Between Two Kings

by Lawrence Ellsworth

  “Enough, Monsieur!” said Louis XIV, rising. “To refuse me a million is your prerogative; those millions are yours to manage. To refuse me two hundred gentlemen is likewise your right, for you are prime minister, and you have, in the eyes of France, the responsibility for peace and war. But to presume to prevent me, the king, from granting hospitality to the grandson of Henri IV, to my cousin, my childhood companion! That’s where your power ends and my will begins.”

  “Sire,” said Mazarin, delighted to get off so cheaply, the more so because that’s why he’d fought so hard in the first place, “I will always bow before the will of my king. My king can keep the King of England near at hand or in one of his châteaux; you can inform Monsieur Mazarin of it, just don’t tell the prime minister.”

  “Good night, Monsieur,” said Louis XIV. “I leave in despair.”

  “But convinced, which is all that I need, Sire,” replied Mazarin.

  The king made no response, but withdrew thoughtfully, convinced, not of all that Mazarin had told him, but on the contrary of something he was careful not to mention, which was of the necessity to make a serious study of his place in the affairs of Europe, because those matters seemed complex and obscure to him.

  Louis found the King of England sitting in the same chair where he’d left him. On seeing him, the English prince rose, but saw at first glance the discouraging expression on his cousin’s face. He spoke first, to help Louis in the painful confession he had to make. “No matter what,” he said, “I will never forget the kindness and friendship you’ve shown me.”

  “Hélas,” replied Louis XIV mournfully. “Only empty friendship, Brother.”

  Charles II went very pale, drew a cold hand across his forehead, and was staggered by momentary dizziness. “I understand,” he said at last. “No hope!”

  Louis took Charles II by the hand. “Wait, Brother,” he said, “don’t do anything rash, all might change. It’s only reckless acts that ruin a cause. I beg of you, add just one more year’s trial to your time of suffering. There’s no more reason to take drastic action now than at any other time, neither occasion nor opportunity. Stay near me, Brother, I’ll give you one of my houses for a residence, and together we’ll keep an eye on events and prepare for what may come; Brother, take courage!”

  Charles II withdrew his hand from the king’s and stood tall before him. “With all my heart, I thank you, Sire,” he said. “But I have pleaded for aid from the greatest king in the world without result, and now I must seek a miracle from God.”

  And he went out before Louis could say anything more, his head high but hands shaking, with an expression of weary sadness on his face, and a distant gaze that, finding nothing to rest upon in the world of men, seemed to look beyond into unknown lands.

  The officer of the musketeers, seeing him pass like a phantom, bowed nearly to the ground before him. He then took a torch, called two of his troopers, and went down the deserted stairs with the unhappy king, holding in his left hand his hat, its plume brushing the steps.

  At the gate, the officer asked the king which direction he was going so he could send the musketeers as escort. “Monsieur, you who once knew my father,” replied Charles II quietly, “did you ever pray for him, perchance? If so, remember me in your prayers now. Where I go I travel alone, and I beg you to give me neither company nor escort any further.”

  The officer bowed and sent his musketeers back inside. But he remained for a moment under the portico to watch Charles II walk away until he disappeared into the shadows of the street. “To him, as before to his father,” he murmured, “as Athos would say, and with good reason: ‘Hail to His Fallen Majesty!’ ”

  Then, climbing the stairs, “How wretched his service is!” he murmured at every step. “What a pitiful master I serve! To go on with this life is intolerable. It’s time I acted for myself! No more giving my all for nothing!” he continued. “The master may yet rise and achieve, but the servant is done. Mordioux! I’ll put it off no longer. Come, you two,” he said, entering the antechamber. “Why are you waiting around here? Put out your torches and return to your posts. Oh, you were watching out for me? Keeping an eye on me, my men? You geese! I’m no Duc de Guise, and they won’t assassinate me in the narrow hall. Besides,” he added to himself, “someone would have to decide to do that, and no one makes decisions since Cardinal Richelieu died. Ah, now there was a man, back in the day! No, it’s decided: tomorrow I hang up my hat for good!”

  Then, after a thought, he said, “No, not yet! I have one last great challenge before me, but this one, I swear, will be the last, mordioux!”

  He had scarcely finished when a voice came from the king’s chamber. “Monsieur le Lieutenant!” it called.

  “I’m here,” he replied.

  “The king would like to speak to you.”

  “Come now,” said the lieutenant. “Perhaps this is the challenge I was thinking of.” And he went in to see the king.

  XII The King and the Lieutenant

  When the king saw the officer come in, he dismissed his valet and his attending gentleman. “Who is on duty tomorrow, Monsieur?” he asked.

  The lieutenant bowed with military precision and replied, “I am, Sire.”

  “What, you again?”

  “Always me.”

  “How can that be, Monsieur?”

  “Sire, the musketeers, when traveling, assume all the duties of guarding Your Majesty’s household, that is to say, yourself, the queen mother, and Monsieur le Cardinal, who borrows from the king the best part of the royal guard, or at least the most numerous.”

  “But in between watches?”

  “There is no in-between, Sire, just twenty or thirty men of your hundred and twenty who are off duty to rest. At the Louvre it’s different, and if we were at the Louvre, I’d rely on my adjutant; but when traveling, Sire, anything can happen, and I prefer to manage things myself.”

  “So, you’re on duty every day?”

  “And every night, yes, Sire.”

  “Monsieur, we can’t have that. You must find time to rest.”

  “Perhaps, Sire, but I’d rather not.”

  “You’d… rather not?” said the king, nonplused by this unusual response.

  “I’m saying, Sire, that I’d rather not expose myself to being at fault. If the devil wanted to play a trick on me, Sire, you’ll understand that since he knows the man he’s dealing with, he’d do it at a moment when I was absent. My duty, and the peace of my conscience, comes before all.”

  “But that way of life, Monsieur—it will kill you.”

  “Oh, Sire! I’ve followed this way of life for thirty-five years and I’m the healthiest man in France and Navarre. Besides, Sire, don’t worry about me, I beg you; it’s unexpected and I’m not used to it.”

  The king cut short the conversation with a new question. “Then, you’ll be here tomorrow morning?” he asked.

  “Like now, like always, yes, Sire.”

  The king paced back and forth across the room. It was easy to see that he was burning with the need to speak, but some fear restrained him. The lieutenant, erect, immobile, his hat in his hand, his fist on his hip, watched this activity, while grumbling into his mustache, “He hasn’t got a half-pistole’s worth of resolution in him, upon my honor! I’d wager he won’t speak on his own.”

  The king continued to pace, occasionally glancing toward the lieutenant.

  “He’s the spit and image of his father,” the officer told himself. “He’s simultaneously proud, ambitious, and timid. Plague take such a master!”

  Louis stopped. “Lieutenant?” he said.

  “Right here, Sire.”

  “This evening, down in the hall, why did you cry out, ‘The king’s service, His Majesty’s Musketeers?’ ”

  “I was obeying your orders, Sire.”

  “Me?”

  “Yourself.”

  “But I didn’t say a word, Monsieur.”

  “Sire, an order may be given by a sig
n, by a gesture, or by a look, as clearly as by speech. A servant who had only ears would be but half a servant.”

  “Your eyes are pretty sharp, then, Monsieur.”

  “Why do you say that, Sire?”

  “Because they see what isn’t there.”

  “My eyes are indeed sharp, Sire, though they’ve served their master a long time. But when there’s something to be seen, they rarely miss the opportunity. Tonight they saw Your Majesty blushing with the effort not to yawn; that Your Majesty looked with eloquent supplication first at His Eminence, and then at Her Majesty the queen mother, and finally at the door that led out of the hall; and they saw all that so well, they practically read the words on Your Majesty’s lips that said, ‘Who will get me out of here?’ ”

  “Monsieur!”

  “Or words to that effect, Sire. Thus, I didn’t hesitate; that look was for me, and as good as an order, so I cried, ‘His Majesty’s Musketeers!’ And I was right, Sire, as Your Majesty proved on the spot.”

  The king turned away to conceal a smile, and then, after a few seconds, turned his gaze back on that countenance so intelligent, so bold and firm, that it looked like the dynamic and proud profile of an eagle facing the sun.51 “Well done,” he said after a short silence, during which he tried, and failed, to stare his officer into dropping his gaze.

  But seeing him say nothing more, the officer turned on his heels and took three steps toward the door, murmuring, “He won’t speak, mordioux! He won’t speak.”

  “Thank you, Monsieur,” the king said then.

  “Really, that was the only thing missing,” continued the lieutenant to himself, “to be thanked for doing my duty as if I might have failed to do it.” And he marched to the door in a military jingle of spurs.

  But when he arrived on the threshold, he sensed the king’s desire calling him back and he turned. “Has Your Majesty told me everything?”

  He asked this in a tone impossible to describe, but which, without seeming to actually solicit a confidence, was so persuasively frank that the king replied at once, “Approach me, Monsieur.”

  “Here, now!” murmured the officer. “It’s coming at last.”

  “Listen to me.”

  “Every word, Sire.”

  “You’ll mount your horse tomorrow at four in the morning, Monsieur, and you’ll have one saddled for me.”

  “From Your Majesty’s stable?”

  “No, from the musketeers.”

  “Very good, Sire. Is that all?”

  “Then you will accompany me.”

  “Alone?”

  “Alone.”

  “Will I come to get Your Majesty, or shall I await him?”

  “You’ll await me.”

  “Where shall I do that, Sire?”

  “At the park’s back gate.”

  The lieutenant bowed, understanding that the king had said all that he would at that time.

  In fact, the king then dismissed him with a friendly gesture. The officer left the king’s chamber and returned philosophically to his armchair, where, instead of falling asleep, as one might expect at such an advanced hour of the night, he began to think more deeply than he ever had.

  The result of these reflections was less sad than previously. “Come, he’s started at last,” he said. “Love drives him, and he moves, he moves! This king is nothing in his Court, but he may amount to something as a man. Anyway, we’ll see come morning… But, oh!” he said suddenly, sitting up very straight. “Now there’s an idea, a gigantic idea, mordioux! And maybe that idea will make my fortune!”

  With this exclamation, the officer rose and paced the broad antechamber, hands in the pockets of his coat. The candle guttered furiously in the path of a cool breeze that entered through the slightly opened window and crossed the room diagonally, projecting a reddish flickering glow, sometimes bright, sometimes diminished, and casting on the wall a great shadow of the lieutenant, drawn in silhouette like a figure from Callot,52 with the plumed felt hat and the sword at his belt.

  “Of course,” he murmured, “unless I’m very much mistaken, Mazarin is laying a trap for the young lover; Mazarin set up a time and place for a rendezvous this evening as smoothly as if he were Monsieur Dangeau himself. I heard it all clearly enough: ‘Tomorrow morning,’ he said, ‘they’ll be passing the bridge from Blois.’ God’s death! That’s clear enough—especially to a lover! And that explains his embarrassment, his hesitation, and this order: ‘Monsieur my Lieutenant of Musketeers, a horse tomorrow, at four in the morning.’ Which is as clear as if he’d said, ‘Monsieur my Lieutenant of Musketeers, tomorrow at four in the morning, on the bridge from Blois, do you hear?’

  “And thus, I’m in possession of a state secret, insignificant though I am. And how did I get it? Because I have sharp eyes, as I just told His Majesty. They say he loves this little Italian doll to distraction! They even say he cast himself at his mother’s feet for permission to marry her. Moreover, they say the queen consulted the Holy See of Rome to find out if such a marriage, made against her will, would be valid. Oh, to be twenty-five again! If only those I once had by my side were with me once more! I’d pit Mazarin against the queen mother, France against Spain, and set up a new queen all on my own! But now? Bah!”

  And the lieutenant snapped his fingers in disdain. “This miserable Italian, this coward, this peasant who dared refuse a million in gold to the King of England, how quickly would he give me a thousand pistoles if I brought him this news? No, mordioux! I’m being childish. I must be drunk! Him, Mazarin, give something to someone? Ha ha ha!”

  With an effort, the officer swallowed his laughter. “To sleep,” he said. “To sleep, and without delay. This night’s work has dulled my edge, and I’ll see things more clearly on the morrow.”

  And having made himself this recommendation, he wrapped himself in his cloak, and sniffed in disdain at his royal neighbor. Five minutes later, he was sleeping with his hands clenched and his lips slightly apart, from which escaped, not his state secret, but a sonorous snore that echoed from the vault of the majestic antechamber.

  XIII Marie de Mancini

  The first rays of the sun were barely topping the great trees of the park and gilding the high wind-vanes of the château when the young king, already awake for over two hours, burning with the insomnia of love, opened his shutters to the dawn, and cast a curious glance across the courtyards of the sleeping palace.

  He saw that it was the appointed hour; the big clock above the courtyard showed a quarter past four. He didn’t call his valet de chambre, still deeply asleep on the other side of the room, but dressed himself. The sound awoke the valet, who awakened quite frightened, afraid he’d overslept and missed his duty, but Louis sent him back to bed, warning him to remain silent. Then he went down the staircase to the courtyard, passed out through a side gate, and saw along the wall of the park a rider who was holding a spare horse by the bridle.

  This rider was unrecognizable under his cloak and broad hat. As to the horse, saddled like that of a wealthy bourgeois, it showed nothing remarkable to even the most inquisitive eye. Louis went and took the horse’s bridle; without leaving his saddle, the officer bent down and held the king’s stirrup as he mounted, then asked in a low voice for orders from His Majesty. “Follow me,” replied Louis XIV.

  The officer put his horse into a trot behind that of his master, and they rode down toward the bridge. When they were on the other side of the Loire, the king said, “Monsieur, be so good as to ride on until you see a carriage, and then return to warn me; I’ll wait here.”

  “Would Your Majesty deign to give me some details, so I’ll recognize the right carriage when I see it?”

  “The carriage will bear two ladies and will probably be followed by servants.”

  “Sire, I don’t wish to make a mistake; is there some other sign by which I’d recognize this carriage?”

  “It will probably display the arms of Monsieur le Cardinal.”

  “Very good, Sire,�
�� replied the officer, now completely clear on the object of his quest. He spurred his horse into a trot in the direction indicated by the king. But he’d gone scarcely five hundred paces before he saw a carriage drawn by four matched mules coming over the crest of a rise. Behind that carriage came another. At a glance he knew that these were the vehicles he was looking for. He turned on the spot, rode back to the king, and said, “Sire, here come the carriages. The first, in fact, contains two ladies and their maids, while the second carries footmen, supplies, and luggage.”

  “Ah, very good,” replied the king in a voice full of emotion. “Go, please, and tell these ladies that a cavalier of the Court wishes to pay them his private respects.”

  The officer went off at a gallop. “God’s death!” he said as he rode. “Here’s a new and honorable position! I complained of being insignificant, and now I’m the confidant of the king. It’s enough to make a musketeer burst with pride!”

  He approached the carriage and delivered his message with wit and gallantry. There were indeed two ladies in the coach, one a great beauty, though perhaps over-slender, and a second, less favored by nature but lively and graceful, her face alight with willful intelligence. Her keen and piercing eyes, in particular, spoke more eloquently than all the amorous phrases current in that time of gallantry. The officer addressed himself to this second lady without hesitation, though as we’ve said, the first was perhaps more beautiful. “Mesdames,” he said, “I’m the Lieutenant of the Musketeers, here to announce that a cavalier who wishes to pay you his respects awaits you on the road just ahead.”

  At these words, whose effects he awaited with curiosity, the dark-eyed lady gave a gasp of joy, leaned out the door, and, seeing the rider approaching, extended her arms, calling, “Ah! My dear Sire!” And her eyes brimmed with tears.

  The coachman abruptly reined in the mules, the maids tumbled to the carriage floor, and the prettier lady bowed humbly, while her mouth curved in the most ironic smile ever sketched on feminine lips by jealousy.