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Ten Years Later

by Alexandre Dumas · English · Gutenberg #1258 · 1,544,996 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Ten Years Later

Author: Alexandre Dumas


        
Release date: March 1, 1998 [eBook #1258]
                Most recently updated: April 24, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1258

Credits: An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TEN YEARS LATER ***

Ten Years Later

by Alexandre Dumas, Père




THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EDITOR’S NOTE TO THE PG D’ARTAGNAN SERIES


LINKED INDEX OF PROJECT GUTENBERG VOLUMES:

ORDER   TITLE                       PG EBOOK#    DATES       VOLUME    CHAPTERS
1       The Three Musketeers        1257         1625–1628    1
2       Twenty Years After          1259         1648–1649    2
3       The Vicomte de Bragelonne   2609         1660         3         1–75
4       Ten Years Later             2681         1660–1661    3         76–140
5       Louise de la Vallière       2710         1661         3         141–208
6       The Man in the Iron Mask    2759         1661–1673    3         209–269

[Project Gutenberg eBook 1258 listed below, is of the same title as
eBook 2681 and its contents overlap those of two other volumes: it
includes all the chapters of eBook 2609 and the first 28 chapters of
2681]

        TITLE                       PG EBOOK#    DATES       VOLUME    CHAPTERS
        Ten Years Later             1258         1660–1661   3         1–104




PROJECT GUTENBERG TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

The Vicomte de Bragelonne is the final volume of D’Artagnan Romances:
it is usually split into three or four parts, and the final portion is
entitled The Man in the Iron Mask. The Man in the Iron Mask we’re
familiar with today is the last volume of the four-volume edition. [Not
all the editions split them in the same manner, hence some of the
confusion. . .but wait. . .there’s yet more reason for confusion.]

One thing that may be causing confusion is that the etext entitled Ten
Years Later, says it’s the sequel to The Three Musketeers. While this
is technically true, there’s another book, Twenty Years After, that
comes between. The confusion is generated by the two facts that many
people see those titles as meaning Ten and Twenty Years “After” the
original story . . . however, this is why the different words “After”
and “Later” . . . the Ten Years “After” is ten years after the Twenty
Years later. . . as per history. Also, the third book of the D’Artagnan
Romances, while entitled The Vicomte de Bragelonne, has the subtitle
Ten Years Later. These two titles are also given to different volumes:
The Vicomte de Bragelonne can refer to the whole book, or the first
volume of the three or four-volume editions. Ten Years Later can,
similarly, refer to the whole book, or the second volume of the
four-volume edition. Here is a guide to the series which may prove
helpful:

The Three Musketeers: Etext 1257 - First book of the D’Artagnan
Romances. Covers the years 1625-1628.

Twenty Years After: Etext 1259 - Second book of the D’Artagnan
Romances. Covers the years 1648-1649.

Ten Years Later: Etext 1258 - First 104 chapters of the third book of
the D’Artagnan Romances. Covers the years 1660-1661.

The Vicomte de Bragelonne: Etext 2609 (first in the new series) - First
75 chapters of the third book of the D’Artagnan Romances. Covers the
year 1660.

Ten Years Later: Etext 2681 Chapters 76-140 of that third book of the
D’Artagnan Romances. Covers the years 1660-1661.

Louise de la Vallière: Chapters 141-208 of the third book of the
D’Artagnan Romances. Covers the year 1661.

The Man in the Iron Mask: Chapters 209-269 of the third book of the
D’Artagnan Romances. Covers the years 1661-1673.

Many thanks to Dr. David Coward, whose editions of the D’Artagnan
Romances have proved an invaluable source of information.




Introduction:


In the months of March-July in 1844, in the magazine Le Siecle, the
first portion of a story appeared, penned by the celebrated playwright
Alexandre Dumas. It was based, he claimed, on some manuscripts he had
found a year earlier in the Bibliotheque Nationale while researching a
history he planned to write on Louis XIV. They chronicled the
adventures of a young man named D’Artagnan who, upon entering Paris,
became almost immediately embroiled in court intrigues, international
politics, and ill-fated affairs between royal lovers. Over the next six
years, readers would enjoy the adventures of this youth and his three
famous friends, Porthos, Athos, and Aramis, as their exploits unraveled
behind the scenes of some of the most momentous events in French and
even English history.

Eventually these serialized adventures were published in novel form,
and became the three D’Artagnan Romances known today. Here is a brief
summary of the first two novels:

The Three Musketeers (serialized March—July, 1844): The year is 1625.
The young D’Artagnan arrives in Paris at the tender age of 18, and
almost immediately offends three musketeers, Porthos, Aramis, and
Athos. Instead of dueling, the four are attacked by five of the
Cardinal’s guards, and the courage of the youth is made apparent during
the battle. The four become fast friends, and, when asked by
D’Artagnan’s landlord to find his missing wife, embark upon an
adventure that takes them across both France and England in order to
thwart the plans of the Cardinal Richelieu. Along the way, they
encounter a beautiful young spy, named simply Milady, who will stop at
nothing to disgrace Queen Anne of Austria before her husband, Louis
XIII, and take her revenge upon the four friends.

Twenty Years After (serialized January—August, 1845): The year is now
1648, twenty years since the close of the last story. Louis XIII has
died, as has Cardinal Richelieu, and while the crown of France may sit
upon the head of Anne of Austria as Regent for the young Louis XIV, the
real power resides with the Cardinal Mazarin, her secret husband.
D’Artagnan is now a lieutenant of musketeers, and his three friends
have retired to private life. Athos turned out to be a nobleman, the
Comte de la Fere, and has retired to his home with his son, Raoul de
Bragelonne. Aramis, whose real name is D’Herblay, has followed his
intention of shedding the musketeer’s cassock for the priest’s robes,
and Porthos has married a wealthy woman, who left him her fortune upon
her death. But trouble is stirring in both France and England. Cromwell
menaces the institution of royalty itself while marching against
Charles I, and at home the Fronde is threatening to tear France apart.
D’Artagnan brings his friends out of retirement to save the threatened
English monarch, but Mordaunt, the son of Milady, who seeks to avenge
his mother’s death at the musketeers’ hands, thwarts their valiant
efforts. Undaunted, our heroes return to France just in time to help
save the young Louis XIV, quiet the Fronde, and tweak the nose of
Cardinal Mazarin.

The third novel, The Vicomte de Bragelonne (serialized October,
1847—January, 1850), has enjoyed a strange history in its English
translation. It has been split into three, four, or five volumes at
various points in its history. The five-volume edition generally does
not give titles to the smaller portions, but the others do. In the
three-volume edition, the novels are entitled The Vicomte de
Bragelonne, Louise de la Vallière, and The Man in the Iron Mask. For
the purposes of this etext, I have chosen to split the novel as the
four-volume edition does, with these titles: The Vicomte de Bragelonne,
Ten Years Later, Louise de la Vallière, and The Man in the Iron Mask.
In the last etext:

The Vicomte de Bragelonne (Etext 2609): It is the year 1660, and
D’Artagnan, after thirty-five years of loyal service, has become
disgusted with serving King Louis XIV while the real power resides with
the Cardinal Mazarin, and has tendered his resignation. He embarks on
his own project, that of restoring Charles II to the throne of England,
and, with the help of Athos, succeeds, earning himself quite a fortune
in the process. D’Artagnan returns to Paris to live the life of a rich
citizen, and Athos, after negotiating the marriage of Philip, the
king’s brother, to Princess Henrietta of England, likewise retires to
his own estate, La Fere. Meanwhile, Mazarin has finally died, and left
Louis to assume the reigns of power, with the assistance of M. Colbert,
formerly Mazarin’s trusted clerk. Colbert has an intense hatred for M.
Fouquet, the king’s superintendent of finances, and has resolved to use
any means necessary to bring about his fall. With the new rank of
intendant bestowed on him by Louis, Colbert succeeds in having two of
Fouquet’s loyal friends tried and executed. He then brings to the
king’s attention that Fouquet is fortifying the island of
Belle-Ile-en-Mer, and could possibly be planning to use it as a base
for some military operation against the king. Louis calls D’Artagnan
out of retirement and sends him to investigate the island, promising
him a tremendous salary and his long-promised promotion to captain of
the musketeers upon his return. At Belle-Isle, D’Artagnan discovers
that the engineer of the fortifications is, in fact, Porthos, now the
Baron du Vallon, and that’s not all. The blueprints for the island,
although in Porthos’s handwriting, show evidence of another script that
has been erased, that of Aramis. D’Artagnan later discovers that Aramis
has become the bishop of Vannes, which is, coincidentally, a parish
belonging to M. Fouquet. Suspecting that D’Artagnan has arrived on the
king’s behalf to investigate, Aramis tricks D’Artagnan into wandering
around Vannes in search of Porthos, and sends Porthos on an heroic ride
back to Paris to warn Fouquet of the danger. Fouquet rushes to the
king, and gives him Belle-Isle as a present, thus allaying any
suspicion, and at the same time humiliating Colbert, just minutes
before the usher announces someone else seeking an audience with the
king.

John Bursey, June, 2000

Transcriber’s note: There is one French custom that may cause
confusion. The Duc d’Orleans is traditionally called “Monsieur” and his
wife “Madame.” Gaston, the king’s uncle, currently holds that title.
Upon the event of his death, it will be conferred upon the king’s
brother, Philip, who is currently the Duc d’Anjou. The customary title
of “Monsieur” will go to him as well, and upon his future wife,
Henrietta of England, that of “Madame.” Gaston’s widow will be referred
to as the “Dowager Madame.” - JB




Contents



 THE VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE.
 Volume I.
 CHAPTER 1. The Letter.
 CHAPTER 2. The Messenger.
 CHAPTER 3. The Interview.
 CHAPTER 4. Father and Son.
 CHAPTER 5. In which Something will be said of Cropoli—of Cropoli and of a Great Unknown Painter.
 CHAPTER 6. The Unknown.
 CHAPTER 7. Parry.
 CHAPTER 8. What his Majesty King Louis XIV. was at the Age of Twenty-Two
 CHAPTER 9. In which the Unknown of the Hostelry of Les Medici loses his Incognito.
 CHAPTER 10. The Arithmetic of M. de Mazarin
 CHAPTER 11. Mazarin’s Policy
 CHAPTER 12. The King and the Lieutenant
 CHAPTER 13. Mary de Mancini
 CHAPTER 14. In which the King and the Lieutenant each give Proofs of Memory
 CHAPTER 15. The Proscribed
 CHAPTER 16. “Remember!”
 CHAPTER 17. In which Aramis is sought and only Bazin is found
 CHAPTER 18. In which D’Artagnan seeks Porthos, and only finds Mousqueton
 CHAPTER 19. What D’Artagnan went to Paris for
 CHAPTER 20. Of the Society which was formed in the Rue des Lombards, at the Sign of the Pilon d’Or
 CHAPTER 21. In which D’Artagnan prepares to travel for the Firm of Planchet and Company
 CHAPTER 22. D’Artagnan travels for the House of Planchet and Company
 CHAPTER 23. In which the Author, very unwillingly, is forced to write a Little History
 CHAPTER 24. The Treasure
 CHAPTER 25. The March
 CHAPTER 26. Heart and Mind
 CHAPTER 27. The Next Day
 CHAPTER 28. Smuggling
 CHAPTER 29. In which D’Artagnan begins to fear he has placed his Money and that of Planchet in the Sinking Fund
 CHAPTER 30. The Shares of Planchet and Company rise again to Par
 CHAPTER 31. Monk reveals himself
 CHAPTER 32. Athos and D’Artagnan meet once more at the Hostelry of the Corne du Cerf
 CHAPTER 33. The Audience.
 CHAPTER 34. Of the Embarrassment of Riches
 CHAPTER 35. On the Canal
 CHAPTER 36. How D’Artagnan drew, as a Fairy would have done, a Country-seat from a Deal Box
 CHAPTER 37. How D’Artagnan regulated the “Assets” of the Company before he established its “Liabilities”
 CHAPTER 38. In which it is seen that the French Grocer had already been established in the Seventeenth Century
 CHAPTER 39. Mazarin’s Gaming Party
 CHAPTER 40. An Affair of State
 CHAPTER 41. The Recital
 CHAPTER 42. In which Mazarin becomes Prodigal
 CHAPTER 43. Guenaud
 CHAPTER 44. Colbert
 CHAPTER 45. Confession of a Man of Wealth
 CHAPTER 46. The Donation
 CHAPTER 47. How Anne of Austria gave one Piece of Advice to Louis XIV., and how M. Fouquet gave him another.
 CHAPTER 48. Agony
 CHAPTER 49. The First Appearance of Colbert
 CHAPTER 50. The First Day of the Royalty of Louis XIV
 CHAPTER 51. A Passion
 CHAPTER 52. D’Artagnan’s Lesson
 CHAPTER 53. The King
 CHAPTER 54. The Houses of M. Fouquet
 CHAPTER 55. The Abbe Fouquet
 CHAPTER 56. M. de la Fontaine’s Wine
 CHAPTER 57. The Gallery of Saint-Mande
 CHAPTER 58. Epicureans
 CHAPTER 59. A Quarter of an Hour’s Delay
 CHAPTER 60. Plan of Battle
 CHAPTER 61. The Cabaret of the Image-de-Notre-Dame
 CHAPTER 62. Vive Colbert!
 CHAPTER 63. How M. d’Eymeris’s Diamond passed into the Hands of M. D’Artagnan.
 CHAPTER 64. Of the Notable Difference D’Artagnan finds between Monsieur the Intendant and Monsieur the Superintendent
 CHAPTER 65. Philosophy of the Heart and Mind
 CHAPTER 66. The Journey
 CHAPTER 67. How D’Artagnan became acquainted with a Poet, who had turned Printer for the sake of printing his own Verses
 CHAPTER 68. D’Artagnan continues his Investigations
 CHAPTER 69. In which the Reader, no doubt, will be as astonished as D’Artagnan was to meet an Old Acquaintance
 CHAPTER 70. Wherein the Ideas of D’Artagnan, at first strangely clouded, begin to clear up a little.
 CHAPTER 71. A Procession at Vannes
 CHAPTER 72. The Grandeur of the Bishop of Vannes
 CHAPTER 73. In which Porthos begins to be sorry for having come with D’Artagnan
 CHAPTER 74. In which D’Artagnan makes all Speed, Porthos snores, and Aramis counsels
 CHAPTER 75. In which Monsieur Fouquet acts
 CHAPTER 76. In which D’Artagnan finishes by at length placing his Hand upon his Captain’s Commission
 CHAPTER 77. A Lover and his Mistress
 CHAPTER 78. In which we at length see the true Heroine of this History appear
 CHAPTER 79. Malicorne and Manicamp
 CHAPTER 80. Manicamp and Malicorne
 CHAPTER 81. The Courtyard of the Hotel Grammont
 CHAPTER 82. The Portrait of Madame
 CHAPTER 83. Havre
 CHAPTER 84. At Sea
 CHAPTER 85. The Tents
 CHAPTER 86. Night
 CHAPTER 87. From Havre to Paris
 CHAPTER 88. An Account of what the Chevalier de Lorraine thought of Madame
 CHAPTER 89. A Surprise for Madame de Montalais
 CHAPTER 90. The Consent of Athos
 CHAPTER 91. Monsieur becomes jealous of the Duke of Buckingham
 CHAPTER 92. Forever!
 CHAPTER 93. King Louis XIV. does not think Mademoiselle de la Vallière either rich enough or pretty enough
 CHAPTER 94. Sword-thrusts in the Water
 CHAPTER 95. Sword-thrusts in the Water (concluded)
 CHAPTER 96. Baisemeaux de Montlezun
 CHAPTER 97. The King’s Card-table
 CHAPTER 98. M. Baisemeaux de Montlezun’s Accounts
 CHAPTER 99. The Breakfast at Monsieur de Baisemeaux’s
 CHAPTER 100. The Second Floor of la Bertaudiere
 CHAPTER 101. The Two Friends
 CHAPTER 102. Madame de Belliere’s Plate
 CHAPTER 103. The Dowry
 CHAPTER 104. Le Terrain de Dieu




THE VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE.




Volume I.




CHAPTER 1.
The Letter.


Towards the middle of the month of May, in the year 1660, at nine
o’clock in the morning, when the sun, already high in the heavens, was
fast absorbing the dew from the ramparts of the castle of Blois a
little cavalcade, composed of three men and two pages, re-entered the
city by the bridge, without producing any other effect upon the
passengers of the quay beyond a first movement of the hand to the head,
as a salute, and a second movement of the tongue to express, in the
purest French then spoken in France: “There is Monsieur returning from
hunting.” And that was all.

Whilst, however, the horses were climbing the steep acclivity which
leads from the river to the castle, several shop-boys approached the
last horse, from whose saddle-bow a number of birds were suspended by
the beak.

On seeing this, the inquisitive youths manifested with rustic freedom
their contempt for such paltry sport, and, after a dissertation among
themselves upon the disadvantages of hawking, they returned to their
occupations; one only of the curious party, a stout, stubby, cheerful
lad, having demanded how it was that Monsieur, who, from his great
revenues, had it in his power to amuse himself so much better, could be
satisfied with such mean diversions.

“Do you not know,” one of the standers-by replied, “that Monsieur’s
principal amusement is to weary himself?”

The light-hearted boy shrugged his shoulders with a gesture which said
as clear as day: “In that case I would rather be plain Jack than a
prince.” And all resumed their labors.

In the meanwhile, Monsieur continued his route with an air at once so
melancholy and so majestic, that he certainly would have attracted the
attention of spectators, if spectators there had been; but the good
citizens of Blois could not pardon Monsieur for having chosen their gay
city for an abode in which to indulge melancholy at his ease, and as
often as they caught a glimpse of the illustrious ennuye, they stole
away gaping, or drew back their heads into the interior of their
dwellings, to escape the soporific influence of that long pale face, of
those watery eyes, and that languid address; so that the worthy prince
was almost certain to find the streets deserted whenever he chanced to
pass through them.

Now, on the part of the citizens of Blois this was a culpable piece of
disrespect, for Monsieur was, after the king—nay, even, perhaps before
the king—the greatest noble of the kingdom. In fact, God, who had
granted to Louis XIV., then reigning, the honor of being son of Louis
XIII., had granted to Monsieur the honor of being son of Henry IV. It
was not then, or, at least it ought not to have been, a trifling source
of pride for the city of Blois, that Gaston of Orleans had chosen it as
his residence, and he his court in the ancient castle of its states.

But it was the destiny of this great prince to excite the attention and
admiration of the public in a very modified degree wherever he might
be. Monsieur had fallen into this situation by habit.

It was not, perhaps, this which gave him that air of listlessness.
Monsieur had been tolerably busy in the course of his life. A man
cannot allow the heads of a dozen of his best friends to be cut off
without feeling a little excitement, and as, since the accession of
Mazarin to power, no heads had been cut off, Monsieur’s occupation was
gone, and his morale suffered from it.

The life of the poor prince was, then, very dull. After his little
morning hawking-party on the banks of the Beuvion, or in the woods of
Chiverny, Monsieur crossed the Loire, went to breakfast at Chambord,
with or without an appetite and the city of Blois heard no more of its
sovereign lord and master till the next hawking-day.

So much for the ennui extra muros; of the ennui of the interior we will
give the reader an idea if he will with us follow the cavalcade to the
majestic porch of the castle of the states.

Monsieur rode a little steady-paced horse, equipped with a large saddle
of red Flemish velvet, with stirrups in the shape of buskins; the horse
was of a bay color; Monsieur’s pourpoint of crimson velvet corresponded
with the cloak of the same shade and the horse’s equipment, and it was
only by this red appearance of the whole that the prince could be known
from his two companions, the one dressed in violet, the other in green.
He on the left, in violet, was his equerry; he on the right, in green,
was the grand veneur.

One of the pages carried two gerfalcons upon a perch, the other a
hunting-horn, which he blew with a careless note at twenty paces from
the castle. Every one about this listless prince did what he had to do
listlessly.

At this signal, eight guards, who were lounging in the sun in the
square court, ran to their halberts, and Monsieur made his solemn entry
into the castle.

When he had disappeared under the shades of the porch, three or four
idlers, who had followed the cavalcade to the castle, after pointing
out the suspended birds to each other, dispersed with comments upon
what they saw: and, when they were gone, the street, the place, and the
court all remained deserted alike.

Monsieur dismounted without speaking a word, went straight to his
apartments, where his valet changed his dress, and as Madame had not
yet sent orders respecting breakfast, Monsieur stretched himself upon a
chaise longue, and was soon as fast asleep as if it had been eleven
o’clock at night.

The eight guards, who concluded their service for the day was over,
laid themselves down very comfortably in the sun upon some stone
benches; the grooms disappeared with their horses into the stables,
and, with the exception of a few joyous birds, startling each other
with their sharp chirping in the tufted shrubberies, it might have been
thought that the whole castle was as soundly asleep as Monsieur was.

All at once, in the midst of this delicious silence, there resounded a
clear ringing laugh, which caused several of the halberdiers in the
enjoyment of their siesta to open at least one eye.

This burst of laughter proceeded from a window of the castle, visited
at this moment by the sun, that embraced it in one of those large
angles which the profiles of the chimneys mark out upon the walls
before mid-day.

The little balcony of wrought iron which advanced in front of this
window was furnished with a pot of red gilliflowers, another pot of
primroses, and an early rose-tree, the foliage of which, beautifully
green, was variegated with numerous red specks announcing future roses.

In the chamber lighted by this window was a square table, covered with
an old large-flowered Haarlem tapestry; in the center of this table was
a long-necked stone bottle, in which were irises and lilies of the
valley; at each end of this table was a young girl.

The position of these two young people was singular; they might have
been taken for two boarders escaped from a convent. One of them, with
both elbows on the table, and a pen in her hand, was tracing characters
upon a sheet of fine Dutch paper; the other, kneeling upon a chair,
which allowed her to advance her head and bust over the back of it to
the middle of the table, was watching her companion as she wrote, or
rather hesitated to write.

Thence the thousand cries, the thousand railleries, the thousand
laughs, one of which, more brilliant than the rest, had startled the
birds in the gardens, and disturbed the slumbers of Monsieur’s guards.

We are taking portraits now; we shall be allowed, therefore, we hope,
to sketch the two last of this chapter.

The one who was leaning in the chair—that is to say, the joyous, the
laughing one—was a beautiful girl of from eighteen to twenty, with
brown complexion and brown hair, splendid, from eyes which sparkled
beneath strongly-marked brows, and particularly from her teeth, which
seemed to shine like pearls between her red coral lips. Her every
movement seemed the accent of a sunny nature, she did not walk—she
bounded.

The other, she who was writing, looked at her turbulent companion with
an eye as limpid, as pure, and as blue as the azure of the day. Her
hair, of a shaded fairness, arranged with exquisite taste, fell in
silky curls over her lovely mantling cheeks; she passed across the
paper a delicate hand, whose thinness announced her extreme youth. At
each burst of laughter that proceeded from her friend, she raised, as
if annoyed, her white shoulders in a poetical and mild manner, but they
were wanting in that richfulness of mold which was likewise to be
wished in her arms and hands.

“Montalais! Montalais!” said she at length, in a voice soft and
caressing as a melody, “you laugh too loud—you laugh like a man! You
will not only draw the attention of messieurs the guards, but you will
not hear Madame’s bell when Madame rings.”

This admonition neither made the young girl called Montalais cease to
laugh and gesticulate. She only replied: “Louise, you do not speak as
you think, my dear; you know that messieurs the guards, as you call
them, have only just commenced their sleep, and that a cannon would not
waken them; you know that Madame’s bell can be heard at the bridge of
Blois, and that consequently I shall hear it when my services are
required by Madame. What annoys you, my child, is that I laugh while
you are writing; and what you are afraid of is that Madame de
Saint-Remy, your mother, should come up here, as she does sometimes
when we laugh too loud, that she should surprise us, and that she
should see that enormous sheet of paper upon which, in a quarter of an
hour, you have only traced the words Monsieur Raoul. Now, you are
right, my dear Louise, because after these words, ‘Monsieur Raoul,’
others may be put so significant and so incendiary as to cause Madame
de Saint-Remy to burst out into fire and flames! Hein! is not that true
now?—say.”

And Montalais redoubled her laughter and noisy provocations.

The fair girl at length became quite angry; she tore the sheet of paper
on which, in fact, the words “Monsieur Raoul” were written in good
characters, and crushing the paper in her trembling hands, she threw it
out of the window.

“There! there!” said Mademoiselle de Montalais; “there is our little
lamb, our gentle dove, angry! Don’t be afraid, Louise—Madame de
Saint-Remy will not come; and if she should, you know I have a quick
ear. Besides, what can be more permissible than to write to an old
friend of twelve years’ standing, particularly when the letter begins
with the words ‘Monsieur Raoul’?”

“It is all very well—I will not write to him at all,” said the young
girl.

“Ah, ah! in good sooth, Montalais is properly punished,” cried the
jeering brunette, still laughing. “Come, come! let us try another sheet
of paper, and finish our dispatch off-hand. Good! there is the bell
ringing now. By my faith, so much the worse! Madame must wait, or else
do without her first maid of honor this morning.”

A bell, in fact, did ring; it announced that Madame had finished her
toilette, and waited for Monsieur to give her his hand, and conduct her
from the salon to the refectory.

This formality being accomplished with great ceremony, the husband and
wife breakfasted, and then separated till the hour of dinner,
invariably fixed at two o’clock.

The sound of this bell caused a door to be opened in the offices on the
left hand of the court, from which filed two maitres d’hotel followed
by eight scullions bearing a kind of hand-barrow loaded with dishes
under silver covers.

One of the maitres d’hotel, the first in rank, touched one of the
guards, who was snoring on his bench, slightly with his wand; he even
carried his kindness so far as to place the halbert which stood against
the wall in the hands of the man stupid with sleep, after which the
soldier, without explanation, escorted the viande of Monsieur to the
refectory, preceded by a page and the two maitres d’hotel.

Wherever the viande passed, the soldiers ported arms.

Mademoiselle de Montalais and her companion had watched from their
window the details of this ceremony, to which, by the bye, they must
have been pretty well accustomed. But they did not look so much from
curiosity as to be assured they should not be disturbed. So guards,
scullions, maitres d’hotel, and pages having passed, they resumed their
places at the table; and the sun, which, through the window-frame, had
for an instant fallen upon those two charming countenances, now only
shed its light upon the gilliflowers, primroses, and rosetree.

“Bah!” said Mademoiselle de Montalais, taking her place again; “Madame
will breakfast very well without me!”

“Oh! Montalais, you will be punished!” replied the other girl, sitting
down quietly in hers.

“Punished, indeed!—that is to say, deprived of a ride! That is just the
way in which I wish to be punished. To go out in the grand coach,
perched upon a doorstep; to turn to the left, twist round to the right,
over roads full of ruts, where we cannot exceed a league in two hours;
and then to come back straight towards the wing of the castle in which
is the window of Mary de Medici, so that Madame never fails to say:
‘Could one believe it possible that Mary de Medici should have escaped
from that window—forty-seven feet high? The mother of two princes and
three princesses!’ If you call that relaxation, Louise, all I ask is to
be punished every day; particularly when my punishment is to remain
with you and write such interesting letters as we write!”

“Montalais! Montalais! there are duties to be performed.”

“You talk of them very much at your ease, dear child!—you, who are left
quite free amidst this tedious court. You are the only person that
reaps the advantages of them without incurring the trouble,—you, who
are really more one of Madame’s maids of honor than I am, because
Madame makes her affection for your father-in-law glance off upon you;
so that you enter this dull house as the birds fly into yonder court,
inhaling the air, pecking the flowers, picking up the grain, without
having the least service to perform, or the least annoyance to undergo.
And you talk to me of duties to be performed! In sooth, my pretty
idler, what are your own proper duties, unless to write to the handsome
Raoul? And even that you don’t do; so that it looks to me as if you
likewise were rather negligent of your duties!”

Louise assumed a serious air, leant her chin upon her hand, and, in a
tone full of candid remonstrance, “And do you reproach me with my good
fortune?” said she. “Can you have the heart to do it? You have a
future; you belong to the court; the king, if he should marry, will
require Monsieur to be near his person; you will see splendid fetes;
you will see the king, who they say is so handsome, so agreeable!”

“Ay, and still more, I shall see Raoul, who attends upon M. le Prince,”
added Montalais, maliciously.

“Poor Raoul!” sighed Louise.

“Now is the time to write to him, my pretty dear! Come, begin again,
with that famous ‘Monsieur Raoul’ which figures at the top of the poor
torn sheet.”

She then held the pen toward her, and with a charming smile encouraged
her hand, which quickly traced the words she named.

“What next?” asked the younger of the two girls.

“Why, now write what you think, Louise,” replied Montalais.

“Are you quite sure I think of anything?”

“You think of somebody, and that amounts to the same thing, or rather
even more.”

“Do you think so, Montalais?”

“Louise, Louise, your blue eyes are as deep as the sea I saw at
Boulogne last year! No, no, I mistake—the sea is perfidious: your eyes
are as deep as the azure yonder—look!—over our heads!”

“Well, since you can read so well in my eyes, tell me what I am
thinking about, Montalais.”

“In the first place, you don’t think Monsieur Raoul; you think My dear
Raoul.”

“Oh!——”

“Never blush for such a trifle as that! ‘My dear Raoul,’ we will
say—‘You implore me to write to you at Paris, where you are detained by
your attendance on M. le Prince. As you must be very dull there, to
seek for amusement in the remembrance of a provinciale——’”

Louise rose up suddenly. “No, Montalais,” said she, with a smile; “I
don’t think a word of that. Look, this is what I think;” and she seized
the pen boldly and traced, with a firm hand, the following words:—

“I should have been very unhappy if your entreaties to obtain a
remembrance of me had been less warm. Everything here reminds me of our
early days, which so quickly passed away, which so delightfully flew
by, that no others will ever replace the charm of them in my heart.”

Montalais, who watched the flying pen, and read, the wrong way upwards,
as fast as her friend wrote, here interrupted by clapping her hands.
“Capital!” cried she; “there is frankness—there is heart—there is
style! Show these Parisians, my dear, that Blois is the city for fine
language!”

“He knows very well that Blois was a Paradise to me,” replied the girl.

“That is exactly what you mean to say; and you speak like an angel.”

“I will finish, Montalais,” and she continued as follows: “You often
think of me, you say, Monsieur Raoul: I thank you; but that does not
surprise me, when I recollect how often our hearts have beaten close to
each other.”

“Oh! oh!” said Montalais. “Beware; my lamb! You are scattering your
wool, and there are wolves about.”

Louise was about to reply, when the gallop of a horse resounded under
the porch of the castle.

“What is that?” said Montalais, approaching the window. “A handsome
cavalier, by my faith!”

“Oh!—Raoul!” exclaimed Louise, who had made the same movement as her
friend, and, becoming pale as death, sunk back beside her unfinished
letter.

“Now, he is a clever lover, upon my word!” cried Montalais; “he arrives
just at the proper moment.”

“Come in, come in, I implore you!” murmured Louise.

“Bah! he does not know me. Let me see what he has come here for.”




CHAPTER 2.
The Messenger.


Mademoiselle de Montalais was right; the young cavalier was goodly to
look upon.

He was a young man of from twenty-four to twenty-five years of age,
tall and slender, wearing gracefully the picturesque military costume
of the period. His large boots contained a foot which Mademoiselle de
Montalais might not have disowned if she had been transformed into a
man. With one of his delicate but nervous hands he checked his horse in
the middle of the court, and with the other raised his hat, whose long
plumes shaded his at once serious and ingenuous countenance.

The guards, roused by the steps of the horse, awoke and were on foot in
a minute. The young man waited till one of them was close to his
saddle-bow: then stooping towards him, in a clear, distinct voice,
which was perfectly audible at the window where the two girls were
concealed, “A message for his royal highness,” he said.

“Ah, ah!” cried the soldier. “Officer, a messenger!”

But this brave guard knew very well that no officer would appear,
seeing that the only one who could have appeared dwelt at the other
side of the castle, in an apartment looking into the gardens. So he
hastened to add: “The officer, monsieur, is on his rounds, but in his
absence, M. de Saint-Remy, the maitre d’hotel shall be informed.”

“M. de Saint-Remy?” repeated the cavalier, slightly blushing.

“Do you know him?”

“Why, yes; but request him, if you please, that my visit be announced
to his royal highness as soon as possible.”

“It appears to be pressing,” said the guard, as if speaking to himself,
but really in the hope of obtaining an answer.

The messenger made an affirmative sign with his head.

“In that case,” said the guard, “I will go and seek the maitre d’hotel
myself.”

The young man, in the meantime, dismounted; and whilst the others were
making their remarks upon the fine horse the cavalier rode, the soldier
returned.

“Your pardon, young gentleman; but your name, if you please?”

“The Vicomte de Bragelonne, on the part of his highness M. le Prince de
Conde.”

The soldier made a profound bow, and, as if the name of the conqueror
of Rocroy and Sens had given him wings, he stepped lightly up the steps
leading to the ante-chamber.

M. de Bragelonne had not had time to fasten his horse to the iron bars
of the perron, when M. de Saint-Remy came running, out of breath,
supporting his capacious body with one hand, whilst with the other he
cut the air as a fisherman cleaves the waves with his oar.

“Ah, Monsieur le Vicomte! You at Blois!” cried he. “Well, that is a
wonder. Good-day to you—good-day, Monsieur Raoul.”

“I offer you a thousand respects, M. de Saint-Remy.”

“How Madame de la Vall—I mean, how delighted Madame de Saint-Remy will
be to see you! But come in. His royal highness is at breakfast—must he
be interrupted? Is the matter serious?”

“Yes, and no, Monsieur de Saint-Remy. A moment’s delay, however, would
be disagreeable to his royal highness.”

“If that is the case, we will force the consigne, Monsieur le Vicomte.
Come in. Besides, Monsieur is in an excellent humor to-day. And then
you bring news, do you not?”

“Great news, Monsieur de Saint-Remy.”

“And good, I presume?”

“Excellent.”

“Come quickly, come quickly then!” cried the worthy man, putting his
dress to rights as he went along.

Raoul followed him, hat in hand, and a little disconcerted at the noise
made by his spurs in these immense salons.

As soon as he had disappeared in the interior of the palace, the window
of the court was repeopled, and an animated whispering betrayed the
emotion of the two girls. They soon appeared to have formed a
resolution, for one of the two faces disappeared from the window. This
was the brunette; the other remained behind the balcony, concealed by
the flowers, watching attentively through the branches the perron by
which M. de Bragelonne had entered the castle.

In the meantime the object of so much laudable curiosity continued his
route, following the steps of the maitre d’hotel. The noise of quick
steps, an odor of wine and viands, a clinking of crystal and plates,
warned them that they were coming to the end of their course.

The pages, valets and officers, assembled in the office which led up to
the refectory, welcomed the newcomer with the proverbial politeness of
the country; some of them were acquainted with Raoul, and all knew that
he came from Paris. It might be said that his arrival for a moment
suspended the service. In fact, a page, who was pouring out wine for
his royal highness, on hearing the jingling of spurs in the next
chamber, turned round like a child, without perceiving that he was
continuing to pour out, not into the glass, but upon the tablecloth.

Madame, who was not so preoccupied as her glorious spouse was, remarked
this distraction of the page.

“Well?” exclaimed she.

“Well!” repeated Monsieur; “what is going on then?”

M. de Saint-Remy, who had just introduced his head through the doorway,
took advantage of the moment.

“Why am I to be disturbed?” said Gaston, helping himself to a thick
slice of one of the largest salmon that had ever ascended the Loire to
be captured between Painboeuf and Saint-Nazaire.

“There is a messenger from Paris. Oh! but after monseigneur has
breakfasted will do; there is plenty of time.”

“From Paris!” cried the prince, letting his fork fall. “A messenger
from Paris, do you say? And on whose part does this messenger come?”

“On the part of M. le Prince,” said the maitre d’hotel promptly.

Every one knows that the Prince de Conde was so called.

“A messenger from M. le Prince!” said Gaston, with an inquietude that
escaped none of the assistants, and consequently redoubled the general
curiosity.

Monsieur, perhaps, fancied himself brought back again to the happy
times when the opening of a door gave him an emotion, in which every
letter might contain a state secret,—in which every message was
connected with a dark and complicated intrigue. Perhaps, likewise, that
great name of M. le Prince expanded itself, beneath the roofs of Blois,
to the proportions of a phantom.

Monsieur pushed away his plate.

“Shall I tell the envoy to wait?” asked M. de Saint-Remy.

A glance from Madame emboldened Gaston, who replied: “No, no! let him
come in at once, on the contrary. A propos, who is he?”

“A gentleman of this country, M. le Vicomte de Bragelonne.”

“Ah, very well! Introduce him, Saint-Remy—introduce him.”

And when he had let fall these words, with his accustomed gravity,
Monsieur turned his eyes, in a certain manner, upon the people of his
suite, so that all, pages, officers, and equerries, quitted the
service, knives and goblets, and made towards the second chamber a
retreat as rapid as it was disorderly.

This little army had dispersed in two files when Raoul de Bragelonne,
preceded by M. de Saint-Remy, entered the refectory.

The short interval of solitude which this retreat had left him,
permitted Monsieur the time to assume a diplomatic countenance. He did
not turn round, but waited till the maitre d’hotel should bring the
messenger face to face with him.

Raoul stopped even with the lower end of the table, so as to be exactly
between Monsieur and Madame. From this place he made a profound bow to
Monsieur and a very humble one to Madame; then, drawing himself up into
military pose, he waited for Monsieur to address him.

On his part the Prince waited till the doors were hermetically closed;
he would not turn round to ascertain the fact, as that would have been
derogatory to his dignity, but he listened with all his ears for the
noise of the lock, which would promise him at least an appearance of
secrecy.

The doors being closed, Monsieur raised his eyes towards the vicomte,
and said, “It appears that you come from Paris, monsieur?”

“This minute, monseigneur.”

“How is the king?”

“His majesty is in perfect health, monseigneur.”

“And my sister-in-law?”

“Her majesty the queen-mother still suffers from the complaint in her
chest, but for the last month she has been rather better.”

“Somebody told me you came on the part of M. le Prince. They must have
been mistaken, surely?”

“No, monseigneur; M. le Prince has charged me to convey this letter to
your royal highness, and I am to wait for an answer to it.”

Raoul had been a little annoyed by this cold and cautious reception,
and his voice insensibly sank to a low key.

The prince forgot that he was the cause of this apparent mystery, and
his fears returned.

He received the letter from the Prince de Conde with a haggard look,
unsealed it as he would have unsealed a suspicious packet, and in order
to read it so that no one should remark the effects of it upon his
countenance, he turned round.

Madame followed, with an anxiety almost equal to that of the prince,
every maneuver of her august husband.

Raoul, impassible, and a little disengaged by the attention of his
hosts, looked from his place through the open window at the gardens and
the statues which peopled them.

“Well!” cried Monsieur, all at once, with a cheerful smile; “here is an
agreeable surprise, and a charming letter from M. le Prince. Look,
Madame!”

The table was too large to allow the arm of the prince to reach the
hand of Madame; Raoul sprang forward to be their intermediary, and did
it with so good a grace as to procure a flattering acknowledgment from
the princess.

“You know the contents of this letter, no doubt?” said Gaston to Raoul.

“Yes, monseigneur; M. le Prince at first gave me the message verbally,
but upon reflection his highness took up his pen.”

“It is beautiful writing,” said Madame, “but I cannot read it.”

“Will you read it to Madame, M. de Bragelonne?” said the duke.

“Yes, read it, if you please, monsieur.”

Raoul began to read, Monsieur giving again all his attention. The
letter was conceived in these terms:

“Monseigneur—The king is about to set out for the frontiers. You are
aware that the marriage of his majesty is concluded upon. The king has
done me the honor to appoint me his marechal-des-logis for this
journey, and as I knew with what joy his majesty would pass a day at
Blois, I venture to ask your royal highness’s permission to mark the
house you inhabit as our quarters. If, however, the suddenness of this
request should create to your royal highness any embarrassment, I
entreat you to say so by the messenger I send, a gentleman of my suite,
M. le Vicomte de Bragelonne. My itinerary will depend upon your royal
highness’s determination, and instead of passing through Blois, we
shall come through Vendome and Romorantin. I venture to hope that your
royal highness will be pleased with my arrangement, it being the
expression of my boundless desire to make myself agreeable to you.”

“Nothing can be more gracious toward us,” said Madame, who had more
than once consulted the looks of her husband during the reading of the
letter. “The king here!” exclaimed she, in a rather louder tone than
would have been necessary to preserve secrecy.

“Monsieur,” said his royal highness in his turn, “you will offer my
thanks to M. de Conde, and express to him my gratitude for the honor he
has done me.”

Raoul bowed.

“On what day will his majesty arrive?” continued the prince.

“The king, monseigneur, will in all probability arrive this evening.”

“But how, then, could he have known my reply if it had been in the
negative?”

“I was desired, monseigneur, to return in all haste to Beaugency, to
give counter-orders to the courier, who was himself to go back
immediately with counter-orders to M. le Prince.”

“His majesty is at Orleans, then?”

“Much nearer, monseigneur; his majesty must by this time have arrived
at Meung.”

“Does the court accompany him?”

“Yes, monseigneur.”

“A propos, I forgot to ask you after M. le Cardinal.”

“His eminence appears to enjoy good health, monseigneur.”

“His nieces accompany him, no doubt?”

“No, monseigneur, his eminence has ordered the Mesdemoiselles de
Mancini to set out for Brouage. They will follow the left bank of the
Loire, while the court will come by the right.”

“What! Mademoiselle Mary de Mancini quit the court in that manner?”
asked Monsieur, his reserve beginning to diminish.

“Mademoiselle Mary de Mancini in particular,” replied Raoul discreetly.

A fugitive smile, an imperceptible vestige of his ancient spirit of
intrigue, shot across the pale face of the prince.

“Thanks, M. de Bragelonne,” then said Monsieur. “You would, perhaps,
not be willing to carry M. le Prince the commission with which I would
charge you, and that is, that his messenger has been very agreeable to
me; but I will tell him so myself.”

Raoul bowed his thanks to Monsieur for the honor he had done him.

Monsieur made a sign to Madame, who struck a bell which was placed at
her right hand; M. de Saint-Remy entered, and the room was soon filled
with people.

“Messieurs,” said the prince, “his majesty is about to pay me the honor
of passing a day at Blois; I depend upon the king, my nephew, not
having to repent of the favor he does my house.”

“Vive le Roi!” cried all the officers of the household with frantic
enthusiasm, and M. de Saint-Remy louder than the rest.

Gaston hung down his head with evident chagrin. He had all his life
been obliged to hear, or rather to undergo this cry of “Vive le Roi!”
which passed over him. For a long time, being unaccustomed to hear it,
his ear had had rest, and now a younger, more vivacious, and more
brilliant royalty rose up before him, like a new and more painful
provocation.

Madame perfectly understood the sufferings of that timid, gloomy heart;
she rose from the table, Monsieur imitated her mechanically, and all
the domestics, with a buzzing like that of several bee-hives,
surrounded Raoul for the purpose of questioning him.

Madame saw this movement, and called M. de Saint Remy. “This is not the
time for gossiping, but working,” said she, with the tone of an angry
housekeeper.

M. de Saint-Remy hastened to break the circle formed by the officers
round Raoul, so that the latter was able to gain the ante-chamber.

“Care will be taken of that gentleman, I hope,” added Madame,
addressing M. de Saint-Remy.

The worthy man immediately hastened after Raoul. “Madame desires
refreshments to be offered to you,” said he; “and there is, besides, a
lodging for you in the castle.”

“Thanks, M. de Saint-Remy,” replied Raoul; “but you know how anxious I
must be to pay my duty to M. le Comte, my father.”

“That is true, that is true, Monsieur Raoul; present him, at the same
time, my humble respects, if you please.”

Raoul thus once more got rid of the old gentleman, and pursued his way.
As he was passing under the porch, leading his horse by the bridle, a
soft voice called him from the depths of an obscure path.

“Monsieur Raoul!” said the voice.

The young man turned round, surprised, and saw a dark complexioned
girl, who, with a finger on her lip, held out her other hand to him.
This young lady was an utter stranger.




CHAPTER 3.
The Interview.


Raoul made one step towards the girl who thus called him.

“But my horse, madame?” said he.

“Oh! you are terribly embarrassed! Go yonder way—there is a shed in the
outer court: fasten your horse, and return quickly!”

“I obey, madame.”

Raoul was not four minutes in performing what he had been directed to
do; he returned to the little door, where, in the gloom, he found his
mysterious conductress waiting for him, on the first steps of a winding
staircase.

“Are you brave enough to follow me, monsieur knight errant?” asked the
girl, laughing at the momentary hesitation Raoul had manifested.

The latter replied by springing up the dark staircase after her. They
thus climbed up three stories, he behind her, touching with his hands,
when he felt for the banister, a silk dress which rubbed against each
side of the staircase. At every false step made by Raoul, his
conductress cried, “Hush!” and held out to him a soft and perfumed
hand.

“One would mount thus to the belfry of the castle without being
conscious of fatigue,” said Raoul.

“All of which means, monsieur, that you are very much perplexed, very
tired, and very uneasy. But be of good cheer, monsieur; here we are, at
our destination.”

The girl threw open a door, which immediately, without any transition,
filled with a flood of light the landing of the staircase, at the top
of which Raoul appeared, holding fast by the balustrade.

The girl continued to walk on—he followed her; she entered a chamber—he
did the same.

As soon as he was fairly in the net he heard a loud cry, and, turning
round, saw at two paces from him, with her hands clasped and her eyes
closed, that beautiful fair girl with blue eyes and white shoulders,
who, recognizing him, called him Raoul.

He saw her, and divined at once so much love and so much joy in the
expression of her countenance, that he sank on his knees in the middle
of the chamber, murmuring, on his part, the name of Louise.

“Ah! Montalais—Montalais!” she sighed, “it is very wicked to deceive me
so.”

“Who, I? I have deceived you?”

“Yes; you told me you would go down to inquire the news, and you have
brought up monsieur!”

“Well, I was obliged to do so—how else could he have received the
letter you wrote him?” And she pointed with her finger to the letter
which was still upon the table.

Raoul made a step to take it; Louise, more rapid, although she had
sprung forward with a sufficiently remarkable physical hesitation,
reached out her hand to stop him. Raoul came in contact with that
trembling hand, took it within his own, and carried it so respectfully
to his lips, that he might be said to have deposited a sigh upon it
rather than a kiss.

In the meantime Mademoiselle de Montalais had taken the letter, folded
it carefully, as women do, in three folds, and slipped it into her
bosom.

“Don’t be afraid, Louise,” said she; “monsieur will no more venture to
take it hence than the defunct king Louis XIII. ventured to take
billets from the corsage of Mademoiselle de Hautefort.”

Raoul blushed at seeing the smile of the two girls; and he did not
remark that the hand of Louise remained in his.

“There,” said Montalais, “you have pardoned me, Louise, for having
brought monsieur to you; and you, monsieur, bear me no malice for
having followed me to see mademoiselle. Now, then, peace being made,
let us chat like old friends. Present me, Louise, to M. de Bragelonne.”

“Monsieur le Vicomte,” said Louise, with her quiet grace and ingenuous
smile, “I have the honour to present to you Mademoiselle Aure de
Montalais, maid of honor to her royal highness Madame, and moreover my
friend—my excellent friend.”

Raoul bowed ceremoniously.

“And me, Louise,” said he—“will you not present me also to
mademoiselle?”

“Oh, she knows you—she knows all!”

This unguarded expression made Montalais laugh and Raoul sigh with
happiness, for he interpreted it thus: “She knows all our love.”

“The ceremonies being over, Monsieur le Vicomte,” said Montalais, “take
a chair, and tell us quickly the news you bring flying thus.”

“Mademoiselle, it is no longer a secret; the king, on his way to
Poitiers, will stop at Blois, to visit his royal highness.”

“The king here!” exclaimed Montalais, clapping her hands. “What! are we
going to see the court? Only think, Louise—the real court from Paris!
Oh, good heavens! But when will this happen, monsieur?”

“Perhaps this evening, mademoiselle; at latest, tomorrow.”

Montalais lifted her shoulders in sign of vexation.

“No time to get ready! No time to prepare a single dress! We are as far
behind the fashions as the Poles. We shall look like portraits of the
time of Henry IV. Ah, monsieur! this is sad news you bring us!”

“But, mesdemoiselles, you will be still beautiful!”

“That’s no news! Yes, we shall be always beautiful because nature has
made us passable; but we shall be ridiculous, because the fashion will
have forgotten us. Alas! ridiculous! I shall be thought ridiculous—I!

“And by whom?” said Louise, innocently.

“By whom? You are a strange girl, my dear. Is that a question to put to
me? I mean everybody; I mean the courtiers, the nobles; I mean the
king.”

“Pardon me, my good friend, but as here every one is accustomed to see
us as we are——”

“Granted; but that is about to change, and we shall be ridiculous, even
for Blois; for close to us will be seen the fashions from Paris, and
they will perceive that we are in the fashion of Blois! It is enough to
make one despair!”

“Console yourself, mademoiselle.”

“Well, so let it be! After all, so much the worse for those who do not
find me to their taste!” said Montalais philosophically.

“They would be very difficult to please,” replied Raoul, faithful to
his regular system of gallantry.

“Thank you, Monsieur le Vicomte. We were saying, then, that the king is
coming to Blois?”

“With all the court.”

“Mesdemoiselles de Mancini, will they be with them?”

“No, certainly not.”

“But as the king, it is said, cannot do without Mademoiselle Mary?”

“Mademoiselle, the king must do without her. M. le Cardinal will have
it so. He has exiled his nieces to Brouage.”

“He!—the hypocrite!”

“Hush!” said Louise, pressing a finger on her friend’s rosy lips.

“Bah! nobody can hear me. I say that old Mazarino Mazarini is a
hypocrite, who burns impatiently to make his niece Queen of France.”

“That cannot be, mademoiselle, since M. le Cardinal, on the contrary,
has brought about the marriage of his majesty with the Infanta Maria
Theresa.”

Montalais looked Raoul full in the face, and said, “And do you
Parisians believe in these tales? Well! we are a little more knowing
than you, at Blois.”

“Mademoiselle, if the king goes beyond Poitiers and sets out for Spain,
if the articles of the marriage contract are agreed upon by Don Luis de
Haro and his eminence, you must plainly perceive that it is not child’s
play.”

“All very fine! but the king is king, I suppose?”

“No doubt, mademoiselle; but the cardinal is the cardinal.”

“The king is not a man, then! And he does not love Mary Mancini?”

“He adores her.”

“Well, he will marry her then. We shall have war with Spain. M. Mazarin
will spend a few of the millions he has put away; our gentlemen will
perform prodigies of valor in their encounters with the proud
Castilians, and many of them will return crowned with laurels, to be
recrowned by us with myrtles. Now, that is my view of politics.”

“Montalais, you are wild!” said Louise, “and every exaggeration
attracts you as light does a moth.”

“Louise, you are so extremely reasonable, that you will never know how
to love.”

“Oh!” said Louise, in a tone of tender reproach, “don’t you see,
Montalais? The queen-mother desires to marry her son to the Infanta;
would you wish him to disobey his mother? Is it for a royal heart like
his to set such a bad example? When parents forbid love, love must be
banished.”

And Louise sighed: Raoul cast down his eyes, with an expression of
constraint. Montalais, on her part, laughed aloud.

“Well, I have no parents!” said she.

“You are acquainted, without doubt, with the state of health of M. le
Comte de la Fere?” said Louise, after breathing that sigh which had
revealed so many griefs in its eloquent utterance.

“No, mademoiselle,” replied Raoul, “I have not yet paid my respects to
my father; I was going to his house when Mademoiselle de Montalais so
kindly stopped me. I hope the comte is well. You have heard nothing to
the contrary, have you?”

“No, M. Raoul—nothing, thank God!”

Here, for several instants, ensued a silence, during which two spirits,
which followed the same idea, communicated perfectly, without even the
assistance of a single glance.

“Oh, heavens!” exclaimed Montalais in a fright; “there is somebody
coming up.”

“Who can it be?” said Louise, rising in great agitation.

“Mesdemoiselles, I inconvenience you very much. I have, without doubt,
been very indiscreet,” stammered Raoul, very ill at ease.

“It is a heavy step,” said Louise.

“Ah! if it is only M. Malicorne,” added Montalais, “do not disturb
yourselves.”

Louise and Raoul looked at each other to inquire who M. Malicorne could
be.

“There is no occasion to mind him,” continued Montalais; “he is not
jealous.”

“But, mademoiselle—” said Raoul.

“Yes, I understand. Well, he is as discreet as I am.”

“Good heavens!” cried Louise, who had applied her ear to the door,
which had been left ajar, “it is my mother’s step!”

“Madame de Saint-Remy! Where shall I hide myself?” exclaimed Raoul,
catching at the dress of Montalais, who looked quite bewildered.

“Yes,” said she; “yes, I know the clicking of those pattens! It is our
excellent mother. M. le Vicomte, what a pity it is the window looks
upon a stone pavement, and that fifty paces below it.”

Raoul glanced at the balcony in despair. Louise seized his arm and held
it tight.

“Oh, how silly I am!” said Montalais, “have I not the robe-of-ceremony
closet? It looks as if it were made on purpose.”

It was quite time to act; Madame de Saint-Remy was coming up at a
quicker pace than usual. She gained the landing at the moment when
Montalais, as in all scenes of surprises, shut the closet by leaning
with her back against the door.

“Ah!” cried Madame de Saint-Remy, “you are here, are you, Louise?”

“Yes, madame,” replied she, more pale than if she had committed a great
crime.

“Well, well!”

“Pray be seated, madame,” said Montalais, offering her a chair, which
she placed so that the back was towards the closet.

“Thank you, Mademoiselle Aure—thank you. Come my child, be quick.”

“Where do you wish me to go, madame?”

“Why, home, to be sure; have you not to prepare your toilette?”

“What did you say?” cried Montalais, hastening to affect surprise, so
fearful was she that Louise would in some way commit herself.

“You don’t know the news, then?” said Madame de Saint-Remy.

“What news, madame, is it possible for two girls to learn up in this
dove-cote?”

“What! have you seen nobody?”

“Madame, you talk in enigmas, and you torment us at a slow fire!” cried
Montalais, who, terrified at seeing Louise become paler and paler, did
not know to what saint to put up her vows.

At length she caught an eloquent look of her companion’s, one of those
looks which would convey intelligence to a brick wall. Louise directed
her attention to a hat—Raoul’s unlucky hat, which was set out in all
its feathery splendor upon the table.

Montalais sprang towards it, and, seizing it with her left hand, passed
it behind her into the right, concealing it as she was speaking.

“Well,” said Madame de Saint-Remy, “a courier has arrived, announcing
the approach of the king. There, mesdemoiselles; there is something to
make you put on your best looks.”

“Quick, quick!” cried Montalais. “Follow Madame your mother, Louise;
and leave me to get ready my dress of ceremony.”

Louise arose; her mother took her by the hand, and led her out on to
the landing.

“Come along,” said she; then adding in a low voice, “When I forbid you
to come to the apartment of Montalais, why do you do so?”

“Madame, she is my friend. Besides, I had but just come.”

“Did you see nobody concealed while you were there?”

“Madame!”

“I saw a man’s hat, I tell you—the hat of that fellow, that
good-for-nothing!”

“Madame!” repeated Louise.

“Of that do-nothing De Malicorne! A maid of honor to have such
company—fie! fie!” and their voices were lost in the depths of the
narrow staircase.

Montalais had not missed a word of this conversation, which echo
conveyed to her as if through a tunnel. She shrugged her shoulders on
seeing Raoul, who had listened likewise, issue from the closet.

“Poor Montalais!” said she, “the victim of friendship! Poor Malicorne,
the victim of love!”

She stopped on viewing the tragic-comic face of Raoul, who was vexed at
having, in one day, surprised so many secrets.

“Oh, mademoiselle!” said he; “how can we repay your kindness?”

“Oh, we will balance accounts some day,” said she. “For the present,
begone, M. de Bragelonne, for Madame de Saint-Remy is not over
indulgent; and any indiscretion on her part might bring hither a
domiciliary visit, which would be disagreeable to all parties.”

“But Louise—how shall I know——”

“Begone! begone! King Louis XI. knew very well what he was about when
he invented the post.”

“Alas!” sighed Raoul.

“And am I not here—I, who am worth all the posts in the kingdom? Quick,
I say, to horse! so that if Madame de Saint-Remy should return for the
purpose of preaching me a lesson on morality, she may not find you
here.”

“She would tell my father, would she not?” murmured Raoul.

“And you would be scolded. Ah, vicomte, it is very plain you come from
court; you are as timid as the king. Peste! at Blois we contrive better
than that to do without papa’s consent. Ask Malicorne else!”

And at these words the girl pushed Raoul out of the room by the
shoulders. He glided swiftly down to the porch, regained his horse,
mounted, and set off as if he had had Monsieur’s guards at his heels.




CHAPTER 4.
Father and Son.


Raoul followed the well-known road, so dear to his memory, which led
from Blois to the residence of the Comte de la Fere.

The reader will dispense with a second description of that habitation:
he, perhaps, has been with us there before, and knows it. Only, since
our last journey thither, the walls had taken a grayer tint, and the
brickwork assumed a more harmonious copper tone; the trees had grown,
and many that then only stretched their slender branches along the tops
of the hedges, now bushy, strong, and luxuriant, cast around, beneath
boughs swollen with sap, great shadows of blossoms of fruit for the
benefit of the traveler.

Raoul perceived, from a distance, the two little turrets, the dove-cote
in the elms, and the flights of pigeons, which wheeled incessantly
around that brick cone, seemingly without power to quit it, like the
sweet memories which hover round a spirit at peace.

As he approached, he heard the noise of the pulleys which grated under
the weight of the massy pails; he also fancied he heard the melancholy
moaning of the water which falls back again into the wells—a sad,
funereal, solemn sound, which strikes the ear of the child and the
poet—both dreamers—which the English call splash; Arabian poets,
gasgachau; and which we Frenchmen, who would be poets, can only
translate by a paraphrase—the noise of water falling into water.

It was more than a year since Raoul had been to visit his father. He
had passed the whole time in the household of M. le Prince. In fact,
after all the commotions of the Fronde, of the early period of which we
formerly attempted to give a sketch, Louis de Conde had made a public,
solemn, and frank reconciliation with the court. During all the time
that the rupture between the king and the prince had lasted, the
prince, who had long entertained a great regard for Bragelonne, had in
vain offered him advantages of the most dazzling kind for a young man.
The Comte de la Fere, still faithful to his principles of loyalty and
royalty, one day developed before his son in the vaults of Saint
Denis,—the Comte de la Fere, in the name of his son, had always
declined them. Moreover, instead of following M. de Conde in his
rebellion, the vicomte had followed M. de Turenne, fighting for the
king. Then when M. de Turenne, in his turn, had appeared to abandon the
royal cause, he had quitted M. de Turenne, as he had quitted M. de
Conde. It resulted from this invariable line of conduct that, as Conde
and Turenne had never been conquerors of each other but under the
standard of the king, Raoul, however young, had ten victories inscribed
on his list of services, and not one defeat from which his bravery or
conscience had to suffer.

Raoul, therefore, had, in compliance with the wish of his father,
served obstinately and passively the fortunes of Louis XIV., in spite
of the tergiversations which were endemic, and, it might be said,
inevitable, at that period.

M. de Conde, on being restored to favor, had at once availed himself of
all the privileges of the amnesty to ask for many things back again
which had been granted him before, and among others, Raoul. M. de la
Fere, with his invariable good sense, had immediately sent him again to
the prince.

A year, then, had passed away since the separation of the father and
son; a few letters had softened, but not removed, the pains of absence.
We have seen that Raoul had left at Blois another love in addition to
filial love. But let us do him this justice—if it had not been for
chance and Mademoiselle de Montalais, two great temptations, Raoul,
after delivering his message, would have galloped off towards his
father’s house, turning his head round, perhaps, but without stopping
for a single instant, even if Louise had held out her arms to him.

So the first part of the journey was given by Raoul to regretting the
past which he had been forced to quit so quickly, that is to say, his
lady-love; and the other part to the friend he was about to join, so
much too slowly for his wishes.

Raoul found the garden-gate open, and rode straight in, without
regarding the long arms, raised in anger, of an old man dressed in a
jacket of violet-colored wool, and a large cap of faded velvet.

The old man, who was weeding with his hands a bed of dwarf roses and
marguerites, was indignant at seeing a horse thus traversing his sanded
and nicely-raked walks. He even ventured a vigorous “Humph!” which made
the cavalier turn round. Then there was a change of scene; for no
sooner had he caught sight of Raoul’s face, than the old man sprang up
and set off in the direction of the house, amidst interrupted
growlings, which appeared to be paroxysms of wild delight.

When arrived at the stables, Raoul gave his horse to a little lackey,
and sprang up the perron with an ardor that would have delighted the
heart of his father.

He crossed the ante-chamber, the dining-room, and the salon, without
meeting with any one; at length, on reaching the door of M. de la
Fere’s apartment, he rapped impatiently, and entered almost without
waiting for the word “Enter!” which was vouchsafed him by a voice at
once sweet and serious. The comte was seated at a table covered with
papers and books; he was still the noble, handsome gentleman of former
days, but time had given to this nobleness and beauty a more solemn and
distinct character. A brow white and void of wrinkles, beneath his long
hair, now more white than black; an eye piercing and mild, under the
lids of a young man; his mustache, fine but slightly grizzled, waved
over lips of a pure and delicate model, as if they had never been
curled by mortal passions; a form straight and supple; an
irreproachable but thin hand—this was what remained of the illustrious
gentleman whom so many illustrious mouths had praised under the name of
Athos. He was engaged in correcting the pages of a manuscript book,
entirely filled by his own hand.

Raoul seized his father by the shoulders, by the neck, as he could, and
embraced him so tenderly and so rapidly, that the comte had neither
strength nor time to disengage himself, or to overcome his paternal
emotions.

“What! you here, Raoul,—you! Is it possible?” said he.

“Oh, monsieur, monsieur, what joy to see you once again!”

“But you don’t answer me, vicomte. Have you leave of absence, or has
some misfortune happened at Paris?”

“Thank God, monsieur,” replied Raoul, calming himself by degrees,
“nothing has happened but what is fortunate. The king is going to be
married, as I had the honor of informing you in my last letter, and, on
his way to Spain, he will pass through Blois.”

“To pay a visit to Monsieur?”

“Yes, monsieur le comte. So, fearing to find him unprepared, or wishing
to be particularly polite to him, monsieur le prince sent me forward to
have the lodgings ready.”

“You have seen Monsieur?” asked the vicomte, eagerly.

“I have had that honor.”

“At the castle?”

“Yes, monsieur,” replied Raoul, casting down his eyes, because, no
doubt, he had felt there was something more than curiosity in the
comte’s inquiries.

“Ah, indeed, vicomte? Accept my compliments thereupon.”

Raoul bowed.

“But you have seen some one else at Blois?”

“Monsieur, I saw her royal highness, Madame.”

“That’s very well: but it is not Madame that I mean.”

Raoul colored deeply, but made no reply.

“You do not appear to understand me, monsieur le vicomte,” persisted M.
de la Fere, without accenting his words more strongly, but with a
rather severer look.

“I understand you quite plainly, monsieur,” replied Raoul, “and if I
hesitate a little in my reply, you are well assured I am not seeking
for a falsehood.”

“No, you cannot tell a lie, and that makes me so astonished you should
be so long in saying yes or no.”

“I cannot answer you without understanding you very well, and if I have
understood you, you will take my first words in ill part. You will be
displeased, no doubt, monsieur le comte, because I have seen——”

“Mademoiselle de la Vallière—have you not?”

“It was of her you meant to speak, I know very well, monsieur,” said
Raoul, with inexpressible sweetness.

“And I asked you if you have seen her.”

“Monsieur, I was ignorant, when I entered the castle, that Mademoiselle
de la Vallière was there; it was only on my return, after I had
performed my mission, that chance brought us together. I have had the
honor of paying my respects to her.”

“But what do you call the chance that led you into the presence of
Mademoiselle de la Vallière?”

“Mademoiselle de Montalais, monsieur.”

“And who is Mademoiselle de Montalais?”

“A young lady I did not know before, whom I had never seen. She is maid
of honor to Madame.”

“Monsieur le vicomte, I will push my interrogatory no further, and
reproach myself with having carried it so far. I had desired you to
avoid Mademoiselle de la Vallière, and not to see her without my
permission. Oh, I am quite sure you have told me the truth, and that
you took no measures to approach her. Chance has done me this injury; I
do not accuse you of it. I will be content then, with what I formerly
said to you concerning this young lady. I do not reproach her with
anything—God is my witness! only it is not my intention or wish that
you should frequent her place of residence. I beg you once more, my
dear Raoul, to understand that.”

It was plain the limpid eyes of Raoul were troubled at this speech.

“Now, my friend,” said the comte, with his soft smile, and in his
customary tone, “let us talk of other matters. You are returning,
perhaps, to your duty?”

“No, monsieur, I have no duty for to-day, except the pleasure of
remaining with you. The prince kindly appointed me no other: which was
so much in accord with my wish.”

“Is the king well?”

“Perfectly.”

“And monsieur le prince also?”

“As usual, monsieur.”

The comte forgot to inquire after Mazarin; that was an old habit.

“Well, Raoul, since you are entirely mine, I will give up my whole day
to you. Embrace me—again, again! You are at home, vicomte! Ah, there is
our old Grimaud! Come in, Grimaud: monsieur le vicomte is desirous of
embracing you likewise.”

The good old man did not require to be twice told; he rushed in with
open arms, Raoul meeting him halfway.

“Now, if you please, we will go into the garden, Raoul. I will show you
the new lodging I have had prepared for you during your leave of
absence, and whilst examining the last winter’s plantations and two
saddle-horses I have just acquired, you will give me all the news of
our friends in Paris.”

The comte closed his manuscript, took the young man’s arm, and went out
into the garden with him.

Grimaud looked at Raoul with a melancholy air as the young man passed
out; observing that his head nearly touched the traverse of the
doorway, stroking his white royale, he slowly murmured:

“How he has grown!”




CHAPTER 5.
In which Something will be said of Cropoli—of Cropoli and of a Great
Unknown Painter.


Whilst the Comte de la Fere with Raoul visits the new buildings he has
had erected, and the new horses he has bought, with the reader’s
permission we will lead him back to the city of Blois, and make him a
witness of the unaccustomed activity which pervades that city.

It was in the hotels that the surprise of the news brought by Raoul was
most sensibly felt.

In fact, the king and the court at Blois, that is to say, a hundred
horsemen, ten carriages, two hundred horses, as many lackeys as
masters—where was this crowd to be housed? Where were to be lodged all
the gentry of the neighborhood, who would gather in two or three hours
after the news had enlarged the circle of its report, like the
increasing circumference produced by a stone thrown into a placid lake?

Blois, as peaceful in the morning, as we have seen, as the calmest lake
in the world, at the announcement of the royal arrival, was suddenly
filled with the tumult and buzzing of a swarm of bees.

All the servants of the castle, under the inspection of the officers,
were sent into the city in quest of provisions, and ten horsemen were
dispatched to the preserves of Chambord to seek for game, to the
fisheries of Beuvion for fish, and to the gardens of Chaverny for
fruits and flowers.

Precious tapestries, and lusters with great gilt chains, were drawn
from the cupboards; an army of the poor were engaged in sweeping the
courts and washing the stone fronts, whilst their wives went in droves
to the meadows beyond the Loire, to gather green boughs and
field-flowers. The whole city, not to be behind in this luxury of
cleanliness, assumed its best toilette with the help of brushes,
brooms, and water.

The kennels of the upper town, swollen by these continued lotions,
became rivers at the bottom of the city, and the pavement, generally
very muddy, it must be allowed, took a clean face, and absolutely shone
in the friendly rays of the sun.

Next the music was to be provided; drawers were emptied; the
shop-keepers did a glorious trade in wax, ribbons, and sword-knots;
housekeepers laid in stores of bread, meat, and spices. Already numbers
of the citizens whose houses were furnished as if for a siege, having
nothing more to do, donned their festive clothes and directed their
course towards the city gate, in order to be the first to signal or see
the cortege. They knew very well that the king would not arrive before
night, perhaps not before the next morning. Yet what is expectation but
a kind of folly, and what is that folly but an excess of hope?

In the lower city, at scarcely a hundred paces from the Castle of the
States, between the mall and the castle, in a sufficiently handsome
street, then called Rue Vieille, and which must, in fact, have been
very old, stood a venerable edifice, with pointed gables, of squat but
large dimensions, ornamented with three windows looking into the street
on the first floor, with two in the second and with a little oeil de
boeuf in the third.

On the sides of this triangle had recently been constructed a
parallelogram of considerable size, which encroached upon the street
remorselessly, according to the familiar uses of the building of that
period. The street was narrowed by a quarter by it, but then the house
was enlarged by a half; and was not that a sufficient compensation?

Tradition said that this house with the pointed gables was inhabited,
in the time of Henry III., by a councilor of state whom Queen Catherine
came, some say to visit, and others to strangle. However that may be,
the good lady must have stepped with a circumspect foot over the
threshold of this building.

After the councilor had died—whether by strangulation or naturally is
of no consequence—the house had been sold, then abandoned, and lastly
isolated from the other houses of the street. Towards the middle of the
reign of Louis XIII. only, an Italian, named Cropoli, escaped from the
kitchens of the Marquis d’Ancre, came and took possession of this
house. There he established a little hostelry, in which was fabricated
a macaroni so delicious that people came from miles round to fetch it
or eat it.

So famous had the house become for it, that when Mary de Medici was a
prisoner, as we know, in the castle of Blois, she once sent for some.

It was precisely on the day she had escaped by the famous window. The
dish of macaroni was left upon the table, only just tasted by the royal
mouth.

This double favor, of a strangulation and a macaroni, conferred upon
the triangular house, gave poor Cropoli a fancy to grace his hostelry
with a pompous title. But his quality of an Italian was no
recommendation in these times, and his small, well-concealed fortune
forbade attracting too much attention.

When he found himself about to die, which happened in 1643, just after
the death of Louis XIII., he called to him his son, a young cook of
great promise, and with tears in his eyes, he recommended him to
preserve carefully the secret of the macaroni, to Frenchify his name,
and at length, when the political horizon should be cleared from the
clouds which obscured it—this was practiced then as in our day, to
order of the nearest smith a handsome sign, upon which a famous
painter, whom he named, should design two queens’ portraits, with these
words as a legend: “To The Medici.”

The worthy Cropoli, after these recommendations, had only sufficient
time to point out to his young successor a chimney, under the slab of
which he had hidden a thousand ten-franc pieces, and then expired.

Cropoli the younger, like a man of good heart, supported the loss with
resignation, and the gain without insolence. He began by accustoming
the public to sound the final i of his name so little, that by the aid
of general complaisance, he was soon called nothing but M. Cropole,
which is quite a French name. He then married, having had in his eye a
little French girl, from whose parents he extorted a reasonable dowry
by showing them what there was beneath the slab of the chimney.

These two points accomplished, he went in search of the painter who was
to paint the sign; and he was soon found. He was an old Italian, a
rival of the Raphaels and the Caracci, but an unfortunate rival. He
said he was of the Venetian school, doubtless from his fondness for
color. His works, of which he had never sold one, attracted the eye at
a distance of a hundred paces; but they so formidably displeased the
citizens, that he had finished by painting no more.

He boasted of having painted a bath-room for Madame la Marechale
d’Ancre, and mourned over this chamber having been burnt at the time of
the marechal’s disaster.

Cropoli, in his character of a compatriot, was indulgent towards
Pittrino, which was the name of the artist. Perhaps he had seen the
famous pictures of the bath-room. Be this as it may, he held in such
esteem, we may say in such friendship, the famous Pittrino, that he
took him in his own house.

Pittrino, grateful, and fed with macaroni, set about propagating the
reputation of this national dish, and from the time of its founder, he
had rendered, with his indefatigable tongue, signal services to the
house of Cropoli.

As he grew old he attached himself to the son as he had done to the
father, and by degrees became a kind of overlooker of a house in which
his remarkable integrity, his acknowledged sobriety, and a thousand
other virtues useless to enumerate, gave him an eternal place by the
fireside, with a right of inspection over the domestics. Besides this,
it was he who tasted the macaroni, to maintain the pure flavor of the
ancient tradition; and it must be allowed that he never permitted a
grain of pepper too much, or an atom of parmesan too little. His joy
was at its height on that day when called upon to share the secret of
Cropoli the younger, and to paint the famous sign.

He was seen at once rummaging with ardor in an old box, in which he
found some brushes, a little gnawed by the rats, but still passable;
some colors in bladders almost dried up; some linseed-oil in a bottle,
and a palette which had formerly belonged to Bronzino, that dieu de la
pittoure, as the ultramontane artist, in his ever young enthusiasm,
always called him.

Pittrino was puffed up with all the joy of a rehabilitation.

He did as Raphael had done—he changed his style, and painted, in the
fashion of the Albanian, two goddesses rather than two queens. These
illustrious ladies appeared so lovely on the sign,—they presented to
the astonished eyes such an assemblage of lilies and roses, the
enchanting result of the change of style in Pittrino—they assumed the
poses of sirens so Anacreontically—that the principal echevin, when
admitted to view this capital piece in the salle of Cropole, at once
declared that these ladies were too handsome, of too animated a beauty,
to figure as a sign in the eyes of passers-by.

To Pittrino he added, “His royal highness, Monsieur, who often comes
into our city, will not be much pleased to see his illustrious mother
so slightly clothed, and he will send you to the oubliettes of the
state; for, remember, the heart of that glorious prince is not always
tender. You must efface either the two sirens or the legend, without
which I forbid the exhibition of the sign. I say this for your sake,
Master Cropole, as well as for yours, Signor Pittrino.”

What answer could be made to this? It was necessary to thank the
echevin for his kindness, which Cropole did. But Pittrino remained
downcast and said he felt assured of what was about to happen.

The visitor was scarcely gone when Cropole, crossing his arms, said:
“Well, master, what is to be done?”

“We must efface the legend,” said Pittrino, in a melancholy tone. “I
have some excellent ivory-black; it will be done in a moment, and we
will replace the Medici by the nymphs or the sirens, whichever you
prefer.”

“No,” said Cropole, “the will of my father must be carried out. My
father considered——”

“He considered the figures of the most importance,” said Pittrino.

“He thought most of the legend,” said Cropole.

“The proof of the importance in which he held the figures,” said
Pittrino, “is that he desired they should be likenesses, and they are
so.”

“Yes; but if they had not been so, who would have recognized them
without the legend? At the present day even, when the memory of the
Blaisois begins to be faint with regard to these two celebrated
persons, who would recognize Catherine and Mary without the words ‘To
the Medici’?”

“But the figures?” said Pittrino, in despair; for he felt that young
Cropole was right. “I should not like to lose the fruit of my labor.”

“And I should not wish you to be thrown into prison and myself into the
oubliettes.”

“Let us efface ‘Medici,’” said Pittrino, supplicatingly.

“No,” replied Cropole, firmly. “I have got an idea, a sublime idea—your
picture shall appear, and my legend likewise. Does not ‘Medici’ mean
doctor, or physician, in Italian?”

“Yes, in the plural.”

“Well, then, you shall order another sign-frame of the smith; you shall
paint six physicians, and write underneath ‘Aux Medici’ which makes a
very pretty play upon words.”

“Six physicians! impossible! And the composition?” cried Pittrino.

“That is your business—but so it shall be—I insist upon it—it must be
so—my macaroni is burning.”

This reasoning was peremptory—Pittrino obeyed. He composed the sign of
six physicians, with the legend; the echevin applauded and authorized
it.

The sign produced an extravagant success in the city, which proves that
poetry has always been in the wrong, before citizens, as Pittrino said.

Cropole, to make amends to his painter-in-ordinary, hung up the nymphs
of the preceding sign in his bedroom, which made Madame Cropole blush
every time she looked at it, when she was undressing at night.

This is the way in which the pointed-gable house got a sign; and this
is how the hostelry of the Medici, making a fortune, was found to be
enlarged by a quarter, as we have described. And this is how there was
at Blois a hostelry of that name, and had for painter-in-ordinary
Master Pittrino.




CHAPTER 6.
The Unknown.


Thus founded and recommended by its sign, the hostelry of Master
Cropole held its way steadily on towards a solid prosperity.

It was not an immense fortune that Cropole had in perspective; but he
might hope to double the thousand louis d’or left by his father, to
make another thousand louis by the sale of his house and stock, and at
length to live happily like a retired citizen.

Cropole was anxious for gain, and was half-crazy with joy at the news
of the arrival of Louis XIV.

Himself, his wife, Pittrino, and two cooks, immediately laid hands upon
all the inhabitants of the dove-cote, the poultry-yard, and the
rabbit-hutches; so that as many lamentations and cries resounded in the
yards of the hostelry of the Medici as were formerly heard in Rama.

Cropole had, at the time, but one single traveler in his house.

This was a man of scarcely thirty years of age, handsome, tall,
austere, or rather melancholy, in all his gestures and looks.

He was dressed in black velvet with jet trimmings; a white collar, as
plain as that of the severest Puritan, set off the whiteness of his
youthful neck; a small dark-colored mustache scarcely covered his
curled, disdainful lip.

He spoke to people looking them full in the face without affectation,
it is true, but without scruple; so that the brilliancy of his black
eyes became so insupportable, that more than one look had sunk beneath
his like the weaker sword in a single combat.

At this time, in which men, all created equal by God, were divided,
thanks to prejudices, into two distinct castes, the gentleman and the
commoner, as they are really divided into two races, the black and the
white,—at this time, we say, he whose portrait we have just sketched
could not fail of being taken for a gentleman, and of the best class.
To ascertain this, there was no necessity to consult anything but his
hands, long, slender, and white, of which every muscle, every vein,
became apparent through the skin at the least movement, and eloquently
spoke of good descent.

This gentleman, then, had arrived alone at Cropole’s house. He had
taken, without hesitation, without reflection even, the principal
apartment which the hotelier had pointed out to him with a rapacious
aim, very praiseworthy, some will say, very reprehensible will say
others, if they admit that Cropole was a physiognomist and judged
people at first sight.

This apartment was that which composed the whole front of the ancient
triangular house, a large salon, lighted by two windows on the first
stage, a small chamber by the side of it, and another above it.

Now, from the time he had arrived, this gentleman had scarcely touched
any repast that had been served up to him in his chamber. He had spoken
but two words to the host, to warn him that a traveler of the name of
Parry would arrive, and to desire that, when he did, he should be shown
up to him immediately.

He afterwards preserved so profound a silence, that Cropole was almost
offended, so much did he prefer people who were good company.

This gentleman had risen early the morning of the day on which this
history begins, and had placed himself at the window of his salon,
seated upon the ledge, and leaning upon the rail of the balcony, gazing
sadly but persistently on both sides of the street, watching, no doubt,
for the arrival of the traveler he had mentioned to the host.

In this way he had seen the little cortege of Monsieur return from
hunting, then had again partaken of the profound tranquillity of the
street, absorbed in his own expectations.

All at once the movement of the crowd going to the meadows, couriers
setting out, washers of pavement, purveyors of the royal household,
gabbling, scampering shopboys, chariots in motion, hair-dressers on the
run, and pages toiling along, this tumult and bustle had surprised him,
but without losing any of that impassible and supreme majesty which
gives to the eagle and the lion that serene and contemptuous glance
amidst the hurrahs and shouts of hunters or the curious.

Soon the cries of the victims slaughtered in the poultry-yard, the
hasty steps of Madame Cropole up that little wooden staircase, so
narrow and so echoing, the bounding pace of Pittrino, who only that
morning was smoking at the door with all the phlegm of a Dutchman; all
this communicated something like surprise and agitation to the
traveler.

As he was rising to make inquiries, the door of his chamber opened. The
unknown concluded they were about to introduce the impatiently expected
traveler, and made three precipitate steps to meet him.

But, instead of the person he expected, it was Master Cropole who
appeared, and behind him, in the half-dark staircase, the pleasant face
of Madame Cropole, rendered trivial by curiosity. She only gave one
furtive glance at the handsome gentleman, and disappeared.

Cropole advanced, cap in hand, rather bent than bowing.

A gesture of the unknown interrogated him, without a word being
pronounced.

“Monsieur,” said Cropole, “I come to ask how—what ought I to say: your
lordship, monsieur le comte, or monsieur le marquis?”

“Say monsieur, and speak quickly,” replied the unknown, with that
haughty accent which admits of neither discussion nor reply.

“I came, then, to inquire how monsieur had passed the night, and if
monsieur intended to keep this apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Monsieur, something has happened upon which we could not reckon.”

“What?”

“His majesty Louis XIV. will enter our city to-day and will remain here
one day, perhaps two.”

Great astonishment was painted on the countenance of the unknown.

“The King of France coming to Blois?”

“He is on the road, monsieur.”

“Then there is the stronger reason for my remaining,” said the unknown.

“Very well; but will monsieur keep all the apartments?”

“I do not understand you. Why should I require less to-day than
yesterday?”

“Because, monsieur, your lordship will permit me to say, yesterday I
did not think proper, when you chose your lodging, to fix any price
that might have made your lordship believe that I prejudged your
resources; whilst to-day——”

The unknown colored; the idea at once struck him that he was supposed
to be poor, and was being insulted.

“Whilst to-day,” replied he, coldly, “you do prejudge.”

“Monsieur, I am a well-meaning man, thank God! and simple hotelier as I
am, there is in me the blood of a gentleman. My father was a servant
and officer of the late Marechal d’Ancre. God rest his soul!”

“I do not contest that point with you; I only wish to know, and that
quickly, to what your questions tend?”

“You are too reasonable, monsieur, not to comprehend that our city is
small, that the court is about to invade it, that the houses will be
overflowing with inhabitants, and that lodgings will consequently
obtain considerable prices.”

Again the unknown colored. “Name your terms,” said he.

“I name them with scruple, monsieur, because I seek an honest gain, and
that I wish to carry on my business without being uncivil or
extravagant in my demands. Now the room you occupy is considerable, and
you are alone.”

“That is my business.”

“Oh! certainly. I do not mean to turn monsieur out.”

The blood rushed to the temples of the unknown; he darted at poor
Cropole, the descendant of one of the officers of the Marechal d’Ancre,
a glance that would have crushed him down to beneath that famous
chimney-slab, if Cropole had not been nailed to the spot by the
question of his own proper interests.

“Do you desire me to go?” said he. “Explain yourself—but quickly.”

“Monsieur, monsieur, you do not understand me. It is very critical—I
know—that which I am doing. I express myself badly, or perhaps, as
monsieur is a foreigner, which I perceive by his accent——”

In fact, the unknown spoke with that impetuosity which is the principal
character of English accentuation, even among men who speak the French
language with the neatest purity.

“As monsieur is a foreigner, I say, it is perhaps he who does not catch
my exact meaning. I wish for monsieur to give up one or two of the
apartments he occupies, which would diminish his expenses and ease my
conscience. Indeed, it is hard to increase unreasonably the price of
the chambers, when one has had the honor to let them at a reasonable
price.”

“How much does the hire amount to since yesterday?”

“Monsieur, to one louis, with refreshments and the charge for the
horse.”

“Very well, and that of to-day?”

“Ah! there is the difficulty. This is the day of the king’s arrival; if
the court comes to sleep here, the charge of the day is reckoned. From
that it results that three chambers, at two louis each, makes six
louis. Two louis, monsieur, are not much; but six louis make a great
deal.”

The unknown, from red, as we have seen him, became very pale.

He drew from his pocket, with heroic bravery, a purse embroidered with
a coat-of-arms, which he carefully concealed in the hollow of his hand.
This purse was of a thinness, a flabbiness, a hollowness, which did not
escape the eye of Cropole.

The unknown emptied the purse into his hand. It contained three double
louis, which amounted to the six louis demanded by the host.

But it was seven that Cropole had required.

He looked, therefore, at the unknown, as much as to say, “And then?”

“There remains one louis, does there not, master hotelier?”

“Yes, monsieur, but——”

The unknown plunged his hand into the pocket of his haut-de-chausses,
and emptied it. It contained a small pocket-book, a gold key, and some
silver. With this change he made up a louis.

“Thank you, monsieur,” said Cropole. “It now only remains for me to ask
whether monsieur intends to occupy his apartments to-morrow, in which
case I will reserve them for him; whereas, if monsieur does not mean to
do so, I will promise them to some of the king’s people who are
coming.”

“That is but right,” said the unknown, after a long silence, “but as I
have no more money, as you have seen, and as I yet must retain the
apartments, you must either sell this diamond in the city, or hold it
in pledge.”

Cropole looked at the diamond so long, that the unknown said, hastily:

“I prefer your selling it, monsieur; for it is worth three hundred
pistoles. A Jew—are there any Jews in Blois?—would give you two hundred
or a hundred and fifty for it—take whatever may be offered for it, if
it be no more than the price of your lodging. Begone!”

“Oh! monsieur,” replied Cropole, ashamed of the sudden inferiority
which the unknown reflected upon him by this noble and disinterested
confidence, as well as by the unalterable patience opposed to so many
suspicions and evasions. “Oh, monsieur, I hope people are not so
dishonest at Blois as you seem to think, and that the diamond, being
worth what you say——”

The unknown here again darted at Cropole one of his withering glances.

“I really do not understand diamonds, monsieur, I assure you,” cried
he.

“But the jewelers do: ask them,” said the unknown. “Now I believe our
accounts are settled, are they not, monsieur l’hote?”

“Yes, monsieur, and to my profound regret; for I fear I have offended
monsieur.”

“Not at all!” replied the unknown, with ineffable majesty.

“Or have appeared to be extortionate with a noble traveler. Consider,
monsieur, the peculiarity of the case.”

“Say no more about it, I desire; and leave me to myself.”

Cropole bowed profoundly, and left the room with a stupefied air, which
announced that he had a good heart, and felt genuine remorse.

The unknown himself shut the door after him, and when left alone,
looked mournfully at the bottom of the purse, from which he had taken a
small silken bag containing the diamond, his last resource.

He dwelt likewise upon the emptiness of his pockets, turned over the
papers in his pocket-book, and convinced himself of the state of
absolute destitution in which he was about to be plunged.

He raised his eyes towards heaven, with a sublime emotion of despairing
calmness, brushed off with his hand some drops of sweat which trickled
over his noble brow, and then cast down upon the earth a look which
just before had been impressed with almost divine majesty.

That the storm had passed far from him, perhaps he had prayed in the
bottom of his soul.

He drew near to the window, resumed his place in the balcony, and
remained there, motionless, annihilated, dead, till the moment when,
the heavens beginning to darken, the first flambeaux traversed the
enlivened street, and gave the signal for illumination to all the
windows of the city.




CHAPTER 7.
Parry.


Whilst the unknown was viewing these lights with interest, and lending
an ear to the various noises, Master Cropole entered his apartment,
followed by two attendants, who laid the cloth for his meal.

The stranger did not pay them the least attention; but Cropole
approaching him respectfully, whispered “Monsieur, the diamond has been
valued.”

“Ah!” said the traveler. “Well?”

“Well, monsieur, the jeweler of S. A. R. gives two hundred and eighty
pistoles for it.”

“Have you them?”

“I thought it best to take them, monsieur; nevertheless, I made it a
condition of the bargain, that if monsieur wished to keep his diamond,
it should be held till monsieur was again in funds.”

“Oh, no, not at all; I told you to sell it.”

“Then I have obeyed, or nearly so, since, without having definitely
sold it, I have touched the money.”

“Pay yourself,” added the unknown.

“I will do so, monsieur, since you so positively require it.”

A sad smile passed over the lips of the gentleman.

“Place the money on that trunk,” said he, turning round and pointing to
the piece of furniture.

Cropole deposited a tolerably large bag as directed, after having taken
from it the amount of his reckoning.

“Now,” said he, “I hope monsieur will not give me the pain of not
taking any supper. Dinner has already been refused; this is affronting
to the house of les Medici. Look, monsieur, the supper is on the table,
and I venture to say that it is not a bad one.”

The unknown asked for a glass of wine, broke off a morsel of bread, and
did not stir from the window whilst he ate and drank.

Shortly after was heard a loud flourish of trumpets; cries arose in the
distance, a confused buzzing filled the lower part of the city, and the
first distinct sound that struck the ears of the stranger was the tramp
of advancing horses.

“The king! the king!” repeated a noisy and eager crowd.

“The king!” cried Cropole, abandoning his guest and his ideas of
delicacy, to satisfy his curiosity.

With Cropole were mingled, and jostled, on the staircase, Madame
Cropole, Pittrino, and the waiters and scullions.

The cortege advanced slowly, lighted by a thousand flambeaux, in the
streets and from the windows.

After a company of musketeers, a closely ranked troop of gentlemen,
came the litter of monsieur le cardinal, drawn like a carriage by four
black horses. The pages and people of the cardinal marched behind.

Next came the carriage of the queen-mother, with her maids of honor at
the doors, her gentlemen on horseback at both sides.

The king then appeared, mounted upon a splendid horse of Saxon breed,
with a flowing mane. The young prince exhibited, when bowing to some
windows from which issued the most animated acclamations, a noble and
handsome countenance, illumined by the flambeaux of his pages.

By the side of the king, though a little in the rear, the Prince de
Conde, M. Dangeau, and twenty other courtiers, followed by their people
and their baggage, closed this veritably triumphant march. The pomp was
of a military character.

Some of the courtiers—the elder ones, for instance—wore traveling
dresses; but all the rest were clothed in warlike panoply. Many wore
the gorges and buff coat of the times of Henry IV. and Louis XIII.

When the king passed before him, the unknown, who had leant forward
over the balcony to obtain a better view, and who had concealed his
face by leaning on his arm, felt his heart swell and overflow with a
bitter jealousy.

The noise of the trumpets excited him—the popular acclamations deafened
him: for a moment he allowed his reason to be absorbed in this flood of
lights, tumult and brilliant images.

“He is a king!” murmured he, in an accent of despair.

Then, before he had recovered from his sombre reverie all the noise,
all the splendor, had passed away. At the angle of the street there
remained nothing beneath the stranger but a few hoarse, discordant
voices, shouting at intervals, “Vive le Roi!”

There remained likewise the six candles held by the inhabitants of the
hostelry des Medici; that is to say, two for Cropole, two for Pittrino,
and one for each scullion. Cropole never ceased repeating, “How
good-looking the king is! How strongly he resembles his illustrious
father!”

“A handsome likeness!” said Pittrino.

“And what a lofty carriage he has!” added Madame Cropole, already in
promiscuous commentary with her neighbors of both sexes.

Cropole was feeding their gossip with his own personal remarks, without
observing that an old man on foot, but leading a small Irish horse by
the bridle, was endeavoring to penetrate the crowd of men and women
which blocked up the entrance to the Medici. But at that moment the
voice of the stranger was heard from the window.

“Make way, monsieur l’hotelier, to the entrance of your house!”

Cropole turned around, and, on seeing the old man, cleared a passage
for him.

The window was instantly closed.

Pittrino pointed out the way to the newly-arrived guest, who entered
without uttering a word.

The stranger waited for him on the landing; he opened his arms to the
old man and led him to a seat.

“Oh, no, no, my lord!” said he. “Sit down in your presence?—never!”

“Parry,” cried the gentleman, “I beg you will; you come from
England—you come so far. Ah! it is not for your age to undergo the
fatigues my service requires. Rest yourself.”

“I have my reply to give your lordship, in the first place.”

“Parry, I conjure you to tell me nothing; for if your news had been
good, you would not have begun in such a manner; you go about, which
proves that the news is bad.”

“My lord,” said the old man, “do not hasten to alarm yourself, all is
not lost, I hope. You must employ energy, but more particularly
resignation.”

“Parry,” said the young man, “I have reached this place through a
thousand snares and after a thousand difficulties; can you doubt my
energy? I have meditated this journey ten years, in spite of all
counsels and all obstacles—have you faith in my perseverance? I have
this evening sold the last of my father’s diamonds; for I had nothing
wherewith to pay for my lodging and my host was about to turn me out.”

Parry made a gesture of indignation, to which the young man replied by
a pressure of the hand and a smile.

“I have still two hundred and seventy-four pistoles left, and I feel
myself rich. I do not despair, Parry; have you faith in my
resignation?”

The old man raised his trembling hands towards heaven.

“Let me know,” said the stranger,—“disguise nothing from me—what has
happened?”

“My recital will be short, my lord, but in the name of Heaven do not
tremble so.”

“It is impatience, Parry. Come, what did the general say to you?”

“At first the general would not receive me.”

“He took you for a spy?”

“Yes, my lord, but I wrote him a letter.”

“Well?”

“He read it, and received me, my lord.”

“Did that letter thoroughly explain my position and my views?”

“Oh, yes!” said Parry, with a sad smile; “it painted your very thoughts
faithfully.”

“Well—then, Parry?”

“Then the general sent me back the letter by an aide-de-camp, informing
me that if I were found the next day within the circumscription of his
command, he would have me arrested.”

“Arrested!” murmured the young man. “What! arrest you, my most faithful
servant?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“And notwithstanding you had signed the name Parry?”

“To all my letters, my lord; and the aide-de-camp had known me at St.
James’s and at Whitehall, too,” added the old man with a sigh.

The young man leaned forward, thoughtful and sad.

“Ay, that’s what he did before his people,” said he, endeavoring to
cheat himself with hopes. “But, privately—between you and him—what did
he do? Answer!”

“Alas! my lord, he sent to me four cavaliers, who gave me the horse
with which you just now saw me come back. These cavaliers conducted me,
in great haste, to the little port of Tenby, threw me, rather than
embarked me, into a fishing-boat, about to sail for Brittany, and here
I am.”

“Oh!” sighed the young man, clasping his neck convulsively with his
hand, and with a sob. “Parry, is that all?—is that all?”

“Yes, my lord; that is all.”

After this brief reply ensued a long interval of silence, broken only
by the convulsive beating of the heel of the young man on the floor.

The old man endeavored to change the conversation; it was leading to
thoughts much too sinister.

“My lord,” said he, “what is the meaning of all the noise which
preceded me? What are these people crying ‘Vive le Roi!’ for? What king
do they mean? and what are all these lights for?”

“Ah! Parry,” replied the young man ironically, “don’t you know that
this is the King of France visiting his good city of Blois? All those
trumpets are his, all those gilded housings are his, all those
gentlemen wear swords that are his. His mother precedes him in a
carriage magnificently encrusted with silver and gold. Happy mother!
His minister heaps up millions, and conducts him to a rich bride. Then
all these people rejoice, they love their king, they hail him with
their acclamations, and they cry, ‘Vive le Roi! Vive le Roi!’”

“Well, well, my lord,” said Parry, more uneasy at the turn the
conversation had taken than at the other.

“You know,” resumed the unknown, “that my mother and my sister, whilst
all this is going on in honor of the King of France, have neither money
nor bread; you know that I myself shall be poor and degraded within a
fortnight, when all Europe will become acquainted with what you have
told me. Parry, are there not examples in which a man of my condition
should himself——”

“My lord, in the name of Heaven——”

“You are right, Parry, I am a coward, and if I do nothing for myself,
what will God do? No, no, I have two arms, Parry, and I have a sword.”
And he struck his arm violently with his hand and took down his sword,
which hung against the wall.

“What are you going to do, my lord?”

“What am I going to do, Parry? What every one in my family does. My
mother lives on public charity, my sister begs for my mother; I have,
somewhere or other, brothers who equally beg for themselves; and I, the
eldest, will go and do as all the rest do—I will go and ask charity!”

And at these words, which he finished sharply with a nervous and
terrible laugh, the young man girded on his sword, took his hat from
the trunk, fastened to his shoulder a black cloak, which he had worn
during all his journey, and pressing the two hands of the old man, who
watched his proceedings with a look of anxiety,—

“My good Parry,” said he, “order a fire, drink, eat, sleep, and be
happy; let us both be happy, my faithful friend, my only friend. We are
rich, as rich as kings!”

He struck the bag of pistoles with his clenched hand as he spoke, and
it fell heavily to the ground. He resumed that dismal laugh that had so
alarmed Parry; and whilst the whole household was screaming, singing,
and preparing to install the travelers who had been preceded by their
lackeys, he glided out by the principal entrance into the street, where
the old man, who had gone to the window, lost sight of him in a moment.




CHAPTER 8.
What his Majesty King Louis XIV. was at the Age of Twenty-Two


It has been seen, by the account we have endeavored to give of it, that
the entree of King Louis XIV. into the city of Blois had been noisy and
brilliant his young majesty had therefore appeared perfectly satisfied
with it.

On arriving beneath the porch of the Castle of the States, the king
met, surrounded by his guards and gentlemen, with S. A. R. the duke,
Gaston of Orleans, whose physiognomy, naturally rather majestic, had
borrowed on this solemn occasion a fresh luster and a fresh dignity. On
her part, Madame, dressed in her robes of ceremony, awaited, in the
interior balcony, the entrance of her nephew. All the windows of the
old castle, so deserted and dismal on ordinary days, were resplendent
with ladies and lights.

It was then to the sound of drums, trumpets, and vivats, that the young
king crossed the threshold of that castle in which, seventy-two years
before, Henry III. had called in the aid of assassination and treachery
to keep upon his head and in his house a crown which was already
slipping from his brow, to fall into another family.

All eyes, after having admired the young king, so handsome and so
agreeable, sought for that other king of France, much otherwise king
than the former, and so old, so pale, so bent, that people called him
the Cardinal Mazarin.

Louis was at this time endowed with all the natural gifts which make
the perfect gentleman; his eye was brilliant, mild, and of a clear
azure blue. But the most skillful physiognomists, those divers into the
soul, on fixing their looks upon it, if it had been possible for a
subject to sustain the glance of the king,—the most skillful
physiognomists, we say, would never have been able to fathom the depths
of that abyss of mildness. It was with the eyes of the king as with the
immense depths of the azure heavens, or with those more terrific, and
almost as sublime, which the Mediterranean reveals under the keels of
its ships in a clear summer day, a gigantic mirror in which heaven
delights to reflect sometimes its stars, sometimes its storms.

The king was short of stature—he was scarcely five feet two inches: but
his youth made up for this defect, set off likewise by great nobleness
in all his movements, and by considerable address in all bodily
exercises.

Certes, he was already quite a king, and it was a great thing to be a
king in that period of traditional devotedness and respect; but as, up
to that time, he had been but seldom and always poorly shown to the
people, as they to whom he was shown saw him by the side of his mother,
a tall woman, and monsieur le cardinal, a man of commanding presence,
many found him so little of a king as to say,—

“Why, the king is not so tall as monsieur le cardinal!”

Whatever may be thought of these physical observations, which were
principally made in the capital, the young king was welcomed as a god
by the inhabitants of Blois, and almost like a king by his uncle and
aunt, Monsieur and Madame, the inhabitants of the castle.

It must, however, be allowed, that when he saw, in the hall of
reception, chairs of equal height placed for himself, his mother, the
cardinal, and his uncle and aunt, a disposition artfully concealed by
the semicircular form of the assembly, Louis XIV. became red with
anger, and looked around him to ascertain by the countenances of those
that were present, if this humiliation had been prepared for him. But
as he saw nothing upon the impassible visage of the cardinal, nothing
on that of his mother, nothing on those of the assembly, he resigned
himself, and sat down, taking care to be seated before anybody else.

The gentlemen and ladies were presented to their majesties and monsieur
le cardinal.

The king remarked that his mother and he scarcely knew the names of any
of the persons who were presented to them; whilst the cardinal, on the
contrary never failed, with an admirable memory and presence of mind,
to talk to every one about his estates, his ancestors, or his children,
some of whom he named, which enchanted those worthy country gentlemen,
and confirmed them in the idea that he alone is truly king who knows
his subjects, from the same reason that the sun has no rival, because
the sun alone warms and lightens.

The study of the young king, which had begun a long time before,
without anybody suspecting it, was continued then, and he looked around
him attentively to endeavor to make out something in the physiognomies
which had at first appeared the most insignificant and trivial.

A collation was served. The king, without daring to call upon the
hospitality of his uncle, had waited for it impatiently. This time,
therefore, he had all the honors due, if not to his rank, at least to
his appetite.

As to the cardinal, he contented himself with touching with his
withered lips a bouillon, served in a gold cup. The all-powerful
minister, who had taken her regency from the queen, and his royalty
from the king, had not been able to take a good stomach from nature.

Anne of Austria, already suffering from the cancer which six or eight
years after caused her death, ate very little more than the cardinal.

For Monsieur, already puffed up with the great event which had taken
place in his provincial life, he ate nothing whatever.

Madame alone, like a true Lorrainer, kept pace with his majesty; so
that Louis XIV., who, without this partner, might have eaten nearly
alone, was at first much pleased with his aunt, and afterwards with M.
de Saint-Remy, her maitre d’hotel, who had really distinguished
himself.

The collation over, at a sign of approbation from M. de Mazarin, the
king arose, and, at the invitation of his aunt, walked about among the
ranks of the assembly.

The ladies then observed—there are certain things for which women are
as good observers at Blois as at Paris—the ladies then observed that
Louis XIV. had a prompt and bold look, which premised a distinguished
appreciator of beauty. The men, on their part, observed that the prince
was proud and haughty, that he loved to look down those who fixed their
eyes upon him too long or too earnestly, which gave presage of a
master.

Louis XIV. had accomplished about a third of his review when his ears
were struck with a word which his eminence pronounced whilst conversing
with Monsieur.

This word was the name of a woman.

Scarcely had Louis XIV. heard this word than he heard, or rather
listened to nothing else; and neglecting the arc of the circle which
awaited his visit, his object seemed to be to come as quickly as
possible to the extremity of the curve.

Monsieur, like a good courtier, was inquiring of monsieur le cardinal
after the health of his nieces; he regretted, he said, not having the
pleasure of receiving them at the same time with their uncle; they must
certainly have grown in stature, beauty and grace, as they had promised
to do the last time Monsieur had seen them.

What had first struck the king was a certain contrast in the voices of
the two interlocutors. The voice of Monsieur was calm and natural while
he spoke thus; while that of M. de Mazarin jumped by a note and a half
to reply above the diapason of his usual voice. It might have been said
that he wished that voice to strike, at the end of the salon, any ear
that was too distant.

“Monseigneur,” replied he, “Mesdemoiselles de Mazarin have still to
finish their education: they have duties to fulfill, and a position to
make. An abode in a young and brilliant court would dissipate them a
little.”

Louis, at this last sentence, smiled sadly. The court was young, it was
true, but the avarice of the cardinal had taken good care that it
should not be brilliant.

“You have nevertheless no intention,” replied Monsieur, “to cloister
them or make them bourgeoises?”

“Not at all,” replied the cardinal, forcing his Italian pronunciation
in such a manner that, from soft and velvety as it was, it became sharp
and vibrating, “not at all: I have a full and fixed intention to marry
them, and that as well as I shall be able.”

“Parties will not be wanting, monsieur le cardinal,” replied Monsieur,
with a bonhomie worthy of one tradesman congratulating another.

“I hope not, monseigneur, and with reason, as God has been pleased to
give them grace, intelligence, and beauty.”

During this conversation, Louis XIV., conducted by Madame,
accomplished, as we have described, the circle of presentations.

“Mademoiselle Auricule,” said the princess, presenting to his majesty a
fat, fair girl of two-and-twenty, who at a village fete might have been
taken for a peasant in Sunday finery,—“the daughter of my
music-mistress.”

The king smiled. Madame had never been able to extract four correct
notes from either viol or harpsichord.

“Mademoiselle Aure de Montalais,” continued Madame, “a young lady of
rank, and my good attendant.”

This time it was not the king that smiled; it was the young lady
presented, because, for the first time in her life, she heard, given to
her by Madame, who generally showed no tendency to spoil her, such an
honorable qualification.

Our old acquaintance Montalais, therefore, made his majesty a profound
courtesy, the more respectful from the necessity she was under of
concealing certain contractions of her laughing lips, which the king
might not have attributed to their real cause.

It was just at this moment that the king caught the word which startled
him.

“And the name of the third?” asked Monsieur.

“Mary, monseigneur,” replied the cardinal.

There was doubtless some magical influence in that word, for, as we
have said, the king started at hearing it, and drew Madame towards the
middle of the circle, as if he wished to put some confidential question
to her, but, in reality, for the sake of getting nearer to the
cardinal.

“Madame my aunt,” said he, laughing, and in a suppressed voice, “my
geography-master did not teach me that Blois was at such an immense
distance from Paris.”

“What do you mean, nephew?” asked Madame.

“Why, because it would appear that it requires several years, as
regards fashion, to travel the distance!—Look at those young ladies!”

“Well; I know them all.”

“Some of them are pretty.”

“Don’t say that too loud, monsieur my nephew; you will drive them
wild.”

“Stop a bit, stop a bit, dear aunt!” said the king, smiling; “for the
second part of my sentence will serve as a corrective to the first.
Well, my dear aunt, some of them appear old and others ugly, thanks to
their ten-year-old fashions.”

“But, sire, Blois is only five days, journey from Paris.”

“Yes, that is it,” said the king: “two years behind for each day.”

“Indeed! do you really think so? Well, that is strange! It never struck
me.”

“Now, look, aunt,” said Louis XIV., drawing still nearer to Mazarin,
under the pretext of gaining a better point of view, “look at that
simple white dress by the side of those antiquated specimens of finery,
and those pretentious coiffures. She is probably one of my mother’s
maids of honor, though I don’t know her.”

“Ah! ah! my dear nephew!” replied Madame, laughing, “permit me to tell
you that your divinatory science is at fault for once. The young lady
you honor with your praise is not a Parisian, but a Blaisoise.”

“Oh, aunt!” replied the king with a look of doubt.

“Come here, Louise,” said Madame.

And the fair girl, already known to you under that name, approached
them, timid, blushing, and almost bent beneath the royal glance.

“Mademoiselle Louise Francoise de la Baume le Blanc, the daughter of
the Marquise de la Vallière,” said Madame, ceremoniously.

The young girl bowed with so much grace, mingled with the profound
timidity inspired by the presence of the king, that the latter lost,
while looking at her, a few words of the conversation of Monsieur and
the cardinal.

“Daughter-in-law,” continued Madame, “of M. de Saint-Remy, my maitre
d’hotel, who presided over the confection of that excellent daube
truffee which your majesty seemed so much to appreciate.”

No grace, no youth, no beauty, could stand out against such a
presentation. The king smiled. Whether the words of Madame were a
pleasantry, or uttered in all innocency, they proved the pitiless
immolation of everything that Louis had found charming or poetic in the
young girl. Mademoiselle de la Vallière, for Madame and, by rebound,
for the king, was, for a moment, no more than the daughter of a man of
a superior talent over dindes truffees.

But princes are thus constituted. The gods, too, were just like this in
Olympus. Diana and Venus, no doubt, abused the beautiful Alcmena and
poor Io, when they condescended, for distraction’s sake, to speak,
amidst nectar and ambrosia, of mortal beauties, at the table of
Jupiter.

Fortunately, Louise was so bent in her reverential salute, that she did
not catch either Madame’s words or the king’s smile. In fact, if the
poor child, who had so much good taste as alone to have chosen to dress
herself in white amidst all her companions—if that dove’s heart, so
easily accessible to painful emotions, had been touched by the cruel
words of Madame, or the egotistical cold smile of the king, it would
have annihilated her.

And Montalais herself, the girl of ingenious ideas, would not have
attempted to recall her to life; for ridicule kills beauty even.

But fortunately, as we have said, Louise, whose ears were buzzing, and
her eyes veiled by timidity,—Louise saw nothing and heard nothing; and
the king, who had still his attention directed to the conversation of
the cardinal and his uncle, hastened to return to them.

He came up just at the moment Mazarin terminated by saying: “Mary, as
well as her sisters, has just set off for Brouage. I make them follow
the opposite bank of the Loire to that along which we have traveled;
and if I calculate their progress correctly, according to the orders I
have given, they will to-morrow be opposite Blois.”

These words were pronounced with that tact—that measure, that
distinctness of tone, of intention, and reach—which made del Signor
Giulio Mazarini the first comedian in the world.

It resulted that they went straight to the heart of Louis XIV., and the
cardinal, on turning round at the simple noise of the approaching
footsteps of his majesty, saw the immediate effect of them upon the
countenance of his pupil, an effect betrayed to the keen eyes of his
eminence by a slight increase of color. But what was the ventilation of
such a secret to him whose craft had for twenty years deceived all the
diplomatists of Europe?

From the moment the young king heard these last words, he appeared as
if he had received a poisoned arrow in his heart. He could not remain
quiet in a place, but cast around an uncertain, dead, and aimless look
over the assembly. He with his eyes interrogated his mother more than
twenty times: but she, given up to the pleasure of conversing with her
sister-in-law, and likewise constrained by the glance of Mazarin, did
not appear to comprehend any of the supplications conveyed by the looks
of her son.

From this moment, music, lights, flowers, beauties, all became odious
and insipid to Louis XIV. After he had a hundred times bitten his lips,
stretched his legs and his arms like a well-brought-up child who,
without daring to gape, exhausts all the modes of evincing his
weariness—after having uselessly again implored his mother and the
minister, he turned a despairing look towards the door, that is to say,
towards liberty.

At this door, in the embrasure of which he was leaning, he saw,
standing out strongly, a figure with a brown and lofty countenance, an
aquiline nose, a stern but brilliant eye, gray and long hair, a black
mustache, the true type of military beauty, whose gorget, more
sparkling than a mirror, broke all the reflected lights which
concentrated upon it, and sent them back as lightning. This officer
wore his gray hat with its long red plumes upon his head, a proof that
he was called there by his duty, and not by his pleasure. If he had
been brought thither by his pleasure—if he had been a courtier instead
of a soldier, as pleasure must always be paid for at the same price—he
would have held his hat in his hand.

That which proved still better that this officer was upon duty, and was
accomplishing a task to which he was accustomed, was, that he watched,
with folded arms, remarkable indifference, and supreme apathy, the joys
and ennuis of this fete. Above all, he appeared, like a philosopher,
and all old soldiers are philosophers,—he appeared above all to
comprehend the ennuis infinitely better than the joys; but in the one
he took his part, knowing very well how to do without the other.

Now, he was leaning, as we have said, against the carved door-frame
when the melancholy, weary eyes of the king, by chance, met his.

It was not the first time, as it appeared, that the eyes of the officer
had met those eyes, and he was perfectly acquainted with the expression
of them; for, as soon as he had cast his own look upon the countenance
of Louis XIV., and had read by it what was passing in his heart—that is
to say, all the ennui that oppressed him—all the timid desire to go out
which agitated him,—he perceived he must render the king a service
without his commanding it,—almost in spite of himself. Boldly,
therefore, as if he had given the word of command to cavalry in battle,
“On the king’s service!” cried he, in a clear, sonorous voice.

At these words, which produced the effect of a peal of thunder,
prevailing over the orchestra, the singing and the buzz of the
promenaders, the cardinal and the queen-mother looked at each other
with surprise.

Louis XIV., pale, but resolved, supported as he was by that intuition
of his own thought which he had found in the mind of the officer of
musketeers, and which he had just manifested by the order given, arose
from his chair, and took a step towards the door.

“Are you going, my son?” said the queen, whilst Mazarin satisfied
himself with interrogating by a look which might have appeared mild if
it had not been so piercing.

“Yes, madame,” replied the king; “I am fatigued, and, besides, wish to
write this evening.”

A smile stole over the lips of the minister, who appeared, by a bend of
the head, to give the king permission.

Monsieur and Madame hastened to give orders to the officers who
presented themselves.

The king bowed, crossed the hall, and gained the door, where a hedge of
twenty musketeers awaited him. At the extremity of this hedge stood the
officer, impassible, with his drawn sword in his hand. The king passed,
and all the crowd stood on tip-toe, to have one more look at him.

Ten musketeers, opening the crowd of the ante-chambers and the steps,
made way for his majesty. The other ten surrounded the king and
Monsieur, who had insisted upon accompanying his majesty. The domestics
walked behind. This little cortege escorted the king to the chamber
destined for him. The apartment was the same that had been occupied by
Henry III. during his sojourn in the States.

Monsieur had given his orders. The musketeers, led by their officer,
took possession of the little passage by which one wing of the castle
communicates with the other. This passage was commenced by a small
square ante-chamber, dark even in the finest days. Monsieur stopped
Louis XIV.

“You are passing now, sire,” said he, “the very spot where the Duc de
Guise received the first stab of the poniard.”

The king was ignorant of all historical matters; he had heard of the
fact, but he knew nothing of the localities or the details.

“Ah!” said he with a shudder.

And he stopped. The rest, both behind and before him, stopped likewise.

“The duc, sire,” continued Gaston, “was nearly where I stand: he was
walking in the same direction as your majesty; M. de Lorgnes was
exactly where your lieutenant of musketeers is; M. de Saint-Maline and
his majesty’s ordinaries were behind him and around him. It was here
that he was struck.”

The king turned towards his officer, and saw something like a cloud
pass over his martial and daring countenance.

“Yes, from behind!” murmured the lieutenant, with a gesture of supreme
disdain. And he endeavored to resume the march, as if ill at ease at
being between walls formerly defiled by treachery.

But the king, who appeared to wish to be informed, was disposed to give
another look at this dismal spot.

Gaston perceived his nephew’s desire.

“Look, sire,” said he, taking a flambeau from the hands of M. de
Saint-Remy, “this is where he fell. There was a bed there, the curtains
of which he tore with catching at them.”

“Why does the floor seem hollowed out at this spot?” asked Louis.

“Because it was here the blood flowed,” replied Gaston; “the blood
penetrated deeply into the oak, and it was only by cutting it out that
they succeeded in making it disappear. And even then,” added Gaston,
pointing the flambeau to the spot, “even then this red stain resisted
all the attempts made to destroy it.”

Louis XIV. raised his head. Perhaps he was thinking of that bloody
trace that had once been shown him at the Louvre, and which, as a
pendant to that of Blois, had been made there one day by the king his
father with the blood of Concini.

“Let us go on,” said he.

The march was resumed promptly, for emotion, no doubt, had given to the
voice of the young prince a tone of command which was not customary
with him. When arrived at the apartment destined for the king, which
communicated not only with the little passage we have passed through,
but further with the great staircase leading to the court,—

“Will your majesty,” said Gaston, “condescend to occupy this apartment,
all unworthy as it is to receive you?”

“Uncle,” replied the young king, “I render you my thanks for your
cordial hospitality.”

Gaston bowed to his nephew, embraced him, and then went out.

Of the twenty musketeers who had accompanied the king, ten reconducted
Monsieur to the reception-rooms, which were not yet empty,
notwithstanding the king had retired.

The ten others were posted by their officer, who himself explored, in
five minutes, all the localities, with that cold and certain glance
which not even habit gives unless that glance belongs to genius.

Then, when all were placed, he chose as his headquarters the
ante-chamber, in which he found a large fauteuil, a lamp, some wine,
some water: and some dry bread.

He refreshed his lamp, drank half a glass of wine, curled his lip with
a smile full of expression, installed himself in his large armchair,
and made preparations for sleeping.




CHAPTER 9.
In which the Unknown of the Hostelry of Les Medici loses his Incognito.


This officer, who was sleeping, or preparing to sleep, was,
notwithstanding his careless air, charged with a serious
responsibility.

Lieutenant of the king’s musketeers, he commanded all the company which
came from Paris, and that company consisted of a hundred and twenty
men; but, with the exception of the twenty of whom we have spoken, the
other hundred were engaged in guarding the queen-mother, and more
particularly the cardinal.

Monsignor Giulio Mazarini economized the traveling expenses of his
guards; he consequently used the king’s, and that largely, since he
took fifty of them for himself—a peculiarity which would not have
failed to strike any one unacquainted with the usages of that court.

That which would still further have appeared, if not inconvenient, at
least extraordinary, to a stranger, was, that the side of the castle
destined for monsieur le cardinal was brilliant, light and cheerful.
The musketeers there mounted guard before every door, and allowed no
one to enter, except the couriers, who, even while he was traveling,
followed the cardinal for the carrying on of his correspondence.

Twenty men were on duty with the queen-mother; thirty rested, in order
to relieve their companions the next day.

On the king’s side, on the contrary, were darkness, silence, and
solitude. When once the doors were closed, there was no longer an
appearance of royalty. All the servitors had by degrees retired.
Monsieur le Prince had sent to know if his majesty required his
attendance; and on the customary “No” of the lieutenant of musketeers,
who was habituated to the question and the reply, all appeared to sink
into the arms of sleep, as if in the dwelling of a good citizen.

And yet it was possible to hear from the side of the house occupied by
the young king the music of the banquet, and to see the windows of the
great hall richly illuminated.

Ten minutes after his installation in his apartment, Louis XIV. had
been able to learn, by movement much more distinguished than marked his
own leaving, the departure of the cardinal, who, in his turn, sought
his bedroom, accompanied by a large escort of ladies and gentlemen.

Besides, to perceive this movement, he had nothing to do but to look
out at his window, the shutters of which had not been closed.

His eminence crossed the court, conducted by Monsieur, who himself held
a flambeau, then followed the queen-mother, to whom Madame familiarly
gave her arm; and both walked chatting away, like two old friends.

Behind these two couples filed nobles, ladies, pages and officers; the
flambeaux gleamed over the whole court, like the moving reflections of
a conflagration. Then the noise of steps and voices became lost in the
upper floors of the castle.

No one was then thinking of the king, who, leaning on his elbow at his
window, had sadly seen pass away all that light, and heard that noise
die off—no, not one, if it was not that unknown of the hostelry des
Medici, whom we have seen go out, enveloped in his cloak.

He had come straight up to the castle, and had, with his melancholy
countenance, wandered round and round the palace, from which the people
had not yet departed; and finding that no one guarded the great
entrance, or the porch, seeing that the soldiers of Monsieur were
fraternizing with the royal soldiers—that is to say swallowing
Beaugency at discretion, or rather indiscretion—the unknown penetrated
through the crowd, then ascended to the court, and came to the landing
of the staircase leading to the cardinal’s apartment.

What, according to all probability, induced him to direct his steps
that way, was the splendor of the flambeaux, and the busy air of the
pages and domestics. But he was stopped short by a presented musket and
the cry of the sentinel.

“Where are you going, my friend?” asked the soldier.

“I am going to the king’s apartment,” replied the unknown, haughtily,
but tranquilly.

The soldier called one of his eminence’s officers, who, in the tone in
which a youth in office directs a solicitor to a minister, let fall
these words: “The other staircase, in front.”

And the officer, without further notice of the unknown, resumed his
interrupted conversation.

The stranger, without reply, directed his steps towards the staircase
pointed out to him. On this side there was no noise, there were no more
flambeaux.

Obscurity, through which a sentinel glided like a shadow; silence,
which permitted him to hear the sound of his own footsteps, accompanied
with the jingling of his spurs upon the stone slabs.

This guard was one of the twenty musketeers appointed for attendance
upon the king, and who mounted guard with the stiffness and
consciousness of a statue.

“Who goes there?” said the guard.

“A friend,” replied the unknown.

“What do you want?”

“To speak to the king.”

“Do you, my dear monsieur? That’s not very likely.”

“Why not?”

“Because the king has gone to bed.”

“Gone to bed already?”

“Yes.”

“No matter: I must speak to him.”

“And I tell you that is impossible.”

“And yet——”

“Go back!”

“Do you require the word?”

“I have no account to render to you. Stand back!”

And this time the soldier accompanied his word with a threatening
gesture; but the unknown stirred no more than if his feet had taken
root.

“Monsieur le mousquetaire,” said he, “are you a gentleman?”

“I have that honor.”

“Very well! I also am one, and between gentlemen some consideration
ought to be observed.”

The soldier lowered his arms, overcome by the dignity with which these
words were pronounced.

“Speak, monsieur,” said he; “and if you ask me anything in my power——”

“Thank you. You have an officer, have you not?”

“Our lieutenant? Yes, monsieur.”

“Well, I wish to speak to him.”

“Oh, that’s a different thing. Come up, monsieur.”

The unknown saluted the soldier in a lofty fashion, and ascended the
staircase; whilst a cry, “Lieutenant, a visit!” transmitted from
sentinel to sentinel, preceded the unknown, and disturbed the slumbers
of the officer.

Dragging on his boots, rubbing his eyes, and hooking his cloak, the
lieutenant made three steps towards the stranger.

“What can I do to serve you, monsieur?” asked he.

“You are the officer on duty, lieutenant of the musketeers, are you?”

“I have that honor,” replied the officer.

“Monsieur, I must absolutely speak to the king.”

The lieutenant looked attentively at the unknown, and in that look,
however rapid, he saw all he wished to see—that is to say, a person of
high distinction in an ordinary dress.

“I do not suppose you to be mad,” replied he; “and yet you seem to me
to be in a condition to know, monsieur, that people do not enter a
king’s apartments in this manner without his consent.”

“He will consent.”

“Monsieur, permit me to doubt that. The king has retired this quarter
of an hour; he must be now undressing. Besides, the word is given.”

“When he knows who I am, he will recall the word.”

The officer was more and more surprised, more and more subdued.

“If I consent to announce you, may I at least know whom to announce,
monsieur?”

“You will announce His Majesty Charles II., King of England, Scotland,
and Ireland.”

The officer uttered a cry of astonishment, drew back, and there might
be seen upon his pallid countenance one of the most poignant emotions
that ever an energetic man endeavored to drive back to his heart.

“Oh, yes, sire; in fact,” said he, “I ought to have recognized you.”

“You have seen my portrait, then?”

“No, sire.”

“Or else you have seen me formerly at court, before I was driven from
France?”

“No, sire, it is not even that.”

“How then could you have recognized me, if you have never seen my
portrait or my person?”

“Sire, I saw his majesty your father at a terrible moment.”

“The day——”

“Yes.”

A dark cloud passed over the brow of the prince; then, dashing his hand
across it, “Do you still see any difficulty in announcing me?” said he.

“Sire, pardon me,” replied the officer, “but I could not imagine a king
under so simple an exterior; and yet I had the honor to tell your
majesty just now that I had seen Charles I. But pardon me, monsieur; I
will go and inform the king.”

But returning after going a few steps, “Your majesty is desirous,
without doubt, that this interview should be a secret?” said he.

“I do not require it; but if it were possible to preserve it——”

“It is possible, sire, for I can dispense with informing the first
gentleman on duty; but, for that, your majesty must please to consent
to give up your sword.”

“True, true; I had forgotten that no one armed is permitted to enter
the chamber of a king of France.”

“Your majesty will form an exception, if you wish it; but then I shall
avoid my responsibility by informing the king’s attendant.”

“Here is my sword, monsieur. Will you now please to announce me to his
majesty?”

“Instantly, sire.” And the officer immediately went and knocked at the
door of communication, which the valet opened to him.

“His Majesty the King of England!” said the officer.

“His Majesty the King of England!” replied the valet de chambre.

At these words a gentleman opened the folding-doors of the king’s
apartment, and Louis XIV. was seen, without hat or sword, and his
pourpoint open, advancing with signs of the greatest surprise.

“You, my brother—you at Blois!” cried Louis XIV., dismissing with a
gesture both the gentleman and the valet de chambre, who passed out
into the next apartment.

“Sire,” replied Charles II., “I was going to Paris, in the hope of
seeing your majesty, when report informed me of your approaching
arrival in this city. I therefore prolonged my abode here, having
something very particular to communicate to you.”

“Will this closet suit you, my brother?”

“Perfectly well, sire; for I think no one can hear us here.”

“I have dismissed my gentleman and my watcher; they are in the next
chamber. There, behind that partition, is a solitary closet, looking
into the ante-chamber, and in that ante-chamber you found nobody but a
solitary officer, did you?”

“No, sire.”

“Well, then, speak, my brother; I listen to you.”

“Sire, I commence, and entreat your majesty to have pity on the
misfortunes of our house.”

The king of France colored, and drew his chair closer to that of the
king of England.

“Sire,” said Charles II., “I have no need to ask if your majesty is
acquainted with the details of my deplorable history.”

Louis XIV. blushed, this time more strongly than before; then,
stretching forth his hand to that of the king of England, “My brother,”
said he, “I am ashamed to say so, but the cardinal scarcely ever speaks
of political affairs before me. Still more, formerly I used to get
Laporte, my valet de chambre, to read historical subjects to me, but he
put a stop to these readings, and took away Laporte from me. So that I
beg my brother Charles to tell me all those matters as to a man who
knows nothing.”

“Well, sire, I think that by taking things from the beginning I shall
have a better chance of touching the heart of your majesty.”

“Speak on, my brother—speak on.”

“You know, sire, that being called in 1650 to Edinburgh, during
Cromwell’s expedition into Ireland, I was crowned at Scone. A year
after, wounded in one of the provinces he had usurped, Cromwell
returned upon us. To meet him was my object; to leave Scotland was my
wish.”

“And yet,” interrupted the young king, “Scotland is almost your native
country, is it not, my brother?”

“Yes; but the Scots were cruel compatriots for me, sire; they had
forced me to forsake the religion of my fathers; they had hung Lord
Montrose, the most devoted of my servants, because he was not a
Covenanter; and as the poor martyr, to whom they had offered a favor
when dying, had asked that his body might be cut into as many pieces as
there are cities in Scotland, in order that evidence of his fidelity
might be met with everywhere, I could not leave one city, or go into
another, without passing under some fragments of a body which had
acted, fought, and breathed for me.

“By a bold, almost desperate march, I passed through Cromwell’s army,
and entered England. The Protector set out in pursuit of this strange
flight, which had a crown for its object. If I had been able to reach
London before him, without doubt the prize of the race would have been
mine; but he overtook me at Worcester.

“The genius of England was no longer with us, but with him. On the 5th
of September, 1651, sire, the anniversary of the other battle of
Dunbar, so fatal to the Scots, I was conquered. Two thousand men fell
around me before I thought of retreating a step. At length I was
obliged to fly.

“From that moment my history became a romance. Pursued with persistent
inveteracy, I cut off my hair, I disguised myself as a woodman. One day
spent amidst the branches of an oak gave to that tree the name of the
royal oak, which it bears to this day. My adventures in the county of
Stafford, whence I escaped with the daughter of my host on a pillion
behind me, still fill the tales of the country firesides, and would
furnish matter for ballads. I will some day write all this, sire, for
the instruction of my brother kings.

“I will first tell how, on arriving at the residence of Mr. Norton, I
met with a court chaplain, who was looking on at a party playing at
skittles, and an old servant who named me, bursting into tears, and who
was as near and as certainly killing me by his fidelity as another
might have been by treachery. Then I will tell of my terrors—yes, sire,
of my terrors—when, at the house of Colonel Windham, a farrier who came
to shoe our horses declared they had been shod in the north.”

“How strange!” murmured Louis XIV. “I never heard anything of all that;
I was only told of your embarkation at Brighthelmstone and your landing
in Normandy.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Charles, “if Heaven permits kings to be thus ignorant
of the histories of each other, how can they render assistance to their
brothers who need it?”

“But tell me,” continued Louis XIV., “how, after being so roughly
received in England, you can still hope for anything from that unhappy
country and that rebellious people?”

“Oh, sire! since the battle of Worcester, everything is changed there.
Cromwell is dead, after having signed a treaty with France, in which
his name is placed above yours. He died on the 5th of September, 1658,
a fresh anniversary of the battles of Dunbar and Worcester.”

“His son has succeeded him.”

“But certain men have a family, sire, and no heir. The inheritance of
Oliver was too heavy for Richard. Richard was neither a republican nor
a royalist; Richard allowed his guards to eat his dinner, and his
generals to govern the republic; Richard abdicated the protectorate on
the 22nd of April, 1659, more than a year ago, sire.

“From that time England is nothing but a tennis-court, in which the
players throw dice for the crown of my father. The two most eager
players are Lambert and Monk. Well, sire, I, in my turn, wish to take
part in this game, where the stakes are thrown upon my royal mantle.
Sire, it only requires a million to corrupt one of these players and
make an ally of him, or two hundred of your gentlemen to drive them out
of my palace at Whitehall, as Christ drove the money-changers from the
temple.”

“You come, then,” replied Louis XIV., “to ask me——”

“For your assistance, that is to say, not only for that which kings owe
to each other, but that which simple Christians owe to each other—your
assistance, sire, either in money or men. Your assistance, sire, and
within a month, whether I oppose Lambert to Monk, or Monk to Lambert, I
shall have reconquered my paternal inheritance, without having cost my
country a guinea, or my subjects a drop of blood, for they are now all
drunk with revolutions, protectorates, and republics, and ask nothing
better than to fall staggering to sleep in the arms of royalty. Your
assistance, sire, and I shall owe you more than I owe my father,—my
poor father, who bought at so dear a rate the ruin of our house! You
may judge, sire, whether I am unhappy, whether I am in despair, for I
accuse my own father!”

And the blood mounted to the pale face of Charles II., who remained for
an instant with his head between his hands, and as if blinded by that
blood which appeared to revolt against the filial blasphemy.

The young king was not less affected than his elder brother; he threw
himself about in his fauteuil, and could not find a single word of
reply.

Charles II., to whom ten years in age gave a superior strength to
master his emotions, recovered his speech the first.

“Sire,” said he, “your reply? I wait for it as a criminal waits for his
sentence. Must I die?”

“My brother,” replied the French prince, “you ask me for a million—me,
who was never possessed of a quarter of that sum! I possess nothing. I
am no more king of France than you are king of England. I am a name, a
cipher dressed in fleur-de-lised velvet,—that is all. I am upon a
visible throne; that is my only advantage over your majesty. I have
nothing—I can do nothing.”

“Can it be so?” exclaimed Charles II.

“My brother,” said Louis, sinking his voice, “I have undergone miseries
with which my poorest gentlemen are unacquainted. If my poor Laporte
were here, he would tell you that I have slept in ragged sheets,
through the holes of which my legs have passed; he would tell you that
afterwards, when I asked for carriages, they brought me conveyances
half-destroyed by the rats of the coach-houses; he would tell you that
when I asked for my dinner, the servants went to the cardinal’s kitchen
to inquire if there were any dinner for the king. And look! to-day,
this very day even, when I am twenty-two years of age,—to-day, when I
have attained the grade of the majority of kings,—to-day, when I ought
to have the key of the treasury, the direction of the policy, the
supremacy in peace and war,—cast your eyes around me, see how I am
left! Look at this abandonment—this disdain—this silence!—Whilst
yonder—look yonder! View the bustle, the lights, the homage!
There!—there you see the real king of France, my brother!

“In the cardinal’s apartments?”

“Yes, in the cardinal’s apartments.”

“Then I am condemned, sire?”

Louis XIV. made no reply.

“Condemned is the word; for I will never solicit him who left my mother
and sister to die with cold and hunger—the daughter and grand-daughter
of Henry IV.—if M. de Retz and the parliament had not sent them wood
and bread.”

“To die?” murmured Louis XIV.

“Well!” continued the king of England, “poor Charles II., grandson of
Henry IV. as you are, sire, having neither parliament nor Cardinal de
Retz to apply to, will die of hunger, as his mother and sister had
nearly done.”

Louis knitted his brow, and twisted violently the lace of his ruffles.

This prostration, this immobility, serving as a mark to an emotion so
visible, struck Charles II., and he took the young man’s hand.

“Thanks!” said he, “my brother. You pity me, and that is all I can
require of you in your present situation.”

“Sire,” said Louis XIV., with a sudden impulse, and raising his head,
“it is a million you require, or two hundred gentlemen, I think you
say?”

“Sire, a million would be quite sufficient.”

“That is very little.”

“Offered to a single man it is a great deal. Convictions have been
purchased at a much lower price; and I should have nothing to do but
with venalities.”

“Two hundred gentlemen! Reflect!—that is little more than a single
company.”

“Sire, there is in our family a tradition, and that is, that four men,
four French gentlemen, devoted to my father, were near saving my
father, though condemned by a parliament, guarded by an army and
surrounded by a nation.”

“Then if I can procure you a million, or two hundred gentlemen, you
will be satisfied; and you will consider me your well-affectioned
brother?”

“I shall consider you as my saviour; and if I recover the throne of my
father, England will be, as long as I reign at least, a sister to
France, as you will have been a brother to me.”

“Well, my brother,” said Louis, rising, “what you hesitate to ask for,
I will myself demand; that which I have never done on my own account, I
will do on yours. I will go and find the king of France—the other—the
rich, the powerful one, I mean. I will myself solicit this million, or
these two hundred gentlemen; and—we will see.”

“Oh!” cried Charles, “you are a noble friend, sire—a heart created by
God! You save me, my brother; and if you should ever stand in need of
the life you restore me, demand it.”

“Silence, my brother,—silence!” said Louis, in a suppressed voice.
“Take care that no one hears you! We have not obtained our end yet. To
ask money of Mazarin—that is worse than traversing the enchanted
forest, each tree of which inclosed a demon. It is more than setting
out to conquer a world.”

“But yet, sire, when you ask it——”

“I have already told you that I never asked,” replied Louis with a
haughtiness that made the king of England turn pale.

And as the latter, like a wounded man, made a retreating
movement—“Pardon me, my brother,” replied he. “I have neither a mother
nor a sister who are suffering. My throne is hard and naked, but I am
firmly seated on my throne. Pardon me that expression, my brother; it
was that of an egotist. I will retract it, therefore, by a sacrifice,—I
will go to monsieur le cardinal. Wait for me, if you please—I will
return.”




CHAPTER 10.
The Arithmetic of M. de Mazarin


Whilst the king was directing his course rapidly towards the wing of
the castle occupied by the cardinal, taking nobody with him but his
valet de chambre, the officer of musketeers came out, breathing like a
man who has for a long time been forced to hold his breath, from the
little cabinet of which we have already spoken, and which the king
believed to be quite solitary. This little cabinet had formerly been
part of the chamber, from which it was only separated by a thin
partition. It resulted that this partition, which was only for the eye,
permitted the ear the least indiscreet to hear every word spoken in the
chamber.

There was no doubt, then, that this lieutenant of musketeers had heard
all that passed in his majesty’s apartment.

Warned by the last words of the young king, he came out just in time to
salute him on his passage, and to follow him with his eyes till he had
disappeared in the corridor.

Then as soon as he had disappeared, he shook his head after a fashion
peculiarly his own, and in a voice which forty years’ absence from
Gascony had not deprived of its Gascon accent, “A melancholy service,”
said he, “and a melancholy master!”

These words pronounced, the lieutenant resumed his place in his
fauteuil, stretched his legs and closed his eyes, like a man who either
sleeps or meditates.

During this short monologue and the mise en scene that had accompanied
it, whilst the king, through the long corridors of the old castle,
proceeded to the apartment of M. de Mazarin, a scene of another sort
was being enacted in those apartments.

Mazarin was in bed, suffering a little from the gout. But as he was a
man of order, who utilized even pain, he forced his wakefulness to be
the humble servant of his labor. He had consequently ordered Bernouin,
his valet de chambre, to bring him a little traveling-desk, so that he
might write in bed. But the gout is not an adversary that allows itself
to be conquered so easily; therefore, at each movement he made, the
pain from dull became sharp.

“Is Brienne there?” asked he of Bernouin.

“No, monseigneur,” replied the valet de chambre; “M. de Brienne, with
your permission, is gone to bed. But, if it is the wish of your
eminence, he can speedily be called.”

“No, it is not worth while. Let us see, however. Cursed ciphers!”

And the cardinal began to think, counting on his fingers the while.

“Oh, ciphers is it?” said Bernouin. “Very well! if your eminence
attempts calculations, I will promise you a pretty headache to-morrow!
And with that please to remember M. Guenaud is not here.”

“You are right, Bernouin. You must take Brienne’s place, my friend.
Indeed, I ought to have brought M. Colbert with me. That young man goes
on very well, Bernouin, very well; a very orderly youth.”

“I do not know,” said the valet de chambre, “but I don’t like the
countenance of your young man who goes on so well.”

“Well, well, Bernouin! We don’t stand in need of your advice. Place
yourself there: take the pen and write.”

“I am ready, monseigneur; what am I to write?”

“There, that’s the place: after the two lines already traced.”

“I am there.”

“Write seven hundred and sixty thousand livres.”

“That is written.”

“Upon Lyons——” The cardinal appeared to hesitate.

“Upon Lyons,” repeated Bernouin.

“Three millions nine hundred thousand livres.”

“Well, monseigneur?”

“Upon Bordeaux seven millions.”

“Seven?” repeated Bernouin.

“Yes,” said the cardinal, pettishly, “seven.” Then, recollecting
himself, “You understand, Bernouin,” added he, “that all this money is
to be spent?”

“Eh! monseigneur; whether it be to be spent or put away is of very
little consequence to me, since none of these millions are mine.”

“These millions are the king’s; it is the king’s money I am reckoning.
Well, what were we saying? You always interrupt me!”

“Seven millions upon Bordeaux.”

“Ah! yes; that’s right. Upon Madrid four millions. I give you to
understand plainly to whom this money belongs, Bernouin, seeing that
everybody has the stupidity to believe me rich in millions. I repel the
silly idea. A minister, besides, has nothing of his own. Come, go on.
Rentrees generales, seven millions; properties, nine millions. Have you
written that, Bernouin?”

“Yes, monseigneur.”

“Bourse, six hundred thousand livres; various property, two millions.
Ah! I forgot—the furniture of the different chateaux——”

“Must I put of the crown?” asked Bernouin.

“No, no, it is of no use doing that—that is understood. Have you
written that, Bernouin?”

“Yes, monseigneur.”

“And the ciphers?”

“Stand straight under one another.”

“Cast them up, Bernouin.”

“Thirty-nine millions two hundred and sixty thousand livres,
monseigneur.”

“Ah!” cried the cardinal, in a tone of vexation; “there are not yet
forty millions!”

Bernouin recommenced the addition.

“No, monseigneur; there want seven hundred and forty thousand livres.”

Mazarin asked for the account, and revised it carefully.

“Yes, but,” said Bernouin, “thirty-nine millions two hundred and sixty
thousand livres make a good round sum.”

“Ah, Bernouin, I wish the king had it.”

“Your eminence told me that this money was his majesty’s.”

“Doubtless, as clear, as transparent as possible. These thirty-nine
millions are bespoken, and much more.”

Bernouin smiled after his own fashion—that is, like a man who believes
no more than he is willing to believe—whilst preparing the cardinal’s
night draught, and putting his pillow to rights.

“Oh!” said Mazarin, when the valet had gone out; “not yet forty
millions! I must, however, attain that sum, which I had set down for
myself. But who knows whether I shall have time? I sink, I am going, I
shall never reach it! And yet, who knows that I may not find two or
three millions in the pockets of my good friends the Spaniards? They
discovered Peru, those people did, and—what the devil! they must have
something left.”

As he was speaking thus, entirely occupied with his ciphers, and
thinking no more of his gout, repelled by a preoccupation which, with
the cardinal, was the most powerful of all preoccupations, Bernouin
rushed into the chamber, quite in a fright.

“Well!” asked the cardinal, “what is the matter now?”

“The king, monseigneur,—the king!”

“How?—the king!” said Mazarin, quickly concealing his paper. “The king
here! the king at this hour! I thought he was in bed long ago. What is
the matter, then?”

The king could hear these last words, and see the terrified gesture of
the cardinal rising up in his bed, for he entered the chamber at that
moment.

“It is nothing, monsieur le cardinal, or at least nothing which can
alarm you. It is an important communication which I wish to make to
your eminence to-night—that is all.”

Mazarin immediately thought of that marked attention which the king had
given to his words concerning Mademoiselle de Mancini, and the
communication appeared to him probably to refer to this source. He
recovered his serenity then instantly, and assumed his most agreeable
air, a change of countenance which inspired the king with the greatest
joy; and when Louis was seated,—

“Sire,” said the cardinal, “I ought certainly to listen to your majesty
standing, but the violence of my complaint——”

“No ceremony between us, my dear monsieur le cardinal,” said Louis
kindly: “I am your pupil, and not the king, you know very well, and
this evening in particular, as I come to you as a petitioner, as a
solicitor, and one very humble, and desirous to be kindly received,
too.”

Mazarin, seeing the heightened color of the king, was confirmed in his
first idea; that is to say, that love thoughts were hidden under all
these fine words. This time, political cunning, keen as it was, made a
mistake; this color was not caused by the bashfulness of a juvenile
passion, but only by the painful contraction of the royal pride.

Like a good uncle, Mazarin felt disposed to facilitate the confidence.

“Speak, sire,” said he, “and since your majesty is willing for an
instant to forget that I am your subject, and call me your master and
instructor, I promise your majesty my most devoted and tender
consideration.”

“Thanks, monsieur le cardinal,” answered the king; “that which I have
to ask of your eminence has but little to do with myself.”

“So much the worse!” replied the cardinal, “so much the worse! Sire, I
should wish your majesty to ask of me something of importance, even a
sacrifice; but whatever it may be that you ask me, I am ready to set
your heart at rest by granting it, my dear sire.”

“Well, this is what brings me here,” said the king, with a beating of
the heart that had no equal except the beating of the heart of the
minister; “I have just received a visit from my brother, the king of
England.”

Mazarin bounded in his bed as if he had been put in relation with a
Leyden jar or a voltaic pile, at the same time that a surprise, or
rather a manifest disappointment, inflamed his features with such a
blaze of anger, that Louis XIV., little diplomatist as he was, saw that
the minister had hoped to hear something else.

“Charles II.?” exclaimed Mazarin, with a hoarse voice and a disdainful
movement of his lips. “You have received a visit from Charles II.?”

“From King Charles II.,” replied Louis, according in a marked manner to
the grandson of Henry IV. the title which Mazarin had forgotten to give
him. “Yes, monsieur le cardinal, that unhappy prince has touched my
heart with the relation of his misfortunes. His distress is great,
monsieur le cardinal, and it has appeared painful to me, who have seen
my own throne disputed, who have been forced in times of commotion to
quit my capital,—to me, in short, who am acquainted with misfortune,—to
leave a deposed and fugitive brother without assistance.”

“Eh!” said the cardinal, sharply; “why had he not, as you have, a Jules
Mazarin by his side? His crown would then have remained intact.”

“I know all that my house owes to your eminence,” replied the king,
haughtily, “and you may believe well that I, on my part, shall never
forget it. It is precisely because my brother the king of England has
not about him the powerful genius who has saved me, it is for that, I
say, that I wish to conciliate the aid of that same genius, and beg you
to extend your arm over his head, well assured, monsieur le cardinal,
that your hand, by touching him only, would know how to replace upon
his brow the crown which fell at the foot of his father’s scaffold.”

“Sire,” replied Mazarin, “I thank you for your good opinion with regard
to myself, but we have nothing to do yonder: they are a set of madmen
who deny God, and cut off the heads of their kings. They are dangerous,
observe, sire, and filthy to the touch after having wallowed in royal
blood and covenantal murder. That policy has never suited me,—I scorn
it and reject it.”

“Therefore you ought to assist in establishing a better.”

“What is that?”

“The restoration of Charles II., for example.”

“Good heavens!” cried Mazarin, “does the poor prince flatter himself
with that chimera?”

“Yes, he does,” replied the young king, terrified at the difficulties
opposed to this project, which he fancied he could perceive in the
infallible eye of his minister; “he only asks for a million to carry
out his purpose.”

“Is that all—a little million, if you please!” said the cardinal,
ironically, with an effort to conquer his Italian accent. “A little
million, if you please, brother! Bah! a family of mendicants!”

“Cardinal,” said Louis, raising his head, “that family of mendicants is
a branch of my family.”

“Are you rich enough to give millions to other people, sire? Have you
millions to throw away?”

“Oh!” replied Louis XIV., with great pain, which he, however, by a
strong effort, prevented from appearing on his countenance;—“oh! yes,
monsieur le cardinal, I am well aware I am poor, and yet the crown of
France is worth a million, and to perform a good action I would pledge
my crown if it were necessary. I could find Jews who would be willing
to lend me a million.”

“So, sire, you say you want a million?” said Mazarin.

“Yes, monsieur, I say so.”

“You are mistaken, greatly mistaken, sire; you want much more than
that,—Bernouin!—you shall see, sire, how much you really want.”

“What, cardinal!” said the king, “are you going to consult a lackey
about my affairs?”

“Bernouin!” cried the cardinal again, without appearing to remark the
humiliation of the young prince. “Come here, Bernouin, and tell me the
figures I gave you just now.”

“Cardinal, cardinal! did you not hear me?” said Louis, turning pale
with anger.

“Do not be angry, sire; I deal openly with the affairs of your majesty.
Every one in France knows that; my books are as open as day. What did I
tell you to do just now, Bernouin?”

“Your eminence commanded me to cast up an account.”

“You did it, did you not?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“To verify the amount of which his majesty, at this moment, stands in
need. Did I not tell you so? Be frank, my friend.”

“Your eminence said so.”

“Well, what sum did I say I wanted?”

“Forty-five millions, I think.”

“And what sum could we find, after collecting all our resources?”

“Thirty-nine millions two hundred and sixty thousand.”

“That is correct, Bernouin; that is all I wanted to know. Leave us
now,” said the cardinal, fixing his brilliant eye upon the young king,
who sat mute with stupefaction.

“However——” stammered the king.

“What, do you still doubt, sire?” said the cardinal. “Well, here is a
proof of what I said.”

And Mazarin drew from under his bolster the paper covered with figures,
which he presented to the king, who turned away his eyes, his vexation
was so deep.

“Therefore, as it is a million you want, sire, and that million is not
set down here, it is forty-six millions your majesty stands in need of.
Well I don’t think that any Jews in the world would lend such a sum,
even upon the crown of France.”

The king, clenching his hands beneath his ruffles, pushed away his
chair.

“So it must be then!” said he, “my brother the king of England will die
of hunger.”

“Sire,” replied Mazarin, in the same tone, “remember this proverb,
which I give you as the expression of the soundest policy: ‘Rejoice at
being poor when your neighbor is poor likewise.’”

Louis meditated for a few moments, with an inquisitive glance directed
to the paper, one end of which remained under the bolster.

“Then,” said he, “it is impossible to comply with my demand for money,
my lord cardinal, is it?”

“Absolutely, sire.”

“Remember, this will secure me a future enemy, if he succeed in
recovering his crown without my assistance.”

“If your majesty only fears that, you may be quite at ease,” replied
Mazarin, eagerly.

“Very well, I say no more about it,” exclaimed Louis XIV.

“Have I at least convinced you, sire?” placing his hand upon that of
the young king.

“Perfectly.”

“If there be anything else, ask it, sire, I shall be most happy to
grant it to you, having refused this.”

“Anything else, my lord?”

“Why yes, am I not devoted body and soul to your majesty? Hola!
Bernouin!—lights and guards for his majesty! His majesty is returning
to his own chamber.”

“Not yet, monsieur: since you place your good-will at my disposal, I
will take advantage of it.”

“For yourself, sire?” asked the cardinal, hoping that his niece was at
length about to be named.

“No, monsieur, not for myself,” replied Louis, “but still for my
brother Charles.”

The brow of Mazarin again became clouded, and he grumbled a few words
that the king could not catch.




CHAPTER 11.
Mazarin’s Policy


Instead of the hesitation with which he had accosted the cardinal a
quarter of an hour before, there might be read in the eyes of the young
king that will against which a struggle might be maintained, and which
might be crushed by its own impotence, but which, at least, would
preserve, like a wound in the depth of the heart, the remembrance of
its defeat.

“This time, my lord cardinal, we have to deal with something more
easily found than a million.”

“Do you think so, sire?” said Mazarin, looking at the king with that
penetrating eye which was accustomed to read to the bottom of hearts.

“Yes, I think so; and when you know the object of my request——”

“And do you think I do not know it, sire?”

“You know what remains for me to say to you?”

“Listen, sire; these are King Charles’s own words——”

“Oh, impossible!”

“Listen. ‘And if that miserly, beggarly Italian,’ said he——”

“My lord cardinal!”

“That is the sense, if not the words. Eh! Good heavens! I wish him no
ill on that account, one is biased by his passions. He said to you: ‘If
that vile Italian refuses the million we ask of him, sire,—if we are
forced, for want of money, to renounce diplomacy, well, then, we will
ask him to grant us five hundred gentlemen.’”

The king started, for the cardinal was only mistaken in the number.

“Is not that it, sire?” cried the minister, with a triumphant accent.
“And then he added some fine words: he said, ‘I have friends on the
other side of the channel, and these friends only want a leader and a
banner. When they see me, when they behold the banner of France, they
will rally round me, for they will comprehend that I have your support.
The colors of the French uniform will be worth as much to me as the
million M. de Mazarin refuses us,’—for he was pretty well assured I
should refuse him that million.—‘I shall conquer with these five
hundred gentlemen, sire, and all the honor will be yours.’ Now, that is
what he said, or to that purpose, was it not?—turning those plain words
into brilliant metaphors and pompous images, for they are fine talkers
in that family! The father talked even on the scaffold.”

The perspiration of shame stood upon the brow of Louis. He felt that it
was inconsistent with his dignity to hear his brother thus insulted,
but he did not yet know how to act with him to whom every one yielded,
even his mother. At last he made an effort.

“But,” said he, “my lord cardinal, it is not five hundred men, it is
only two hundred.”

“Well, but you see I guessed what he wanted.”

“I never denied that you had a penetrating eye, and that was why I
thought you would not refuse my brother Charles a thing so simple and
so easy to grant him as what I ask of you in his name, my lord
cardinal, or rather in my own.”

“Sire,” said Mazarin, “I have studied policy thirty years; first, under
the auspices of M. le Cardinal de Richelieu; and then alone. This
policy has not always been over-honest, it must be allowed, but it has
never been unskillful. Now that which is proposed to your majesty is
dishonest and unskillful at the same time.”

“Dishonest, monsieur!”

“Sire, you entered into a treaty with Cromwell.”

“Yes, and in that very treaty Cromwell signed his name above mine.”

“Why did you sign yours so low down, sire? Cromwell found a good place,
and he took it; that was his custom. I return, then, to M. Cromwell.
You have a treaty with him, that is to say, with England, since when
you signed that treaty M. Cromwell was England.”

“M. Cromwell is dead.”

“Do you think so, sire?”

“No doubt he is, since his son Richard has succeeded him, and has
abdicated.”

“Yes, that is it exactly. Richard inherited after the death of his
father, and England at the abdication of Richard. The treaty formed
part of the inheritance, whether in the hands of M. Richard or in the
hands of England. The treaty is, then, still as good, as valid as ever.
Why should you evade it, sire? What is changed? Charles wants to-day
what we were not willing to grant him ten years ago; but that was
foreseen and provided against. You are the ally of England, sire, and
not of Charles II. It was doubtless wrong, from a family point of view,
to sign a treaty with a man who had cut off the head of the king your
father’s brother-in-law, and to contract an alliance with a parliament
which they call yonder the Rump Parliament; it was unbecoming, I
acknowledge, but it was not unskillful from a political point of view,
since, thanks to that treaty, I saved your majesty, then a minor, the
trouble and danger of a foreign war, which the Fronde—you remember the
Fronde sire?”—the young king hung his head—“which the Fronde might have
fatally complicated. And thus I prove to your majesty that to change
our plan now; without warning our allies, would be at once unskillful
and dishonest. We should make war with the aggression on our side, we
should make it, deserving to have it made against us, and we should
have the appearance of fearing it whilst provoking it, for a permission
granted to five hundred men, to two hundred men, to fifty men, to ten
men, is still a permission. One Frenchman, that is the nation; one
uniform, that is the army. Suppose, sire, for example, that, sooner or
later, you should have war with Holland, which, sooner or later, will
certainly happen; or with Spain, which will perhaps ensue if your
marriage fails” (Mazarin stole a furtive glance at the king), “and
there are a thousand causes that might yet make your marriage
fail,—well, would you approve of England’s sending to the United
Provinces or to Spain a regiment, a company, a squadron even, of
English gentlemen? Would you think that they kept within the limits of
their treaty of alliance?”

Louis listened; it seemed so strange to him that Mazarin should invoke
good faith, and he the author of so many political tricks, called
Mazarinades. “And yet,” said the king, “without any manifest
authorization, I cannot prevent gentlemen of my states from passing
over into England, if such should be their good pleasure.”

“You should compel them to return, sire, or at least protest against
their presence as enemies in an allied country.”

“But come, my lord cardinal, you who are so profound a genius, try if
you cannot find means to assist this poor king, without compromising
ourselves.”

“And that is exactly what I am not willing to do, my dear sire,” said
Mazarin. “If England were to act exactly according to my wishes, she
could not act better than she does; if I directed the policy of England
from this place, I should not direct it otherwise. Governed as she is
governed, England is an eternal nest of contention for all Europe.
Holland protects Charles II., let Holland do so; they will quarrel,
they will fight. They are the only two maritime powers. Let them
destroy each other’s navies, we can construct ours with the wrecks of
their vessels; when we shall save our money to buy nails.”

“Oh, how paltry and mean is all this that you are telling me, monsieur
le cardinal!”

“Yes, but nevertheless it is true, sire; you must confess that. Still
further. Suppose I admit, for a moment, the possibility of breaking
your word, and evading the treaty—such a thing sometimes happens, but
that is when some great interest is to be promoted by it, or when the
treaty is found to be too troublesome—well, you will authorize the
engagement asked of you: France—her banner, which is the same
thing—will cross the Straits and will fight; France will be conquered.”

“Why so?”

“Ma foi! we have a pretty general to fight under this Charles II.!
Worcester gave us good proofs of that.”

“But he will no longer have to deal with Cromwell, monsieur.”

“But he will have to deal with Monk, who is quite as dangerous. The
brave brewer of whom we are speaking was a visionary; he had moments of
exaltation, of inflation, during which he ran over like an over-filled
cask; and from the chinks there always escaped some drops of his
thoughts, and by the sample the whole of his thought was to be made
out. Cromwell has thus allowed us more than ten times to penetrate into
his very soul, when one would have conceived that soul to be enveloped
in triple brass, as Horace has it. But Monk! Oh, sire, God defend you
from ever having anything to transact politically with Monk. It is he
who has given me, in one year, all the gray hairs I have. Monk is no
fanatic; unfortunately he is a politician; he does not overflow, he
keeps close together. For ten years he has had his eyes fixed upon one
object, and nobody has yet been able to ascertain what. Every morning,
as Louis XI. advised, he burns his nightcap. Therefore, on the day when
this plan slowly and solitarily ripened, shall break forth, it will
break forthwith all the conditions of success which always accompany an
unforeseen event. That is Monk, sire, of whom perhaps, you have never
heard—of whom, perhaps, you did not even know the name before your
brother Charles II., who knows what he is, pronounced it before you. He
is a marvel of depth and tenacity, the two only things against which
intelligence and ardor are blunted. Sire, I had ardor when I was young,
I always was intelligent. I may safely boast of it, because I am
reproached with it. I have done very well with these two qualities,
since, from the son of a fisherman of Piscina, I have become prime
minister to the king of France; and in that position your majesty will
perhaps acknowledge I have rendered some service to the throne of your
majesty. Well, sire, if I had met with Monk on my way, instead of
Monsieur de Beaufort, Monsieur de Retz, or Monsieur le Prince—well, we
should have been ruined. If you engage yourself rashly, sire, you will
fall into the talons of this politic soldier. The casque of Monk, sire,
is an iron coffer, in the recesses of which he shuts up his thoughts,
and no one has the key of it. Therefore, near him, or rather before
him, I bow, sire, for I have nothing but a velvet cap.”

“What do you think Monk wishes to do, then?”

“Eh! sire, if I knew that, I would not tell you to mistrust him, for I
should be stronger than he; but with him, I am afraid to guess—to
guess!—you understand my word?—for if I thought I had guessed, I should
stop at an idea, and, in spite of myself, should pursue that idea.
Since that man has been in power yonder, I am like one of the damned in
Dante whose neck Satan has twisted, and who walk forward looking behind
them. I am traveling towards Madrid, but I never lose sight of London.
To guess, with that devil of a man, is to deceive one’s self, and to
deceive one’s self is to ruin one’s self. God keep me from ever seeking
to guess what he aims at; I confine myself to watching what he does,
and that is well enough. Now I believe—you observe the meaning of the
word I believe?—I believe, with respect to Monk, ties one to nothing—I
believe that he has a strong inclination to succeed Cromwell. Your
Charles II. has already caused proposals to be made to him by ten
persons; he has satisfied himself with driving these ten meddlers from
his presence, without saying anything to them but, ‘Begone, or I will
have you hung.’ That man is a sepulcher! At this moment Monk is
affecting devotion to the Rump Parliament; of this devotion, observe, I
am not the dupe. Monk has no wish to be assassinated,—an assassination
would stop him in the midst of his operations, and his work must be
accomplished;—so I believe—but do not believe, what I believe, sire:
for I say I believe from habit—I believe that Monk is keeping on
friendly terms with the parliament till the day comes for dispersing
it. You are asked for swords, but they are to fight against Monk. God
preserve you from fighting against Monk sire; for Monk would beat us,
and I should never console myself after being beaten by Monk. I should
say to myself, Monk has foreseen that victory ten years. For God’s
sake, sire, out of friendship for you, if not out of consideration for
himself, let Charles II. keep quiet. Your majesty will give him a
little income here; give him one of your chateaux. Yes, yes—wait
awhile. But I forgot the treaty—that famous treaty of which we were
just now speaking. Your majesty has not even the right to give him a
chateau.”

“How is that?”

“Yes, yes, your majesty is bound not to grant hospitality to King
Charles, and to compel him to leave France even. It was on this account
we forced him to quit you, and yet here he is again. Sire, I hope you
will give your brother to understand that he cannot remain with us;
that it is impossible he should be allowed to compromise us, or I
myself——”

“Enough, my lord,” said Louis XIV, rising. “In refusing me a million,
perhaps you may be right; your millions are your own. In refusing me
two hundred gentlemen, you are still further in the right; for you are
prime minister, and you have, in the eyes of France, the responsibility
of peace and war. But that you should pretend to prevent me, who am
king, from extending my hospitality to the grandson of Henry IV., to my
cousin-german, to the companion of my childhood—there your power stops,
and there begins my will.”

“Sire,” said Mazarin, delighted at being let off so cheaply, and who
had, besides, only fought so earnestly to arrive at that,—“sire, I
shall always bend before the will of my king. Let my king, then, keep
near him, or in one of his chateaux, the king of England; let Mazarin
know it, but let not the minister know it.”

“Good-night, my lord,” said Louis XIV., “I go away in despair.”

“But convinced, and that is all I desire, sire,” replied Mazarin.

The king made no answer, and retired quite pensive, convinced, not of
all Mazarin had told him, but of one thing which he took care not to
mention to him; and that was, that it was necessary for him to study
seriously both his own affairs and those of Europe, for he found them
very difficult and very obscure. Louis found the king of England seated
in the same place where he had left him. On perceiving him, the English
prince arose; but at the first glance he saw discouragement written in
dark letters upon his cousin’s brow. Then, speaking first, as if to
facilitate the painful avowal that Louis had to make to him,—

“Whatever it may be,” said he, “I shall never forget all the kindness,
all the friendship you have exhibited towards me.”

“Alas!” replied Louis, in a melancholy tone, “only barren good-will, my
brother.”

Charles II. became extremely pale; he passed his cold hand over his
brow, and struggled for a few instants against a faintness that made
him tremble. “I understand,” said he at last; “no more hope!”

Louis seized the hand of Charles II. “Wait, my brother,” said he;
“precipitate nothing, everything may change; hasty resolutions ruin all
causes, add another year of trial, I implore you, to the years you have
already undergone. You have, to induce you to act now rather than at
another time, neither occasion nor opportunity. Come with me, my
brother; I will give you one of my residences, whichever you prefer, to
inhabit. I, with you, will keep my eyes upon events; we will prepare.
Come, then, my brother, have courage!”

Charles II. withdrew his hand from that of the king, and drawing back,
to salute him with more ceremony, “With all my heart, thanks!” replied
he, “sire; but I have prayed without success to the greatest king on
earth; now I will go and ask a miracle of God.” And he went out without
being willing to hear any more, his head carried loftily, his hand
trembling, with a painful contraction of his noble countenance, and
that profound gloom which, finding no more hope in the world of men,
appeared to go beyond it, and ask it in worlds unknown. The officer of
musketeers, on seeing him pass by thus pale, bowed almost to his knees
as he saluted him. He then took a flambeau, called two musketeers, and
descended the deserted staircase with the unfortunate king, holding in
his left hand his hat, the plume of which swept the steps. Arrived at
the door, the musketeer asked the king which way he was going, that he
might direct the musketeers.

“Monsieur,” replied Charles II., in a subdued voice, “you who have
known my father, say, did you ever pray for him? If you have done so,
do not forget me in your prayers. Now, I am going alone, and beg of you
not to accompany me, or have me accompanied any further.”

The officer bowed and sent away the musketeers into the interior of the
palace. But he himself remained an instant under the porch watching the
departing Charles II., till he was lost in the turn of the next street.
“To him as to his father formerly,” murmured he, “Athos, if he were
here, would say with reason,—‘Salute fallen majesty!’” Then,
reascending the staircase: “Oh! the vile service that I follow!” said
he at every step. “Oh! my pitiful master! Life thus carried on is no
longer tolerable, and it is at length time that I should do something!
No more generosity, no more energy! The master has succeeded, the pupil
is starved forever. Mordioux! I will not resist. Come, you men,”
continued he, entering the ante-chamber, “why are you all looking at me
so? Extinguish these torches and return to your posts. Ah! you were
guarding me? Yes, you watch over me, do you not, worthy fellows? Brave
fools! I am not the Duc de Guise. Begone! They will not assassinate me
in the little passage. Besides,” added he, in a low voice, “that would
be a resolution, and no resolutions have been formed since Monsieur le
Cardinal de Richelieu died. Now, with all his faults, that was a man!
It is settled: to-morrow I will throw my cassock to the nettles.”

Then, reflecting: “No,” said he, “not yet! I have one great trial to
make and I will make it; but that, and I swear it, shall be the last,
Mordioux!”

He had not finished speaking when a voice issued from the king’s
chamber. “Monsieur le lieutenant!” said this voice.

“Here am I,” replied he.

“The king desires to speak to you.”

“Humph!” said the lieutenant; “perhaps of what I was thinking about.”
And he went into the king’s apartment.




CHAPTER 12.
The King and the Lieutenant


As soon as the king saw the officer enter, he dismissed his valet de
chambre and his gentleman. “Who is on duty to-morrow, monsieur?” asked
he.

The lieutenant bowed his head with military politeness and replied, “I
am, sire.”

“What! still you?”

“Always I, sire.”

“How can that be, monsieur?”

“Sire, when traveling, the musketeers supply all the posts of your
majesty’s household; that is to say, yours, her majesty the queen’s,
and monsieur le cardinal’s, the latter of whom borrows of the king the
best part, or rather the most numerous part, of the royal guard.”

“But in the interims?”

“There are no interims, sire, but for twenty or thirty men who rest out
of a hundred and twenty. At the Louvre it is very different, and if I
were at the Louvre I should rely upon my brigadier; but, when
traveling, sire, no one knows what may happen, and I prefer doing my
duty myself.”

“Then you are on guard every day?”

“And every night. Yes, sire.”

“Monsieur, I cannot allow that—I will have you rest.”

“That is very kind, sire, but I will not.”

“What do you say?” said the king who did not at first comprehend the
full meaning of this reply.

“I say, sire, that I will not expose myself to the chance of a fault.
If the devil had a trick to play on me, you understand, sire, as he
knows the man with whom he has to deal, he would choose the moment when
I should not be there. My duty and the peace of my conscience before
everything, sire.”

“But such duty will kill you, monsieur.”

“Eh! sire, I have performed it for thirty years, and in all France and
Navarre there is not a man in better health than I am. Moreover, I
entreat you, sire, not to trouble yourself about me. That would appear
very strange to me, seeing that I am not accustomed to it.”

The king cut short the conversation by a fresh question. “Shall you be
here, then, to-morrow morning?”

“As at present? yes, sire.”

The king walked several times up and down his chamber; it was very
plain that he burned with a desire to speak, but that he was restrained
by some fear or other. The lieutenant, standing motionless, hat in
hand, watched him making these evolutions, and, whilst looking at him,
grumbled to himself, biting his mustache:

“He has not half a crown worth of resolution! Parole d’honneur! I would
lay a wager he does not speak at all!”

The king continued to walk about, casting from time to time a side
glance at the lieutenant. “He is the very image of his father,”
continued the latter, in his secret soliloquy, “he is at once proud,
avaricious, and timid. The devil take his master, say I.”

The king stopped. “Lieutenant,” said he.

“I am here, sire.”

“Why did you cry out this evening, down below in the salons—‘The king’s
service! His majesty’s musketeers!’”

“Because you gave me the order, sire.”

“I?”

“Yourself.”

“Indeed, I did not say a word, monsieur.”

“Sire, an order is given by a sign, by a gesture, by a glance, as
intelligibly, as freely, and as clearly as by word of mouth. A servant
who has nothing but ears is not half a good servant.”

“Your eyes are very penetrating, then, monsieur.”

“How is that, sire?”

“Because they see what is not.”

“My eyes are good, though, sire, although they have served their master
long and much: when they have anything to see, they seldom miss the
opportunity. Now, this evening, they saw that your majesty colored with
endeavoring to conceal the inclination to yawn, that your majesty
looked with eloquent supplications, first at his eminence, and then at
her majesty, the queen-mother, and at length to the entrance door, and
they so thoroughly remarked all I have said, that they saw your
majesty’s lips articulate these words: ‘Who will get me out of this?’”

“Monsieur!”

“Or something to this effect, sire—‘My musketeers!’ I could then no
longer hesitate. That look was for me—the order was for me. I cried out
instantly, ‘His Majesty’s musketeers!’ And, besides, that was shown to
be true, sire, not only by your majesty’s not saying I was wrong, but
proving I was right by going out at once.”

The king turned away to smile; then, after a few seconds, he again
fixed his limpid eye upon that countenance, so intelligent, so bold,
and so firm, that it might have been said to be the proud and energetic
profile of the eagle facing the sun. “That is all very well,” said he,
after a short silence, during which he endeavored, in vain, to make his
officer lower his eyes.

But seeing the king said no more, the latter pirouetted on his heels,
and took three steps towards the door, muttering, “He will not speak!
Mordioux! he will not speak!”

“Thank you, monsieur,” said the king at last.

“Humph!” continued the lieutenant; “there was only wanting that. Blamed
for having been less of a fool than another might have been.” And he
went to the door, allowing his spurs to jingle in true military style.
But when he was on the threshold, feeling that the king’s desire drew
him back, he returned.

“Has your majesty told me all?” asked he, in a tone we cannot describe,
but which, without appearing to solicit the royal confidence, contained
so much persuasive frankness, that the king immediately replied:

“Yes, but draw near, monsieur.”

“Now then,” murmured the officer, “he is coming to it at last.”

“Listen to me.”

“I shall not lose a word, sire.”

“You will mount on horseback to-morrow, at about half-past four in the
morning, and you will have a horse saddled for me.”

“From your majesty’s stables?”

“No, one of your musketeers’ horses.”

“Very well, sire. Is that all?”

“And you will accompany me.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

“Shall I come to seek your majesty, or shall I wait?”

“You will wait for me.”

“Where, sire?”

“At the little park-gate.”

The lieutenant bowed, understanding that the king had told him all he
had to say. In fact, the king dismissed him with a gracious wave of the
hand. The officer left the chamber of the king, and returned to place
himself philosophically in his fauteuil, where, far from sleeping, as
might have been expected, considering how late it was, he began to
reflect more deeply than he had ever reflected before. The result of
these reflections was not so melancholy as the preceding ones had been.

“Come, he has begun,” said he. “Love urges him on, and he goes
forward—he goes forward! The king is nobody in his own palace; but the
man perhaps may prove to be worth something. Well, we shall see
to-morrow morning. Oh! oh!” cried he, all at once starting up, “that is
a gigantic idea, mordioux! and perhaps my fortune depends, at least,
upon that idea!” After this exclamation, the officer arose and marched,
with his hands in the pockets of his justacorps, about the immense
ante-chamber that served him as an apartment. The wax-light flamed
furiously under the effects of a fresh breeze which stole in through
the chinks of the door and the window, and cut the salle diagonally. It
threw out a reddish, unequal light, sometimes brilliant, sometimes
dull, and the tall shadow of the lieutenant was seen marching on the
wall, in profile, like a figure by Callot, with his long sword and
feathered hat.

“Certainly!” said he, “I am mistaken if Mazarin is not laying a snare
for this amorous boy. Mazarin, this evening, gave an address, and made
an appointment as complacently as M. Dangeau himself could have done—I
heard him, and I know the meaning of his words. ‘To-morrow morning,’
said he, ‘they will pass opposite the bridge of Blois. Mordioux! that
is clear enough, and particularly for a lover. That is the cause of
this embarrassment; that is the cause of this hesitation; that is the
cause of this order—‘Monsieur the lieutenant of my musketeers, be on
horseback to-morrow at four o’clock in the morning.’ Which is as clear
as if he had said,—‘Monsieur the lieutenant of my musketeers,
to-morrow, at four, at the bridge of Blois—do you understand?’ Here is
a state secret, then, which I, humble as I am, have in my possession,
while it is in action. And how do I get it? Because I have good eyes,
as his majesty just now said. They say he loves this little Italian
doll furiously. They say he threw himself at his mother’s feet, to beg
her to allow him to marry her. They say the queen went so far as to
consult the court of Rome, whether such a marriage, contracted against
her will, would be valid. Oh, if I were but twenty-five! If I had by my
side those I no longer have! If I did not despise the whole world most
profoundly, I would embroil Mazarin with the queen-mother, France with
Spain, and I would make a queen after my own fashion. But let that
pass.” And the lieutenant snapped his fingers in disdain.

“This miserable Italian—this poor creature—this sordid wretch—who has
just refused the king of England a million, would not perhaps give me a
thousand pistoles for the news I could carry him. Mordioux! I am
falling into second childhood—I am becoming stupid indeed! The idea of
Mazarin giving anything! ha! ha! ha!” and he laughed in a subdued
voice.

“Well, let us go to sleep—let us go to sleep; and the sooner the
better. My mind is wearied with my evening’s work, and will see things
to-morrow more clearly than to-day.”

And upon this recommendation, made to himself, he folded his cloak
around him, looking with contempt upon his royal neighbor. Five minutes
after this he was asleep, with his hands clenched and his lips apart,
giving escape, not to his secret, but to a sonorous sound, which rose
and spread freely beneath the majestic roof of the ante-chamber.




CHAPTER 13.
Mary de Mancini


The sun had scarcely shed its first beams on the majestic trees of the
park and the lofty turrets of the castle, when the young king, who had
been awake more than two hours, possessed by the sleeplessness of love,
opened his shutters himself, and cast an inquiring look into the courts
of the sleeping palace. He saw that it was the hour agreed upon: the
great court clock pointed to a quarter past four. He did not disturb
his valet de chambre, who was sleeping soundly at some distance; he
dressed himself, and the valet, in a great fright sprang up, thinking
he had been deficient in his duty; but the king sent him back again,
commanding him to preserve the most absolute silence. He then descended
the little staircase, went out at a lateral door, and perceived at the
end of the wall a mounted horseman holding another horse by the bridle.
This horseman could not be recognized in his cloak and slouched hat. As
to the horse, saddled like that of a rich citizen, it offered nothing
remarkable to the most experienced eye. Louis took the bridle: the
officer held the stirrup without dismounting, and asked his majesty’s
orders in a low voice.

“Follow me,” replied the king.

The officer put his horse to the trot, behind that of his master, and
they descended the hill towards the bridge. When they reached the other
side of the Loire,—

“Monsieur,” said the king, “you will please to ride on till you see a
carriage coming; then return and inform me. I will wait here.”

“Will your majesty deign to give me some description of the carriage I
am charged to discover?”

“A carriage in which you will see two ladies, and probably their
attendants likewise.”

“Sire, I should not wish to make a mistake; is there no other sign by
which I may know this carriage?”

“It will bear, in all probability, the arms of monsieur le cardinal.”

“That is sufficient, sire,” replied the officer, fully instructed in
the object of his search. He put his horse to the trot, and rode
sharply on in the direction pointed out by the king. But he had
scarcely gone five hundred paces when he saw four mules and then a
carriage, loom up from behind a little hill. Behind this carriage came
another. It required only one glance to assure him that these were the
equipages he was in search of; he therefore turned his bridle, and rode
back to the king.

“Sire,” said he, “here are the carriages. The first, as you said,
contains two ladies with their femmes de chambre; the second contains
the footmen, provisions, and necessaries.”

“That is well,” replied the king in an agitated voice. “Please to go
and tell those ladies that a cavalier of the court wishes to pay his
respects to them alone.”

The officer set off at a gallop. “Mordioux!” said he, as he rode on,
“here is a new and an honorable employment, I hope! I complained of
being nobody. I am the king’s confidant: that is enough to make a
musketeer burst with pride.”

He approached the carriage, a

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