The Cat and the King

by Louis Auchincloss

  Why do we ever worry about the future? It may be better than we have hoped, or far worse than we have dreaded, but we can be sure that it will never be what we anticipated. That was the lesson I learned in the first years of the new reign. I had been quite accurate in surmising that Madame de Maintenon and the due du Maine would have prevailed with the dying old king to leave a will conferring the governorship of the young Louis XV and a seat on the regency council upon Maine, but what I had not predicted was that the due d’Orléans should have persuaded the parlement, without the slightest difficulty, to invalidate the testament and recognize his absolute regency.

  Even better things were to come. The regent, who had kept his old antagonism against the bastards more alive than I should have thought likely in one so easygoing, now proceeded to direct a supine parlement to strip the due du Maine and the comte de Toulouse of their status as princes of the blood, to deny them and their issue all rights of succession to the crown and to reduce them to the peerage, ranking them only with the dates of their titles. At last I took precedence over the wretched Maine, and the day of his humiliation, when I caught his shame-faced eye with my own triumphant one across the chamber of parlement, was perhaps the most glorious of my lifetime.

  Gabrielle was never a woman to indulge the mood of “I told you so.” All she said, when I returned from the ceremony, was “So there’s your dragon—all paint and smoke.” And after that, very wisely and kindly, she did not refer to the matter again.

  We were tranquil together once more, she and I, in those early days of the regency. Our differences had disappeared. Orléans, who was as hopeless a parent as he was capable a statesman, allowed his favorite child to do anything she wanted, so Gabrielle no longer had to make efforts to keep her respectable, and was able to confine her task as lady of honor to the remunerative business of running the Luxembourg. Versailles had been closed, and the young king moved to the château de Vincennes, so the capital of France was again Paris, or rather the Palais-royal, to which I repaired almost daily as a member, appointed by Orléans, of the great regency council. I had re-occupied my comfortable hôtel in Paris, for my mother, now very old, preferred to live in La Ferté. It was, on the whole, a good life.

  So why should I have not been indefinitely contented? We had weathered the crisis of the great king’s passing. The bastards had been put in their place. Orléans had been restored to his rightful position. The young king had improved in health and was beautiful to look upon. Why was not all for the best in our fair land of France?

  The answer, I think, lay in the complicated character of Orléans himself. He was wise, shrewd, quick-witted and generous. He was totally devoid of vindictiveness. He allowed Maine, once reduced to his proper status, to keep all his wealth and other honors. Even those who had wickedly conspired against the regent were let off with simple admonitions. Hardly a day went by at the Palais-royal when I did not see him sign a pardon or mitigate some ghastly punishment. In foreign affairs he adopted the healthy policy of healing the open wound between England and ourselves, and he made every effort to conciliate the suspicious and still resentful king of Spain.

  Yet he was like the child in the fairy story who had received every gift but the knack of coordinating them. What seemed to me his deepest deficiency was in any real faith in himself, or in the House of France, or in God. It was as if he were playing a part, and laughing at us for trying to believe in him. I suspected that the only times he considered that he was actually living were when he retired in the evening with a group of debauched friends, including, alas, his Messalina of an oldest daughter, behind doors that were not to be opened except in the direst emergency, and dined and wined and God knows what else, waited on by handsome servants of both sexes, until the small hours. How could these orgies not have affected the morale of our government from top to bottom?

  Of course, they did. The word “regency” to this day has a ring of free living, loose manners, godlessness. And then, too, the regent’s stubborn passion for experimentation was productive of disaster. It was he who encouraged that wily Scot, John Law (whose surname should have been just the opposite), to launch his Mississippi Company, which embarked the whole nation on a torrent of inflationary spending. Nothing could have been more destructive of the ordered hierarchy of our society. I had always supposed that if our system were ever to be toppled, it would be by a revolution, as in England, when the Puritans had cut off the head of Charles I, great-great-grandfather of our own infant king. But now I saw that violence and bloodshed would not necessarily be required. With inflation a lackey could become a millionaire, and a duke a bankrupt. The figures did it all.

  But when I protested to Orléans about what the world was becoming, he would simply laugh at me.

  “Really, my friend, do you think I can change the shape of history? You are very flattering. Even my uncle could not do that.”

  When arrangements were made to marry his daughter Mademoiselle de Montpensier to the prince of the Asturias, heir to Philippe V, I asked Orléans if he would appoint me to the post of special ambassador to escort the young princess to Madrid.

  “I can’t imagine a better man for the job!” he exclaimed cheerfully. “You’re the only person who can beat the Spaniards in etiquette!”

  Gabrielle had no idea of making the arduous trip to Spain, and she objected to the immense personal expenses to which I would be subjected. When I pointed out, however, that my real objective was to obtain the rank of Spanish grandee, which under the circumstances Philippe V could hardly refuse me, and confer it on our second son, she withdrew her objections.

  I have described my journey with the moody, truculent little princess in my memoirs, so I need not repeat it here. But what I wish to emphasize was the effect upon me of the ceremonial of the court of Spain. At first, it seemed as if I had died and gone to heaven. At the Escorial, at the royal palace in Madrid, at Aranjuez, amidst a splendor as great as any at Versailles in the old days, huge numbers of perfectly attired gentlemen and ladies attended their sovereign with the ease and smartness of well-drilled troops. Everyone seemed to know his exact place and his precise duty, and disputes, if any, were legally, if a bit lengthily, processed. An air of exquisite courtesy pervaded the court, so much so that I wondered at first why these Latins had such a reputation for passion, hot blood and duels. In time I learned that all these latter things indeed existed, but that they had been woven into their proper places in the great tapestry of etiquette.

  When the preliminary ceremonials were over, and the slow work on the marriage papers commenced, I began at last to learn the heavy price that the Spaniards had paid for the perfection of their forms, and I even found myself yearning for what had seemed to me the slapdash methods of the Palais-royal. And by the time we had signed terms that had really been agreed upon by correspondence long before my departure from Paris, I was in a mood (though I had obtained my grandeeship) to see the Iberian court as a mere caricature of my ideal. This in turn raised sad doubts about my own lifetime involvement with rules and precedents. Oh, yes, under that hot Spanish sky I had misgivings as well as headaches! It was not a happy time.

  And then came the curious episode, the aftermath of which constituted, in some curious way, my redemption. When I went to take my leave of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, the future queen of Spain (poor child, she was to be it for a short enough time), I found her standing on a dais, surrounded by her new ladies. As I approached and bowed low to ask her if she had any messages for her parents or for her grandmother, she simply stared at me for a moment and then opened her mouth and gave vent to a resounding belch!

  It was followed by another and then another. In the burst of rude laughter that now riotously filled that sedate chamber there was nothing I could do but simply turn and take to my heels. It was as if those belches and those shouts of laughter had been sweeping me out of court and out of Spain, sweeping away the whole meretricious fabric of our civilization. Could I survive this vivid protest of
a lonely child, exiled forever from her friends and family, married off to a stranger, to be buried alive in a frozen court where so many French princesses before her had eaten out their hearts in sorrow and died young, to be encased in massive marble in the subterranean vaults of the Escorial?

  Fortunately, I had a long voyage home and the chance to make many reflections. The most important of these was that if the present, or the future, which so mocked me, was represented by a belch, it could not be anything that I had to regard as much superior to my own lares and penates. That one way of life may have been shown up as inadequate did not mean that the first substitute at hand was any better. Was the belching little princess of the Asturias, or her drunken promiscuous older sister, any better, for that matter, than her splendid, adulterous grandmother, Madame de Montespan? Even if I should have to concede that, moral for moral, the regency was no worse than the great days of Louis XIV, at least the sinners of that older time had had style. And wasn’t style a hedge against chaos? Mightn’t it be, at the very worst, our only one?

  When the terrible czar Peter had visited Paris after the death of the old king, he had insisted on seeing Madame de Maintenon. He was told that she lived in absolute retirement at St. Cyr and received no one. Nothing daunted, the giant Slav pushed his way into the convent school, stamped into the great lady’s chamber and yanked aside the curtains of her bed. For a long, grim silent moment the barbarian of the north and the octogenarian dowager stared at each other. Then he let the curtains drop. Two centuries had come face to face. It was a question as to which had had the upper hand.

  Thinking of this episode in my bumping carriage on the rough white roads of northern Spain, I felt a new compassion for the memory of old Maintenon. The past jogged along with me as I tried to doze, popped in at me through the windows: Conti, Monsieur, the due de Beauvillier, Madame la Duchesse, my old father, the king. Yes, it was the king who filled my imagination at the last. It seemed to me as if I might have been nothing, all my life, but the reflection of him. His terrible faults were always present: the overbuilding, the overfighting, the bigotry, the hideous persecutions, the elevation of the bastards—certainly, these things never should be and never would be forgotten. But now I began to have my vision of what the old man had nonetheless accomplished for France and for history. He had had a great style.

  By the time we had crossed the border back into France, my spirits had risen, and on the long road to Paris they approached something like elation. I saw now what I was going to do with all the multitude of my notes and diaries and tracts and essays. Yes, I would, as I had always vaguely planned, mold it into a kind of history of the France of my time. But it would now be something much more. It would be a study of absolute power, exercised over a long lifetime by one man for only one goal—glory.

  What it would be in the end—an epic, a history, a novel, a saga—whether it would ever even be printed, I did not know and I almost did not care. What I now knew was that it was my destiny to write it. It would have a kind of reality of its own, just by existing. Perhaps the day would come when it would be truer of the age than the facts themselves. Perhaps the age of Louis XIV would be created by my own pages! But the great point was that those pages had to be written.

  Relationships of the Condés and Contis to Louis XIV

  About the Author

  LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS was honored in the year 2000 as a “Living Landmark” by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. During his long career he wrote more than sixty books, including the story collection Manhattan Monologues and the novel The Rector of Justin. The former president of the Academy of Arts and Letters, he resided in New York City until his death in January 2010.