Fortunes of France 4: League of Spies

by Robert Merle

  Scarcely had Guise departed before the king dismissed the rest of his visitors, with a singular dearth of tenderness for Bellièvre, and for the royal skirts that had protected the duc, retaining only Du Halde, Chicot and me (whom he’d pretended to forget in my corner), and told me that it was no longer enough to speak with Mosca, but that I should immediately head out into the streets and public squares of the capital to try to take the pulse of the people. He had no scruples in asking me to do this since he didn’t think it so dangerous, for he’d noticed that not one of the people who’d just been there, despite the fact that they all knew me, had recognized me with my beard, unattractive hair and merchant’s clothing. He requested that, once my mission was accomplished, I return through the Porte Neuve, the Tuileries Garden and the secret entrance, no matter what the hour, and share my observations with him.

  I was delighted that the king would make such use of me in the almost desperate predicament he was in, and Miroul and I spared no effort in running around the city, talking with its labourers and inhabitants, pretending that I was a bonnet-maker from Boulogne who was visiting a friend in Paris. I was careful to wear my medallion of the Virgin proudly displayed on the front of my doublet, and a mother-of-pearl rosary wrapped around my right wrist, and to proffer many Leagueish observations, much like the ones I was hearing everywhere in the shops, in the markets and on the steps of the churches throughout the capital. Once inside the churches, I pretended to be very assiduous, my nose in my missal, giving generously to the collection, and listening with devout nods of the head to the seditious, disloyal and criminal sermons that were being preached and that, at another time, would have had me drawing my sword from its scabbard in anger.

  On this occasion, I was careful not to wear a sword, but to carry a dagger concealed on my back and two pistols in my wretched leggings. Miroul’s were no less ridiculously puffy and bourgeois than mine, and also concealed two pistols, plus several knives that he could throw should necessity require it.

  I learnt from Quéribus, who visited me that evening at Alizon’s lodgings, that during these two days I spent wearing out my soles on the paving stones of the capital, Guise had not left the king’s side, having returned with a large escort, visiting him at Mass or at dinner, where in his role of grand master of France he offered him his napkin, or else at the Convent of the Repentant Daughters, where the queen mother was lodged. It seemed, from what transpired at these discussions, that the king was trying to persuade Guise to leave Paris, and Guise was assuring him of his obedience, on condition that the king promise that, once Guise left the capital, the lives of his supporters in the League would not be endangered. On his part, the king reproached Guise for his capture of the cities in Picardy, whereupon Guise swore that he held them in the king’s name and that he’d return them once Henri, instead of giving ear to his enemies (meaning Épernon), recognized Guise’s good service and made peace with him. And when the king defended Épernon tooth and nail, Guise made a deep bow and replied, with a smile full of malice, that “out of love for the master, he’d love even his dog”. So, as Du Halde (whom I saw for a few minutes on the 11th) reported it, it was clear that Guise was toying with the king and playing for time.

  It was quite clear to me why Guise wanted to gain time, and I shared this with the king: everywhere I went, I found the capital more stirred up than ever. The Leaguers—who, until his arrival in Paris, had been losing heart and had more or less fallen into debauchery—had regained their courage as soon as he had arrived, and, like flies to honey, were organizing nearly open sedition and inflaming the delirium and adoration of the people for the duc. Guise, however, had not shown himself in public very much, except on his arrival on 9th May, when, as soon as he was recognized, he couldn’t take a step in this city that idolized him without crowds gathering and pressing him on every side, the good people acclaiming him and kissing his hands, his boots and his horse’s shoes—some even rubbing their rosaries on his coat to sanctify them.

  During these two days, I saw everywhere men organizing, openly carrying both swords and firearms, polishing their weapons in the back rooms of their shops and having heated discussions, their hats frequently decorated with white crosses, reminiscent of the murderers of St Bartholomew’s eve, who were now going about bragging of their former exploits, which they hoped soon to renew. Many preachers were giving sermons in the street and I don’t know how many barrels were being rolled into the streets and piled in places that had been indicated in advance so that, when the time came, they could be filled with uprooted paving stones and placed strategically as “barricades”.

  Of the three areas of the city—la Ville, the Île de la Cité and l’Université—this last seemed to me by far the most fearsome in its resolution, the professors, monks and priests having insufflated a frenetic papist zeal into the population of ecclesiastics and students, who, because of their youth and quarrelsome nature, were only too inclined to pillage and revolt. As for the right-bank area of Paris, called la Ville, the people seemed more political than zealous, and more interested in removing the king’s favourites, who were wasting huge amounts of public money, than in deposing the king himself. But within l’Université the sedition was animated by the taste for blood, combat and regicide. Everywhere there was talk of assembling Guise’s troops, who were being hidden by the monks in the innumerable cloisters, colleges and monasteries of this quarter, of rushing down the rue Saint-Jacques, across the Pont Saint-Michel, through the Île de la Cité and across the Pont Notre-Dame, and then “going to seize the blackguard in his Louvre”. And as for what they would do with him when they had taken him—I would fear to dirty my pen by repeating what I heard in the mouths of the clerics.

  I couldn’t help noticing during the two days that I spent crossing and recrossing Paris with my alert Miroul (who knew the capital better than anyone), that if the Duc de Guise affected to appear a stranger to what was happening here, seeing the king twice a day and trying to lull him with language that was both conciliatory and ambiguous, his lieutenants, particularly Captain de Saint-Paul and the Comte de Brissac, went about very actively—the latter especially in l’Université—organizing a public uprising.

  The Comte de Brissac, a large, well-built man with red hair and green eyes, would have been very good-looking had he not had a squint in his left eye and if his mouth did not have a tendency to pull to the left, which, together, gave him on second glance a shady and false expression. Having chosen a career in arms, he’d done little to distinguish himself in terrestrial combat or in the unfortunate naval engagement in the Azores, which had led the king (who could never resist a bon mot) to observe that “Brissac was good neither on land nor at sea”. When he’d heard these words repeated, Brissac had conceived a homicidal hatred for his king and become a Guisard, vowing to rid his country of this monarch if he could, sparing neither pain nor effort during these two days to prepare an insurrection in the streets, and repeating—with his mouth ever more twisted—that, if he weren’t good on either land or sea, he’d show His Majesty that he was good on paving stones, where he’d finally found his element.

  On each of these days I saw Mosca, who was very well placed amid the knot of League vipers, and he confirmed the imminence of the tumult that was being prepared. He cited the “quasi-miraculous” appearance of the duc (as the sermonizers had labelled it), and his “quasi-divine presence within our walls” (so many rosaries had been sanctified by contact with his coat), and said that he had reawakened the deflated resolutions of the people and inflamed their passions to the heavens.

  I saw the king on the evenings of the 10th and the 11th, and repeated Mosca’s observations, as well as my own. He listened very attentively and related that all of the accounts he’d heard came to the same sinister conclusions about the great popular uprising provoked by the Leaguers and the Guisards, and that what worried him the most were the reports of a large number of soldiers being hidden in the quarter of l’Université, who would bol
ster the rioters with their pikes.

  During the second of these two visits, I overheard a few words that His Majesty exchanged with Du Halde, to the effect that Henri had finally convinced Guise to leave Paris and that he could see all too well that the Lorraine duc had secretly had a hand in planning the revolt, all the while pretending hypocritically to be involved in vain negotiations; however, the king had decided to put an end to this commotion by bringing his Swiss Guards into Paris from their garrison in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, so that the Leaguers could be reminded of their duty and in the hopes that even Guise himself, seeing so many troops, would withdraw to Soissons.

  On the evening of the 11th, Lady Markby came to see me and, once we were alone in my room, began furiously kissing me, which at first distracted me from my troubles, but then discomfited me excessively when Alizon went at me tooth and nail after discovering these goings-on.

  Lady Markby, who already knew about the king’s decision to bring the Swiss Guards into Paris—given how excellent the spies of the Moor were—told me that Lord Stafford predicted that the people, far from being intimidated by these new troops, would be spurred to anger like a taunted bull.

  “My Lark,” said Lady Markby with a delicate smile, “Lord Stafford has asked me to tell you that if you’re feeling threatened or in danger of being recognized in your peregrinations though Paris, you’re welcome to take refuge in his embassy on the quai des Bernardins, which you should enter not by the main gates but through the bakery next door, which has a secret passage leading to it. It will be enough to show this sign,” she explained, handing me a coin displaying the image of Queen Elizabeth and that had been pierced in its centre, “and you’ll be admitted immediately. As for me,” she added, her black eyes shining and her carnivorous teeth showing brightly, “if I have to seek refuge there as well, I will immediately make good on the promise I gave to pluck a certain lark of its feathers…”

  I slept little and badly on the night of the 11th to the 12th May and, finally nodding off at daybreak, I had a nightmare in which I found myself in my shirt on the gibbet, the rope already round my neck; and, though my hands were tied behind my back, I was struggling like the Devil in a baptismal font, and shouting with indignation at the hangman, who looked just like the Comte de Brissac, with his sinister eyes and mouth, telling him that I was a gentleman of the court and that as such I should not be hanged but beheaded. At this the executioner responded derisively that he’d never seen a gentleman dressed like me, and, moreover, even if what I said was true, he couldn’t satisfy me—however eager he was to satisfy his customers—since, no more than the king of France, he was not in possession of a sword or axe that would be sharp enough to decapitate all his felons. Saying this, he tightened the rope about my neck and I woke up with a cry, and found my little fly from hell, fully dressed, shaking me by the shoulders with her two little hands, assuredly much softer than the rope, whose bite I had felt on my skin only an instant before.

  “Pierre!” she cried. “My Pierre! The guards! The Swiss Guards are in Paris!”

  And, very happy to discover I was alive and still possessed of all my parts in this soft bed, with Alizon on top of me, though only a moment before I had seen myself passing into the beyond, badly washed of all my sins, I added to those sins by pulling her to me and kissing her with great joy, as the very symbol of all those pleasures the rope had very nearly deprived me of.

  “Ah, my Pierre!” cried Alizon, struggling like the supple eel that she’d always been. “Have you gone mad? This is not the time to start fooling around! Can’t you hear the drums? And the Swiss Guards’ boots on the pavement? Ah, we’re doomed! They’ll kill us all! Pillage everything! Truly, soldiers in Paris! Is that not shameful! ’Tis a vile and abominable violation of the Paris privilege!”

  “What privilege?” I frowned.

  “Well, my Pierre,” explained my little fly from hell, frowning back in anger, and escaping from my embrace, “haven’t you yet wiped the Périgordian dust off your feet? Truly! The pretty Parisian you pretend to be! Don’t you know that Paris has the privilege to defend itself by calling on its bourgeois militias, and that no garrison of troops has ever been allowed within the city walls? This is just another dirty trick by your devil of a king!”

  “He’s also yours!”

  “And by his arch-favourite!”

  “Who couldn’t be involved since he’s in Normandy!”

  “Ah, my Pierre,” she cried, throwing herself in my arms, “let’s not quarrel any more! I’m terrified at the thought of losing everything I’ve worked so hard for over the last twenty years! Truly! If they don’t murder us, these nasty Swiss are going to pillage our homes and rape all our women! I could endure that since the pain doesn’t last forever, but my property! They’re going to take it and plunder it! Oh, Pierre!” she continued, seeing me getting dressed. “Help me! Take your good sword, I beg you, your pistols and your daggers, and, with Miroul and Baragran, escort me to the nuncio!”

  “To the nuncio?” I asked, astonished. “To the Pope’s nuncio? And to what end?”

  “To put my gold in trust. Some of the artisans in our street did this yesterday and the day before yesterday to protect it from the popular uprising, and so I’d be very well advised to do the same, if you’ll only give me a hand.”

  “Well, I’m not sure!” I said derisively. “In my view that would be going from bad to worse. The nuncio is no different from anyone else! He’d never renounce any gold he could get his hands on! Will he give it back when the tumult has passed? Since I am still, as you put it, my fly, an unwashed peasant from Périgord, I’m going to share a langue d’oc proverb with you.”

  “In langue d’oc?” she cried in disappointment and anger. “I don’t want to hear it! Enough of that jargon! I don’t understand a word of it!”

  “I’ll translate it for you: ‘Monks and lice never satisfy their lust: they’ll eat anything, even the crust.’”

  “Ah, Huguenot!” she shouted, tears of rage spurting from her eyes. “You’re attacking our good priests, you heretic! Instead of helping me, you torture me!”

  “You crazy she-wolf,” I said, seizing her by the arm as she was pacing frantically back and forth in the room like an unhinged lunatic. And holding her tightly in my arms I continued, “What does this mean, ‘Huguenot’? ‘Heretic’? ‘Torturer’? Is this your Pierre you want to sink your teeth into? Can’t we have different opinions? Am I a heretic simply because I don’t say ‘amen’ to every decision you make? If you absolutely want to give your gold to the nuncio, go ahead, my sweet madwoman! I’ll help and cooperate, however much I disagree with the decision.”

  Hearing these words, she softened and melted into my arms; and, transformed from wolf into cat, she began purring a thousand thanks in my ear, giving me loving looks, kissing me and caressing my head and neck in ways she knew full well would please me. And having me thus wound tight in her web, she would have wanted to leave right away if, opening the window, I hadn’t advised her to wait until the Swiss Guards had passed, their advance marked by the sinister rhythm of their drums, the menacing undulation of their flutes and the hammering of their boots, as they marched four by four down the rue de la Ferronnerie, heading, I judged, towards the walls of the Saints-Innocents cemetery, their swords at their sides and on their shoulders their arquebuses—which, from what I could see with some misgivings, had their wicks already lit, which meant they were loaded and ready to fire. This detail didn’t escape the notice of Alizon, who, clenching her fists, cried between her clenched teeth:

  “Ah the accursed soldiers! They want to fire their lead into our chests and make a St Bartholomew’s day massacre of the Catholics! If I had a stone here, I’d throw it at them!”

  This sentence, now that the street was quiet, all the fifes and drums having passed, and the pale labourers and inhabitants frozen and silent at their windows, was heard by one of their officers, who, looking up at our window, cried mockingly at the spectators:<
br />
  “Bourgeois, put some fresh sheets on your beds! We’ll be back tonight to sleep with your wives!”

  This nasty phrase made the rounds in Paris, and was everywhere received with angry rumblings that we heard from virtually every side when the troops had passed and barricaded themselves within the Saints-Innocents cemetery. After they’d passed, Miroul, Baragran and I set out, pushing a cart with a locked chest on it, armed to the teeth, which didn’t surprise anyone, since at this point there wasn’t a mother’s son who wasn’t out on the streets, some with pistols, others with arquebuses, pikes or skewers, or even butcher’s knives—but all with fire in their eyes, seditious slogans on their tongues and fists raised in defiance.

  The nuncio lodged in the Saint-Antoine quarter, and in each street we passed we could see increasing numbers of people emerging from shops and houses with the same angry expressions and furious shouts that the king had violated the Parisians’ privilege, all of them very resolved to protect their families from his mercenaries.

  Once we’d arrived the nuncio’s palace, we had to stand in line for a good two hours given the numbers of merchants and bourgeois who’d had the same idea. But, to tell the truth, however much of a papist this cardinal was, he impressed me with his honest and good face, and his frank and open expression. He even joked that it was a pity that these were all merely deposits and not offerings—for, he said, with all this gold he could defeat the Turks and establish Christianity in the Holy Land!

  Returning to Alizon’s lodgings around noon, we were surprised to see that our way was blocked by barricades, which were springing up here and there like mushrooms. They were made of barrels filled with paving stones, just as Mosca had reported. Each barricade had an opening just large enough for a pedestrian or a man on horseback to pass through, but the space could be filled by a cart like ours, which could be wheeled into place and used as a kind of door in the barricade.