The Cat and the King

by Louis Auchincloss

  It was all I could do to keep from reeling. So this was where all my dreams and ambitions and loyalties were to end up: that I should be the consort of the lady of honor to a child of a bastard! That I should bow my knee to, place the seal of my arms on, the very system that had ben my peculiar abomination!

  “If you will pardon me, sire, for even hesitating in the face of so great and undeserved an honor, would it be presumptuous of me to inquire if the rank of the duchesse de Saint-Simon does not entitle her to be lady of honor to the duchesse de Bourgogne?”

  “But that position is already filled,” the king answered easily. “If the duchesse du Lude should ever relinquish it, it would be time enough to consider your wife’s qualifications.” Oh, yes, he had thought it all out. He knew he had me!

  “Would it be possible, sire, for me to have twenty-four hours in which to consult my wife?”

  “But that’s quite unnecessary, my dear fellow. Madame de Maintenon has already done so and finds her delighted to accept the post. Madame de Maintenon, I do not hide from you, had favored the candidacy of Mademoiselle de Bourbon to marry Berry. One of the conditions of her change of mind was that Madame de Saint-Simon should head the Berry household. So there you are. It all depends on you!”

  Of course, I knew it didn’t. But when such a king as Louis XIV professed to ask your permission to marry two of his grandchildren to each other, what did you do? The valves of the great golden gates of his courtesy had swung them slowly open. There was nothing for me to do now but enter.

  “Madame la duchesse de Saint-Simon will be only too delighted to serve you, sire!”

  The king at once signaled his attendants to turn his wheelchair back to his entourage, and he made the announcement then and there, both of the marriage and of my wife’s appointment. I did not even have the chance to speak to Gabrielle before she became the mistress of a household of five hundred persons, with a larger apartment at Versailles and a salary greater than my whole income! She had proved herself the more skillful courtier, but at what kind of court? The court of absolutism and bastardy, the court that I had dedicated my life to purifying!

  The king’s chair was now turned back towards the palace, and behind it, people crowded up to congratulate me. Some, I suspected, were sarcastic, but the majority meant well enough. We had all, I could only conclude grimly, been made parts of the Versailles system.

  7

  IT WAS not long after these events that the royal family was struck with a series of deaths that seemed to threaten its very survival. First Monseigneur died, at the age of fifty, stricken with smallpox, and the entire court gathered at midnight at Versailles to watch the return of our ancient monarch from his son’s deathbed at Meudon. As the reader can imagine, this news was hardly dire to me. At a single stroke, all the elaborate plottings of Madame la Duchesse and her cabal were swept away. The only thing that astonished me was the attitude of the due d’Orléans, who wept genuine tears of regret for this cousin who had so hated and persecuted him. I urged him to take his sorrow to the privacy of his chamber, for he was bound to be accused of the most odious hypocrisy.

  But the next blow was far, far worse, the greatest tragedy that France has had to sustain in my lifetime. The charming, the enchanting duchesse de Bourgogne suddenly sickened and slipped away from us, followed in a few days’ time, horror of horrors, by her inconsolable husband and the elder of his two infant sons, the due de Bretagne. The king had lost three heirs apparent in less than two years, and the succession now depended on the fragile life of an infant. Who would be regent? Presumably the stupid Berry! And then he died, childless, as a result of a riding accident, leaving the king (except for the Spains) with a single delicate twoyear-old boy for all his legitimate posterity! Even I began to have sinful doubts about a God who allowed the bastards so to multiply and the licit issue to wither on the vine.

  A silver lining to our cloud of woe was the still tighter unification of all classes of our country around our stricken and embattled old sovereign. The allies had missed their opportunity, and when the Treaty of Ryswick was finally signed to end the most devastating of all wars, we found ourselves, however exhausted and impoverished, still in possession of the bulk of the territorial advantages gained in the king’s earlier campaigns. And, of course, Philippe V remained king of Spain, although this, as I had long suspected, turned out to be no great advantage to our country.

  I had hoped to find another silver lining in the rise of the fortunes of the due d’Orléans, who had every claim now, as second heir to the throne, to act as regent for the infant Louis XV, Bourgogne’s second son, when the latter should succeed. Yet this prospect was muddied by the absurd but persistent rumor that Orléans had caused the due and duchesse de Bourgogne to be poisoned. Anyone who knew him knew how incapable he would have been of poisoning the devil himself, but people didn’t know him, or understand him, and his laboratories at St.-Cloud and the Palais-royal were regarded by the superstitious as embassies of hell. I have no doubt that Madame la Duchesse was heaping brushwood on the fires of suspicion; it was rumored that the king himself, convinced by the ever-vindictive Maintenon, had not rejected the accusation out of hand. I cannot emphasize more strongly how bad the situation had become than by pointing out that, in the most sycophantic of courts, the king’s own nephew and second heir to the throne, the probable future regent of the land, was shunned by all but the Saint-Simons!

  In the meanwhile the bastards were at work again. It began to look as if their hour might strike at last. Madame la Duchesse and Madame de Maintenon became passionate allies in promoting the regency of the due du Maine. Madame de Maintenon, Gabrielle reported to me, usually so tactful with the king, was now positively shrill in her arguments that only this pretty bastard son, the king’s favorite of all the litter, could save the House of Bourbon from extinction and oblivion. I felt that my old nightmare was at last coming true.

  The news broke like thunder one hot summer morning that the king, by simple edict to be registered with the parlement of Paris, had raised the due du Maine and the comte de Toulouse to the rank of princes of the blood with rights to succeed to the throne on the extinction of the older branches! When I rushed to our apartment to tell Gabrielle, I found that she already knew. But she seemed, as usual, perfectly composed.

  “What you must do immediately is call upon the due du Maine and congratulate him. Everyone is going there. Let’s not be the last!”

  I stared. “Do you really expect me, Gabrielle, having held all my life to the principles of which you are well aware, to be guilty at this point of such an apostasy?”

  “It’s not an apostasy, Louis; it’s a form.” Gabrielle had taken to using my Christian name ever since she had become a lady of honor. “If, in the new reign, Maine should be the ruling force, this will have been your chance to make up for all the snubs he’s suffered from you. If not, it will be only a bit of politeness that nobody will remember.”

  “Except me. It would be a dead weight on my conscience!”

  “Really, Louis, you’re being even more unreasonable than usual. You owe it to Maine as a family matter. After all, he’s your cousin.”

  “I do not acknowledge him!” I cried indignantly. Never before had Gabrielle dared to fling in my teeth that Madame de Montespan had been a cousin of my mother’s, relating me, indubitably, to her illegal as well as her legal spawn.

  “You can’t just think of yourself in these matters,” Gabrielle continued inexorably. “You must think of your sons. Why should you deny them their place in the sun? It’s all very well for you to say that you’d rather die than live in a France where Maine was king...”

  “King!” I almost shrieked. “Do you have to go that far? We’re only talking about a possible regency.”

  “Not at all. We’ve had four deaths in the direct royal line since 1711. How many more would we need, under the new edict, before Maine succeeded?”

  I did not have to count, but I did, to prolong the agon
y of having to answer her. The weak baby dauphin. Orléans and his little boy. The young due de Bourbon and his two younger brothers. The young Conti. “Seven,” I almost whispered.

  “And most of them mere boys who haven’t had the pox. Oh, it could happen, Louis. Besides, how do you know that the king, now he has the bit in his teeth, won’t put Maine ahead of the young Condés and Contis, distantly related as they are and hardly known to the public? Maine is his son—the son of Louis the Great!”

  I decided that there was no point arguing further the rights or wrongs of the matter with Gabrielle. There were issues that the female of our species simply could not—or would not—see. Had Gabrielle found herself transported in time and space to the court of Attila the Hun, she would have found no difficulty in qualifying as lady-in-waiting to one of his concubines. But her words about our poor two undersized boys, the “beagles,” as they were cruelly known at court, cut deeply into my heart. Should I sacrifice them to my principles? Was I being selfish in my idealism? I had stood by while Gabrielle became lady of honor to Madame de Berry. I had even fostered the Berry marriage. How could I make my sons pay now for such scraps of ideals as I had left? I should have been hanged for a lamb!

  When I presented myself at the apartment of the due du Maine, I found it jammed with a noisy, congratulating crowd of courtiers. Yet such was my reputation for being anti-bastard, that something like a hush fell over the room as the pretty little duke hurried towards me with outstretched arms.

  “Saint-Simon, my dear fellow, I’m so delighted!”

  Even I had to concede that his eyes recalled the beautiful ones of his late (O God!) half-nephew Bourgogne. No one was less sincere, no one more demonstratively affectionate, than this love child of the Montespan. I choked so that I could hardly speak.

  “I have come to offer my congratulations on your elevation, sir. May you live long and prosperously to enjoy it!”

  The bastard now actually embraced me. “It means all the more to me, Saint-Simon, in that the duchess and I believed you antagonistic to the edict.”

  “Allow me to explain that, sir.” I was well aware of the openly smirking members of my acquaintance who moved closer to hear how I should get out of this one. Well, I would show them! “I have been opposed only to the intermediate rank created for you and your brother between the princes of the blood and the peers. I had thought there was neither precedent nor justification for it. But now that the king has seen fit to correct this by increasing the class of princes of the blood, I can think of no more appropriate addition than yourself.”

  At this I thought it best to retire. The ingenuity of my excuse aroused considerable hilarity at court, but I had long since learned how quickly these things passed. I prided myself on having got out of a bad situation as best I could.

  Gabrielle, in the meanwhile, had her hands full with the duchesse de Berry, who, since the death of the duchesse de Bourgogne, had become first lady of the land. I wonder if, since Messalina, any great princess of an imperial court has behaved so grossly. She not only drank to excess and used the foulest language; she made hardly any secret of her lovers, some of the lowest class. As even she would hardly have dared to behave so at Versailles under the eye of the king and of Madame de Maintenon, she spent most of her time at the Luxembourg, which had been given her as an official residence at Berry’s death. Gabrielle ran this great establishment and ran it with the greatest efficiency; it was thanks to her that the public scandal of the duchess’s life was not worse than it was. She occupied a beautiful apartment on the main floor of the palace, where I would sometimes join her for a week at a time.

  “At the pace the duchess is going, she won’t last long,” she told me. “But I shall have put aside enough to last us a lifetime.”

  “Isn’t there anything you can do to stop her?”

  “Do you think me a monster? I would if I could. No, I assure you, it’s hopeless. That poor girl has the drive of Louis XIV and the passion of Madame de Montespan, all without a single compensating principle, either in religion or humanity.”

  Savonne and I were no longer on speaking terms. He haunted the Luxembourg, completely infatuated, drinking more and more, degraded to the point of sharing his adored princess with lackeys. Nonetheless, I was taken by surprise when Gabrielle announced to me that a lettre de cachet had placed him in the Bastille.

  “But why?” I demanded. “Why just him?”

  “I haven’t the least idea. All I know is that it’s where he belongs.”

  I decided that I could not abandon a lifetime friend without a further inquiry, and at Versailles I requested an interview with Madame de Maintenon, stating my concern for my friend and her cousin. The great lady gave me a few minutes before her departure for St. Cyr. She was very old now, pale and a bit haggard, but she held herself as straight as ever, in the high red chair.

  “Your wife knows all about the matter, Monsieur de Saint-Simon,” she said in a cold, clear tone. “But I have no objection to explaining it to you, if she does not care to do so. The due de Savonne has got it into his silly head that he will marry the duchesse de Berry. This, of course, is not only not to be allowed; it is not even to be thought of. The king has given orders that Savonne, if and when he is released from the Bastille, shall be exiled permanently to his estates. Would you suggest that the king had an alternative, sir?”

  “No, ma’am,” I admitted sadly. “I am only sorry for our friend.”

  “I am sorry for all of us, Monsieur de Saint-Simon. There is no point pretending that you and I are not aware of all the horrors that go on at the Luxembourg.”

  “It is indeed a tragedy. Who could have guessed that that charming child should have turned out so?”

  “Your wife could have guessed it!” Madame de Maintenon exclaimed sharply. “Or rather, she knew it all along. She was aware from the beginning of the viciousness of Mademoiselle de Valois’ character. But what did your wife care for poor Berry? All she cared about was to be lady of honor. Well, I suppose she’s no worse than half the court. That’s what we produce, here at Versailles, while we perish in symmetry!”

  “Madame, I must protest! You are not fair to my wife!”

  “Oh, Monsieur de Saint-Simon, go away, please. I’m an old woman, and I’m tired. You have twice interfered with the royal family, and I hope you’re proud of the results.” She put up her hands emphatically as I was about to speak. “That will be all, sir!”

  Gabrielle was at our apartment at Versailles that day, so I did not, dizzy with grief and confusion as I was, have far to go to confront her. But she simply sighed when I blurted out the story of my interview, as if it were almost too much, with all that she had to go through, to be obliged to refute such naïvetés. When she spoke at last, it was in no tone of apology.

  “Of course, it sounds cold-blooded, put that way. I did have a pretty good idea that Mademoiselle de Valois was a bad lot. But what was the alternative for poor Berry? Mademoiselle de Bourbon was not much better. Besides, Berry had been so badly educated, in that idiotic way they treat younger sons, that he would have been an easy dupe for any clever Bourbon princess. It would have been easier had there not been a war. Then he could have been matched with some docile German cow, and I promise you I would have been glad. But as it was, the poor fellow might as well marry where it would do us some good—you thought so yourself—”

  “I did it for Orléans!” I cried in exasperation.

  “Well, it comes to the same thing. We stand with the Orléans. And at least Berry had some wild nights. For that little bitch gave him a good time, I promise you. Oh, yes! He had that, after all, in his short, useless life. And it’s about all he did have. No, Louis, I apologize to no one!”

  “Gabrielle! I want you to resign your post! I can’t have you working any longer for that creature!”

  I had risen in my anger, and she rose now, too, but she was as calm as I was excited.

  “I shall resign my post when the king asks me to, and
not a minute before. So direct your plea to him, if you dare. And let me say this. I have given you every chance through the years to make a position for our children, and all you have done is dissipate our assets. You have achieved neither post nor honor. You have spent your life jumping up and down in idle protest against a great king. So I had at last to decide to do things my own way. I managed to secure the money and position the children need. I hedged my bets against the future. Whatever happens in the new reign, we shall have our chance. Leave me alone, Louis. Leave me to do things my way. I always promised that I would help you. I still think I have!”

  “And what do you leave me?” I cried in misery.

  “I leave you the last word. Write about us. We shall have existed only for you!”

  8

  AND THEN the unthinkable thing—or rather, the only thing about which we had been thinking—happened. The king died. On September first, 1715, after the longest reign in recorded history, seventy-two years, Louis XIV bequeathed the throne that, even after the terrible reverses of the Spanish war, he had made the first of the civilized world, to a child of five. I, with hundreds of others, silent and awed, had watched him, day and night, to the very end, stiff, formidable, unable to eat and hardly to drink, refusing until the last minute to abandon his rigid routine. He had lived on stage, and he died on stage, never out of character, never missing a cue.