Merivel: A Man of His Time

by Rose Tremain

  ‘I am sorry, Reverend,’ said the Voice, ‘I dislike drawing a man’s attention to any Error he may utter. I do not doubt that you strive to be honest in what you say, but I cannot admit that you own nothing. Have you not, for instance, a Cross hanging about your neck? And would you not prefer for me to take that Cross than for me to wind the chain on which it hangs about your throat and pull upon it till you breathe no more?’

  The Priest’s body, at my side, was now shaking so terribly, I could hear his bones rattling in their sockets and perhaps it was pity for him that caused me to announce: ‘I have a ring, Highwayman! It is a Sapphire and was given to me by His Majesty King Charles, to atone for the frequency with which he used to beat me at Tennis. I vouch it is worth more than any other thing in this coach, so why do you not take this jewel, which may get you a hundred livres, or ten pistoles, which is a deal more than your own pistol is worth. Then you may be gone in peace?’

  I removed the glove of my right hand and was just about to prise the sapphire ring from my finger when a very vast Noise, as of the Thunder of Jupiter, filled all the air around us and I saw the Nose and the Head on which it sat disappear sideways, followed instantly by the Hand and the Flintlock, and I smelled the stench of sulphur, and in through the open door of the coach came the acrid smoke, which was the smoke of a fired Blunderbuss.

  The triplets then gave way to their screaming and the Priest fell forward into the straw. I scrambled to my feet, stepped over the Priest’s recumbent form and went out into the dark. The bitter cold night clamped itself around me and the smoke from the Blunderbuss clouded all vision. But in a very little time it cleared and I could see the Coachman trying to hold the horses to stop them from rearing up and, at my feet, the body of the Highwayman with his head shot clean away. The Guard, holding the Blunderbuss pointed at the Robber’s body, as though wondering whether shooting a man’s head off might not kill him sufficiently, stood there, shaking his head. Then he kicked out at the corpse. ‘I cannot abide them,’ said he. ‘Highwaymen are Vermin. There is not one of them that I do not despatch, whenever I can.’

  I am on the Seas now.

  In my little cabin (which is so small, it reminds me of the room I inhabited when I worked at Whittlesea – which, in turn, reminded me of my broom cupboard at Bidnold) I am endeavouring to write to Margaret, but after my adventures on the Night Coach, I find myself overcome with weariness, and set aside my letter and lay my head down on my mattress of sacking and fall into a deep sleep.

  It is late morning when I wake. The day is very cold, yet the Channel is calm and the rocking of the Ship, which is a Brig taking English Wool to the port of Dieppe, is so gentle that all my fears about the sea travel have vanished. Indeed, I suddenly find myself most enamoured of this means of transportation and wonder why I have never attempted it before.

  I go up and walk about the deck, and marvel at how the lazy wind is just enough to fill our sails and push us onwards, and I feel glad to be alive and not dead on the Dover Road, with my head shot off. I have seen many deaths in my life as a Physician: death by Consumption, death by Convulsion, death by Wasting, death in Childbed, death by Plague and death by Fire. But I have never before seen a man’s head catapulted from his body by a Blunderbuss and I do not think I shall forget it very quickly.

  Yet now I am calm. Out here, on the great ocean, all seems to rejoice at itself: sunlight silvers the wavelets and the wings of the white gulls that follow us, just as they follow the plough, diving for fish in the turning of our wake. The bright pennants flying from the mastheads seem to proclaim a pride in our cargo of wool and in us and in England. And I find my heart to be filled with a ridiculous patriotic joy.

  I strut about like a fat pigeon (I am wearing grey) conversing about this or that thing with the Sailors, uncaring if they think me foolish or mad, and regret only that Margaret is not with me, to feel what I feel and be cheered to see that my Melancholy has, for the time being, departed and been replaced with a sudden zeal for living.

  All the way to France I am a-dazzle with unexpected happiness. But when the French coast at last appears I feel an onrush of disappointment. It is not that the little port of Dieppe appears uninviting, for it does not. It is merely that I have been held in an embrace so strong by the journey that I find I have relinquished the will to arrive.

  My plan had been to hire a carriage and be driven to Versailles without more delay. But as I disembark from the ship I sense that clouding of the air, which always feels to me like the gradual fading of my sight, but which is only the slow coming of the dusk.

  And I know that – cold, now, and parted from my mood of joy – I have not the heart to bargain for a carriage, nor to endure the long ride to my destination without some hours of sleep. To excuse myself this frailty I think once again of the words of Montaigne, who insists that a man’s happiness may be determined by his knowledge, acquired only by slow Degree, of his own capabilities.

  I ask about me for the whereabouts of any hostelry in Dieppe, where I might find food and a bed, and I am directed to what the French call an Auberge, a superior kind of Inn, where I am shown to a handsome room. A fire is lit for me by a Chambermaid, with her hair all a-curl beneath her white cap, and I feel glad that I was not robbed of all my money on the Dover Road, so that I can give her a few grateful sous.

  The room is like a gallery, long and thin, and inhabiting the topmost storey of the building. It is big enough to sleep four or five people, but contains only one bed, curtained with chenille, and having at its foot a quantity of books piled up in a precarious stack. I note within the pile the admirable Commentarius upon the way human speech distinguishes us from the Animals by Théodore Bibliander and, on the top of the stack, a copy of the Fables of Aesop.

  There is also a heavy wooden bureau, set in the middle of the room, as though on an invisible island. On the bureau has been placed an Inkstand and a dozen quills and some pieces of parchment and a painted Globe, showing all that is known of the world. Near the door is a basket of Walking Sticks and a leather cloak, hanging on a nail.

  I walk first to the fire and warm myself, till I feel the chill depart from my hands, and I take a covering off the bed and wrap it round me to comfort me. Then I sit down at the bureau and, finding that my rump fits the chair very snugly, say to myself that surely some Ghost of a Scribe resides here, as though he might be a man who, like me, once wrote the Story of his Life and placed it under his mattress, finding it to be a thing of no value. And this notion, no less than the bedcovering, warms my body and my heart.

  I send down for some wine and a plate of Oysters. In the distance I can hear the sea, breaking on the shores of France.

  My most dear Margaret, I write,

  Now I am truly embarked upon this great and exotic journey of mine. Yet do not imagine that because I am far Away, I am not thinking about Puffins …

  5

  MY JOURNEY BY coach to Versailles was long and, as I travelled the grey road unlit by any sun, with here and there a scattering of poor villages and hovels, it was difficult to believe, seeing much misery around me, that I was moving towards the Great Enormity the King had described to me. But then I remembered that within the word ‘enormity’ lie two meanings: the first being ‘vastness’ and the second being ‘error’.

  His Majesty had requested in his letter that I be given Board and Lodging in the Château, but I reflected, as the weary hours passed, that all depended upon depositing my letter into the hands of King Louis, and my knowledge of the workings of Whitehall was sufficient to remind me that Supplicants for favours, bearing letters to which they cling as to little rafts on a wind-dragged ocean, often find themselves waiting many days without food or sleep in the Royal Corridors. (It is related, though I have not seen this, that some waited so long that they died there and this, I think, is so pathetic as to wake in a man no other reaction than helpless mirth.)

  I tried to put all pessimistic thought out of my mind when at last I sensed that
we were approaching the Palace. The first sign that drew my attention to this was a great noise of hammering and pounding. I opened the window of the coach and this noise grew very loud, and I smelled that the air was clotted with dust and this clotting mingled with a marshy Stench. Then we came upon the source of these things: a widening plain on which a great quantity of Stonecutters were toiling upon blocks of granite and white marble, and Carpenters hewing wood, and all the heavy material of their labours being loaded into carts, drawn by horses and mules.

  This plain extended far to the east and west horizons, and was altogether filled up with this arduous labour. There must have been five hundred men and a hundred horses spread over the earth, which appeared very damp, so that the wheels of the carts were sometimes sunk into it, and the straining of the animals to move the carts pitiful to behold. God be praised that I have never seen a Battlefield, but this is how the scene suggested itself to me, as though blood had mingled with the soil, to make it heavy. And everywhere there were things broken and cast away: ladders and wheels and shafts, and horses themselves, appearing to lie still and dead in the mud.

  I gaped stupidly at this panorama. It seemed to me that, in truth, what lay before me were the workings of the mind of King Louis. Though Versailles stood already garlanded with universal glory, he evidently desired it to be greater yet. He had not finished with Nature but, like the Emperors of Rome, was still tearing at it, to conjure from it wonders never before imagined.

  I remembered the thirty-six thousand souls who had already given their labour to the enterprise, and asked myself how great that number might be now and how great it would become, and how many had perished. And I thought how fortunate I was to be living my life of relative ease in England and not breaking my sinews as a stonecutter, here on a black and malodorous plain, as winter came on.

  I turned my head away. I examined my Letter once again. Beyond the plain was a steep incline, up which my carriage toiled, and then, lo, it was there before me, the Great and Marvellous Palace.

  I admit that it caught at my breath. In an instant, the sufferings of the stonecutters vanished away. Everything vanished away. For here was a disposition of buildings unlike any that I’d ever beheld. I am at pains to describe it with simple words. The best I can set down is to say that the whole seemed, almost, to flow in its wondrous horizontal order, and its colours of pink brick and cream stone to rise up in one harmonious chord, as though it had been conjured there, not by any architect but by a composer of Music. Even the sun colluded with this Song of Magnificence and Beauty by breaking through the grey clouds and etching the buildings with soft winter light, so that the slate roofs gleamed like pewter and the glass of a thousand windows was touched with a diamond brightness, like the high notes from a flute.

  I could have wished it to be deserted, so that I might hear its music played for me alone, or even to be some Picture of itself at which I might pause and gaze in rapt silence. But as we came on, I found my coach surrounded by a throng of people, mostly of the poorer kind, who dared not try to enter at the outer gate and contented themselves by hawking their wares or by performing little feats, such as walking on stilts or turning somersaults, to get a few sous from the Courtiers, as they passed by.

  My coachman drove through this little crowd impatiently, as though they might have been a troupe of geese, sending one man flying off his stilts into the dust, and we entered into the first of the two vast courtyards, built upon ramparts, called the Place des Armes, which lends to the Palace additional space and grandeur.

  Once entered here, it is as though you have come into a city, for everything folds in around you. All you can absorb is the march upon march of ornamented façades, seeming to stretch almost to infinity. The world beyond these façades ceases, on the moment, to exist. Lined up in two great ranks, guarding the portail, beyond which lie the King’s Appartements, are the uniformed Swiss Guards, their ranks moving slowly and in unimpeachable step to the soft beating of twenty or thirty drums.

  The coach drove on to the portail, where our way was barred by Sentries carrying halberds, who had been chosen, no doubt, for their furious dark eyes and their largeness of form. I descended from the coach, a little stiff and bent-over, and dusty and smelling of straw, and took out my Letter. This document – already somewhat creased and dirtied by the journey it had endured (and with a small crack in the sealing wax now horribly visible to me) – was examined by the Sentries with disinclination, as though it might have been the corpse of a mouse, and handed back to me. I was informed peremptorily that my coach could not proceed beyond this point.

  ‘Messieurs,’ said I, in the best French I could muster after all my hours upon the road. ‘Regardez-bien. This is the Great Seal of His Majesty King Charles II of England. This Letter contains his express wish that I be granted an immediate audience with His Majesty King Louis, to whom I am come to offer my services …’

  ‘The King,’ replied the tallest of the sentries, ‘does not grant “Immediate Audiences”. Please make your way to the Grand Commun, over there, where the Correct Formalities for Foreign Supplicants will be explained to you by one of the Surintendents.’

  The Grand Commun was revealed to be the very substantial three-storeyed building to the right of the courtyard, with a great quantity of windows and a press of people coming and going through two doorways. I had no choice but to obey the Sentry, clambering back into the coach, so that I could be driven to one of the doors with my Valises, and here I was set down at last.

  I paid the Coachman and thanked him. As he turned the horses and made to drive away, I put up my hand and waved to him sadly, as though I might have been a Pauper’s child deposited on the steps of an orphanage. And when he had quite gone, I felt all around me the great World of Versailles pressing upon me, as though to sweep me up and lead me on into its thousand wonders, but then pushing past me and buffeting me and showing me a very vast Indifference, and I really did not know, in that sudden instant, what to do or where to turn. I only wished myself younger and more lithe, and with a heart beating more strongly than mine for the great Adventure upon which I had embarked.

  Abandoning my heavy Valises to temporary chance of theft, I entered the Grand Commun, turned left down a passageway and was relieved to find myself, upon opening the first door that I came to, in an enormous kitchen, where fifteen or twenty chefs were preparing some imminent feast. The air was steamy from two great cauldrons of soup upon a blackened range, fragrant with the smell of boiling leeks and onions, and noisy with the shouting and badinage of the chefs as they worked.

  Not having eaten for many hours, I stared about me with longing, noting now a quantity of chickens and rabbits being turned on a roasting spit, and some delectable soft pastries set out to cool upon a marble slab.

  Doffing my hat, I saluted the chefs and said in my inelegant French: ‘Good day to you, Messieurs. I am come out from England, an emissary of my King.’

  One or two of the cooks raised their heads and stared at me. The others merely carried on with their work. Nobody spoke.

  ‘Please forgive the intrusion upon your labours,’ I continued. ‘But I confess I am a little lost. And somewhat hungry.’

  At this, one of the chefs threw a muslin cloth over the pastries, towards which he could see my eyes (if not yet my hand) straying; then he wiped his brow with a corner of his apron and said to me: ‘Please go away, Monsieur. We have no time to talk to strangers.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I understand. But if one of you might direct me … I was advised to ask for the Surintendents du Grand Commun …’

  Taking hold of my arm with his damp, meaty hand, this chef manoeuvred me towards the door through which I had arrived and pointed to a staircase at the far end of the passageway. ‘Surintendents up above,’ he said. ‘Not in the kitchens.’

  For the next hour I walked the corridors of the Grand Commun, where the stone of the ground floor was replaced, on the First étage, by polished wood and great tapestrie
s hung between the windows and marble busts, and statues were everywhere to be seen in a state of such magnificent whiteness, it was as though they had been brought this very day from the studio of the sculptor.

  But it was difficult to look closely at anything, because every great space was choked with people: men and women wearing what I took to be the latest fashions from Paris and vitiating the air with their strong perfumes and their wig powder, and those strange chemicals the women use to paint black moles on their faces.

  I walked among them with a smile on my lips, just as though I were an old habitué of the building, when in truth I had no idea where I was going, or whom, precisely, I was seeking, nor in what direction my orphaned Valises any longer resided.

  I noted, after a while, that some of the Courtiers looked at me strangely and one man, wearing a coat of coral-coloured satin, flicked at my shoulder lightly with his thumb and forefinger, and laughed, before scampering away. And then the others in his company turned and regarded me, and joined in the laughter. I looked down at myself, to see whether mud or straw still clung to my coat, but it appeared clean enough, so I walked on, unknowing. And this is a thing I do detest, that others laugh at me for no reason that I can understand. I am happy to be the butt of a jest, as I frequently was at Whitehall, but to enjoy myself I must know what the jest is about.

  Hunger persecuted me. I was almost ready to go down again to the kitchen and beg a bowl of soup from the chefs, when I was at last shown into the company of one of the Surintendents of the building by a kindly crone, walking in a slow and stately step, under a peculiar coiffure of black lace.

  I felt, by this time, exhausted and teetering on the edge of some kind of madness. I clutched at this Surintendent with a desperate grip. For it seemed to me that the exquisite Order of the façades at Versailles was matched, once one entered the buildings, by a corresponding Chaos. I could make no sense of anything, so I held tightly to this man, like a desperado about to carry him off, guessing that only someone calling himself a Surintendent might possess the means to lighten for me my heavy burden of confusion.