The Sun King Conspiracy

by Yves Jégo

  Faced with the boy’s stubborn silence, d’Orbay went on:

  ‘Your father and I shared a commitment to the service of a cause that is greater than we are. Perhaps he talked to you about it. In fact it is in our struggle and the nature of the documents that fell into your possession that you will find the source of your misfortunes. If you truly wish to be faithful to the memory of André de Pontbriand, you should talk to Nicolas Fouquet himself before you commit an act of folly for the sake of honour.’

  Gabriel said nothing. He did not know what to do or how to react, and at the same time had the disagreeable impression that d’Orbay knew much more than he was giving away.

  Understanding his unease, François took a letter from his glove and handed it to Gabriel.

  My dear François,

  Thanks to you I have just been reunited with Gabriel. What joy! He has gone to fetch what we have been hoping for, and I am using his absence to write you this letter, filled with a father’s emotion and gratitude. If destiny should strike me down I am counting on you to take care of my cherubino.

  Your friend,

  Charles Saint John.

  Gabriel paled as he read this posthumous message.

  ‘Very well, Monsieur, I believe that you knew my father, but this note doesn’t free me from the need to avenge him. As you know the details of what happened you should also be aware that I found a document on the body of the man I killed in London that directly implicated Colbert. Colbert is the one who directed the assassins.’

  He was now almost shouting.

  ‘I am going to kill Colbert. I want to avenge my father!’

  D’Orbay’s tone turned icy.

  ‘And we shall avenge him, believe me. But not now. And not in this way. Do you think Colbert is so naïve that he neglects to be constantly on his guard? He has you watched, you disappear, and his men are murdered. Would he then continue to act as if nothing had happened? I am sure that his guard has already been strengthened, even if the link has not yet been established between you and those men’s deaths. Though in all likelihood it has. If Bartet found you, do you think it would be impossible for others to do so, too?’

  Gabriel was silent, shaken by d’Orbay’s arguments.

  ‘Throwing yourself straight into the lion’s mouth, alone, would not serve your vengeance and would compromise our plans. For pity’s sake, go to Vaux and see Fouquet. I promise you that Colbert will still receive his just desserts.’

  Gabriel nodded.

  ‘Very well, I shall follow your advice and go to see the Superintendent, but do me the kindness of telling me everything you know about my father, and about the mystery surrounding his life which seems, alas, to have also been the cause of his death!’

  Relieved, d’Orbay sighed and laid his hand once more upon the pale youth’s arm.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ he said, giving the signal for the carriage to set off. ‘A long story. But Nicolas Fouquet should be the one to tell it. He alone has the right. He was chosen,’ he added enigmatically.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Vaux-le-Vicomte – Saturday 30 April, three o’clock in the afternoon

  GABRIEL watched the white pebble skim over the surface of the lake, then sink straight down beneath its dazzling surface. The afternoon sun cast patches of golden light across the nearly completed gardens, emphasising the brightness of the chateau’s pale stone façades. The scaffolding had disappeared, flowers and shrubs were gradually covering the bare earth, bringing the flowerbeds to life, and Vaux was slowly taking shape, little by little revealing its full majesty.

  But all this was far from the young man’s thoughts. All he could think about, obsessively, was the distance that separated Vaux from Paris, in other words from his father’s murderer. Two days had elapsed since he had agreed to take d’Orbay’s advice and follow him to Vaux. Two days, during which his appetite for revenge had continued to conflict with his belief that to mount a lone attack on the man who dared to have a snake for his emblem was a recipe for failure and suicide.

  ‘Gabriel.’

  The soft voice made the young man turn round. Dropping his handful of pebbles, he leapt to his feet to face the man who had called to him.

  ‘Monsieur Superintendent?’

  With his eyes lowered and his hat obscuring his face, Fouquet silently removed his dusty gloves and took off the travelling cloak he wore to protect his dark green doublet.

  ‘I’ve just arrived from Paris,’ he said.

  Looking up, his eyes met Gabriel’s.

  ‘I must talk to you, my dear Pontbriand,’ he went on. At that very moment, the sun struck the chateau’s front windows and dazzled Gabriel. He blinked and took a step back, temporarily blinded. In this moment of bedazzlement, he heard Fouquet’s voice again:

  ‘It’s about your father.’

  Gabriel’s expression hardened.

  ‘François told me about your conversation,’ went on Fouquet.

  He came closer.

  ‘I can imagine your impatience, your rage, your pain. François shares them, as do we all.’

  He had placed deliberate emphasis on the word ‘we’.

  ‘And we shall avenge your father.’

  Taking him by the elbow, Fouquet led him slowly away.

  ‘I met him only once a long time ago, and very briefly. To me he was Charles Saint John, not André de Pontbriand … And yet in that one meeting he talked to me in barely disguised terms about you and about what he called his “other dream”, to distinguish it from the quest pursued by our Brotherhood. Despite his ardent desire to spare you the sufferings he had known, that dream was to make you his heir. I confess I did not immediately understand what he meant. He realised this and repeated the word “heir”. He meant his heir to our project, and not only in the sense that you were his son.’

  Fouquet paused to look Gabriel square in the face.

  ‘That is a very special kind of inheritance, Monsieur de Pontbriand.’

  The young man clenched his teeth and tears shone in his eyes.

  ‘I shall be direct, Gabriel. We need you. The documents you miraculously retrieved at the theatre, then saved once again on the night your father was murdered; these documents which have placed your life in danger are of vital importance. They altered the course of your father’s life, and yours for that matter. Now you have a chance to change that curse. If you entrust me with the documents, you will be carrying out your father’s dearest wish … And you will succeed him.’

  ‘But what are these accursed secrets which have torn my family apart?’ demanded Gabriel.

  ‘I shall tell you; you’ve earned that right many times over. But I want it to be your choice. Gabriel, there will be consequences if I tell you the story of this secret: if you hear it, it means that you have already accepted it and agreed to serve it. Once I’ve told you, there can be no going back.’

  The Superintendent broke off for a moment and moved a little way away from Gabriel.

  ‘Rest. And think. For once, time is on our side. We are alone until tomorrow. I am going to check on the construction work, and then we shall have dinner with La Fontaine. You must not let anything slip, I beg you. La Fontaine is a dear friend, but he is not one of us and must not find out what is at stake in this conflict. If you don’t think you can manage that, do not come down for dinner; I will say that you are unwell. In that case I shall wait for you in my office at eleven o’clock tonight. If you join me there, I shall consider that you have accepted your inheritance and the burden of these secrets.’

  Without waiting for a reply, the Superintendent of Finance left Gabriel and headed back towards the chateau.

  *

  Night had fallen over the Château de Vaux. Standing in his office at the French doors which opened onto the terrace, with his hands clasped behind him, Nicolas Fouquet gazed out at the inky sky dotted with stars. He smiled faintly in the silence as he listened to the sound of light footsteps on the wooden floor in the adjoining salo
n. The door creaked open softly, and Fouquet turned to see Gabriel standing motionless in the doorway. The light from two torches surrounded him with a luminous halo that emphasised the pallor of his skin. Dressed in a simple white nightshirt, he came forward with a spring in his step, looking Fouquet straight in the eye, and stopped in the centre of the room.

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘The night is warm,’ answered Fouquet, pointing to the terrace.

  ‘Shall we walk?’

  The lights of the chateau were still twinkling in the distance. Setting off along an avenue lined with young poplars, the two men felt the warm breeze caress their faces as it rustled through the leaves.

  ‘It’s a very long story, Gabriel. It began more than one thousand six hundred years ago, by the Sea of Galilee in the Holy Land, at the house of a fisherman who hadn’t returned home in years; not since he left to follow a prophet called Jesus. The man was called Simon Peter and his village was Capernaum. And this story began while he was busy re-reading the testimonies written by other companions of the master. There were four of these testimonies, four documents which the world would come to know as the Gospels. Four documents which would not have given rise to this story had Simon Peter not been mad with rage, horrified by what he read. He took a terrible decision, the decision to rewrite part of those texts, to alter them. In fact it was quite a mundane thing: an act of censorship. Except that it changed the course of history throughout the world. Simon Peter cut the texts. He expurgated them and dictated a new version, the one we know. Then he buried the original texts in an amphora, and for twelve centuries no one knew anything about them. Until the crusades brought our knights to the Holy Land. Until a few of them, on the road to Syria, stopped beside the Sea of Galilee and sought refuge in a cave which had become accessible after twelve hundred years of erosion. Until they found the amphora in that cave. Amongst them was a learned man who knew Aramaic. Months later, in his monastery in Jerusalem, this learned man spent some time deciphering the texts, which were written on papyrus. Despite the terror which filled him as he read them, and after checking thousands of times that his eyes were not deceiving him, this learned man found the courage to reveal his discovery to the chapter of his order. That learned man was also a soldier. His order was that of the Templars. And these writings were then given a name: the Fifth Gospel. That is the Secret which your father bore. Like me, like others, he was guardian of the Fifth Gospel, willing to sacrifice everything so that this Secret should not fall into unworthy hands liable to misuse or destroy it. Its injudicious revelation could provoke a terrifying situation of murderous anarchy. Like others, your father had taken a vow to bear this Secret and to wait until the appropriate circumstances arose. Only then could it be revealed, to a man capable of comprehending its meaning and accepting this inheritance before his people, thus countering Simon Peter’s rewriting.’

  Stunned, Gabriel hung on Fouquet’s every word.

  ‘But where are the documents? Did I carry them?’

  Fouquet smiled.

  ‘No. By an incredible stroke of fortune, you carried the key which provides access to them. The knights hid it in order to protect the Secret. After translating the text, they copied it between the lines on each of the leaves of papyrus used by Simon Peter. Then they soaked the pages of this codex in a bath of special ink which rendered them unreadable. They had learned this art from an Arab scholar. All the pages of the codex are turned black on both sides. And only their immersion in a decoction of plants, prepared according to an extremely precise formula, can cause the ink to vanish and reveal the true text in Aramaic and in Latin. What is more, this operation has to take place at a particular time on a particular date, which only occurs once a year. The formula for this decoction is on the document your father encoded, and its history is almost as extraordinary as that of the codex itself. It was lost during the sacking of the Templar’s commandery by Philippe le Bel. No one knew what had become of it. As for the codex, unreadable as it was, it was carefully hidden in Rome. We were merely the guardians of a memory whose existence we passed on from generation to generation, ready to act if we picked up the trail of the formula. This we did at the height of the Fronde, a little less than fifteen years ago. The formula reappeared in the hands of a Genoese merchant. How it ended up there, nobody knows exactly. All we know is that during the pillaging of the commandery, one of our Brothers – on the point of being caught and murdered, and unable to communicate in any way with our Brotherhood – in an act of despair entrusted the formula to a servant who did not even know what he possessed. He ordered him to flee to Italy and to make contact with one of our people there. He failed to do this. Instead the wretch sought to turn what he possessed into money, without success; he died in poverty around 1350. It is probable that the formula lay for three centuries in a loft before the chance transactions of buying and selling caused it to be brought in a trunk to Genoa. The formula had been stored with other documents belonging to the Templars. Letters mainly, any objects of value having been destroyed. The Genoese merchant had known your father twenty years earlier, when they fought together in the French armies against the Habsburgs. They had remained in contact by letter and this merchant knew of your father’s interest in the history of the Order of the Temple. He therefore offered to send him the documents, not imagining for an instant what they were. As for your father, he realised immediately. We had almost reached our goal. An extraordinary meeting of the fourteen members of our Brotherhood was hastily arranged, in Rome. Alas, when he arrived in Rome, your father revealed to his travelling companion, another of our Brothers, the subject of the meeting. Only your father’s passion for the art of cryptography saved us then. In fact he only had time to encrypt the text in a code known solely to us. The very next day and one day prior to our meeting, the traitor denounced him and handed him over to Mazarin’s agents in Italy. Although abducted and taken back to France, where he was imprisoned and tortured, your father said nothing. In the end he escaped, but he left behind the coded formula which was lost for fifteen years until Providence placed you in its path.’

  ‘But what about the original of the formula?’ Gabriel asked.

  ‘He destroyed it when he realised he had been betrayed.’

  The Superintendent looked away.

  ‘This story is the curious result of man’s desire to put everything in writing. Why did Simon Peter not destroy the papyri? I have never been able to explain to myself what held him back. If he had done so, nobody would ever have known anything …’

  He sighed before continuing, an edge of tension perceptible in his voice.

  ‘For four centuries we have waited and patiently prepared for our chance. Fortified by the possession of the codex, even though we could not make it readable to many people, we made preparations to reveal its existence in several countries, in the hope that we would eventually recover the formula. I was chosen by my Brothers to prepare for the occasion in France. In the meantime, the revolution in England almost presented us with our opportunity. Cromwell was our man: had he not been killed by the grain of sand in his kidneys, the face of the world and our destiny would have been different. But …’

  Gabriel opened his mouth but Fouquet spoke first.

  ‘Don’t ask me to tell you the contents of the codex now. You will have to trust me for the moment, just as I am demonstrating my trust in you by revealing to you the very existence of our secret. The plants needed for the decoction are growing in the orangery and will be ready for the transmutation process in a few weeks’ time; the location is ready too,’ he said, indicating the chateau. ‘Everything is now possible … if you place your trust in me.’

  He approached Gabriel. Once again, there was a smile on his face.

  ‘There, Monsieur de Pontbriand; you now know half of your inheritance. You know what gave meaning to André de Pontbriand’s life. Do you want to know the other half? It will tell you how to become his son a second time.’

  Gabriel smi
led back at him. The men faced each other, two shapes surrounded by darkness.

  ‘Speak, Monsieur. You cannot reveal the nature of the Secret to me, I accept that. So tell me, what can be at stake that is important enough to persuade a son to put off avenging his father?’

  ‘Open your eyes, Gabriel: it is all around you. The stake is symbolised by these walls,’ he added, making a sweeping gesture towards the rooftops of Vaux as they glistened in the moonlight.

  Gabriel shuddered.

  ‘It is almost time. Follow me.’

  In silence, they left the poplar-lined avenue and walked up the hill through the trees.

  ‘This mound was created using the earth removed to create the chateau’s foundations,’ said Fouquet, as they emerged at the top of the hillock. ‘Look to your left, and you will understand.’

  Fouquet watched him, smiling.

  ‘Surprising, is it not? No one but d’Orbay and I have gazed upon what you see here. This is the true vista of the Château de Vaux.’

  As far as the eye could see, the roofs Gabriel saw from above to the left and right seemed to stretch all the way towards the horizon, linking the chateau and its outbuildings in a compact unit and totally transforming the look of the edifice. What Gabriel was gazing at in wonderment was no longer simply the proud chateau of a great lord but a town, a new city.

  ‘Vaux is the concrete illustration, the symbol of the word of which we are guardians. Like that word, it has two appearances: one obvious but deceptive, the one you see through the main gates when you look at the façade. And the other, hidden one, which reveals its true nature.’

  Fascinated, Gabriel could not tear his gaze away from the sight.

  ‘Now do you grasp it?’ Fouquet went on. ‘This Secret involves more than just you and me, and that is why you must postpone your vengeance: it involves the entire Kingdom, and even more than that. This Secret is the establishment of a new political order. That of a society of consent, not of fear; of choice, not of subservience. A society in which the sovereign will no longer reign in the name of a transcendent order, but in the name of the people who make up its population. A society in which the ruling principle will be equality, in which chateaux will no longer glorify one man alone, but will instead become houses for all.’