible riches of the most powerful monarch in Christendom.

  What’s more, my master, far from being able to improvise such a momentous decision on the spur of moment, was really a man of his study, a political mind, a Machiavellian, whose thought was more suited to waiting and temporizing, to knotting and untying the many threads of an action well in advance. And finally, as I’ve said many times already, he had a deep repugnance for shedding blood, and would only do so if every other possibility seemed closed and out of reach.

  “Sire,” said Alphonse d’Ornano, his enormous frame trembling from head to foot from the affront to the king—he was like a mastiff pulling on its chain with its teeth bared as it watches its master being assailed by his enemies without being able to come to his aid. “Sire, shall I do this thing?”

  And, except for Pompous Pomponne, who belonged to the queen mother and was more or less a partisan of the League, everyone present, indignant that Guise had presumed to insult the king in this way, stood silently watching the king, holding his breath and desperately praying that he would consent to d’Ornano’s proposal.

  “Sire,” said the little abbot d’Elbène, his suave and fluty voice cutting through the silence, “permit me, touching our present predicament, to cite the Holy Scriptures.”

  “Go ahead, abbot,” said the king without looking up.

  “‘Smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered.’”

  “Sire, shall I do it?” d’Ornano suddenly repeated, as though encouraged in his violent scheme by the authority of the sacred word.

  Whether it was because of the clarion voice of d’Ornano (which, even when he murmured, gave the impression he wanted to be heard by the entire regiment), or, instead, because of the weight of all of our expectant looks bearing on him, Henri raised his head, presented his calm and composed face to us and, casting his beautiful dark eyes on d’Ornano, said, with the affectionate derision that he liked to take with his closest servants:

  “No, my courageous Corsican. I do not wish it. There is no need for that yet.”

  Unlike L’Étoile, De Thou and so many others, I couldn’t decide whether my beloved sovereign was right or wrong by opting for the longer road of patience. It is the tantalizing nature of history, whose outcome produces such unbearable regrets, that we project our own desires with childish impatience onto the great actors of the drama and yearn to give them a nudge so that they can make the decisions that our knowledge of hindsight shows us to be the most desirable ones. Having such convenient knowledge of the future of the prince, the historian falls prey to the temptation to think he’s wiser than he, forgetting that the prince was confronted with an opaque present.

  Whoever didn’t see the tall, handsome Duc de Guise enter the king’s apartments—looking truly magnificent in his white, pearl-studded doublet, accompanied not by his gentlemen but by the queen mother, his cousin the queen and the latter’s usual companion the Duchesse d’Uzès, the three of whom seeming to flank and protect him like frigates alongside the admiral’s galleon—can’t imagine the impression of power and invincibility that he projected, as if the wind that was carrying him towards the throne were the same one that at that exact moment—9th May 1588—was swelling the sails of the Armada off Lisbon, as it set out for England.

  As soon as he saw the king, the duc made him a deep bow, to which Henri responded with a slight nod of his head, but without presenting him his hand, his expression and eyes cold as ice, and his teeth clenched:

  “What is this? Did I not forbid you to come here?”

  “Well, sire!” said Guise, with blatant hypocrisy. “If you’d expressly forbidden it, I would have died rather than disobey you.”

  “So, Bellièvre!” said the king, turning to the Pompous Pomponne. “Did you not repeat my words to Monsieur de Guise? Didn’t you give him my letter?”

  At this, Bellièvre made a bow to the king that seemed to be intended as much for Guise as for Henri, but said not a word, since he didn’t dare, tortured by the risk of offending the king, or the queen mother, who’d given him a message for Guise exactly contrary to the king’s, or the duc, whom he believed to be his future sovereign—if the duc were able to leave these apartments alive, which he began to doubt, in which case his betrayal would have bee
n in vain.

  “Well, Bellièvre?” said the king, whose glacial look seemed to penetrate, one by one, each of the embarrassing calculations of his ambassador. “Did you or did you not deliver my message to Monsieur de Guise?”

  “Assuredly, sire,” stammered Bellièvre, whose uncertain look was fixed respectfully on the king, as if he wished to take back his ambiguous words, which appeared to answer two contradictory questions but in reality answered neither one.

  “Sire,” said Guise, who was doubtless too concerned about his own safety to worry about helping Pomponne out of his predicament, “I did indeed receive Monsieur de Bellièvre in Soissons. But if I had understood that you were ordering me expressly—”

  “Did he not give you a letter from me?” continued the king, interrupting him in the most abrupt fashion. “And have you not read this letter? Did I not have you confirm its contents by Monsieur de La Guiche? How many ambassadors must I send you to persuade you to obey me?”

  “Sire,” answered Guise, looking around him uncomfortably, for he’d just seen Crillon, the chief officer of the Louvre, enter, who, far from politely doffing his hat to the duc, had furiously pushed it farther down on his brow, and gone over to stand next to d’Ornano, who was posted by the door, after which the two began speaking to each other in hushed tones and throwing Guise angry looks, while fidgeting with the handles of their daggers.

  “Sire,” said Guise, “Monsieur de La Guiche does not have the same authority as Monsieur de Bellièvre and it’s the latter whom I believed.”

  “Your Bellièvre here is as quiet as a carp,” cried the king, his black eyes flashing in anger.

  “Sire,” said Bellièvre, who was now trembling from his capacious stomach to his double chin, “there must be some misunderstanding. The Duc de Guise did not understand my words as he should have.”

  “That’s enough, Bellièvre!” the king cried furiously, and, turning his back on Guise, he went over to the window, glaring murderously over his shoulder at both Bellièvre and Guise.

  And, whether his legs were suddenly too weak to support his large body, or whether he meant to anticipate a sword thrust in his back, Guise went over to sit down on the chest on which the king had just been sitting, and, as he did, threw a desperate look at the queen, his cousin, who, understanding this mute message, went over to him, took his hand affectionately and sat down on the chest on his right. Whereupon the Duchesse d’Uzès, seeing a look from the queen mother, went over and sat down on his left. In this way the two women made it impossible for the king to proceed to his arrest or his execution.

  “’Sblood!” murmured d’Ornano (though his murmurs could easily be heard by all). “Nice work to have two petticoats serve as your protection!”

  At this remark, a complete silence fell over the room, while the queen whispered something to Guise, and the king, for his part, stood with his back turned, tapping on the windowpane with his finger, and shaking with anger from head to foot.

  The queen mother stood silently looking at her son, her large eyes protruding, her lips twisted in pain from her gout (having got out of her sickbed to take Guise to the Louvre, fearing that without her august presence they might have killed him right then and there). She now felt helpless, since the king had let his mask slip and allowed his anger to explode against the duc, against Bellièvre and, clearly, against her too, given that he had neither looked at nor greeted her when she’d entered his apartments.

  She seemed to me to hesitate over whether to join him at the window, and perhaps felt that she didn’t have the strength to go over to him alone, since she walked with such difficulty, as I’d observed when she entered, her left hand grasping the arm of the Duchesse d’Uzès, and her right the arm of Guise, her “old woman’s walking stick”, as she dared say. She also seemed to me, moreover, very sickly: her cheeks, which had always been so round, now seemed swollen and wan, and her lower lip hung so loosely that she seemed to have difficulty joining it to the upper one when she tried, from time to time, to do so. She looked like nothing so much as a toad, especially with her protruding eyes and her drooping eyelids.

  “Bellièvre,” she said to this creature of hers, extending her arm to ask for his. But when the gentleman ran over to her, his back bent to her command, she doubtless decided that she could not, without some danger, approach the king in his company, and so she said:

  “No, not Bellièvre—Du Halde!”

  To which Du Halde obeyed, but with a good deal less enthusiasm than Bellièvre had displayed, since he had no love for Catherine, seeing as she had tried so many times, out of jealousy and hatred of him, to have him removed by the king, although she had failed each time.

  “My son,” she said, suddenly in tears (a commodity she’d always been able to produce on demand), “won’t you listen to me?”

  “Madame,” replied the king without turning his head, “my ears are tired.”

  “Ah, my son,” said the queen mother, redoubling her tears, “what will they say of me when they see that I, whom God chose for your mother, find myself rejected by you?”

  “Madame,” replied the king without turning to look at her, “I am not rejecting you. It even seems that I’m listening to you, whether I like it or not.”

  “Well then, my son,” said the queen mother, “if I must tell the truth, it is not to affront you that Guise has come, but at my request, to answer the calumnies that your Huguenots have spread about his activities.”

  “At your request, Madame?” said the king. “It’s because you invited him that he’s here? This is another of your wicked tricks!”

  “But,” parried the queen mother, “he’s only here to ask for forgiveness for his mistakes and to find some way to make his peace with you and give you back your cities in Picardy.”

  “Madame,” said the king quietly but his voice full of fury, “you’re nothing but a very confused old lady! You’re muddled and you meddle too much. Give me back my cities in Picardy? That’s not what this is about! Did you dream this?”

  “I’m going to keep trying day and night even if I sacrifice the little life that remains to me!”

  At these words the king turned round, looked at her and, surprised at the change he discovered in her, found that he felt some compassion for her; so he said, more gently:

  “Madame, you are not well. Go back to your bed. You shouldn’t have left it.”

  “My son,” she murmured, throwing all her battalions into the breach, “I will not return to my bed unless you promise me that you will not persecute the duc.”

  “Madame,” replied the king with obvious weariness, “I’ll do as you wish, but I beg you, go back to bed!”

  Under the watchful eye of her son, the queen mother pursued her absurd speech about reconciliation, which Du Halde, who was listening, later described as making as much sense as claiming that the fox had entered the chicken coop in order to have a reasoned discussion with the hens. Watching the king, Du Halde could tell that Henri had truly loved his mother when he was a youth, but that he had become embittered when he’d watched her ally herself first with his brother Alençon and subsequently, and more disastrously, with this most mortal enemy of the throne and the state—but Henri could not resign himself to hate her, since this was a sentiment that simply could not take root in his benign character, which was too noble and forgiving to harbour such a trait, one that would have easily dominated a less generous soul.

  That Guise had come, as she dared pretend, without bitterness, to explain and justify his actions, to make peace with the king, to return to him the cities he’d seized in Picardy, and to promise to behave himself from now on, Henri didn’t believe for one single moment. And if, ultimately, he seemed to accept her version of events, it was because, having decided not to kill the duc, since he could see the forest of the Invincible Armada’s masts emerging behind his back, he wanted to give this apparent gift to the queen mother in order to maintain her services as “interpreter” between the duc and hims
elf, so that he could, at any given moment, get an idea of his dangerous but vacillating enemy’s intentions through her. It was a subtle, Machiavellian game: Catherine undermined her son’s power in pretending to serve him, while he feigned belief in her in order to ascertain the duc’s underhand treachery.

  “Madame,” he said finally, “if you will do everything you can to return the cities in Picardy and persuade the duc to leave Paris immediately, since his very presence here is an affront to me, I will be infinitely grateful to you. I’m already in your debt for the innumerable gifts you have bestowed on me. If you would oblige me even more by making peace between the duc and me, your good offices will serve to cut the roots of the calamities that now risk falling upon us. But, Madame, you are pale, suffering and not well at all. I beg you, return to your bed and do not leave it until you are in better health! As for me, I’m going to be much more gracious with the duc.”

  Bowing to her with apparent good grace, he left the window recess and walked over to Guise, still surrounded by the ramparts of the queen’s and the Duchesse d’Uzès’s dresses; and, looking the duc in the eye, but with a less severe but still somewhat cold expression, he said, in a much calmer voice:

  “My cousin, I must take my breakfast. You must do likewise. Return here when you’ve done, and we will continue our conversation.”

  So saying, he presented his hand to the duc, who, dropping to one knee, bestowed a fairly devout kiss upon it. This done, he stood, made a deep bow to the king, not wishing to be sparing in his genuflections; then, without taking any more notice of the queen mother than if she’d been a dead goat—she who had apparently just saved him—he headed to the door, while Crillon and d’Ornano shot him murderous looks. And, in my estimation, if ever a man felt astonished to be leaving the Louvre alive, after the welcome he’d at first received, it was on this 9th May, and that man was Guise. And that he should have later forgotten, in his overweening conceit, the peril he’d ventured into that day is wholly astonishing.