The Red Sphinx

by Alexandre Dumas

  Cardinal Ferdinand died in his turn, and Charles-Emmanuel knew a moment of hope, but the third brother, Vincenzo Gonzaga, came and, uncontested, assumed the Mantuan regency.

  Charles-Emmanuel had patience. Riddled with infirmity, the new duke couldn’t last long. He fell ill, and the Duke of Savoy felt sure that this time Montferrat and Mantua would fall to him.

  But he didn’t see the storm that was forming against him on the other side of the mountains.

  There was in France a certain Louis de Gonzague, Duc de Nevers, the eldest of a cadet branch of the Gonzaga family. His son, Charles de Nevers, was the uncle of those last three sovereigns of Montferrat, so his grandson, the Duc de Rethel, was the cousin of Marie de Gonzague, the heir to Mantua and Montferrat.

  Now, the interest of Cardinal Richelieu—and the interest of Cardinal Richelieu was always that of France—was in having a zealous supporter of the fleurs de lys amid the powers of Lombardy, which were always ready to declare for Austria and Spain. The Marquis de Saint-Chamont, the French ambassador to Mantua, was sent his instructions, and he passed his master’s wishes on to Vincenzo Gonzaga. And Vincenzo Gonzaga, when dying, named Charles, the Duc de Nevers, as his heir.

  The Duc de Rethel took possession on behalf of his father, with the title of Vicar General, and Princess Marie was sent to France, where she was placed under the care of Catherine de Gonzague, Dowager Duchesse de Longueville. She was the widow of Henri I d’Orléans-Longueville, the daughter of Louis de Gonzague, and thus Marie’s aunt.

  One rival to Charles de Nevers was Caesar Gonzaga, the Duke of Guastalla, whose grandfather had been accused of having poisoned the dauphin, the elder brother of Henri II, and of murdering the infamous Pierre-Louis Farnese, Duke of Parma and son of Pope Paul III.

  The other rival, as we know, was the Duke of Savoy. The policies of France pushed him closer, moment by moment, to Spain and Austria. On his behalf the Austrians marched into Mantua with an army commanded by Spinola, while Don Gonzalès de Cordova undertook to wrest from the French Nice-de-la-Paille, Montcalvo, the Pont de Sture, and Casale.

  The Spaniards took everything except Casale, and within two months the Duke of Savoy found himself master of the valleys of the Po, Tanaro, and Belbo, and all the land in between. This all occurred while the French were occupied with the siege of La Rochelle.

  When it was able to do so, France sent a force to aid the Duc de Rethel, sixteen thousand men under the Marquis d’Uxelles. However, due to lack of experience, poor judgment, neglect, and very likely the betrayal of Créqui, they were repulsed by Charles-Emmanuel, much to the aggravation of the cardinal.

  But there remained, in the center of Piedmont, a town that continued to hold out under the flag of France: Casale, defended by a brave and loyal commander named the Chevalier de Gurron.

  Despite Richelieu’s many statements to the effect that France intended to support the rights of Charles de Nevers, the Duke of Savoy had high hopes that this would be a fight that Louis XIII would eventually give up, as he knew Nevers was hated by Queen Mother Marie de Médicis. In his youth, Nevers had refused to marry her on the grounds that the Médicis weren’t noble enough to be allied with the Gonzaga, who had been princes when the Médicis were still lowly gentry.

  Thus, the cardinal’s support of Nevers was another cause of the resentment that surrounded him, and of which we heard him complain bitterly to his niece.

  The queen mother hated Cardinal Richelieu for many reasons. The first and most bitter is that he was once her lover, and was her lover no more; she had started out obeying him in all things, and eventually came to oppose him in all things. Where Richelieu wanted to enhance the greatness of France at the expense of Austria, she desired the expansion of Austria and the humiliation of France. And if he wanted to support Charles de Nevers as Duke of Mantua, she, driven by her old grudge, must oppose it.

  Queen Anne of Austria hated Cardinal Richelieu because he’d frustrated her love affair with the Duke of Buckingham, exposed the scandalous episode of the gardens of Amiens, exiled her accomplice Madame de Chevreuse, and balked the English to the benefit of France. Worse, she harbored the ugly suspicion, never stated aloud, that the cardinal had somehow induced Felton to bury his knife in Buckingham’s chest. And finally, she hated him because he monitored her closely to prevent the advance of any new lovers, and she knew that nothing she did, no matter how hidden, escaped his knowledge.

  The Duc d’Orléans hated Cardinal Richelieu because he knew the cardinal recognized his true nature: ambitious, cowardly, and vicious. Gaston eagerly anticipated his brother King Louis’s death, and was even willing to hasten the event. He’d been denied entry to the King’s Council, his mentor Ornano had been imprisoned, and his friend and accomplice Chalais beheaded for conspiring to kill the king—while Monsieur’s reward for the same crime had been to be dishonored, though enriched. Furthermore, though he loved no one but himself, he hoped, upon his brother’s death, to marry his queen, although she was seven years his elder—most especially if she was pregnant.

  Finally, the king himself hated the cardinal because he felt that Richelieu embodied genius, patriotism, and a genuine love of France, while he reeked of selfishness, indifference, and mediocrity; because he felt he would never really rule while the cardinal lived, and rule only badly if the cardinal died. But one thing always drew him back to the cardinal, though it, too, was a source of resentment. Was it a potion he’d drunk, some magic talisman he wore around his neck, an enchanted ring that had been placed on his finger? No: the magic charm was an ever-full chest of gold, one that was always open for the king. Concini had kept him in misery, Marie de Médicis in poverty; Louis XIII had never had any money until this wizard had touched his wand to the ground, and under the wondering eyes of the king, the golden River of Pactolus sprang forth. Richelieu was careful to ensure that the king always had money to spend, even when he himself had none.

  Now, in the hope that everything on the chessboard is as clear to our readers as it was to Richelieu, we will resume our story where we left off.

  XVI

  Marie de Gonzague

  Eight days have passed since the events last told of. To resume our story where we left off, we ask our readers to be so good as to follow us to the Hotel de Longueville, which, backed up against that of the Marquise de Rambouillet, shared with it the block between Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre and the Hospital of the Three Hundred. But the Hotel de Longueville was entered from Rue Saint-Niçaise, opposite the Tuileries, while the marquise’s mansion, as we’ve said, faced Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre.

  This mansion had belonged to Prince Henri de Condé—the same who’d mistaken Chapelain for a sculptor—and formerly had been occupied by himself and Madame la Princesse, his wife, whom we met at Madame de Rambouillet’s soirée. He abandoned it in 1612, two years after his marriage to Mademoiselle de Montmorency, when he bought the great hotel in Rue Neuve-Saint-Lambert and caused the street to be rebaptized as the Rue de Condé, the name it bears to this day. At the time of our story—that is to say, on December 13, 1628 (events are so critical at this point that it’s wise to be specific about dates)—this former mansion of the Prince de Condé was occupied by the Dowager Duchesse de Longueville and her ward, Her Highness Princess Marie, daughter of François de Gonzague (whose estate was causing such tumult not only in Italy but in Austria and Spain) and Margaret of Savoy, the daughter of Charles-Emmanuel.

  Marie de Gonzague, born in 1612, had then attained her sixteenth year. All historians of the time agree that she was ravishingly beautiful, and from contemporary chroniclers, whose statements are more trustworthy, we learn that her beauty was the pinnacle of those perfectly shaped, dark-complexioned women born in Mantua—who, like the women of Arles, blossoming in the mists of the surrounding marshes, are blessed with black hair, blue eyes, pearly teeth, eyebrows and eyelashes like velvet, and lips that didn’t even need to speak to offer sweet promises.

  As fiancée of the Duc de Rethel, s
on of Charles de Nevers, who was heir to Duke Vincenzo, it goes without saying that her role would be important in the events to follow. Marie de Gonzague, whose beauty was sufficient, like the pole star, to draw the gaze of all the young cavaliers of the Court, caught the attention as well of those men of any age whose interest or ambition was in politics.

  It was known that she was under the particular protection of Cardinal Richelieu—which was just one more reason for those who wanted to pay their respects to the cardinal to pay assiduous court to Marie de Gonzague.

  It is evidently thanks to the sponsorship of the cardinal—of which the presence of Madame de Combalet is proof—that we see, arriving at the doors of the Hotel de Longueville about seven in the evening, several of the new sedan chairs, the monopoly of which is shared between Souscarrières and Madame de Cavois, and which are suddenly the favored transport of everyone of importance. The passengers are admitted into the front salon, which is hung with tapestries, below a ceiling painted with scenes representing the life of the bastard Dunois, founder of the house of Longueville. Candelabra flicker from mantels and sconces, and an immense chandelier is suspended in the center of the room, beneath which stands Princess Marie.

  One of the first to arrive was Monsieur le Prince.

  As Monsieur le Prince has a certain part to play in our story, and a major role in the time both before and after it, a part both shady and sad, we ask permission to acquaint the reader with that dubious offspring of the royal house of Condé.

  While the first Condés were brave and jovial, this one was somber and aloof. He’d been heard to say “I may be a coward, but I’m not as bad as my cousin Vendôme”—as if that was some consolation, assuming he needed any.

  How to explain this difference from his forefathers?

  The first Prince de Condé, though he was small and a little hunchbacked, was every woman’s darling. Of him it was sung:

  The little prince so fair,

  That laughing, singing lad,

  With lovers everywhere,

  God guard him, though he’s bad.

  Upon his death, slain at Jarnac by Montesquiou, this charming little Prince de Condé left a son who, along with the young Henri of Navarre, became one of the leaders of the Protestant party.

  That man, Henri de Condé the first, was a worthy son of his father, leading a charge at the Battle of Jarnac at the head of five hundred gentlemen, despite having one arm in a sling and a broken leg with its bone jutting from his boot. When, on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, Charles IX demanded, “Death or the mass,” it was Condé who replied death, while Henri of Navarre, more prudent, replied the mass.

  He was the last great Condé of the early race of that name. However, he didn’t die on the battlefield, gloriously covered with wounds and slain by another Montesquiou—he died from being poisoned by his wife.

  After an absence of five months, he returned to his Château des Andelys to find his wife, a daughter of the house of La Trémouille, pregnant courtesy of a Gascon page. At the dinner celebrating his return, she served her husband a peach for dessert.

  Two hours later, he was dead. The page fled to Spain that same evening.

  There was a public outcry, and the poisoner was arrested. Her son of adultery was born in prison, where his mother languished, no one daring to bring her to trial, as she was sure to be found guilty. After eight years, King Henri IV, who didn’t want to see the end of the Condés, that lovely branch of the Bourbon tree, ordered her released from jail without trial. The widow was absolved by royal clemency, though convicted in the eye of the public.

  Her son was the second Henri, Prince de Condé, the one who mistook Chapelain for a sculptor, and we can relate in just a few words how he came to marry Mademoiselle de Montmorency. It’s a curious story that deserves its own parenthesis, despite the risk of making this digression overlong. But there’s no harm in learning about history from a novelist, especially those details that historians find unworthy to relate, assuming they even know them.

  In 1609, Queen Marie de Médicis put on a court ballet. During rehearsals, King Henri IV sulked because, though the ballet had all the prettiest women of the Court for its dancers, the queen had refused to admit Henri’s mistress Jacqueline de Beuil, mother of the Comte de Moret. And since all the dancers on their way to the rehearsal hall in the Louvre were obliged to pass the door of Henri IV, the king, to show his displeasure, had shut that door.

  One day, he left it ajar—and through the gap beheld Mademoiselle Charlotte de Montmorency.

  “There was nothing under heaven,” said Bassompierre in his memoirs, “more beautiful than Mademoiselle de Montmorency, nothing more graceful or perfect.”

  She was a vision so radiant that the king’s bad mood immediately took wing and fluttered off like a butterfly. He rose from his chair and followed her, drawn like Aeneas following cloud-wrapped Venus.

  On that day, for the first time, he attended the ballet.

  There was one scene in which the ladies dressed as nymphs—and scanty as the costume of a nymph is today, it was scantier in the seventeenth century—and there was a point at which all the nymphs raised their spears, as if to strike at once. At this moment, Mademoiselle de Montmorency turned with hers and almost ran the king through. The king, not anticipating any danger, wasn’t wearing a cuirass, and could easily have been stabbed to the heart. Which, he later said, is exactly what happened when he saw the beautiful Charlotte’s graceful thrust.

  Madame de Rambouillet and Mademoiselle Paulet were both at the ballet that day, and immediately befriended Mademoiselle de Montmorency, though they were five or six years older than her.

  From that day on, good King Henri IV completely forgot Jacqueline de Beuil. (He was forgetful that way, as we know.) Thereafter, his only thought was to find a way to possess Mademoiselle de Montmorency. His plan was to find the beautiful Charlotte a complaisant husband who, for a dowry of four or five hundred thousand francs, would look the other way when the king sought to take advantage of his wife’s proximity.

  He’d done the same thing for the Comtesse de Moret when he’d found her a husband in Monsieur de Césy, whom he’d sent overseas as an ambassador on the night of her wedding.

  The king thought he had just the man close at hand. Because if a son of murder and adultery married the daughter of a Constable of France, with the king as his patron, the stain on his birth would disappear.

  The man was open to such a negotiation, and all his conditions were agreed to. The constable gave his daughter a dowry of a hundred thousand crowns, King Henri added a half million more, and Henri II de Condé, who the day before had an income of ten thousand, found himself on the morning of his wedding with fifty thousand a year.

  Of course, that evening he would have to depart.

  Only he didn’t.

  However, he did stick to his agreement insofar as to spend his wedding night in a room separate from that of his wife. Meanwhile Henri IV, the eager fifty-year-old lover, obtained Charlotte’s promise that, to prove she was alone and mistress of herself, she would appear on her balcony between two torches with her hair down on her shoulders.

  When he saw her there, the king nearly died from joy.

  It would take too long to follow Henri IV through all the turns of his final amour, his mad fury when Condé fled with his wife to the Netherlands, his royal mania cut short by the knife of Ravaillac while he was on his way to visit the lovely Mademoiselle Paulet, for what consolation the charming Lioness could provide.

  After the king’s death, Monsieur de Condé returned to France with his wife, who was still technically Mademoiselle de Montmorency, as the marriage wasn’t consummated until during the three years they spent together in the Bastille. It’s probable that, given Monsieur de Condé’s preference for the schoolboys of Bourges, without those three years in the Bastille neither the Grand Condé nor Madame de Longueville would ever have been born.

  Monsieur le Prince was best known for his greed and p
arsimony. When going to visit his attorneys, he rode through the streets of Paris on an everyday hackney, accompanied by a single valet. La Martelière, a famous lawyer of the time, had, like doctors, those days when he would consult with clients for free. Condé visited him on those days.

  Though always badly clothed, on the evening of which we speak he had dressed more carefully than usual, perhaps because he knew his brother-in-law, the Duc de Montmorency, would be paying his respects to Princess Marie, and the duke had said that, should he encounter Condé dressed in a manner unworthy of a prince of the blood, he would pretend not to know him.

  Indeed, Henri II, Duc de Montmorency, was the complete opposite of Henri II, Prince de Condé. He was the brother of the beautiful Charlotte, and was as elegant as Monsieur de Condé was coarse, as generous as Monsieur de Condé was stingy. One day, upon hearing that a certain gentleman’s fortune would be made if he could find twenty thousand crowns to borrow for two years, he said, “Seek no further: they are found.” Taking a piece of paper, he wrote on it, Good for twenty thousand crowns. “Bring this to my steward tomorrow,” he said to the gentleman, “and may you prosper.”

  And indeed, two years later the gentleman offered to return Monsieur de Montmorency his twenty thousand crowns. “Go, go, Monsieur,” the duke said. “It’s enough that you offer them to me; keep them with my good wishes.”

  He was deeply in love with the queen, as was Roger de Bellegarde, whose throat he almost cut over it. The queen flirted with both, and though Monsieur de Montmorency had thirty years while Monsieur de Bellegarde had sixty, she couldn’t decide between them—until Buckingham came to Court and settled the matter. The older gentleman made so much noise about the affair that the younger duke coined a couplet that was soon heard in all the alcoves:

  Roger’s star shines

  No more at the Louvre;

  Everyone finds

  He’s had to move.