by Robert Merle
I immediately obeyed as best as I could, and, to tell the truth, this “best” wasn’t too bad (may the reader excuse my vanity!), for I’d been working on my story since the night before and had been thinking about it during the entire return voyage (Alizon becoming impatient with my silence), knowing all too well how much the king liked lively stories—especially in these times, when his throne rested on such shaky foundations that the wildest financier wouldn’t have bet a sol on it.
“My good Siorac!” exclaimed the king when I’d finished. “That was well thought out, well done and, what’s more, well recounted! I’m very proud of you! Just because Pibrac is dead and Ronsard dying doesn’t mean that the art of fine speech has to be replaced by the gibberish of the priests of the League!”
“But, sire,” interjected Du Halde, whose long face suggested a degree of austerity that one seldom found in the papist courtiers, “it isn’t such an enormous gain not to lose a city!”
“Ah, killjoy!” replied Henri. “We shouldn’t discount good things when they come, even if they are so rare! More to the point, the failures of the League in Boulogne and in Marseilles—did you know that the Leaguers failed to take Marseilles, Siorac?—put a dent in its reputation for invincibility and, at least for the moment, will put a stop to the betrayals. But Chicot, have you gone mute?”
“Sire, I have nothing to say!”
“What, not a single joke? Has the League also stolen the wit of my fool?”
“Henri,” replied Chicot after a moment’s thought, his nose perennially dripping, “the traitors you’re referring to are turning my stomach! I’d like to vomit them up with my bile. Or shit them out with my shit.”
“Well,” the king replied, “what does it matter that I’m surrounded by ingrates, as long as I don’t catch the infection? But my gratitude is as fresh as a daisy—and thick-skinned. Hey, Du Halde!” he continued, laughing. “Now that I think about it, call the barber right away and ask him to give me a shave! Siorac, my son, you have served me well and loyally. I won’t forget it.”
“I and Captain Le Pierre, sire!”
“Indeed, and I won’t forget him either!”
“Alas, sire!” observed Du Halde. “For every Siorac or Le Pierre, how many Montcassins are there!” (Montcassin had been sent by the king to Metz with an armed force and a good deal of money, but made a detour to Châlons-sur-Marne and gave the troops and the money to the Duc de Guise, thereby shortening his trip.)
“Montcassin,” growled the king with a look of infinite disdain, “is nothing but a little mouse compared to the fat rat who’s nibbling away at my kingdom, city after city. Ah, Du Halde! Du Halde! It’s obvious that if I keep letting these people have their way, they’ll end up as my masters and not my companions. It’s time to put my house in order!”
“Well then, sire, gather every one of your supporters among the nobility and we’ll mount all together and ride against this traitor Guise!”
“Fire and brimstone, Siorac!” gasped the king with a weak smile. “Am I going to stick a firebrand down the throat of Guise?”
“Absolutely, sire!”
“And risk the entire kingdom on a throw of the dice in one battle? And start a civil war?” asked Henri, contemplating the void before him with a grave air. “A war that would profit only the financiers, the horse-dealers and the weapon-makers, and fill the kingdom with foreign fighters, division, eternal discord and endless murder and brigandage, while our poor labourers have hardly caught their breath after our past troubles?”
“But Henri,” observed Chicot, “if we don’t set a cat on the trail of this rat, it’s going to keep gnawing away, and soon enough gnaw all of Paris!”
“It’s already happening! I can hear his teeth! And I can see all the holes he’s making! But that’s not a reason to go waging war far from Paris, since I may not find any refuge here on my return.”
“Ah, sire, are things really so far gone?”
“And worse still! Mosca’s reports are rosy compared to the reality of the situation!”
“So what should we do, Henri,” asked Chicot, “when they’ve got you by the throat?”
“Like Machiavelli,” answered the king, “we should ‘trim our sails’. Let the line out little by little, then reel it in, let it out again and pull it in.”
“Until it breaks,” finished Chicot, who’d sat down next to the fireplace and was sharpening a small knife on the hearth stones.
“What are you doing, Chicot?” asked the king.
“It’s for Guise.”
At this the king sighed and, lowering his beautiful Florentine eyes, murmured:
“I hope it never comes to that.”
“Well, sire,” I dared to observe, Guise’s insolence weighing so heavy on my heart, “is this prince of Lorraine so blustery and stormy that the king of France has to ‘trim his sails’? What will the nobility think?”
“Siorac,” said the king, fixing me with his large black eyes, “have you read Machiavelli?”
“No, sire.”
“Then think about this: it is often wise, and certainly the best sort of valour, to pretend to be soft and timid in the world’s eyes, if this pretence is useful in attaining your goals. Du Halde,” he added, “while it’s fresh in my memory, please write to my treasurer and have him give 2,000 écus to Siorac, and the same amount to Le Pierre.”
“Sire,” I ventured, not without some apprehension that I’d be rebuked, “Your Majesty will forgive me, I hope, if I ask for more and less.”
“More and less?” asked the king, pondering this conundrum. “Chicot do you understand this enigma?”
“Not in the least, Henri, unless the Bloodletter is sweet on one of the queen mother’s ladies-in-waiting.”
“Which ladies,” observed the king, “given their morality, are hardly worth 2,000 écus apiece! Moreover, I have no sway over the gilded whores of the queen mother—who, though she’s surrounded me with her ministers, has not yet encircled me with her petticoated spies.”
“This has nothing to do with the flesh, sire,” I explained, “but with your comfit box, which you more or less offered to grant me as a kind of reward for Boulogne.”
“Then its yours, Siorac!” exclaimed the king, detaching it from his belt as if it were the most worthless bauble.
“Well, sire!” cried Du Halde reproachfully. “You give everything away! But you shouldn’t so casually abandon this comfit box!’ Twas the queen mother who gave it to you!”
“The queen mother is now a member of the League,” returned the king bitterly. “So who knows whether she won’t take it back someday and give it to Guise!”
“Ah sire! You mustn’t make light of this!”
“Rather than see it end up in Guise’s greedy hands,” the king answered, “I prefer to see it in the loyal hands of my good Siorac! On the one condition that he not display it at court as long as my mother does me the honour of living here.”
Ah heaven! I was walking on air as I left the king, the bejewelled box stashed carefully in the deepest pocket of my doublet, and I almost forgot in my childish pleasure the misfortunes of the kingdom. Well! No doubt my uncle, Sauveterre, would have accused me of being woefully untutored in the art of bargaining, since I’d traded a comfit box worth, at most, 600 écus for 2,000 newly minted coins. And, certainly, he would also have let me understand in his Huguenot way that there was more than a hint of worldly idolatry in the immense value I attached to owning something that had belonged to the king. But, from another standpoint, when a monarch steers as best he can the ship of state through the hazards that confront him, how can a Frenchman, if he loves his nation, not cherish his sovereign wholeheartedly or be half-heartedly loyal to him—especially when this king is so likeable and so touching, as much in his generosity as in his distress?
What’s more, this box was one day to save my life, as I shall later recount, and not by shielding me from an assassin’s bullet, but in a much more unusual and bizarre way. F
ar from wearing it or showing it off to anyone, I showed it only to my Angelina when I returned to our lodgings, where I locked it away in a secret drawer in a little cherrywood cabinet that I kept in my room. This room adjoined hers, and, hearing her come in shortly after I did, I went to find her, took her in my arms and, pressing her to me in a most delicious embrace, gave her a thousand kisses on her neck and face and whispered a thousand compliments on her goodness, her beauty and her grace, assuring her of the great and indestructible love that I felt for her, feeling some remorse for what I’d done in Boulogne. Despite the strangeness of the hour, Angelina consented, not without the initial restraint and reserve that are so much part of her natural complexion, to allow me to lock the door and lead her to her bed.
Our first tumult over, we fell into tender conversation, in which each of us opened our heart to the other, I raised on my elbow, contemplating her beautiful doe’s eyes, my hand on her breast, whose form and texture I never tired of. It occurred to me to ask her why, since she was so open and affectionate with Fogacer, she displayed, if not coldness, then at least a sort of distance with Giacomi.
“In truth,” she confessed, not without a trace of shame, “I love them equally, each for his own qualities. But Fogacer, who puts on such airs with men, constantly looks at me with such a childish expression and without a trace of the desire that I don’t like seeing in any eyes but your own, Monsieur my husband, and find so offensive in other men. It’s not the same with Giacomi, though he is infinitely respectful. Because he is so in love with my twin sister, our resemblance could not but create some confusion, and put an occasional light in his eyes when he looks at me that I cannot accommodate.”
I remained silent at hearing this, remembering my own confusion at Barbentane when I encountered Larissa unexpectedly in an upper hallway, and ended up being very relieved to see her depart, albeit in Samarcas’s clutches.
“Do you believe,” asked Angelina, observing my silence, “that there’s any reasonable hope that we may free her from the claws of this Jesuit?”
“I do. It’s clear that Samarcas is known to the English spies, and that he is aware of it, but that he’s chosen, in his crazy, intrepid fanaticism, to continue his intrigues in London. At some point, he’s bound to be caught in their net!”
Angelina looked at me wide-eyed, since she’d never heard me speak of Samarcas’s enterprises, and I’d carefully hidden from her Mundane’s connection to Walsingham and the Jesuit’s hand in Mundane’s murder. And despite her usual discretion on these matters, she couldn’t help asking:
“But if Samarcas were to be thrown in an English jail, isn’t it possible that Larissa would be as well, since she’d be suspected of conniving in his machinations?”
“If that were to happen, my love,” I soothed, “I’d be the first to learn of it and would have every hope of freeing her and bringing her back here.”
So, with this small and fragile hope, Angelina had to be contented, and Giacomi as well, with whom not a day passed without our discussing it.
At the end of May, the king asked me to attend to Épernon, who, given the awful state of his health, was afraid of either dying a natural death that was predicted on all sides, given how emaciated he looked, or assassination by the League, who had vowed to kill him, since they believed he was the last mainstay of the throne. He had retired to his chateau in Saint-Germain-en-Laye with 400 guards, either to recover from his illness or to die peacefully there.
I hastened to his side, and found him terribly thin and weak, suffering from painful cankers in his throat, and attended by two great asses of doctors who had, for the last two months, been bleeding him, starving him, purging him and immobilizing him. I sent word to the king that very evening that if such a “cure” were continued, they’d reduce him to a skeleton in no time.
“As for me,” I added, “I will try to restore his health and vigour by other means, on condition that these shitty quacks be removed forthwith.”
Which the duc did, on advice from the king, and it was a good thing too, since their purgations had so uselessly tortured his empty bowels. I put an immediate end to their regime, and began feeding him a liquid diet that he was able to force down. Recalling how much my father hated the practice of bleeding, which some charlatan had introduced into France from Italy on the illusory pretext that the more dirty water one withdraws from a well the clearer it will get, I had it stopped. And taking the opposite tack from his previous cures, I counselled the duc to get up out of his chair and begin walking and exercising his body. Which, with the strength that he was regaining from the nourishment I provided, he did all the more willingly, since he’d always been of a very lively and robust complexion and could barely tolerate the repose that had been forced on him by the two quacks. As for his throat, I contented myself, as I had done during the voyage to Guyenne, with a prescription of gargling with boiled salt water every morning, noon and evening after each meal. But then, observing that this remedy soothed the duc without really healing his throat, and, on the other hand, seeing that he was regaining some of his former strength every day, I attempted to cauterize the cankers with a red-hot iron. Which I did very lightly, several times, and, as I believe, with some success—for, from that day forward, the duc began to recover, and by the beginning of July was fully healed.
During these two months, I saw the duc almost daily, and, as assiduous as I was in my cure, as much to save the life of my patient as because I judged his life to be very important in his service to the king, I never managed to like him as a person, finding him to be very haughty in nature. This trait naturally displeased me, even though I could see that it was linked to an admirable firmness of soul that was so much a part of his temperament that, even with his king and sovereign, Épernon displayed an air of inflexibility.
Quéribus told me in this regard that when he first arrived at court, Épernon went to meet the king with his doublet unbuttoned, and the king, annoyed by this failure of etiquette, scolded him. At the king’s rebuke, bowing, but without a word of reply, Épernon turned on his heels, walked away and began packing his bags, preparing to leave the court that very day. When the king learnt of this, he sent for the duc to entreat his reconciliation.
As for his physical appearance, he struck me as exceptionally strong and tough, and, given the rapidity of his recovery as soon as the other doctors were prevented from interfering with him, I believed that he was made of hardened mortar and would last for a century.
He wanted to offer me a good sum of money as a reward for my cure, but I refused, saying that I was acting on orders from the king and was salaried by His Majesty. When the duc heard this, he sensed that there was some nobility in my refusal, and he told me with a smile (since he could be very charming when he wished) that the Chevalier de Siorac was henceforth his friend and, as such, could not refuse the gift of a diamond and a beautiful horse that he had in his stables. I consented to this, very happy that, in the end, he was treating me as a gentleman (if not really as a friend, since friendship, as far as I could tell, was a feeling entirely unknown to him).
Having no use for it, and being very happy with the steeds I already had, I ended up selling the horse, and giving the diamond to Angelina, after a jeweller had mounted it in a gold ring (and informed me that its value was easily 1,000 écus). I wryly surmised that the duc wouldn’t have given half this sum to a doctor who couldn’t convince him that he was of noble birth.
Judging that the king’s forces, roughly 25,000 good soldiers, were not inferior to those that Guise had marshalled in the east of the kingdom, thanks to the gold Felipe II had provided, Épernon decided that he must immediately have it out with the rebel duc, a decision I’d heard him announce to the king every time His Majesty came to visit him in the chateau at Saint-Germain-en-Laye to ask about his health. But His Majesty, who had a deeper understanding of the situation, argued that he could never wage war on Guise as long as this latter hid his activities under the mantle of religion,
which guaranteed him the support of the clergy and the people, whose support we most needed to win away from the League. And this was the reason that the king ended up, on the intercession of the Guisard queen mother, signing with Guise the Treaty of Nemours, which ended up being so disastrous and ignominious, by which the king of France recognized as practically legitimate the rebellion that had been raised against him, and forfeited to the duc dominion over the cities he’d seized from the king.
“The worst thing in all of that,” said Pierre de L’Étoile on the morning he informed me of this news (being marvellously informed about everything), “is that the king is on foot and the duc on horseback.”
“No,” I corrected, “the worst thing is that they forced him to annul all the edicts guaranteeing peace between the two parties, and instead to sign an injunction compelling all Huguenots to leave the country within six months or else have all their worldly goods confiscated! A nice bonfire lit atop a barrel of gunpowder.”
“And you’re no doubt thinking,” said Pierre de L’Étoile, “about all your father will suffer from such an injunction.”
“Oh, no! Mespech is now in the claws of my older brother, who, having become a turncoat, is now a devout Catholic—but who cannot see that His Majesty has avoided a civil war with Guise only to start one with the Huguenots. It’s Scylla after Charybdis!”
“And yet, when you think about it,” said Pierre de L’Étoile with a wry smile, “this civil war against the Huguenots will be waged by His Majesty without any zeal whatsoever!”
“Well!” I responded. “I think so as well. But isn’t it the height of Machiavellianism to pretend to ally oneself with one’s mortal enemy in order to give the appearance of waging war against one’s natural ally?”
* “Ah Corydon, Corydon, what madness has seized you?”
† “Lord, bury your sword in a vagina, the Church does not like to shed blood.”
