Fortunes of France 4: League of Spies

by Robert Merle

  “Monseigneur,” he said, “we are all resolutely faithful subjects of the king.” (“Ah, by God,” I thought, “if only the air, which must suffer everything, would turn red each time a man tells a lie, this comte would have turned crimson!”) “The Duc de Guise,” Brissac continued with more unctuousness than a monk, “did not come to Paris to make trouble and difficulties for the king, but to extend a protective wing over the good people of this city, whom he loves, but whose well-being was threatened by a plot that had filled the Hôtel de Ville with gibbets and executioners—an indubitable fact that I beg you, Monseigneur, to report to Her Majesty the queen of England.”

  “I’ve heard rumours of these gibbets,” replied Lord Stafford stiffly. “An odious fact, were it true—but it requires proof, and proof that would have been easy to furnish by producing these very gibbets, which the League, once the Hôtel de Ville was in its hands, didn’t judge it expedient to do. Moreover,” he added, not without some derision in his tone, “those who form such great plans are not required to confide their secret designs to anyone, only to reveal them at the desired moment, painted with the colours that they are pleased to give them.”

  This statement, which, however diplomatically it was expressed, was dosed with equal amounts of oil and vinegar, made Brissac wince and twist his mouth even more.

  “And yet, what I reported to you,” he said much less resolutely, “was but the pure truth.”

  “The truth is rarely pure,” said Lord Stafford gravely. “And true or false, whatever the pretext invoked for justifying the insurrection in Paris against the sovereign, foreign princes will receive the news very badly, since it creates a dangerous and indeed disastrous example of the valet raising himself over the master and chasing him out of his house.”

  “Nevertheless,” replied Brissac, quite mortified by what he’d just heard, “I would be very grateful if you would report to Her Majesty the queen of England the facts that I’ve just reported.”

  “I shall do so, my dear Brissac,” replied Lord Stafford, smoothing his words with a bit of oil, “out of friendship for you, and out of consideration for your master, but, at the same time, I would like the Duc de Guise to know that, as ambassador to the king of France, I cannot be, nor do I wish to be, his interpreter or his go-between with my sovereign. However, as I just said, I will inform the queen of what you’ve said, without judging your words in any wise, leaving this work to Her Gracious Majesty, who will know what she ought to think, being much more intelligent than I.”

  “Then I am completely satisfied,” replied Brissac, who manifestly was not satisfied in the least, having a bone so firmly stuck in his throat that he could neither chew it nor throw it up. “But, My Lord,” he continued, not without a threatening tone in his voice, “touching this safeguard that the Duc de Guise proposes to give you here, I would very strongly advise you to accept it, since you have everything to fear under the present tumultuous circumstances, the Parisians being excessively embittered against your nation, given the cruelty that the queen exercised against Mary Stuart.”

  “Cruelty, Monsieur!” cried Lord Stafford, interrupting him vociferously. “I will not accept the word ‘cruelty’. The person you just mentioned was the object of a long judicial procedure conducted according to all the forms and rules of the law. And as for the Parisians, I don’t see what reason they’d have to hate me so much, since I’ve never offended any of them.”

  “Well,” said Brissac, whose bitterness was beginning to seep through his honey, “rumours are flying in Paris, among its inhabitants and labourers, that you have arms hidden in this house.”

  At this Lord Stafford immediately burst out laughing.

  “Comte,” he said with a mocking sneer, “are you repeating this hypothesis in private, as the personal friend that you are, and as your uncle, Arthur de Cossé, was?”

  “Certainly,” replied the comte, who looked quite embarrassed by the turn the conversation was taking, steered by the ambassador.

  “In that case, I would answer that if I had come here as a private person, it’s possible I would have taken the precaution that you suggest. But being clothed in the dignity and responsibilities of my office and the inviolable title that is mine, I have to tell you that the rights of men and public faith are my only and my sufficient defenders.”

  “Again speaking to you as a friend,” snarled Brissac in an openly hostile way, “my duty requires me to inform you that you may be invaded from one moment to the next by a people in revolt, who will search every corner of your house—and so I advise you, Lord Stafford, to close and lock your doors.”

  “No, no!” cried Lord Stafford proudly. “The lodgings of an ambassador must be open to all—I shall not close my door until I see such a mob arrive. And if they want to break in by force I shall defend this house to my last drop of blood and my last breath! My death will mark this kingdom with infamy, and it will be reported to the end of time and throughout the world that the rights of men were odiously violated in the person of an English ambassador!”

  “May it please God to see that that never happens!” said Brissac, who added to the end of this pious ejaculation I don’t know how many protestations and compliments, all uttered with evident hypocrisy, while his squinting eye seemed increasingly drawn to the door of the cabinet in which we were hiding. Lady Markby clearly divined from this behaviour that he fully intended to head towards the wrong door as he was leaving and open this one. And seeing him already moving this way, she quickly whispered to me to hide in the place we’d agreed. Which I did, pulling my legs as close to me as I could just in time, since the hoop skirt fell over me at the very moment the door was flung open with a great crash, and I heard Lady Markby say in the most derisive tones:

  “Well, Lord Brissac! This is very strange indeed! Will you search this house? Or me, for that matter? Are you French lords so indiscreet?”

  “Madame,” said Brissac, whose steps I could hear circling her on the parquet, “I make you my humblest and most regretful apologies! I seem to have used the wrong door!”

  “I hope that’s so,” said Lord Stafford in dry and icy tones. “Otherwise, how could I ever have forgiven you this invasion of my private apartments?”

  At this, Brissac continued to babble his excuses in profusion, never being short of words or of impudence.

  “We’ll speak no more of this, Brissac,” said Lord Stafford, who didn’t wish to drive the stake in too far. “I would prefer we parted as friends, since tomorrow I must leave for Chartres.”

  “For Chartres!” said Brissac, clearly taken aback by this news. “You’re leaving Paris for Chartres?”

  “Of course, since I am not assigned as ambassador in Paris,” he replied calmly, “but ambassador to the king of France, and therefore must follow him to Chartres, where he is setting up his court.”

  At these words, which sounded the death knell for Guise’s hopes of keeping the English ambassador in Paris and, in this wise, gaining his official recognition, Brissac took his leave, and Lord Stafford showed him out, as I divined from hearing their voices and steps grow fainter; but even though Lady Markby was pushing me with both hands under her petticoat, I didn’t want to emerge—until I heard Lord Stafford return to the room and say:

  “Chevalier, the weasel has left and my door has closed behind him. Come out of your amiable hiding place so you don’t suffocate!”

  Which I did, red from the heat and my hair ruffled, and when Lord Stafford saw me he fell into an armchair and began to laugh hysterically, a spectacle that quite amazed me, given how stiff and cold he’d been with Brissac.

  “Ah, Madame,” he said in French to Lady Markby, “if I ever see our gracious sovereign again, I’ll amuse her no end by telling her to what extremities you’ve pushed your zeal of serving her.”

  “Honi soit qui mal y pense!”* cried Lady Markby, quoting the motto of the Order of the Garter and feigning outrage—though, only a moment later, she herself burst out laughing and
added, “In any case, My Lord, I’ll tell Lord Markby that it was your idea!”

  “Yours, Madame, yours!” cried Lord Stafford. “Let it never be said in this house in front of a French gentleman that the head of an English ambassador could ever consider such an idea, one so beneath the dignity of his charge.”

  “What?” replied my Lady Markby, throwing him a look so subtle and conniving that it gave me much food for thought. “You expect me to take responsibility for this? Wasn’t it your suggestion? Am I going to sacrifice my reputation once again to maintain your good name?”

  At this, a shadow of embarrassment came over Lord Stafford’s face and Lady Markby’s regained its composure as she said:

  “My Lord, you said a moment ago ‘if I ever see our gracious sovereign again’. Are you apprehensive about what’s going to happen to us in Paris?”

  “In Paris? Not at all,” he replied. “The Magnificent wants to appear, above all, magnanimous, as he proved when he liberated all those poor Swiss Guards. We’ll be able to leave here unharmed, and will pass outside the walls of the city without incident and without being searched. My fears are more long-term and concern this single question: does the benediction of the Pope have any power with the Master and Sovereign of Heaven?”

  “The Pope’s benediction!” I cried. “My Lord Stafford, what do you mean?”

  “Well, didn’t Sixtus V solemnly bless the Armada, calling it ‘my daughter’? If this benediction is effective, then the Armada will really be as ‘invincible’ as its name suggests. With England invaded, our beloved queen will disappear, your king as well, chevalier, and as for us, ambassador or not, the gibbet will be waiting for us.”

  “Well, I for one won’t be afraid to climb onto it,” cried Lady Markby, choosing to laugh rather than cry. “Anyone who’s got a reputation as infernal as mine ought to perish on a pyre!”

  Lord Stafford took me with him in his travelling coach, with all the curtains lowered, and, as he had predicted, there was no trouble at the Porte Saint-Honoré, neither from the Leaguers nor the bourgeois militias there, since the Comte de Brissac, to whom the ambassador had communicated the hour of our departure, was waiting to ensure our safe passage so that we would not be held up by any bloodthirsty zealots. Meanwhile, although I was very eager to see my beloved master and to offer him my immediate services in whatever way I could be of help, when I saw the coach take the road through Montfort-l’Amaury, moved by the compulsion of the moment, I asked to be let out there, feeling a very strong desire to embrace Angelina and my beautiful children, whom I hadn’t seen in so long. And only later did I realize how lucky a decision this was, when I learnt that a large party of Leaguers, acting on their own and without orders, had stopped the coach at Rambouillet, and, in the teeth of the ambassador’s most vehement protest, searched it—luckily not finding me. Otherwise, I would never have had the opportunity of writing these lines—or for that matter any of the ones that precede them, my great love of my family saving my life on this occasion. Meanwhile, having taken leave of my host, I begged him to tell my king when they arrived in Chartres that I would rush to his side the moment he sent for me, a call that didn’t come until August, as I shall recount.

  Since my history here concerns a moment of such great import for the future of the kingdom, I will not dwell on the felicities I found in my sweet, bucolic and conjugal retreats, after the all the intensity of Paris, and, alas, in all the sinning as well, my conscience stinging me as usual—not that this would prevent such sins in the future, or heal them, such guilt in the aftermath always being in vain. Indeed, I wonder whether there isn’t some ambiguous hypocrisy in remorse thanks to which we can satisfy our consciences while gratifying our flesh. And many of the king’s subjects also had their reasons for remorse, when it came to public affairs, for having chased the king out of Paris, even if they were partisans of the League. This was a subject that I wanted to discuss with various of my friends in Montfort-l’Amaury—in particular Ameline, the priest of the town, who was neither a committed Guisard nor a complete royalist (like many other French people in these uncertain times). Ameline wondered, indeed, whether he ought to congratulate the League on their victory or deplore the fact that the king had been reduced to such an extremity and the necessity of fleeing his capital.

  Ameline, who got his news through the abbot of Barthes, confessor of the minister Villequier, informed me that not one, but several delegations of Leaguers had gone to find the king in Chartres to ask him to return to the Louvre, but that the king, while receiving them with his usual benevolence, and assuring them of his pardon, had not consented to their request. Ameline also told me that Henri had employed the venerable Dr Marc Miron as his go-between with the princes of Lorraine in order to try to make peace with them, and that an agreement had been reached in which the king had acceded to all the demands of the Duc de Guise, who forced him to agree that Navarre would be blocked, as a heretic, from any claim to the throne, that Épernon would be disgraced and that Guise himself would be named lieutenant general of the armies. In addition, the Estates-General would be convened in the autumn to address the abuses of the kingdom—a project that should have begun, in my opinion, with the suppression of Guise himself!

  Quéribus, followed by his elegant escort, came to see me towards the end of August, and, in his usual humorous fashion, recounted the affairs of the “little court in Chartres”, reporting that there weren’t many people there—the setting sun attracting less attention than the new day that one could see dawning in Paris.

  The strangest thing in these last days of August was that the weather was not seasonal but remarkably unsettled at the Rugged Oak, with lots of rain and wind, and constant storms coming down, according to Gertrude (who had just returned from her native Normandy), from the Channel, where an incredibly violent tempest had been raging for a month without pause. The damp cold so penetrated our bones that I kept a huge fire going in my library, which at least brightened up that part of the house.

  “My brother,” I said as we stood warming ourselves in front of that fire, “can it be possible that the king has ceded all of his power to Guise?”

  “The truth is that my poor Henri,” replied Quéribus (who never missed a chance to flaunt his familiarity with the king of France—a familiarity that was in truth merely superficial, since the king maintained some distance from his favourites despite his courteous manners), “when he acceded to Guise’s demands, had one eye on Paris and the other on the Invincible Armada that was making its way towards the English coast, and whose victory he considered ineluctable, all the while praying on his knees that it might not be so. So having his eyes fixed on two different scenes, he was squinting like Brissac… (What do you think of that comparison, my brother? Isn’t it gallant?) In which state he considered Guise’s demands baseless and bumbling, and so he answered yes to the whole proposal in principle, but reserved the right to reject any parts of it that he objected to and has been systematically undoing everything he agreed to. Moreover, in Chartres, there’s a remarkable dearth of funds, not even enough money to pay the Swiss Guards, who, as good Swiss, have nevertheless remained faithful to him. Which is part of the reason the king agreed to meet with the Estates-General, hoping to wrest some money from them under the pretext of pursuing the war against the Huguenots—which monies, once obtained, he’ll use for his own ends, as he’s always done.”

  “But what about the disgrace of the Duc d’Épernon?”

  “Merely for the sake of appearances, as was your exile. Épernon has traded control of Normandy for the control of Angoumois, where he can establish a secret liaison with Navarre, who controls the armies in that region.”

  “So you think that the king is just ‘trimming his sails’, as he likes to say?”

  “I’m quite sure of it. Listen to the rest, which will entirely confirm this: after the agreement between the king and Guise, which was called the Edict of Union (so named, of course, since it’s preparing the disunion of
the country and a civil war), Guise freed the queen and the queen mother, whom he’d been holding under house arrest since the king’s flight to Chartres.”

  “What? He had the temerity to hold them prisoner?”

  “With all sorts of kissing of their hands, flattery and genuflections—you know how that sort of hypocrisy works! But still, they weren’t allowed to leave Paris until the Edict of Union was signed. And so they’re both coming to Chartres, the queen mother more of a Guisard than ever, since she believes that Guise’s ship is in full sail and that the Armada will be victorious. So she has attached herself to the king like a horsefly to the arse of a mare!”

  “Did he kick her off?”

  “I’ll tell you. The scene took place in the king’s apartments in the bishop’s palace in Chartres, and I was among the very few who attended. If some people in the court want you to believe that they were there, don’t trust them, for the only people present were Du Halde, Chicot, François d’O, Alphonse the Corsican, Crillon, Laugnac and me.”

  “I shall remember, my brother,” I said gravely.

  “Anyway, the queen mother arrived on Bellièvre’s arm.”

  “What, he was also there?”

  “Yes, and a few others whose names I’ve forgotten. Catherine came in looking very ill, but heavily made up with lots of ceruse and whitening, clothed in her perpetual black dress, dragging her foot like a wounded crow, and, the minute she crossed the threshold, croaking like one. At this the king, who’d at first appeared happy enough to see her, suddenly closed up like an oyster.

  “‘My son,’ she said, ‘what are you doing here in Chartres, where you’re nothing but a kinglet without a palace or a court and confined to the bishop’s palace, instead of coming back to your Louvre in Paris and living as befits your rank?’

  “‘Madame,’ he replied with visible bitterness in his black eyes, ‘I am infinitely grateful for your wise counsel, but the same reasons that made me leave my Louvre continue to keep me away from it, and these reasons haven’t changed since last Friday, the thirteenth—in fact, quite the contrary.’