And, from that moment, Anne of Austria, whose memory and reason seemed to have become entirely suspended for a time, remained impenetrable, with vacant look, mind almost wandering, and hands hanging heavily down, as if life had almost departed.
“We must put her to bed,” said La Molena.
“Presently, Molena.”
“Let us leave the Queen alone,” added the Spanish attendant.
Madame de Motteville rose; large and glistening tears were fast rolling down the Queen’s pallid face; and Molena, having observed this sign of weakness, fixed her black vigilant eyes upon her.
“Yes, yes,” replied the Queen. “Leave us, Motteville; go.”
The word “us” produced a disagreeable effect upon the ears of the French favourite; for it signified that an interchange of secrets, or of revelations of the past, was about to be made, and that one person was de trop in the conversation which seemed likely to take place.
“Will Molena, alone, be sufficient for your Majesty to-night?” inquired the Frenchwoman.
“Yes,” replied the Queen. Madame de Motteville bowed in submission, and was about to withdraw, when, suddenly, an old female attendant, dressed as if she had belonged to the Spanish court of the year 1620, opened the doors, and surprised the Queen in her tears. “The remedy!” she cried, delightedly, to the Queen, as she unceremoniously approached the group.
“What remedy?” said Anne of Austria.
“For your Majesty’s sufferings,” the former replied.
“Who brings it?” asked Madame de Motteville eagerly; “Monsieur Vallot?”
“No; a lady from Flanders.”
“From Flanders? Is she Spanish?” inquired the Queen.
“I don’t know.”
“Who sent her?”
“M. Colbert.”
“Her name?”
“She did not mention it.”
“Her position in life?”
“She will answer that herself.”
“Her face?”
“She is masked.”
“Go, Molena; go and see!” cried the Queen.
“It is needless,” suddenly replied a voice, at once firm and gentle in its tone, which proceeded from the other side of the tapestry hangings; a voice which made the attendants start, and the Queen tremble excessively. At the same moment, a masked female appeared through the hangings, and, before the Queen could speak a syllable, she added, “I am connected with the order of the Béguines of Bruges, and do, indeed, bring with me the remedy which is certain to effect a cure of your Majesty’s complaint.” No one uttered a sound, and the Béguine did not move a step.
“Speak,” said the Queen.
“I will, when we are alone,” was the answer.
Anne of Austria looked at her attendants, who immediately withdrew.
The Béguine, thereupon, advanced a few steps towards the Queen, and bowed reverently before her. The Queen gazed with increasing mistrust at this woman, who, in her turn, fixed a pair of brilliant eyes upon her, through her mask.
“The Queen of France must, indeed, be very ill,” said Anne of Austria, “if it is known at the Béguinage of Bruges that she stands in need of being cured.”
“Your Majesty is not irremediably ill.”
“But, tell me, how do you happen to know I am suffering?”
“Your Majesty has friends in Flanders.”
“Since these friends, then, have sent you, mention their names.”
“Impossible, madame, since your Majesty’s memory has not been awakened by your heart.”
Anne of Austria looked up, endeavouring to discover through the concealment of the mask, and through her mysterious language, the name of her companion, who expressed herself with such familiarity and freedom; then, suddenly, wearied by a curiosity which wounded every feeling of pride in her nature, she said, “You are ignorant, perhaps, that royal personages are never spoken to with the face masked.”
“Deign to excuse me, madame,” replied the Béguine humbly.
“I cannot excuse you. I may, possibly, forgive you, if you throw your mask aside.”
“I have made a vow, madame, to attend and aid all afflicted or suffering persons without ever permitting them to behold my face. I might have been able to administer some relief to your body and to your mind, too; but, since your Majesty forbids me, I will take my leave. Adieu, madame, adieu.”
These words were uttered with a harmony of tone and respect of manner that deprived the Queen of all her anger and suspicion, but did not remove her feeling of curiosity. “You are right,” she said, “it ill becomes those who are suffering to reject the means of relief which Heaven sends them. Speak, then; and may you, indeed, be able, as you assert you can, to administer relief to my body—”
“Let us first speak a little of the mind, if you please,” said the Béguine; “of the mind, which, I am sure, must also suffer.”
“My mind?”
“There are cancers so insidious in their nature that their very pulsation is invisible. Such cancers, madame, leave the ivory whiteness of the skin untouched, and marble not the firm, fair flesh, with their blue tints; the physician who bends over the patient’s chest hears not, though he listens, the insatiable teeth of the disease grinding its onward progress through the muscles, as the blood flows freely on; the knife has never been able to destroy, and rarely even, temporarily, to disarm the rage of these mortal scourges; their home is in the mind, which they corrupt; they fill the whole heart until it breaks. Such, madame, are the cancers, fatal to queens; are you, too, free from their scourge?”
Anne slowly raised her arm, dazzling in its perfect whiteness, and pure in its rounded outlines, as it was in the time of her earlier days.
“The evils to which you allude,” she said, “are the condition of the lives of the high in rank upon earth, to whom Heaven has imparted mind. When those evils become too heavy to be borne, Heaven lightens their burden by penitence and confession. There we lay down our burden, and the secrets which oppress us. But, forget not, that the same gracious Heaven, in its mercy, apportions to their trials the strength of the feeble creatures of its hand; and my strength has enabled me to bear my burden. For the secrets of others, the silence of Heaven is more than sufficient; for my own secrets, that of my confessor is just enough.”
“You are as courageous, madame, I see, as ever, against your enemies. You do not acknowledge your confidence in your friends.”
“Queens have no friends; if you have nothing further to say to me,—if you feel yourself inspired by Heaven as a prophetess—leave me, I pray you, for I dread the future.”
“I should have supposed,” said the Béguine resolutely, “that you would rather have dreaded the past.”
Hardly had these words escaped her lips, than the Queen rose up proudly. “Speak,” she cried, in a short, imperious tone of voice; “explain yourself briefly, quickly, entirely; or, if not—”
“Nay, do not threaten me, your Majesty,” said the Béguine gently; “I came to you full of compassion and respect. I came here on the part of a friend.”
“Prove that to me! Comfort, instead of irritating me.”
“Easily enough; and your Majesty will see who is friendly to you. What misfortune has happened to your Majesty during these three and twenty years past—”
“Serious misfortunes, indeed; have I not lost the King?”
“I speak not of misfortunes of that kind. I wish to ask you if, since the birth of the King, any indiscretion on a friend’s part has caused your Majesty the slightest serious anxiety or distress?”
“I do not understand you,” replied the Queen; setting her teeth hard together in order to conceal her emotion.
“I will make myself understood, then. Your Majesty remembers that the King was born on the 5th of September, 1638, at a quarter past eleven o’clock.”
“Yes,” stammered out the Queen.
“At half-past twelve,” continued the Béguine, “the Dauphin,k who had been baptise
d by Monseigneur de Meaux in the King’s and in your own presence, was acknowledged as the heir of the crown of France. The King then went to the chapel of the old Château de Saint-Germain, to hear the Te Deum chanted.”
“Quite true, quite true,” murmured the Queen.
“Your Majesty’s confinement took place in the presence of Monsieur, His Majesty’s late uncle, of the princes, and of the ladies attached to the court. The King’s physician, Bouvard, and Honoré, the surgeon, were stationed in the antechamber; your Majesty slept from three o’clock until seven, I believe!”
“Yes, yes; but you tell me no more than every one else knows as well as you and myself.”
“I am now, madame, approaching that which very few persons are acquainted with. Very few persons, did I say, alas! I might almost say two only, for formerly there were but five in all, and, for many years past, the secret has been well preserved by the deaths of the principal participators in it. The late King sleeps now with his ancestors. Péronne, the midwife, soon followed him, Laporte is already forgotten.”
The Queen opened her lips as though about to reply; she felt beneath her icy hand, with which she kept her face half concealed, the beads of perspiration upon her brow.
“It was eight o‘clock,” pursued the Béguine; “the King was seated at supper, full of joy and happiness; around him on all sides arose wild cries of delight and drinking of healths; the people cheered beneath the balconies; the Swiss guards, the musketeers, and the royal guards wandered through the city, borne about in triumph by the drunken students. Those boisterous sounds of the general joy disturbed the Dauphin, the future King of France, who was quietly lying in the arms of Madame de Hausac, his nurse, and whose eyes, as he opened them, and stared about, might have observed two crowns at the foot of his cradle. Suddenly, your Majesty uttered a piercing cry, and Dame Péronne immediately flew to your bedside. The doctors were dining in a room at some distance from your chamber; the palace, deserted from the frequency of the irruptions made into it, was without either sentinels or guards. The midwife, having questioned and examined your Majesty, gave a sudden exclamation as if in wild astonishment, and taking you in her arms, bewildered almost out of her senses from sheer distress of mind, despatched Laporte to inform the King that Her Majesty the Queen wished to see him in her room. Laporte, you are aware, madame, was a man of the most admirable calmness and presence of mind. He did not approach the King as if he were the bearer of alarming intelligence and wished to inspire the terror which he himself experienced; besides, it was not a very terrifying intelligence which awaited the King. Therefore, Laporte appeared with a smile upon his lips, and approached the King’s chair, saying to him,—‘Sire, the Queen is very happy, and would be still more so to see your Majesty.’ On that day Louis XIII would have given his crown away to the veriest beggar for a ‘God bless you.’ Animated, light-hearted, and full of gaiety, the King rose from the table, and said to those around him, in a tone that Henry IV might have adopted,—‘Gentlemen, I am going to see my wife.’ He came to your bedside, madame, at the very moment Dame Péronne presented to him a second prince, as beautiful and healthy as the former, and said,—‘Sire, Heaven will not allow the kingdom of France to fall into the female line.’ The King, yielding to a first impulse, clasped the child in his arms, and cried, ‘Oh! Heaven, I thank thee!’ ”
At this part of her recital the Béguine paused, observing how intensely the Queen was suffering; she had thrown herself back in her chair, and with her head bent forward and her eyes fixed, listened without seeming to hear, and her lips moving convulsively, either breathing a prayer to Heaven or in imprecations against the woman standing before her.
“Ah! do not believe that, because there could be but one Dauphin in France,” exclaimed the Béguine, “or that if the Queen allowed that child to vegetate, banished from his royal parents’ presence, she was on that account an unfeeling mother. Oh! no, no; there are those alive who know the floods of bitter tears she shed; there are those who have known and witnessed the passionate kisses she imprinted on that innocent creature in exchange for a life of misery and gloom to which State policy condemned the twin brother of Louis XIV.”
“Oh! Heaven!” murmured the Queen feebly.
“It is admitted,” continued the Béguine, quickly, “that when the King perceived the effect which would result from the existence of two sons, both equal in age and pretensions, he trembled for the welfare of France, for the tranquillity of the State; and it is equally well known that the Cardinal de Richelieu, by the direction of Louis XIII, thought over the subject with deep attention and, after an hour’s meditation in His Majesty’s cabinet, he pronounced the following sentence:—‘One prince is peace and safety for the state; two competitors are civil war and anarchy.’ ”
The Queen rose suddenly from her seat, pale as death, and her hands clenched together:—“You know too much,” she said, in a hoarse, thick voice, “since you refer to secrets of State. As for the friends from whom you have acquired this secret, they are false and treacherous. You are their accomplice in the crime which is being now committed. Now, throw aside your mask, or I will have you arrested by my captain of the guards. Do not think that this secret terrifies me! You have obtained it, you shall restore it to me. Never shall it leave your bosom, for neither your secret nor your own life belong to you from this moment.”
Anne of Austria, joining gesture to the threat, advanced a couple of steps towards the Béguine. “Learn,” said the latter, “to know and value the fidelity, the honour, and secrecy of the friends you have abandoned.” And, then, suddenly she threw aside her mask.
“Madame de Chevreuse!” exclaimed the Queen.
“With your Majesty, the sole living confidante of this secret.”
“Ah!” murmured Anne of Austria; “come and embrace me, Duchesse. Alas! you kill your friend in thus trifling with her terrible distress.”
And the Queen, leaning her head upon the shoulder of the old Duchesse, burst into a flood of bitter tears. “How young you are still!” said the latter, in a hollow voice, “you can weep!”
5
Two Friends
THE QUEEN LOOKED STEADILY at Madame de Chevreuse, and said: “I believe you just now made use of the word ‘happy’ in speaking of me. Hitherto, Duchesse, I had thought it impossible that a human creature could anywhere be found less happy than the Queen of France.”
“Your afflictions, madame, have indeed been terrible enough. But by the side of those great and grand misfortunes to which we, two old friends separated by men’s malice, were just now alluding, you possess sources of pleasure, slight enough in themselves it may be, but which are greatly envied by the world.”
“What are they?” said Anne of Austria bitterly. “What can induce you to pronounce the word ‘pleasure,’ Duchesse—you, who just now, admitted that my body and my mind both stood in need of remedies.”
Madame de Chevreuse collected herself for a moment, and then murmured, “How far removed kings are from other people.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that they are so far removed from the vulgar herd that they forget that others stand in need of the bare necessaries of life. They are like the inhabitant of the African mountain, who, gazing from the verdant plateau, refreshed by the rills of melted snow, cannot comprehend that the dwellers in the plains below him are perishing from hunger and thirst in the midst of their lands, burned up by the heat of the sun.”
The Queen slightly coloured, for she now began to perceive the drift of her friend’s remark. “It was very wrong,” she said, “to have neglected you.”
“Oh! madame, the King I know has inherited the hatred his father bore me. The King would dismiss me if he knew I were in the Palais-Royal.”
“I cannot say that the King is very well disposed towards you, Duchesse,” replied the Queen; “but I could—secretly, you know—”
The Duchesse’s disdainful smile produced a feeling of uneasiness in the Queen’s
mind. “Duchesse,” she hastened to add, “you did perfectly right to come here, even were it only to give us the happiness of contradicting the report of your death.”
“Has it been said, then, that I was dead?”
“Everywhere.”
“And yet my children did not go into mourning.”
“Ah! you know, Duchesse, the court is very frequently moving about from place to place; we see M. Albert de Luynesl but seldom, and many things escape our minds in the midst of the preoccupations which constantly beset us.”
“Your Majesty ought not to have believed the report of my death.”
“Why not? Alas! we are all mortal; and you may perceive how rapidly I, your younger sister, as we used formerly to say, am approaching the tomb.”
“If your Majesty had believed me dead, you ought, in that case, to have been astonished not to have received any news of me.”
“Death not infrequently takes us by surprise, Duchesse.”
“Oh! your Majesty, those who are burdened with secrets such as we have just now discussed, must, as a necessity of their nature, satisfy their craving desire to divulge them, and they feel they must gratify that desire before they die. Among the various preparations for their final journey, the task of placing their papers in order is not omitted.”
The Queen started.
“Your Majesty will be sure to learn, in a particular manner, the day of my death.”
“In what way?”
“Because your Majesty will receive the next day, under several coverings, everything connected with our mysterious correspondence of former times.”
“Did you not burn them?” cried Anne in alarm.
“Traitors only,” replied the Duchesse, “destroy a royal correspondence.”
“Traitors, do you say?”
Man in the Iron Mask (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 8