Fortunes of France 4: League of Spies

by Robert Merle

  “Sir, will you be so kind as to tell my embassy of my predicament?”

  I nodded in affirmation, though I had no idea how to go about this, given the urgent advice of the other spy. Musing on this dilemma, I went downstairs and out into the courtyard, and thence to my stables, where I saw Miroul busily cleaning the blood from the interior.

  “Ah Miroul! Excellent work! And how thoughtful of you not to leave this job to the indiscretion of a chambermaid. But, unfortunately, cleaning it won’t be enough. We can’t take the risk of this carriage being recognized by those people, so I’d like you to paint it pink—especially since that’s Dame du Luc’s favourite colour.”

  “Monsieur,” replied Miroul, stepping from the coach with a most unhappy expression on his face, “don’t count on it! I am not a painter, nor do I aspire to be one, since I’m well above such manual trades. Moreover, I hate that colour!”

  “Well, Miroul, no one’s forcing you! If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it! We’ll just ask some painter from around here, but he won’t do it any better than you and will likely go off chattering about the work.”

  And I walked off, pretending to heave a sigh of resignation, all the while knowing that the minute I was out of sight, he’d set to it and do it with great care.

  As I returned to our room after these early-morning events, I found Angelina just finishing her nursing of our little babe and eager to see me, since she hadn’t found me there when she’d awoken earlier. But she didn’t want to converse or cuddle with me until she had had a chance to wash her face, brush her beautiful blonde tresses and perfume her neck, which I loved to kiss, since her skin was so soft there. This I did as soon as she’d ceased being, as she put it, “too horrible to look at”, and, taking her sweet body in my arms, I teased her a bit about her foibles while her beautiful doe eyes looked at me full of mute questions about where I’d been since dawn. I understood very well what she was thinking, but I didn’t want to tell her the naked truth in order to spare her excessive worry about Larissa. Finally, I said,

  “Angelina my love, I can’t tell you where I was this morning, since I must keep it secret out of loyalty to my king, but I’m glad I was there, because I was able to help a young Englishman who’d been wounded in a villainous attack; I’ve brought the young man here to our blue room in order to bind and heal his wound. We need to tell our servants not to disturb him because he’s taken some opium to help him sleep off his pain.”

  At this point, Gertrude and Zara burst into our room to say good morning, still dressed in their flowing nightgowns, which revealed their beautiful shoulders and more, and gave us each a hug (never an unpleasant event with two such beautiful women, though I would never press such intimacies beyond a casual embrace). They exploded into joyful cries to see us so happily ensconced, and leapt into bed with us, distributing sweet caresses to Angelina and me, both of them so avid to receive the compliments I showered on them throughout the day. When it comes to women, it’s my belief that it’s best to go at it not with a teaspoon but with a trowel, like a mason, given how insecure these creatures are about the duration of their beauty. But I must add that I felt no constraint or hypocrisy in doing so, given how sensitive I am to the graces of the feminine body, and how unable I am to see a pretty girl without feeling a sharp desire to caress her—and, since I can’t go at it straightaway with my fingers and lips, I must do the best I can with words, so that whatever compliments I pay to my lovers are really part of my pleasure in making love to them.

  It’s true that, with Gertrude and Zara, I could have gone a little further than words alone, though exactly how far I’d never tested, having decided not to go beyond the point of no return, but instead to substitute verbal caresses for physical ones in order to avoid offending Samson or my Angelina. Perhaps the excitement of such delicacies derives from the fact that, however innocent they appear, they aren’t completely so, allowing us to enjoy the secret dreams or regrets that they may provoke.

  When I’d done with such sweetness in the warmth and delicious disorder of their soft and flowing nightgowns, which are free of all the stays and rigid hoops that our current style imposes on them, and had caressed them and been caressed by them to my heart’s content (though my heart isn’t so easily satisfied), I took on a grave expression, and explained to them how I’d found a badly wounded English gentleman in the street, and brought him to our house. I urged them to help care for him since, other than Florine, I didn’t want our chambermaids to see him, since we mustn’t be compromised by others hearing of his presence here.

  They were suddenly all aflutter at the idea that there was a veritable Englishman in our house. When I ventured to add that he was not only English but very good-looking, despite his red hair, Gertrude exclaimed:

  “Ah, my brother, how can you speak of him with such disparagement? Didn’t I hear you just last month praising Lady Stafford to the skies precisely because of her red hair?”

  “That’s different: hers is Venetian red; he’s a carrot-top!”

  And, as I opened the door, she sniffed, “You’re leaving? Have I so pricked you by pointing out your meanness?”

  “Not at all! No one in the kingdom is more charming than you, my sister!”

  “What about me?” pouted Zara.

  But I didn’t bother to reply, since Gertrude’s allusion to Lady Stafford had just given me a way out of our predicament, and I needed to visit Madame de Joyeuse post-haste.

  I had Miroul take her a note, and he was, of course, delighted to have to abandon his painting for a leisurely stroll through Paris—so leisurely that he didn’t return till an hour after the midday meal, having taken two hours where one would have sufficed. I derived a double pleasure from this: the first from the relief that Madame de Joyeuse agreed to receive me, and the second that Florine set about Miroul with ten times the fury for his “loitering” than I would have dared apply, and so saved me from having to do it!

  No sooner was I admitted to Madame de Joyeuse’s apartments than Aglaé de Mérol appeared and welcomed me to the house, just as she had done when I was a medical student in Montpellier and Monsieur de Joyeuse was the governor of the city.

  At that time, Aglaé had despaired of ever marrying, since her father was so rich that he would only allow her to marry a man of very considerable means, and the three or four suitors that possessed such wealth were entirely unacceptable to her. Heavens! Eighteen years had flown by, like sand in the wind, since I’d kissed her pretty dimpled cheek for the first time. In the meantime, her father had died; she’d followed Madame de Joyeuse to Paris, and met the Marquis de Miroudot, a handsome gentleman ten years her junior, who was from an ancient and good family but poor as Job, having only his debts to live on—and whom, being finally mistress of her own destiny, she married.

  This turned out to be both a good and not such a good thing. For though Philippe de Miroudot, who was a very refined gentleman of great wit and cultured tastes, became her most delicious friend—spending hours in her boudoir, dressing her, coiffing her and helping her put on her make-up—his nature led him to no greater intimacy than this, oriented as he was in another direction. So Aglaé had a devil of a time to get him to give her a child, since her young husband went at it so half-heartedly, despite his great affection for her, his enjoyment of her company and his love of her clothes. She valued all of these feelings very highly, but they were not enough to satisfy her, and, after her feelings for her husband took a more maternal turn, she found what she needed from one of those young pages who are, as Quéribus had explained to me, all the rage among the noblewomen of the court.

  “Monsieur de Siorac,” said Aglaé, to whom I offered a discreet kiss, following the custom we’d established eighteen years earlier, “I’m delighted to see you here! Indeed, I’m always complaining that I never get to see you as much as I’d like! Of course, it’s true that, given your looks, an old woman has no attraction for you, especially now that I’m over thirty and Madame de Joy
euse—”

  “Stop right there!” I broke in, giving her another kiss on her dimple. “Don’t tell me the maréchale’s age—and, as for yours, it’s the same as my Angelina’s, and you know how I love her! And I swear that in your case, as in hers, the years have passed without making any inroads into your imperishable beauty!”

  “Well, Monsieur,” she answered wryly, “I must be very old indeed to require as much hyperbole as you used to shower Madame de Joyeuse with in Montpellier.”

  “But that was entirely different! They were employed as was dictated by my role as her official lover!”

  “Well, Monsieur! I’d advise you to keep quiet about that!” said Aglaé, placing her finger on my lips and pretending to be shocked. “Don’t breathe a word in this house about your former role, nor about the ‘school of sighs’! No surprise that you bring it up first thing! But within a year of your departure, Madame de Joyeuse fell into the most zealous devotion! You simply wouldn’t believe it! Other than eating and drinking to sustain them, we are to consider our bodies as having no value! Our life here is like that in a convent: we hear Mass every morning, take Communion every Sunday, spending at least two hours a day in the chapel; we go on retreats, and run after poor people to give them alms. In a word, we are now enflamed only by the love of God!”

  “We?”

  “She, I meant to say.”

  “Thank Heaven!” I cried. “But do I dare appear before her? Won’t she revile me for reminding her of her past?”

  “Not if you adopt, Monsieur, an air of modest contrition, scarcely brushing her hand with your kiss, lowering your assassin’s eyes in humility, restraining your body and maintaining a funereal expression.”

  “Funereal, Madame? When Madame de Joyeuse has so many reasons to be proud of her sons, the king showering favours on both of them? Anne is now a duc, a peer and an admiral! The Comte du Bouchage is master of the king’s wardrobe, and a bishop awaiting his cardinal’s biretta!”

  “Showering is the word! It’s been a veritable storm of favours, and we have become great as a result—greater even than Épernon. But our greatness has not made us happy.”

  The most sanctimonious Tartuffe never put on a more priestly face than I did as I entered Madame de Joyeuse’s salon. My eyes lowered, my spine reverential and my voice a mere whisper, I presented her my respects, which she accepted with a benign air and one visibly innocent of any excesses she may have once shared with me back when I was a student of medicine in Montpellier, a memory that had, no doubt, been completely effaced.

  “Monsieur,” she intoned, “you’ve abandoned me! It’s true that I have mostly withdrawn from the world and its vanities”—a description that conveniently omitted the dozen superbly attired great lords and ladies who regularly paid court to the mother of Henri’s favourite—“but don’t I remember that your family is descended from the Caumonts of Périgord, my little cousin? And, in such wise, are you not under the obligation of assiduously paying me your respects?”

  “Madame,” I conceded, “I would be devastated to have failed in such an obligation, but you must remember that you and your family have risen so high, and now shine so brilliantly at the head of our kingdom, that I would have been afraid to approach you too often, for fear of being blinded by your splendour.”

  “Oh,” she objected, her golden-brown eyes full of melancholy (the only feature of her face that reminded me of our past), “you cannot be serious, my cousin! That’s exactly where the shoe pinches the most! We’ve risen too quickly and too high! I’m terrified of such heights and of the fall that must inevitably follow! You know, of course, that the king married my son” (he’d actually married off two of her sons, but she was referring to Anne, whose ambiguous sobriquet—“the king’s favourite”—caused some nasty smiles at court) “to a princess of the house of Lorraine, thereby making him his brother-in-law. But I found myself so stupefied by such a rapid elevation, and the incredible benefits that accompanied it, that I had to remain closeted in my chapel for two whole days and nights, pretending to be ill and praying God to slow the course of this immense fortune, stricken with the apprehension—that I still feel—of our inevitable decline.”

  “Madame!” I exclaimed in surprise. “May Heaven be deaf to your fears! Why should you fear for the future? There’s not a soul who doesn’t believe that Anne is solidly ensconced in the king’s favour!”

  “But the king is mortal, my cousin!” she whispered. “And if he dies, what will become of us? Are you aware of the history of the chateau the king bequeathed to my son as a wedding gift? François I ripped it from the hands of his treasurer, Ponchet, to give it to Madame d’Étampes. When the king died, Henri II gave it to Diane de Poitiers, from whom it was confiscated at Henri’s death, and now it’s in the hands of my son! Do I not have good reason to be afraid?”

  I tried to console her, but couldn’t help being secretly amused that Madame de Joyeuse had spoken with such pleasant naivety of this domain in Limours, whose strange destiny had somehow caused it, as my friend L’Étoile said, “to fall prey to a succession of mistresses and sweethearts of our kings”.

  “But Madame,” I reassured her, “your son, Anne, is married to one of the princesses of the house of Lorraine! Who’d dare confiscate this land from the sister of the king?”

  “Well, my cousin,” sobbed Madame de Joyeuse, “that’s precisely why I’m so afraid! If the king were to die, how would my son continue to maintain the princess in a manner befitting her rank? She’d be the ruin of us! I shared my fears with His Majesty, who replied, ‘But Madame, I’m neither old nor infirm. Don’t go worrying about my death more than I do myself! In any case, I shall know how to guarantee your son’s safety because of the great friendship I feel for him, and because, after all, he’s my brother, having married my sister!’”

  “Madame,” I said soothingly, “given such assurances from the king himself, can you not put your worries to rest?”

  “Alas, my cousin!” she moaned, tears welling up in her amber eyes. “Nothing seems to help! I’m consumed by my anxieties!”

  Alas for me as well! We weren’t yet done with this subject, which dragged on for another quarter of an hour, Madame de Joyeuse, her plump hand posed on my wrist, continuing her moans and lamentations, trying to impress on me the terrible future portended by the power, glory and riches of her son. “Oh heaven!” I mused. “The poor lady is consumed with fear! And isn’t it interesting how this paragon of piety, who spends her life in prayer trying to fortify herself against the infernal fires, is in fact much more worried about her treasures on earth? One of these fears should have calmed the other, instead of combining to make her so miserable!”

  Luckily, instead of taking my leave of this tedious teller, I managed to continue my audience long enough to catch sight of the red hair of Lady Stafford, whom I knew to be most assiduous in her attentions to her friend, visiting virtually every day, in part out of friendship—and in part, I suspected, in order to pick up the latest court gossip to pass on to her husband.

  When, finally, there came a pause in this flood of fears and recriminations, I seized the opportunity to come up for air, and exclaimed, as if surprised, “Isn’t that Lady Stafford I see over by the window? Might I ask you, Madame, to introduce us? I understand she speaks beautiful English, and I’d love to practise mine, which is much in need of improvement!”

  Madame de Joyeuse shot me a sharp look, as if she immediately suspected that I had some frivolous designs on the wife of the English ambassador, but seeing only pure innocence in my eyes, and recalling that I was now married and reputed to be very much in love with my wife and faithful to her, she took me by the hand, led me over to the lady and said,

  “My Lady, may I introduce my cousin, the Chevalier de Siorac, who is of good, noble stock, and who has had the strange notion of studying medicine—doubtless the only nobleman in France to do so—and the good fortune to become one of the king’s physicians.”

  To which L
ady Stafford, after giving me a penetrating look with her hazel eyes, and judging me to be worthy of her attention, extended her hand with a gracious but cold smile. I had no doubt that she had every reason to be wary when meeting people in this country, since she was surrounded by so many sworn enemies of her queen.

  I kissed her fingertips in the Spanish manner, and immediately began speaking English to her, spouting a stream of banalities, hoping that we’d soon be rid of the dowager with whom Lady Stafford had been conversing, as well as of Madame de Joyeuse. And, as soon as we were alone, I told her, sotto voce, that I was a Huguenot who went under duress to Mass; thus having to some extent gained her confidence—since the English Church, despite its continued adherence to many of the errors of the papist practice, had no worse enemy than the Pope—I told her about Mundane, his wound and the circumstances in which he’d received it. She listened with great attention to my story, looking me directly in the eyes the whole time, which prevented me from looking at her lips and appreciating her English beauty.

  “My Lady,” I continued, “Mr Mundane must not be moved from his present bed. Therefore, I will keep him in my house until he’s well, if God wills that his wounds should heal.”

  Lady Stafford remained silent for quite a while, looking me over with those fine, sagacious eyes of hers. I must say that it was a rare pleasure to be studied by one so beautiful, and when she finally spoke I was even more delighted, for I’d never heard such a sweet feminine voice speaking English with so ravishing an accent—indeed, I believe the English language is one of the most melodious in the world, so fluid, supple and elegant you’d think you were listening to the music of the spheres! She assured me that her husband would be most obliged to me for the care I was providing Mr Mundane, but she found it quite inexplicable that I would put myself at such risk and peril unless it was in service of my king, who clearly had an interest in the stability of the English crown.