The Red Sphinx

by Alexandre Dumas

  “And is that everything, Monseigneur?”

  “Everything! When you go down, have the goodness to tell the taller of my porters that I need, within the quarter of an hour, another sedan chair like the first—only one that can be locked, and has curtains over the windows.”

  “I will relay Monseigneur’s orders.”

  On the side of his face away from the superior, the cardinal showed the jovial smile we saw the night he gave Souscarrières and Madame Cavois the patent for sedan chairs. It’s an expression we’ll see again, and more than once, as our story unfolds.

  “Now,” the cardinal said to the Dame de Coëtman, “I think you’re well enough to eat a chicken wing or two, and even drink half a glass of wine to the health of our good superior.”

  Three days later, the chronicler L’Estoile wrote the following in his journal, based on information received from the Convent of Repentant Daughters:

  On the night of December 13 to 14, in the little stone cell built in the courtyard of the Convent of Repentant Daughters, where she’d been confined for nine years since Parliament sentenced her to bread and water, died the Demoiselle Jacqueline Le Voyer, known as the Dame de Coëtman, wife of Isaac de Varenne, suspected of complicity with Ravaillac in the assassination of good King Henri IV. She was buried that same night in the convent’s cemetery.

  XXIV

  Maximilien de Béthune,

  Baron de Rosny, Duc de Sully

  The entire time the Dame de Coëtman was telling her story, the cardinal had listened with the utmost attention to her long and sorrowful tale. But though every word the poor victim spoke was a moral proof of the complicity of Concini, d’Épernon, and the queen mother in the assassination of Henri IV, no physical evidence—nothing visible, tangible, and irrefutable—had come out of it.

  But what was clear as day, more clear than crystal, was not only the innocence of the Dame de Coëtman, but her dedication to preventing the terrible regicide of May 14—a dedication that was paid for by nine years imprisoned in the Conciergerie and nine years in a tomb at the Repentant Daughters.

  And since the process verbal from Ravaillac’s trial was burned and lost, it remained essential for the cardinal to obtain, at all costs, that sheet of Ravaillac’s final revelations written when he was on the wheel.

  This, then, was the difficulty, one might even say the impossibility, that the cardinal faced; it seemed that after all his efforts, he was back where he’d started. But Richelieu had known from the first that the difficulties he faced were almost insurmountable.

  We believe we’ve said this sheet had been in the hands of Parliament’s court reporter, Messire Joly de Fleury. Unfortunately, Messire Joly de Fleury had died two years before, and it was only after his return from Chalais’s trial in Nantes that the cardinal had thought to begin collecting evidence against the queen mother—for it wasn’t until Chalais’s trial that he’d fully appreciated the extent of Marie de Médicis’s hatred for him.

  Messire Joly de Fleury was survived by a son and a daughter. The cardinal had summoned both of them to his office at his house in the Place Royale to interrogate them about the fate of this sheet, so important to him, and, indeed, to history. But Joly de Fleury’s children said the sheet was no longer in their hands.

  The cardinal had been told that eleven years before, in March 1617, a young man of fifteen or sixteen, dressed all in black and with a large hat pulled down over his eyes, had called on Messire Joly de Fleury, accompanied by another man ten or twelve years his senior. The Reporter of Parliament had received them in his office, where he’d spoken to them for nearly an hour. He’d then conducted them, with every mark of respect, out to the street, where a carriage—a rarity at the time—awaited the pair.

  At dinner that evening, the worthy solicitor had told his son and daughter, “My children, if anyone ever comes to you after my death to claim the sheet containing Ravaillac’s last confession on the wheel, say that it’s no longer in your possession—or, better yet, that it never existed.”

  So the cardinal had been told, five or six months before the start of our story, when he’d interviewed the son and daughter of Messire Joly de Fleury. They’d tried at first to deny even the existence of the sheet, but when pressed by the cardinal they’d consulted with each other for a moment, then decided to tell him everything.

  However, they were entirely ignorant of the identity of the two mysterious visitors who, it appeared, had come to demand that important piece of evidence from their father.

  It was only six months later that the seriousness of the threats against him had forced the cardinal to reopen his investigation.

  More than ever, as we’ve seen, this piece of evidence was essential to completing the case he was building to defend himself against Marie de Médicis. But more than ever, he despaired of finding it.

  However, as Father Joseph had said, Providence had already carried the cardinal this far, and surely he could hope it wouldn’t stop halfway to his goal.

  Meanwhile, as supporting evidence, he would go after the letter Madame de Coëtman had written to the king, sending it to Sully by way of Mademoiselle de Gournay—a letter which Sully might have kept.

  If so, it should be easy to obtain. The old minister, or rather the old friend of Henri IV, was still alive, dividing his time between his château in Villebon and his winter house on the Rue Saint-Antoine, between the Rue Royale and the Rue de l’Égout-Sainte-Catherine. It was said that, faithful to his lifelong habits, he was always in his office by five in the morning. The cardinal drew an exquisite watch from his pocket: it was four o’clock.

  At half past five exactly—after stopping at his house in the Place Royale to get a hat, and to leave word for his crony, Père Mulot de Lafollone, that he’d see him for lunch, and to his jester, Bois-Robert, that he needed to speak to him before noon—the cardinal knocked on the door of the Hotel Sully, which was opened by a Swiss Guard dressed in the uniform worn during the reign of Henri IV, the monarch people were already beginning to call le Grand Roi.

  Let’s take advantage of Richelieu’s visit to Sully, a minister too often lost in the shadow of the minister who followed him, to present to our readers one of the most interesting personalities of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a man whose character is often misunderstood—especially by historians who have been content to judge him by the face he presented to the public, without bothering to walk around and observe his other sides.

  Maximilien de Béthune, Duc de Sully, who was, at the time of our story, sixty-eight years old, had singular pretensions regarding his birth. Instead of simply accepting that his father and grandfather were descended from the Comtes de Béthune in Flanders, he had concocted a family tree showing that he was descended from a Scotsman named Bethun, which would make him a cousin of the Archbishop of Glasgow. He also tried to show he was related to the great House of Guise through the House of Coucy, which was connected to the Emperor of Austria and the King of Spain.

  Sully, who was called Monsieur de Rosny because his birthplace was the village of Rosny, near Mantes, was only moderately wellborn, despite his purported connections with the Archbishop of Glasgow and the houses of Austria and Spain. When Gabrielle d’Estrées, the king’s mistress, took offense at some rude remarks by Monsieur de Sancy, the Surintendant des Finances, she’d had Henri IV replace him with Sully, believing him her devoted servant. Henri IV was oblivious to pettiness and ingratitude in his mistresses—it was one of the great faults of this great king—and due to the selfish wheedling of Gabrielle, he’d forgotten that Monsieur de Sancy, in order to buy the loyalty of the Swiss, had personally pawned the great diamond that still bears his name and was part of the Crown Jewels. In carrying out these sacrifices for France, the poor Surintendant des Finances had so impoverished himself that, in order to provide funds for his successor, Henri IV was obliged to resort to an expedient called a stop-defense, which was basically a delaying tactic deployed against his creditors.
In fact, when confronted by the king’s creditors, the irreverent Sancy sometimes had himself arrested as a common debtor. When conveyed to the door of the prison, he would show the warders the order for his arrest, and then, bowing to the officers, release himself and go on his way.

  Sully was his successor. But the first time the upright Sully was called upon to prove his loyalty to his patron, it was in a matter that would have required him to be disloyal to his religion. When Henri IV, hoping to convert his children to legitimate heirs, spoke seriously of marrying Gabrielle, he found in Sully one of the fiercest opponents to the union.

  King Henri’s idea of marrying Gabrielle was more than just a lover’s fancy: he wanted to give France a French queen, something it had never had.

  Henri IV, politically astute and aware of his own weaknesses, didn’t pretend that the woman he married would have no influence on the destiny of the State. In the two hours per day that he devoted to the business of rule, he settled even the most difficult questions with the decisiveness of a military commander—but everyone knew that this forceful captain, who wanted to be regarded as an absolute ruler, had at home a wife or mistress who was also, in her bedroom, a ruler quite as absolute.

  With a king like that, who he married mattered a great deal.

  It wouldn’t matter that the Spanish had been beaten at Arques and Ivry if a queen, Spanish by birth or temperament, ruled the king’s bed, and from that bed stretched her hand over the realm.

  When Henri IV decided to remarry, he was virtually the only sovereign in Europe who’d borne a sword in battle. He was a conqueror on horseback, wearing the white plume of Ivry, the only man of his kind on the continent. But that sword, that French sword, was no threat if it was stolen from his bedside by a queen with foreign loyalties.

  This is what a great politician, a man of genius like Richelieu, would have understood—but which Sully did not.

  Sully, whose cold blue eyes and ruddy complexion, even at age sixty, might justify his claim to be of Scottish descent, was more feared than loved, even by Henri IV. As Duplessis-Mornay’s secretary Marbault testified, he brought fear with him wherever he went: fear of his deeds, fear of his decisions, fear even of his gaze.

  He was a soldier first and foremost, having been at war his entire life; as a minister he was active, energetic, and, rarest of all, an able financier. He exercised general command over all matters military, financial, and nautical—and personal command over his first love, the artillery.

  He’d come to command the artillery because Gabrielle, who’d wanted higher honors for her sadly mediocre father, had been foolish enough to allow Henri IV to offer the position of Grand-Master of the Artillery to Sully instead—and Sully was wise enough to seize that opportunity without feeling the least bit grateful to Gabrielle. The day Gabrielle decided to insult Sully by offering him his first important office as a throwaway was the day she ensured that she would never become Queen of France.

  Henri IV had attempted to legitimize his two sons by Gabrielle, granting them the title of prince and having them baptized as such. Afterwards Fresnes, Henri’s Secretary of State, had sent Sully the documents recording their baptism as official Children of France.

  But Sully had said “There are no Children of France,” and sent the documents back. And the king hadn’t dared to insist otherwise.

  It was Sully’s way of testing his master. Perhaps, if Henri IV had insisted, Sully might have given way. But in the event, it was King Henri who backed down. Sully then realized that the king didn’t love Gabrielle quite as much as he respected Sully.

  Gabrielle was beginning to age—and to sour. So Sully brought in, to oppose her, a rival who was still young, still beautiful, still seductive—in short, the complete package.

  Gabrielle, alas, was a package plundered, opened, and emptied.

  The new package came straight from the Grand Duke of Tuscany. He’d sent the king a portrait of his niece, a charming miniature of Marie de Médicis in her girlhood, radiating youth and freshness, in which her incipient obesity could be regarded as evidence of health.

  Gabrielle brushed it off. “It’s not her portrait I fear,” she said, “it’s her coffers of cash.”

  Indeed, Henri IV was in a position where he had to make a choice between love and money. And he had to decide quickly, before his love’s love of money poisoned his own love.

  In Paris at that time there was a man of Moorish race, an ex-cobbler from Lucca named Zamet who’d made a fortune in France and was now master of over 1.7 million crowns. Zamet had first found success as shoemaker to Henri III, employing his mastery of the tongue (to use a term from the cobbler’s trade) in making charming, feminine shoes for the royal foot. Henri III, flattered by this delightful footwear, had made Zamet Preceptor of the Inner Chambers and Director of the Royal Boys’ Choir—for this great king was a lover of music.

  That was the beginning of Zamet’s fortune. During the insurgency of the Catholic League, when everyone needed money, Zamet lent money to everyone: the Leaguers, the Spaniards, even the King of Navarre, who hadn’t even asked for it. Had Zamet foreseen the greatness of Henri of Navarre, as Croesus had of Caesar? It seems an apt comparison.

  Ultimately, Zamet was a tool of Grand Duke Ferdinand of the Empire. But Sully and Zamet understood each other. Sully was just waiting for his opportunity; if it came, and he seized it with a steady hand, he’d win.

  To Gabrielle, Sully was little more than a servant, as he himself said in his memoirs. One memorable day, Gabrielle had referred to Sully as a mere “valet”—and though Sully might actually be a servant, he certainly didn’t want to be called one. He complained about this remark to Henri IV, and the king told Gabrielle, “Better a ‘valet’ like Sully than ten mistresses like you.”

  Sully’s time had come. Duke Ferdinand was on the move and, though an ex-cardinal, had reached across the Alps to poison his brother Francis and his sister-in-law Bianca.

  Gabrielle was at Fontainebleau with the king. Easter was nigh. Her confessor demanded that she celebrate Easter in Paris. She had the fatal idea of staying at the home of Zamet the Moor—which sealed her fate.

  Sully, who had quarreled with her, nonetheless went to see her there. Why? Perhaps because he couldn’t believe she’d be so imprudent.

  The poor woman thought she was already the queen. She acted as if she was, and told Sully she would always be happy to receive the Duchesse de Sully at her levers and couchers, her morning and evening audiences.

  The duchess was furious at this impertinence. To appease her, Sully said, “Things are not as she believes, and soon you’ll see a game well played, so long as the ball keeps moving.”

  Obviously, he knew everything.

  What, you say? Sully knew Gabrielle would be poisoned?

  No doubt about it. Sully was a statesman, and was careful to leave Paris so the poisoners could operate freely, though he left word that he be kept informed.

  We say “poisoners” because there were two: the second was named Lavarenne, who died of shock because gossip named him, not a man, but a fish: poisson.

  Just as Zamet was an ex-cobbler, Lavarenne was an ex-cook. Ironically, Henri had recommended him to the kitchens of his sister Madame, where he’d earned a reputation as a judge of chickens. She encountered him one day, after he’d made his fortune, and said, “Well done, my dear Lavarenne: you’ve plucked more chickens than my brother has plucked chicks.”

  Droll; very droll indeed. But Madame’s anecdote highlights the ambitious nature of the former chicken chef.

  It was to Lavarenne that Sully had said, “Let me be the first to know if by some chance an accident should befall Gabrielle—that is, the Duchesse de Beaufort.”

  Lavarenne took the hint. Thus Sully was one of the first informed; Lavarenne wrote him that Gabrielle had suddenly fallen ill, with a strange malady that had so disfigured her features that he “feared that if King Henri IV came back to Paris, viewing her would repulse him, so he dared to
beg him to stay in Fontainebleau, especially since she was dead.”

  And he added to Sully, “And here I am, holding this poor dead woman in my arms, hardly able to believe that she won’t be alive in another hour or so.”

  Yes, the two were so certain of the quality of their poison that, while Gabrielle was still alive, one of them wrote to tell the other that she was dying and the king that she was dead. Very droll indeed.

  But she didn’t die as quickly as they thought she would. She lingered on, in agony, until Saturday morning. Lavarenne had sent his message to Sully on Friday evening, and it arrived before the night was over. Sully kissed his wife, who was in bed, and told her, “My dear, you will not have to attend the levers and couchers of the Duchesse de Beaufort after all. That cord has broken. Now that she’s dead, God grant our king a good life and a long one!”

  Sully himself spoke of the matter, in more or less these words, in his own memoirs.

  With Gabrielle dead, Sully had little trouble persuading Henri to settle on Marie de Médicis. But before Sully could proceed with that marriage, he had one more cord to break: that of Henriette d’Entragues.

  Of all our Kings of France, it was Henri IV who was most susceptible to amours. Gabrielle was barely dead before he fell hard for Henriette d’Entragues, the daughter of Marie Touchet. Before she would give up herself, she asked for a promise of marriage; before he would give up his daughter, her father demanded five hundred thousand francs.

  The king sent a proposed marriage contract to Sully, and ordered him to pay five hundred thousand francs to the father.

  Sully tore up the marriage contract, then had half a million silver francs poured into the antechamber outside Henri’s bedroom.

  Henri IV, on returning to his room, stepped knee-deep into a pile of coins and looked down into the faces of French kings. There were even some guilders, as some of the money had come from Tuscany.

  “Ouais!” he said. “What’s all this?”