by Robert Merle
At dusk, to my considerable surprise, since I thought I’d seen the last of him, Venetianelli came to visit me. As usual, I made him many hyperbolic compliments and invited him to sit down at my table, facing the mirror behind me that he made such use of, and share my dinner. I asked him no questions, but simply waited for the fruit to ripen and fall off the tree into my mouth. And indeed, as soon as my guest had relaxed into the welcome I’d lavished on him, he told me that Guise had learnt of the fury of the king that Henri had displayed on returning to his apartments after Mass that morning, and that His Majesty had held a long meeting with his closest advisors in the old cabinet. As nothing appeared to have come from that meeting, Guise had become very worried and had made a decision to leave Blois at noon on Friday the 23rd.
After Venetianelli had left my room, La Bastide and Montseris having excused themselves for the obvious reasons, I felt a terrible knot in my throat and sweat began to pour down my cheeks; my legs felt so weak I could hardly remain upright, and my hands were shaking uncontrollably. It took me some moments before I understood that my reaction was due to the certainty that I was a tiny but crucial cog in the implacable chain of events that was unfolding: certainly, I could decide not to share Venetianelli’s words with the king. But if I repeated them to him, as was not only my duty but also my inclination, it was clear that I would be helping the duc set the date and the hour of his own death, for the vehement desire of the king was to prevent his departure, which would have been fatal to his cause.
The next day was 22nd December, and as soon as I arrived at the chateau with the Forty-five, I asked the king’s usher to alert Du Halde that I had something of great importance to say to His Majesty. Du Halde came up and embraced me warmly. In a hushed voice I asked him how the king was. Du Halde answered, in the same tones: “On the surface, very calm, but inside he’s boiling and feverish.” He led me across the king’s chamber (where I saw only one valet, who was putting logs on the fire) to the new cabinet, where the king was seated before a table on a simple stool, his back to the flames, reading dispatches that secretary of state Revol, was handing to him one by one. Seeing me, His Majesty interrupted his reading and presented me with his hand; he told me to take a seat, and told Du Halde to stay, then continued his reading. I watched him closely as he read and noticed that although his face was inscrutable, his interior agitation was betrayed by his eyelids, which from time to time fluttered uncontrollably, and by his lower lip, which was disturbed by the twitching of a muscle spasm—a reaction Henri must have been aware of, because at each spasm he raised his hand to calm it. However, his hands, which were holding the dispatches, did not tremble in the least.
As I was standing on his right and the candelabrum that was lighting his reading was set to his left, his face was etched by this luminous halo, and, though he looked thin and wan, I found him very handsome, his profile so refined, prolonged by his short black beard, which was now streaked with white, as was his hair. The more I looked at him (which I could do without offending him since he was reading), the more I admired the sensitivity in this fine and noble visage. Many of the ladies of the court sang the praises of Guise, nicknamed Magnificent by Chicot, but I did not like the falseness of his slanted eyes, the heaviness of his jaw or the gross fatuousness of his arrogance. He was a carnival king, made of cardboard, tall and well painted, but lacking the Italian finesse that one appreciated in Henri’s eyes.
Having finished his reading, the king put down the dispatches, glanced over at me and asked: “Quid novi, mi fili?”*
Before I could answer, Bellegarde entered and told the king that Madame de Sauves begged His Majesty to receive her so that she could thank him for his marvellous present, and because she had a message to deliver from the queen mother. The king consented to her visit immediately and, at a sign he gave me, I stood up and moved away from the light of the candelabrum over to the darkest corner of the room, having little fear that Madame de Sauves might recognize me since I now had a full black beard and wore the velvet cap of the Forty-five.
Madame de Sauves, who continued to be called by the name of her late husband, despite her subsequent marriage to the Marquis de Noirmoutiers, entered the king’s cabinet preceded by Monsieur de Nambu, and the king rose to greet her with his usual courtesy (showing as he did the ladies of the court, except when he was furious, the greatest regard). He presented his hand and Madame de Sauves bowed graciously before him, revealing her fine figure and generous bosom, which was decorated with a little pink lace collar, sprinkled with a very expensive plethora of pearls.
But it would be unjust not to mention that the lady displayed a grace that her years did not seem to diminish, not only in her body but in her face, which was so angelic that the most perspicacious saint would have been fooled by it: beautiful blue eyes, gorgeous pink skin, a dreamy mouth, a long neck and something so disarming in her physiognomy that even a tiger would not have remained insensitive to her charms. But she was a devil in her heart, and in her innate haughtiness already imagined herself the next queen of France, since she’d been consorting with the Magnificent. Meanwhile, in a meek but hypocritical display of deference, she remained kneeling at the king’s feet—at all of our feet, I should say, since Du Halde, Bellegarde, Nambu and I also gazed down at her, as she knelt and endeavoured, in her apparent submission, to better dominate us with the yoke of her all-powerful beauty.
“Madame, you may rise,” said the king, giving her his hand and leading her to a chair.
“Ah, sire!” she replied sweetly, in her deep, musical voice. “Your condescension overwhelms me completely, and I’ll never be able to thank you enough for the marvellous present of the pearl earrings you bestowed on me, which are all the dearer to me for your having worn them! And I swear to you that I shall wear them every day that God grants me before the end of my terrestrial life.”
Madame de Sauves continued in this vein for ten long minutes, which must have dragged unbearably for the king, but which he made no attempt to shorten, responding to his guest with that language of the court that manages to stretch the least phrase into ten lines and to use ten words where one would have sufficed.
“Sire,” she continued, “knowing how much the affairs of state press and occupy you, I wouldn’t have dared ask Your Majesty to receive me if the queen mother hadn’t requested that I intervene on her behalf. Since she must keep to her room, she has asked the Duc de Guise to come to her chambers at two this afternoon, and, since she has got wind of a cooling in your relations after Mass yesterday, she would be very desirous of providing a prompt remedy so that you can make peace with each other for the greater good of the state.”
“Well, Madame,” replied the king with a sweetness of tone and look that left me astonished, “what infinite gratitude I owe you for this sweet embassy; with what joy I shall visit my mother this afternoon and with what redoubled happiness do I welcome the chance to see my cousin Monsieur de Guise, with whom I would never want to have a quarrel without wanting immediately to smooth it over! I would be infinitely unhappy if Monsieur de Guise were to think that I had so black a soul as to wish evil on the firmest pillar of my throne. Quite the contrary, I swear and declare here that there is no one in my kingdom whom I love more than him, or anyone to whom I am bound by so many obligations—as I hope to prove before too long, for the greatest good.”
These words were proffered in such a sincere, spontaneous and naive tone that for a split second I doubted the king’s true intentions. But when I saw him rise and present his hand to Madame de Sauves, seize hers and kiss it in turn, I understood the enormous and secret derision that lay behind the farce this great comedian was playing for the woman whom, that very morning, he’d called “Guise’s whore”. After having told her, as he kissed her hand, that “he was only king by right of succession, whereas she was queen by her incomparable beauty”, he walked her to the door of his chamber as if she were a royal princess, a favour and an honour that appeared to enchant the lady,
given how true it is that we mortals lose all perspective and clarity of vision when our vanity is caressed.
Meanwhile, after the lady had left by the spiral staircase that led to the queen mother’s chambers and that was heavily guarded by Nambu and three of Larchant’s men, the king returned to his new cabinet, walking quickly and with a very sullen expression, as if the comedy he’d just had to play to calm the suspicions of the queen mother and Guise had given him indigestion.
“My son,” he said very tersely as he sat down, indicating that I should sit in front of him, “quid novi?”
Seeing him thus harried by so many disquieting worries, I didn’t want to weave a story, but told him in a few words what I’d learnt about the tertium quid’s intention to leave Blois at noon on Friday.
“Well!” said the king; but then he fell silent for a long minute and sat there as immobile as a rock, his eyes staring straight ahead, but without the flutter I’d noticed when I came in, or the little spasm of the muscle under his lower lip. His whole body seemed petrified, with the exception of his hands, which he’d joined as if in prayer, and which were so tightly pressed one against the other than I could see his fingers turning white.
“It seems,” he finally said in a deep, firm voice, “that our council will be meeting on Friday morning at seven.”
Bellegarde, Du Halde and I looked at each other for a moment in silence, without any of us desiring to add anything, words being now superfluous since the day and the hour had now been decided. But Bellegarde, who, being so young, still had something of the child in him, said:
“Sire, if I understand you correctly, you won’t be going to visit the queen mother this afternoon?”
“Ah, Bellegarde! Bellegarde!” said the king with a wan smile. “You’re not thinking politically! Of course I’ll go! Now more than ever! For fourteen years,” he continued in a very meditative vein, his finger pointed at the floor, “that lady and author of my days has been meddling in my affairs and trying to get me to meddle in the Devil’s work, whether Alençon or Guise be the Devil; and she has worked single-mindedly to make me give up everything I had, whether it be half the kingdom or the position of constable of France! Well then, by God, let’s let him have everything! Tomorrow we’ll see the effects! A dead man cannot hurt us any more.”
The king asked that only Bellegarde accompany him to the queen mother’s chambers, for the simple reason that Bellegarde was so quiet and so little engaged in politics that he’d never offended anyone and no one could accuse him of influencing the king. Many years later, when I’d gained his confidence, he told me that during that afternoon the king proved himself to be the most dazzling performer of the commedia dell’arte that he’d ever seen. Apparently, Guise was very defiant, distant and cold at the outset, but the king overwhelmed him with grandiloquent demonstrations of friendship and hinted at promises of his future greatness, wrapping it all in so many little pleasantries, small compliments and gracious gestures, including offering him dragées from his comfit box, that Guise ultimately melted like snow in the sun—and, of course, the queen mother, watching this from her bed, was so ecstatic to have effected such a reconciliation between the two that you would have thought you were at a wedding!
As he was leaving, the king took Guise aside and said in a confidential and affectionate voice:
“My cousin, we have much business on our hands that must be expedited before the end of the year. In this wise, come tomorrow morning at seven and we’ll take care of some of it, though I have to leave for several days for a retreat at my house in la Noue. You can send me what you’ve resolved.”
I asked Bellegarde to repeat twice the king’s words, and later the ambassador from Tuscany, Filippo Cavriana, who’d come to visit the queen mother and was present at the end of this conversation, confirmed them verbatim. Cavriana admired the king’s Machiavellian finesse, since by leaving Guise to preside over the meeting in his absence, he was already assigning him the functions of a constable of France—a piece of bait that must have been impossible to resist and overcame any caution Guise might otherwise have exercised in this situation.
The king had told me before his visit to the queen mother to remain in his new cabinet and to sleep the night of the 22nd to the 23rd in his wardrobe with Du Halde, who slept there every night on a bed that he rolled up at dawn and locked in a closet. But since His Majesty hadn’t explained exactly what service he expected of me, I found myself quite at a loose end, my only work being to write a letter to the Cardinal de Guise that the king dictated, for lack of his secretary. The cardinal hadn’t attended a meeting of the council for nearly two months, and the king requested that he attend the meeting scheduled for the next morning, since it was the last one of the year and so the matters discussed there would be of great consequence. This letter was so amiable in expression and so favourable in substance, and the addressee had been so insufferably arrogant with the king, having demanded a retraction of his speech the morning after the opening of the Estates, that I understood that the plan was to allot him the same fate as his brother. Wishing to understand this situation better, I asked Du Halde what he thought of the cardinal. And Du Halde, after a moment of reflection, replied:
“He’s worse than the duc. He’s a furious zealot. He breathes only blood.”
At nine that evening, the king had Larchant brought to him and made sure that the officer had told Guise that he wanted to present him with a request the next morning, at the foot of the grand staircase, regarding the pay of his guards, so that the duc wouldn’t be surprised by their presence there. The guards, the king added, were to be assembled there at seven o’clock with no other instructions than that they should secure the grand staircase after the duc and the archbishop of Lyons had entered, and to forbid anyone else to pass in either direction. After Larchant, the king saw Laugnac, and asked him to assemble his Forty-five at five the next morning in the Gallery of the Stags, at the bottom of the stairs that I’ve labelled s’ on the floor plan. I observed that the king didn’t say a word to Laugnac about the true purpose of the Gascons’ presence, perhaps because he felt some mistrust of Laugnac or, possibly, because he feared that a secret that was shared among so many men couldn’t be kept.
Once Laugnac had left, the king gave Du Halde and me leave to go to bed in his wardrobe, which we did, though the bed was somewhat narrow for two men who were anything but narrow themselves, especially since the cold obliged us to sleep with our coats on. Being separated from the new cabinet only by a door, I could hear the king speaking quietly with Bellegarde for quite a while. After which, I heard the king’s steps in front of our other door, from which I concluded that he’d gone to sleep with the queen. At this moment, Bellegarde, a candle in his hand, opened the door a crack and said:
“Du Halde, the king demands that, on your life, you should not fail to wake him at four in the morning.”
“Well, Monsieur,” answered Du Halde, his voice full of anxiety, “may I ask you to hold your candle up to my clock so that I can set the alarm?”
Bellegarde came into the wardrobe and obligingly knelt next to Du Halde and held his candle up to the alarm clock that the latter had removed in order to set it. Leaning on my elbow, I watched him try to set the alarm, but his hands were trembling violently out of the fear that he might not set it at the right time, since the numbers were so small and the light so weak and flickering. Not a word was spoken during this scene; the only sounds were the noise of our breathing and, from time to time, the noise of gusts of rain whipping the windowpanes.
“Baron,” said Du Halde, his voice trembling with anxiety, “did I set it correctly?”
“I believe so,” I replied, but as I reached over to take the clock to verify it, he put his hand on my wrist to stop me, saying that the watch must not be shaken since the least motion would put it out of order.
Once Bellegarde had left, I tried in vain to get a little sleep, but I was filled with terror at the idea that the tiniest detail goi
ng wrong at the last minute could completely undo the king’s designs. However, after finally dropping off, I was awakened by such a loud noise that I doubted that it could be Du Halde’s snores. Sitting up, I saw Du Halde trying to stoke up the fire with a large pair of bellows, which explained the noise I’d heard. I asked him if he were cold, and he answered that he wasn’t, but that he needed the light of the fire to see his alarm clock. I could see he was covered in sweat for fear of missing the fateful hour.
“Don’t you trust it? Has it ever failed you?”
“Never.”
“So trust it now!”
“Ah,” replied Du Halde, “the risk is too great!”
“What time is it?”
“Three o’clock,” replied Du Halde after reviving the fire enough to see the face of his watch.
“Has it ever stopped?” I asked, looking at it.
“Never. It’s fairly new. I bought it on the day of the opening of the Estates-General in Blois, knowing how much Blois is famous throughout the world for the excellence of its watches and alarm clocks.”
“Has its alarm ever failed to sound at the prescribed hour?”
“Never,” affirmed Du Halde, throwing a stick on the fire that was about to burn his fingers.
“Well then, go back to sleep.”
“I can’t,” confessed Du Halde, “I’m too terrified of letting the hour pass and everything failing on my account.”
“Well then, stay awake!”
“If I stay awake,” complained Du Halde, “I’ll end up being so tired that I’ll fall asleep without realizing it!”
“Well then, Du Halde,” I laughed, “stop tormenting yourself! Let’s roll up this bed and stow it in the closet; then we’ll wait up together, on those two stools, and the first one to fall asleep will fall off the stool and wake up! That’ll pass the time pretty quickly!”