Fortunes of France 4: League of Spies

by Robert Merle

  I told her that, indeed, I served my king ardently, which naturally inclined me to be a friend to his friends, but I added that I also had a personal interest in the matter, since Mundane’s assailant held my wife’s sister in his power and control, and that I couldn’t help fearing for her safety, seeing that she was so implicated in his plots against the English—despite her complete innocence in these affairs, given that she was somewhat deranged.

  “And what is the lady’s name?”

  “Larissa de Montcalm.”

  “I shall not forget it,” she assured me, extending her hand to signal that our interview was concluded, and throwing me such an enchanting smile that, to this day, I can remember the emotion it produced.

  Satisfied that I had now accomplished to my satisfaction—and to Lady Stafford’s—the mission that had brought me here, I was heading towards Madame de Joyeuse to ask her permission to leave, when suddenly the double doors of the salon were thrown open with a great racket by the swarthy valets who guarded them. Through them, arm in arm and with great panache, marched Anne de Joyeuse and his younger brother, Henri, Comte du Bouchage, master of the king’s wardrobe. They were followed by a swarm of the gentlemen of their households, though only the first few gained entrance before the doors were closed again on the rest, who were thus forced to wait in the antechamber.

  The two brothers, who obviously enjoyed each other’s affection, were quite tall, of elegant bearing, possessed of the same long face, aquiline nose and azure-blue eyes, and could have been mistaken for identical twins except that Anne’s beard was blond and his brother’s red. The other difference was that Henri’s demeanour was as austere and melancholy as his brother’s was joyful.

  Indeed, the Comte du Bouchage’s expression accurately mirrored his character, for he was every bit as devout as his mother, having been, from earliest childhood, indoctrinated in churchly beliefs and behaviour. Against these the delights and vanities of the court had no force whatsoever and could not prevent him, when his wife died, from cloistering himself with the Capuchin monks, exchanging his pearly doublet for a cassock and rope belt.

  Anne, whose bearing was much less serious than his brother’s, seemed wholly intoxicated by the magnificent favours the king lavished on him. Unlike the Duc d’Épernon, Anne’s talents were vastly inferior to his fortunes, but he believed his gifts were superior to others’, and, watching him burst into his mother’s salon with such a self-satisfied air, I discerned in his eyes, voice and gestures, and in his way of throwing himself into an armchair, that this naive belief in his own strengths led him to behave as though he were the king himself, though he was only a pale reflection of his monarch. He was like the foam carried on the crest of a wave: frothy but of little consistency.

  There was no denying, however, that he was good-looking, well built, youthful, gay and gracious, and infinitely amiable to all those who crowded around his armchair to pay court to him.

  When it was my turn to greet him, he said, “Ah! Monsieur de Siorac, I’m very happy to see you! How well I remember the little soldiers that you gave me in Montpellier when I was just a child, and which you employed to portray the glorious campaign at Calais, where we retook that good city from those nasty Englishmen!”

  Of course, this was a very handsome thing to say to me, though it was the tenth time that Anne had mentioned it, forgetting with each repetition that he’d already said it. But what a heedless and inappropriate thing to say of the valiant English people in front of Lady Stafford, whom, in my view, he should have greeted when he first entered her salon, rather than waiting till she came forward.

  I was in the midst of these reflections when the doors of the salon burst open yet again, despite the valets’ efforts to prevent this, and the Baron de Quéribus, after paying his respects to his hostess and to the Duc de Joyeuse, pulled me aside into an alcove and whispered urgently:

  “I’ve just come from your lodgings, Pierre, where Angelina told me you’d be here: the king demands your presence in his chambers immediately.”

  “What! In his chambers?”

  “He’s taken to his bed.”

  “Already! Is he sick?”

  “He is, or is pretending to be—I know not which. I found him extremely agitated, looking very sad and eaten up by anxiety.”

  * “Who can tell?”

  † “Samarcas is a man who would flail a louse to get his pelt!”

  ‡ “Let me do the talking.”

  § “Tell me!”

  ¶ “The same.”

  || “The venom’s in the tail.”

  5

  PEOPLE TALKED SO MUCH about the health of my good master, and both Guise’s people and the Catholic League spread so many false rumours about it, that others came to believe that Henri wasn’t fit to reign. I have to say, however—speaking not only from my own observations of Henri but also from those of Miron, Fogacer and His Majesty’s other physicians—that, while it’s true that the king was beset by many ills that greatly pained him, some of which even humiliated him, none of them seemed to us to be life-threatening. Indeed, all of us believed that he would have lived to the ripe old age at which many men in this kingdom die, had not the knife of his assassin monk severed his life’s thread in his thirty-eighth year.

  Since my duty to my readers is to make my account reliable, recounting the facts as they were, however shameful, I have to report that Henri suffered from various abscesses, sores and fistulas, one under his left eye, another under his right arm and others in his groin and on his testicles—these last doubtless the cause of his sterility. These were cold humours; they never grew enflamed or enlarged, produced acute fevers or suppurated, but certainly caused the patient much discomfort and worry.

  The king also suffered terribly from haemorrhoids, which sometimes became so enlarged that they made sitting uncomfortable, which is why, despite his excellent horsemanship, he preferred his carriage. Of course, this preference caused rumours that he’d gone soft, but the truth was that it was due instead to this particular condition, which is so difficult to treat. This was also the reason he didn’t like jousting or hunting. And though he went hunting more often than his critics claimed, the gentleness of his nature gave him little taste for it, since he had no appetite for killing animals, as his brother Charles IX had, but was more like Montaigne, who professed no pleasure “in hearing the screams of a hare caught in the dogs’ teeth”.

  Unlike his brother Charles, or Guise or Navarre, he had little interest in tennis, since he doubtless found it beneath him to appear on a tennis court in shirtsleeves, with a racquet in his hand. On the other hand, he delighted in the noble art of fencing, and, thanks to the lessons Sylvie had given him, and thanks as well to constant practice, he was an excellent swordsman, and few gentlemen in the kingdom were his equal in this regard. Anyone who’d seen him with a sword, as I did more than once, would never have dared claim that he was soft, weak or sickly, for he went at it furiously, without stopping, breathing hard and sweating but rarely exhausted.

  And as for me, I can testify better than anyone to his robust nature, having, as I mentioned earlier, already accompanied him on his pilgrimage from Notre-Dame de Paris to Notre-Dame de Chartres, a very long trek that he covered on foot in two days—after which, after resting a day and a night, he undertook the return journey in two days as well. From this he suffered no other discomfort than blisters on his feet and some stomach pain, after having eaten too much on the road.

  This is strange behaviour for a man purported to be so near death, wearing out his shoes on the gravelly roads and then eating too much at the inn! For although he took no spirits, Henri ate like an ogre—sometimes two whole capons in a single sitting; he was never one, as the saying goes, to turn his back on a feast—or on his enemy in battle.

  It’s true that, with such an appetite, he’d developed a bit of a paunch by the age of thirty, but, in conversation one day with Monsieur de Thou, the president of parliament, who was quite old but
in very good health, Henri asked him the secret of his marvellous youthfulness. De Thou answered that he’d always maintained an even disposition, lived a well-ordered life, dining, sleeping and waking at the same hour every day, always eating the same foods and never to excess. This so impressed Henri that, from that day forward, he never took more than two meals a day, and never again ate more than one capon for his dinner. Naturally, he was the better for it.

  I will dare to say, after all this, that the veritable malady from which Henri suffered was not rooted in his body but in his soul, which the harshest and most continuous persecution had bruised and mutilated. For being of an infinitely magnanimous nature, he pushed this rare virtue to the point of pardoning the many priests who dragged him through the mire every Sunday in their sermons. But since Henri III aspired only to keep the peace among his subjects, and didn’t believe that one could vanquish heresy by the knife, he met only the most pitiless execration from both Huguenots and Catholics. I can only pray that, in future centuries, the crying injustice that comes from such partisan approaches to religion, and that so overwhelmed my poor master during his lifetime, may at last come to an end. Our children and grandchildren will hopefully look back with horror on the excesses perpetrated by this religious zeal and on the way in which such zeal blinded people to the most manifest truths.

  Henri was such a hard worker that he would spend hours with his advisors and in his study, and yet the minute he sought some recreation, people would accuse him of sloth. If he studied Latin, the rumour-mongers would say he was “declining”. Though he was very pious, both by nature and by practice, his detractors nevertheless accused him of being a secret enemy of the Church, a fomenter of heretics, an instrument of the Devil—and who knows what else? Too valiant to howl with the wolves, he displayed a marvellous constancy in his service to the state, but he was accused of being a coward. His determination regarding the great principles of government, and notably the question of succession, remained unshakeable to the end, and yet he was accused of weakness and vacillation. And lastly—as I’ve already said and can never repeat enough—he was, by nature and by reflection, good-natured and forgiving, but people called him cruel.

  This entrenched hatred that was relentlessly spewed out about him; the thousands of insults and calumnies that were spread about him on all sides; the betrayals that were perpetrated by the nobility, his ministers, his officers, his servants, his favourites and even (with the exception of the queen) his family—his brother Alençon, his sister Margot and his mother Catherine (the latter two of whom passed over to Guise’s side); and, beginning in 1584, the flurry of threats, which became increasingly grievous and seditious and weighed on his freedom and his life, all rained down bitterly on this sensitive soul, to the point where it became totally enervated, and Henri went from tears to fury, and from fury to melancholy, and from melancholy to despair.

  At one point, I saw his face bathed in tears after hearing the report of an insult the Duchesse de Montpensier had directed at him. I also saw him, when Anne de Joyeuse made an unforgivable comment, become so angry that he beat and kicked his favourite practically unconscious. I once saw him tremble helplessly at each burst of lightning from a violent storm in his belief that Heaven had taken up the complaints of his subjects and was about strike him dead. I watched him, in the coldest winter months, shiver in the gloom of wind and rain, fall into despair, and experience the discomforts of life as so many insufferable stings. At such moments, totally withdrawn, his mouth twisted in bitter resentment, his wild eyes darting about in defiance and suspicion, he saw evil everywhere. Gradually the gentlemen in his retinue learnt to refrain from any humour or impudent remarks, as poor Monsieur X learnt, who, hearing the king’s manservant, Du Halde, say to His Majesty that it sufficed for him to appear somewhere for the plague to disappear from that place, exclaimed, “One plague chases out another!” So outraged was the king that he threw himself on X and beat him like a new-cut stalk of barley, and might have killed the man had Épernon not grabbed his fists.

  According to what I’d heard from Quéribus in Madame de Joyeuse’s salon, Henri had fallen into one of those dark moods, and so it was not without a great deal of apprehension that I requested permission to enter his apartments from his butler, Monsieur de Merle, who, understanding the reason for my visit, immediately bade me enter and whispered in my ear to be very careful not to aggravate His Majesty, who seemed exceedingly overwrought.

  The king was stretched out on his bed, lying almost as rigidly as if he’d been the recumbent effigy on his own tomb, wearing the mask he wore in his sleep to preserve him from the unhealthy night air, which he believed ruined his complexion (despite the fact that his face was quite ruddy and resisted both sun and wind quite well). He was flanked on both sides by chambermaids, who were kneeling next to him, rubbing his hands with a yellowish unguent that smelt like musk. Du Halde stood nearby, watching this application and directing their work. The king’s fool, Chicot, was seated on a stool, looking very upset, being very devoted to his master and unhappy to see him in such anguish. Chicot, unlike most members of his profession, was neither small nor deformed, but a strapping Gascon gentleman, whose bravery with a sword was to be demonstrated by the manner of his death.

  “Who goes there?” came the muffled voice of the king from beneath his mask.

  “Sire, ’tis the Chevalier of Bloodletting,” replied Chicot, who loved giving pseudonyms to all the personages of the court, calling Guise “the Magnificent”, the Cardinal de Guise (the duc’s brother) “the Great Whoremonger”, the Cardinal de Bourbon “the Great Halfwit”, and the king himself “His Double Majesty”, alluding to the crown of Poland (which, however, he’d recently lost).

  “Chicot, give your stool to the chevalier and keep quiet!” said the king from beneath his mask.

  “As for my stool, I gladly cede it,” replied Chicot rising, “but, Henri, must I be quiet when the Magnificent speaks so loudly to you? What is a fool who doesn’t make a sound? If you no longer wish me to serve you, Henri, tell your treasurer to pay me my wages, for I cannot bear to ask alms from this son of a whore. I’ll find work elsewhere. Already the Guise brothers are paying court to me to get me to work for them! To the scaffold with all of them! But if you’d like me to keep working for you, Henri, my sweet, I’ll remain, despite better offers from your enemies, and despite the wretched odours wafting from your privy this morning!”

  “Chicot!” laughed the king. “Stay, I beg you, but quietly! I need to talk to Monsieur de Siorac.”

  “But, Henri,” insisted Chicot, delighted to have succeeded in making his master laugh, “what can the Chevalier of Bloodletting tell you that I haven’t already told you? He hears Mass half-arsedly. I hear Mass whole-arsedly. And didn’t you know that to be king of France today it’s enough to be Catholic? Which is why the Great Halfwit is aspiring to succeed you.”

  The king laughed again, pulled off his mask and, raising himself on one elbow, commanded, “Du Halde! Send these women away and put on my gloves!”

  At this, the chambermaids, without waiting for the manservant’s orders, backed towards the exit with three bows, and disappeared as Du Halde closed the door behind them.

  “Slide the bolt, Du Halde—and you, Chicot, keep quiet!”

  “If Your Double Majesty so commands,” replied Chicot, “I’ll obey twice. And if I disobey twice, I’ll give myself a double whipping. As the Magnificent says, ‘Let everyone whip himself in whatever guise he chooses!’”

  “Ah Chicot,” laughed the king, “if I didn’t love you so much, I’d hate you!”

  “And vice versa,” replied Chicot.

  “Siorac,” began the king with a wan smile, “are you surprised that so many gentlemen in this kingdom disregard my commandments? Even my fool won’t listen to me!”

  “Ah, but there’s a difference,” corrected Chicot, “which is that I disobey you out of love.”

  “What, Chicot!” smiled the king. “What imperti
nence! Are you going to claim that my cousin the Duc de Guise is not crazy about me? He tells me so every day!”

  “And, assuredly, ’tis true!” agreed Chicot. “Why, to save you he’d give the last drop of your blood!”

  “Now, Chicot!” warned the king, who did not appreciate this last witticism. “You’re going to exhaust my patience!”

  “That’s not possible. How can the king lose his patience when he has none?”

  At this, the king laughed outright, proving that he loved a good joke even when he was the target.

  “Sire,” said Du Halde, “if Your Majesty keeps shaking and moving about, I’ll never get his gloves on!”

  “Go on, Du Halde, go on!” replied the king, for he always wore these gloves to bed, and kept them on all night to preserve the ointments that had been rubbed on his hands. I never ceased to be amazed at this precaution, since I would find it such a discomfort that I wouldn’t be able to tolerate it. It’s true that my own hands, which had no other merit than being washed daily, were not as beautiful as the king’s.

  “My little Henri,” announced Chicot, who knew infallibly when it was time to keep silent, “you’ve listened to me long enough. I won’t open my mouth again until you’ve finished your business with Monsieur de Siorac, unless you ask for my advice.”

  Henri smiled at this, and I realized how much he relied on his fool’s wisdom when I saw him ask Du Halde to withdraw, but kept Chicot as a witness to our conversation.

  “Monsieur de Siorac,” he began, “I heard from Mosca what happened this morning at the gates of Saint-Germain. But since Mosca cannot appear in the Louvre without losing the trust of those he’s spying on for me, I had to learn of the event through an emissary, who gave only the briefest account of the thing, so I’d like you to give me a fuller one.”