“Étienne Latil,” he said, “this is to pay for your treatment. If you recover, when you can be moved, have yourself brought to the hotel of the Duc de Montmorency, in Rue des Blancs-Manteaux. If you die, die in the knowledge that masses will be sung for your soul.”
At the approach of the young man, the wounded man had risen on one elbow and, as if at the sight of a ghost, appeared struck dumb, eyes wide and mouth gaping.
But when the young man turned and walked away, the wounded man murmured, “The Comte de Moret!” and fell back on the table.
As for the friar, at the first entrance of the false Jacquelino into the room, he had stepped back and pulled his hood over his face, as if afraid of being recognized.
VII
Stairs and Corridors
Upon leaving the Inn of the Painted Beard, the Comte de Moret, for it was indeed he, went down the Rue de l’Homme-Armé, turned right on the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, and knocked on the door of the Hotel de Montmorency. This was the town mansion of the Duc de Montmorency, Henri, the second of the name, and it had two doors, one on the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux and the other on the Rue Sainte-Avoye.
Clearly, the son of Henri IV was known to the household, for as soon as he was recognized, a young page of fifteen grabbed a four-branched candlestick, lit the tapers, and went on before him. The prince followed the page.
The Comte de Moret’s rooms were on the first floor. In the outer room, the page lit the candelabras, then said to the prince, “I’m at His Highness’s command.”
“Has your master assigned you any duties this evening, Galaor?” asked the Comte de Moret.
“No, Monseigneur—I’m free.”
“Will you go with me, then?”
“With pleasure, Monseigneur!”
“In that case, dress warmly and bring a good cloak. It’s a cold night!”
“I’m ready!” said the young page. His master frequently employed him as a street runner, so he was an old hand at such matters. “Will I be guarding your horse?”
“Better: you’ll be an honor guard at the Louvre. But not a word, Galaor, even to your master.”
“Say no more, Monseigneur,” said the lad, smiling and placing a finger to his lips. He moved toward the door.
“Wait,” said the Comte de Moret. “I have further instructions.”
The page bowed.
“Get a horse ready to go, and put loaded pistols in both holsters.”
“Just one horse?”
“Yes, just one—you’ll ride behind me. A second horse would attract attention.”
“Just as Monseigneur orders.”
Ten o’clock sounded. The count listened, counting each bronze beat. “Ten o’clock,” he said. “Go, and have everything ready within a quarter of an hour.”
The page bowed and went out, proud of being in the confidence of the count.
As to the latter, he went to his wardrobe and dressed in the outfit of a cavalier, simple but elegant, with a red doublet and blue breeches, both of velvet. His fine cambric shirt was trimmed with magnificent Brussels lace, showing through his doublet’s slashed sleeves at cuffs and wrist. He drew on tall knee boots and donned a gray felt hat decorated with feathers that echoed the colors of his clothes, red and blue, pinned in place with a diamond brooch. Then he draped a rich baldric over his shoulder, and hung from it a red-hilted sword, a weapon both handsome and practical.
Finally, with that vanity natural to youth, he spent a few minutes on his appearance, making sure his naturally curly hair framed his face correctly, and that his fashionably long love-lock—which he wore because his mustache and goatee refused to grow as thick as he would have liked—fell properly to the left. He took a purse from a drawer to replace the one he’d left with Latil, and then, as if that reminded him, murmured, “But who the devil would want me killed?”
He reflected for a moment, but as he could think of no satisfactory answer to his question, with the insouciance of youth he set the matter aside. He patted himself to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, glanced once more at the mirror, then went down the stairs singing the last verse of the song he’d begun at the Inn of the Painted Beard.
“Song, go where I’m thinking of,
Into the chamber of my love,
There to kiss those fingers
That brought to me such healing.
Promise them all the feeling
That in my heart still lingers.”
At the street door, the count found the page waiting for him with a horse. He leaped into the saddle with the lightness and elegance of a consummate horseman. At his invitation, Galaor climbed up behind. After making sure the page was well seated, the count set his horse at a trot down Rue Maubué, took the Rue Troussevache to the Rue Saint-Honoré, and finally reached the Rue des Poulies.
At the corner of the Rue des Poulies and the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain, beneath a lamp-lit Madonna, a young lad sat on a borne. Seeing a cavalier with a page on his crupper, and thinking it was probably the gentleman he was waiting for, he rose and opened his cloak. Beneath it he wore a jacket of buff and blue: the livery of Madame la Princesse.
The count recognized the page as the one he was to meet. He set Galaor on the ground, dismounted, and approached the lad.
The page got down from his borne and waited respectfully.
“Casale,” the count said.
“Mantua,” the page replied.
The count gestured to Galaor to stay back, came near his guide, and said, “So I’m to follow you, my pretty lad?”
“Yes, Monsieur le Comte, if you would,” the page replied, in a voice so musical, the prince immediately suspected he was dealing with a woman.
“Well, then,” he said, abandoning the tone a man takes with a boy, “please be so kind as to show me the way.”
The count’s altered tone didn’t escape the notice of the person he addressed. The page gave him a sidelong glance, tried and failed to stifle a laugh, then gestured in the direction they were to go and marched on before him.
At the drawbridge, the page whispered a password to the sentry, and they crossed over to the gate of the Louvre. Passing into the courtyard, they headed for the northeast corner.
Arriving at the inner gate, the page removed his cloak, displaying his livery of buff and blue, and said, in as masculine a voice as possible, “Household of Madame la Princesse.”
But in doing so, the page’s face was exposed to the light from the gate lantern. The rays glanced from golden hair that fell to rounded shoulders, glinted from blue eyes full of mischief and merriment, and glowed on a mouth both full and fine, as ready to bite as to kiss. And the Comte de Moret recognized Marie de Rohan-Montbazon, Duchesse de Chevreuse.
He caught up with her at the turn of the stairs, saying, “Dear Marie, did my friend the duke send you to make me jealous of him?”
“No, my dear Count,” she said, “especially since he knows you’re making a fool of yourself over Madame de la Montagne.”
“Good answer,” laughed the prince. “I see that as well as the most beautiful, you’re still the wittiest creature in the world.”
“If the end result of my journey from Holland is to hear compliments from you, Monseigneur,” she said with a bow, “then the trip was worth it.”
“Indeed! But I thought you’d been exiled after that little intrigue in the garden at Amiens.”
“Oh, that! In recognition that I and Her Majesty were both quite innocent—and at the insistence of the queen—the cardinal has deigned to forgive me.”
“Unconditionally?”
“Well, I did have to take an oath to forego meddling in intrigue.”
“And how are you keeping that oath?”
“Scrupulously, as you see.”
“Does your conscience have nothing to say to you?”
“Why should it? I have a papal dispensation.”
The count laughed.
“And besides,” she continued, “is it intrigue to conduc
t a brother-in-law to meet his sister-in-law?”
“Dear Marie,” said the count, taking her hand and kissing it with the passion he had inherited from his royal father, as we already saw with his “cousin” at the Inn of the Painted Beard. “Dear Marie, will you surprise me by revealing that your room is on the way to the queen’s chamber?”
“Ah, you truly are the only genuine son of Henri IV! All the others are just . . . bastards.”
“Even my brother, Louis XIII?” laughed the count.
“Especially your brother, Louis XIII—whom God preserve! How can he have so little of your blood in his veins?”
“We don’t have the same mother, Duchess.”
“And maybe not the same father, either.”
“Ah, Marie!” the Comte de Moret cried. “You’re too adorable not to be kissed!”
“Are you crazy? Trying to kiss a page on the staircase? It will be the ruin of your reputation—especially for one who just came from Italy.”
“We can’t have that,” said the count. “And that’s it—there goes my mood.” He dropped the duchess’s hand.
“Well!” she said. “The queen sends one of her loveliest women to meet him at the Inn of the Painted Beard, and he complains!”
“My cousin Marina?”
“Your ‘cousin Marina,’ who else?”
“Ah! Ventre-saint-gris! Who was that little enchantress?”
“What! You don’t know?”
“No!”
“You don’t know Fargis?”
“Fargis, the wife of our ambassador to Spain?”
“Exactly. She was given a position near the queen after that affair in the Amiens garden got the rest of us exiled.”
“Well, well!” the Comte de Moret laughed. “I see the queen is well guarded, with the Duchesse de Chevreuse at the head of her bed and Madame de Fargis at the foot. My poor brother Louis! You must admit, Duchess, he has no luck at all.”
“You’re so delightfully impertinent, Monseigneur, that it’s a good thing we’ve arrived.”
“We’re there?”
The duchess took a key from her pouch and opened the door of a dark corridor. “Here is your path, Monseigneur,” she said.
“You’re not going to take me all the way?”
“No, you’re going by yourself.”
“Am I? Well, I swore an oath I’d do this. Now a trap door will open beneath my feet, and it’ll be good night to Antoine de Bourbon. Not that I have much to lose, since the women treat me so badly.”
“Ingrate. If you knew who waited for you at the other end of this corridor. . . .”
“What! Does another woman await me at the end of the passage?”
“Yes, the third one this evening. Any more complaints?”
“No, no complaints from me! Au revoir, Duchess.”
“Watch out for that trap door.”
“I’ll risk it.”
The duchess shut the door, and the count found himself in complete darkness.
He hesitated for a moment. He had no idea where he was. He considered turning back, but the sound of the key turning in the lock forestalled that idea.
Finally, after hesitating a few more seconds, he decided to press on. “Ventre-saint-gris!” he said. “After all, the lovely duchess says I’m the true son of Henri IV, and it’s no lie.”
Arms extended in the dark, he advanced slowly toward the far end of the corridor. In complete darkness, even the bravest man will hesitate.
He’d gone scarcely twenty paces when he heard the rustling of a dress and the intake of a breath.
He stopped. The rustling and breathing stopped as well.
He was trying to decide what to say to the source of this charming sound, when a soft and trembling voice asked, “Is that you, Monseigneur?”
The voice was no more than two steps away. “Yes,” said the count.
He stepped forward, and an outstretched hand found his own. But she instantly withdrew it, and he heard a faint cry, as melodious as a sylph’s sigh or the sound of a wind-brushed harp.
The count started at the sound. He felt a new and unknown sensation.
It was delicious.
“Where are you?” he murmured.
“H-here,” the voice stammered.
“I was told I would find a hand to guide me on my way. Are you . . . refusing it?”
The timid presence hesitated a moment, then said, “Here it is.”
The count took the hand between his own and tried to bring it to his lips, but stopped as the voice cried, in alarm and appeal, “Monseigneur!”
“Your pardon, Mademoiselle,” the count said, as respectfully as if speaking to the queen.
He lowered her hand, already halfway to his lips, and both fell silent. He yet kept her hand in his, and she didn’t try to remove it, standing as still as if she’d lost the power, or the will, to move.
Her hand, resting in his, was as still as she was. But that didn’t keep the count from realizing that it—that she—was small, fine, elegant, aristocratic, and, above all, virginal.
He stood, motionless and silent, holding her hand, entirely forgetting what had brought him there.
“Are you coming, Monseigneur?” the sweet voice asked.
“Where do you want me to go?” asked the count, somewhat at random.
“But . . . the queen is waiting for you. The queen.”
“Oh, yes! I’d forgotten.” He sighed. “Let’s go.”
He resumed his walk in the dark, a Theseus in a labyrinth simpler but darker than that of Crete, guided not by Ariadne’s thread, but by Ariadne herself.
After a few steps, his Ariadne turned to the right. “We’re here,” she said.
“Alas!” murmured the count.
And in fact they had stopped before a large glass door that looked into the queen’s antechamber.
Due to Her Majesty’s indisposition, all the lights were out except for one lamp hanging from the ceiling. Through the glass, the lamp glinted like starlight.
By this dim glow the count tried to see his guide, but could distinguish no more than her outlines.
The girl stopped. “Monseigneur,” she said, “now that there’s enough light to see by, please follow me.” And she removed her hand from his, despite his slight effort to retain it. She opened the door and entered the queen’s antechamber. The count followed her.
Both tiptoed quietly across the chamber to the door on the opposite side, which opened into the queen’s bedchamber. Suddenly they were stopped by an approaching sound: the noise of people coming up the grand staircase that led to the queen’s suite.
“Mon Dieu!” murmured the girl. “Is it the king, leaving the ballet to check on Her Majesty—to see if she’s really sick?”
“They’re coming this way,” said the prince.
“Wait here,” said the girl. “I’ll go see!”
She sprang to the staircase door, glanced through it, and dashed back to the count. “It’s him!” she cried. “Quick, into this closet!”
And, opening a door hidden behind a tapestry, she pushed the count through it and went in after him.
Just in time. As the closet door closed, the staircase door opened and, preceded by two pages carrying torches, and followed by his two favorites, Baradas and Saint-Simon, behind whom came his valet, Beringhen, in walked King Louis XIII. Signaling his entourage to wait, he went on into the queen’s chamber.
VIII
His Majesty King Louis XIII
We hope our readers will forgive us, but we believe it is time to present King Louis XIII to them, and to devote a chapter to his strange personality.
King Louis XIII was born Thursday, September 27, 1601, and was thus twenty-seven years and three months of age at the time of our story. A sad and drooping figure with a dark complexion and a black mustache, he didn’t exhibit a single trait that recalled Henri IV in either appearance or character. He was so cheerless, so prematurely old, that he didn’t even seem French. Spanish rumo
r held that he was the son of Virginio Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, a cousin of Marie de Médicis. Indeed, on her departure for France, Marie de Médicis, already twenty-seven, had received some advice from her uncle, the former Cardinal Ferdinand—the same Ferdinand who had poisoned his brother Francis and his sister-in-law Bianca Capello in order to ascend the throne of Tuscany.
Ferdinand’s advice: “My dear niece, you go to marry a king who divorced his first wife because she was childless. You will be one month on the journey, with three handsome lads in your company: Virginio Orsini, who is already your paramour; Paolo Orsini; and finally, Concino Concini. By the time you arrive in France, make sure you are in such a condition as to prevent repudiation.”
The Spanish asserted that Marie de Médicis had followed her uncle’s advice to the letter. The trip from Genoa to Marseilles alone had taken ten days. Henri IV, though not particularly eager to see his “fat banker,” as he called her, thought the journey strangely prolonged. The poet Malherbe sought a reason for this delay and, right or wrong, thought he’d found one: Neptune was so fond of the bride of the King of France that he was loath to give her up.
Ten days at sea spent on pleasure?
Such a thought would betray her.
The Sea-King, fond of such treasure,
Was just trying to delay her.
In Rubens’s painting of Queen Marie’s arrival, which hangs in the Louvre, her ship is surrounded by Neptune’s Nereids. Perhaps this mythic excuse for her delay wasn’t very credible—but Henri’s former wife, Queen Margot, had never found his excuses very credible either.
Nine months later, Grand Duke Ferdinand was reassured to hear of the birth of the Dauphin Louis, immediately dubbed “the Just” because he was born under the sign of Libra.
From childhood, Louis XIII displayed the melancholy that was the hallmark of the house of Orsini. From birth, he had the tastes of a decadent Italian. A passable composer and musician, and an adequate painter, he was always cut out to be more of an artisan than a king, despite his reverence for the idea of royalty. Never physically strong, and subjected as a child to the abominable medical practices of the time, as a young man he was so sickly that three or four times he was almost given up for dead.
The Red Sphinx Page 7