by Karleen Koen
“So I was.”
“How is the viscount?”
But his father didn’t answer, instead walked forward to the table strewn with papers and rummaged through them. Guy put out his hand, as if to stop him.
“He told me it was so,” said the marshall, “but I wanted to see for myself.” He held up a paper, Guy’s handwriting scrawled across it.
“Buggerer of goats, buggerer of boys, buggerer in all ways,” he read, his voice indifferent, as if the words weren’t slurs of the worst kind. He let go the paper and, slowly, it drifted to the floor.
“How you shame me,” he said. His hands moved through other papers on the table, until he was holding up a pamphlet, the one from which the damning words came, its type tiny and curving and difficult to read. “How came you by this?”
Guy closed his eyes a moment. “At the Palais-Royal shops, I saw an old wooden chest, curious carving on it, which amused me, and so I bought it. Inside were a hundred or more of these old Mazarinades.” He smiled so that his father wouldn’t see the pain he felt at his father’s contempt. “They made interesting reading for someone who was a boy in the civil wars. A crime to let them be forgotten, I thought.” He shrugged, insouciance covering mortification.
“Where is this chest?”
Guy pointed.
“You will burn its contents and these papers upon the table, now, in my presence, please.”
He stood in silence as Guy lit a fire, brought paper after paper to it, and burned them.
When the last pamphlet was curling in the flames, Guy said, “Have you come to arrest me or to banish me?”
“I would have done either, most gladly, but his majesty was kinder than I am.”
“His majesty?” Guy cut in. “Did not the viscount tell you of this?”
“I’ve had little conversation with the viscount, who busies himself receiving relatives and friends and those who come to worship at the shrine of his importance. His majesty requests your presence in a regiment. He reads you well. War will cool your fire or kill you, one or the other. He has the grace not to be angry with you for my sake, for the sake of your growing up together, for the sake of his brother’s affection for you, but I am angry for him. Why did you do this?”
For old time’s sake, thought Guy, because they were there, because I wanted to make him tremble, because it amused me, because I could, because I’m bored, because I’m bad.
When there was no answer, his father said, “You are to leave this place today and go to your mother in Paris and take your leave of her. The orders for your military service are with my chamberlain.” He held out his hand. “Farewell.”
Just like that, they were finished. Guy knew better than to argue or cajole. He knelt to kiss his father’s hand, looked into his father’s face and saw there was no softness there, for his father’s code of conduct was rigid and unchanging. He listened to his father’s retreating footsteps on the stairs as outside the window he heard servants calling to one another. Before the viscount had left for Brittany, he and Guy and a visitor had sat drinking and talking in the château’s glorious salon, the gardens visible everywhere their eyes fell. The visitor was an English count, who had traveled across the channel specifically to see Vaux-le-Vicomte, to meet the viscount. Talk had drifted, as talk will when the wine is good and the afternoon better, to the vagaries of life, and the Englishman had quoted to them from his book of prayer, translating the words slowly, and sometimes badly, into French. The race is not to the swift, he’d said, nor the battle to the strong, nor riches to men of understanding nor favor to men of skill, but time and chance happen to them all. Guy didn’t know why he thought of those words, but they remained in his head all the way to Paris.
NICOLAS STEPPED INTO the sedan chair that would take him back to the house of a cousin where he slept during this sojourn in Brittany. The king had kept him after this morning’s council meeting to talk about the gift of money which the provincial assembly had presented the crown, and the conversation, easy, complimentary, had lifted Nicolas’s mood. He’d had a fever, then chills, since the fête, disturbing dreams and images playing in his mind. Those around him were in a kind of fever themselves, his wife and certain of his friends convinced he was to be arrested, urging him to retreat to Belle Isle and remain there. Yet there was no warning from her majesty, from her confessor, from poor, ill Madame de Motteville. To go to Belle Isle would be such an open move, such a direct hit. It would splinter to pieces his summer of soothing the king, would stir up the hornet’s nest he very much imagined his majesty’s temper when crossed might be.
“There’s people who want to talk to you, your greatness,” one of the sedan-chair bearers told him. “Shall we stop?”
A crowd was gathered before the town’s cathedral, petitioners with requests for who knew what—Brittany was after all the seat of his power, where he’d begun as a local official—and Nicolas felt both ennui at the obligations of his position and satisfaction at this evidence of his importance. The king simply needed time to accept Nicolas’s importance, that was all. “Yes,” he said.
It was a mistake he would mull over for the rest of his life.
SACRED FINGERS OF the Christ, thought D’Artagnan, breaking into a sweat, have I missed him? The viscount wasn’t in the courtyard. He put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, and some fifteen musketeers were immediately at his side.
“Follow me,” he ordered, and he ran out of the courtyard, through the castle’s gate, but there, in the distance, in front of the town cathedral, was the viscount’s sedan chair, its bearers having set it to the ground, because people had crowded to present the viscount with petitions. “Surround the chair,” D’Artagnan told his men.
“A message for the viscount!” he said loudly as he pushed through the crowd.
Nicolas pulled himself up and out of the chair and took off his hat in a gesture of courtesy, smiling his charming smile. “Lieutenant d’Artagnan, what have you for me?”
D’Artagnan was curt. “I arrest you by the king’s orders.”
People stepped back. The chair bearers looked at one another. Nicolas’s hat dropped out of his hands and into the dirt. “May I see the warrant?”
D’Artagnan gave it to him. He stared down at the words for a long time, and when he raised his eyes again, his face was white, the way it had been when his fever first began.
“Let’s effect this without a fuss,” he said, and he sat back down in the sedan chair, his hands gripped tight on its arms as he stared straight ahead.
WAITING, LOUIS STOOD at a window in the castle of the Duke of Brittany. In the courtyard below were musketeers. He’d told everyone he was going hunting as an excuse for their presence, but they were assembled to chase down the viscount, if need be. Behind him, now that his council meeting was over, mingled courtiers and friends, various ministers and local officials and members of the prominent Breton families.
Have we spun the game too long? thought Louis. Was it a mistake to come to Brittany? Regiments stood ready to land on the viscount’s island. A messenger from its governor had been captured in the early hours of this morning with a message for the viscount. The note, hidden in the heel of the messenger’s boot, warned the viscount of the presence of the king’s troops. Am I too late? thought Louis. Colbert was convinced the viscount would bolt, would commence a war from his island. Had D’Artagnan failed? Had the viscount eluded him?
A musketeer came running through the castle’s gate. He saw Louis at the window and waved his hat back and forth. Louis closed his eyes, then he turned around to face the men assembled here, not a woman among them. He’d left his love, his wife, the ladies who graced his mettlesome, proud, self-seeking court, as well as his brother, at Fontainebleau, where they would be safest. Under his shirt, in a pocket sewn in his doublet, was one of Louise’s gloves. He moved his hand to it, touching it for good luck.
The chamber was gradually silencing as men realized the king was watching them. One conver
sation after another ended, and they waited. Everyone who was important was here, several officers of the crown, his royal cousins.
“I’ve arrested the Viscount Nicolas,” Louis said.
There was a shocked silence, a moment of absolute quiet in the chamber. What he announced was a thunderclap over their heads. A million thoughts flew through Louis’s mind. It seemed to him that he saw every face and read the feelings behind the masks of flesh. His minister of war, one of his inner three and an ally of the viscount, wiped perspiration from his upper lip. Still no one spoke. A ballad Louis had heard a few nights earlier, a local ballad of this province with its treacherous seacoast, went dancing through his head along with thoughts of all that might happen now. Would credit hold? Would there be war?
The sea has donned her robe of green, went the ballad, her robe of green, ’tis hope they say, evening has come, gone is the day, the sea has donned her robe of green with all about the skirt a screen of the ocean’s fairest flowers. Lilting had been the voices singing the ballad. His thoughts had been of Louise. The sea has donned her robe of green, let love be ours. How could the viscount have had the audacity to attempt to bribe her?
Paris would be in an uproar once the news reached them in a week or so. Who here would be disloyal? Which of his provinces would revolt first? Colbert’s bet was this one. The musketeers in the courtyard waited. If he wasn’t downstairs among them in half an hour’s time, they would storm this castle.
“I thought it necessary,” he began the speech he’d delivered a thousand times in his mind, “and now I shall explain why …”
He didn’t know it would be the first sentence of an absolute monarchy that would become the envy of Europe and the triumph of his life’s work, that only the incompetence of great-great-grandsons and the marching forward of time—the birth of the ideas of independence espoused in the new world across the sea—would unravel what he set into motion with this moment.
“Long live the king,” someone shouted when he was done, and others took up the cry, and he walked to the window and showed himself to his troop below, his heart pounding, because he could not yet know there would be no war; just as he could not yet know that his will, and his alone, would become the crux of a kingdom and the backbone of two hundred years of power and the last thing he would regret before he died.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THESE FOUR MONTHS in the life of Louis XIV when he was twenty-two capture a moment in history when he showed all that was the best in him: ardor, passion, gallantry, courage, and resourcefulness. I couldn’t resist him. Much of what I’ve written in this novel is true. What fun to guess the rest. Here is a glimpse of the history I based the story upon:
The iron mask: This is one of the enduring legends of French history and fiction. There is no definite proof of a man or boy in an iron mask. There was, however, a man who wore a mask of black silk, who was treated with utmost respect, kept isolated from all other prisoners, and who died without a name on record. No one knows who he was.
The arrest: When he was twenty-two, Louis had his powerful superintendent of finance arrested in September 1661 to the astonishment and shock of all around him. It was an earthquake in the terrain of court and finances. Financiers and tax farmers were brought to trial and fined. Colbert reorganized France’s system of finance and its system of governance. The superintendent, named Nicolas Fouquet, remained in prison at Pignerol for the rest of his life.
Nicolas Fouquet: He was witty, polished, cultured, the unnamed superintendent of art and literature as well as the named superintendent of finance. He patronized many writers and artists. Controversy still thrives in France about whether his arrest was deserved or not.
Vaux-le-Vicomte: Fouquet’s estate exists to this day and has been lovingly restored. Louis claimed the three artisans Fouquet had summoned to work together—Le Vau, Le Brun, and Le Nôtre—and put them to recreating Versailles, which was transformed from a hunting lodge and tryst for love to the most famous palace in Europe.
Love: Louis XIV was faithful for the first year of his marriage, but by the summer of 1661 was paying enough attention to his sister-in-law to make scandal bubble. Then talk died back, but until late autumn only Louis knew why: someone unexpected had captured his heart.
A blue jacket: In a romantic, tender, secret gesture, Louis XIV wore a blue jacket, likely sewn by Louise, for fourteen days straight in the fall of 1661
Louise: She is known in history as Louise de la Vallière. She never stopped loving the king but became a nun of the Carmelites in 1674. Queen Maria Teresa was among the huge crowd to witness the ceremony of her taking the veil, but Louis XIV was not.
Athénaïs: Ah, readers, that is indeed—another story …
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR HELP IN research: the late Nancyhelen Fischer of The French Connection; Henri Leers, translator; Count Patrice de Vogüé, owner of Vaux-le-Vicomte; Sophie Hubert of the Fontainebleau Museum Château; Nick Poyntz of the blog mercuriuspoliticus.wordpress.com; Professor Jeffrey Merrick of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. For serving as first readers and/or proofreading eyes: Joan Boote, Ann Bradford, Alice Lemos, Chris Ritter, Sandi Stromberg, Tammie Thomas. For manuscript cleanup: Kristin Kearns, Burning Designer Studios. For support: Joyce Boatright, Sandi Stromberg, Jean Naggar, my long-time and very dear agent, and Jennifer Weltz of the Jean Naggar Literary Agency. For revision suggestions and seeing the book to completion: Heather Lazare of the Crown Publishing Group. For providing a quiet place to finish last revisions: the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karleen Koen is the New York Times bestselling author of Through a Glass Darkly as well as Now Face to Face and Dark Angels. Visit her online at karleenkoen.net and karleenkoen.wordpress.com.
