by Robert Merle
§ “The thing is done, Lion.”
¶ “The promise of an honest man is the equivalent of a legal obligation.”
|| “Envoy of the master.”
** “God does not exist; neither does the Devil.”
†† “These very words.”
‡‡ “Bodily posture.”
8
THAT SAME DAY, as I was returning to my lodgings, I found a letter that a messenger had just brought, and that immediately plunged me into an abyss of surprise and apprehension:
Monsieur my cousin,
It pains me greatly that you haven’t yet replied to the invitation I made you to visit me in my Hôtel de Montpensier, where I would have been delighted to introduce you to Madame my cousin, who is most eager to meet you, having heard such diverse opinions of you that she desires to make your acquaintance and thereby form an opinion of you that comes only from knowing you. Believing, Monsieur my cousin, that you would not knowingly neglect the wishes of this high lady—as, alas, you have done mine—I pray to God to keep you in His holy protection, or at least as long as this noble lady commands me to remain, Monsieur my cousin, your humble and devoted servant,
Jeanne de La Vasselière
I could hardly believe my eyes at the extreme impudence of this Marianne, who was ordering me in a combination of threats and politeness to submit to the inquisition of the Duchesse de Montpensier, whom everyone knew to be the frenetic servant of her brother, and whose gold inspired the most strident of the priests of the League to rage against the king day and night in their sermons. From her belt dangled a pair of gold scissors, by which she meant to tonsure Henri before locking him away in a monastery, giving him his third and final crown, the first being the Polish one and the second the French. She spawned a constant stream of perverse and wicked invective that the League then bruited about in Paris and that the king, had he not been so excessively mild-mannered, should have punished by exiling her forever.
Since I couldn’t share this letter with my Angelina, who was so good and naive that she could never see evil in anything or anyone—and, in addition, having decided, in order to preserve her peace of mind, never to reveal the perilous enterprises into which the service of the king led me—I decided to show the note to Miroul. He immediately bade me not to put myself at the mercy of the ferocious Guise in her mansion, which was no doubt the garrison for many armed and hostile men, and added:
“Monsieur, it’s my belief that you should not go there under any circumstances! When you grab a wolf by his ears, you’re pretty sure to get bitten! Especially since you’re known as the king’s loyal servant and your lodgings are already marked for the massacre!”
“But Miroul,” I protested, “he who plays the sheep will be devoured by the wolf!”
“And he who doesn’t run away is eaten all the sooner! Monsieur, wait for him to show his teeth if he must bite! Don’t throw yourself headlong between his jaws!”
What he said made sense, but finding his peasant’s prudence a bit too passive under the circumstances, I decided to seek the opinion of Quéribus, who, taking a position in direct opposition to Miroul’s, laughed:
“Monsieur my brother, go ahead! The danger you face is no greater inside the Hôtel de Montpensier than outside it! And, once inside, you’ll be able to cast your piercing blue eyes on this monster, one of whose thighs is too short and the other too light, as Chicot has said—a quip that would have had him assassinated ten times over had it not been dishonourable to dispatch a fool! Madame Limp suspects, as does everyone else, that you’re secretly working for the king. She wants you to visit her in her mansion so she can pick your brain. But I think you’re way too clever not to give her enough rope to hang herself. You are not unaware that the king sets great store by your opinions—which is why I’m not jealous that he uses you more than me, since I’m more agile with a blade than with my brain.”
“Quéribus, I cannot imagine that you’d ever be jealous of me!” I cried, throwing an arm over his shoulder. “I who am but a sketch for your exquisite portrait!”
“Well, ’tis true,” gloated Quéribus as he preened his wasp-like figure, “that, as for my earthly appearance, I am still, though well past thirty years old, enough of a beauty to turn many a head, and that, every day I spend at court presents a thousand opportunities to sin were I not so fond of Madame your sister.”
His words brought a knowing smile to my face, since, though I agreed that he had as many occasions to sin as he claimed, I doubted that he didn’t take advantage of some of them. He found my smile as flattering as my usual compliments, so that I left him very happy with me, as I was with him, since his advice suited my present inclinations much more than Miroul’s.
I sent Miroul off to the Hôtel de Montpensier with a little note in which I threw myself at the feet of Mademoiselle de La Vasselière, and, less than an hour later, he returned, looking very mournful and not a little worried. He told me he’d met directly with this prodigious wench, and that if it wasn’t the Marianne we’d met in Mâcon, it was an exact portrait of our assassin. He related that she’d read my missive with a wry smile and had said in a derisive tone, “I’m charmed by your master’s obedience and request his immediate presence here… unless he’s afraid of being devoured by the ogresses who reign herein!”
Hearing these words, I strapped on my sword without further ado, all the while Miroul begging me not to be crazy enough to go wandering off into this she-wolf’s lair, exposing my life to these Furies from hell who, only a month previously, had hired Mérigot to shoot me. But since I’d already made up my mind, I refused to listen to a single word, so he decided that the best he could do was to fasten a small Italian dagger to my back, under my cape, explaining that it might come in useful, as they would surely confiscate my sword at the entrance to the Hôtel de Montpensier.
And, of course, he was right, for without this little Italian stiletto I would have felt very vulnerable and exposed when an enormous blackguard of a lackey ushered me into a small salon, where I was to wait. But no sooner had I got my bearings than the door flew open and Marianne appeared, offering me her hand to kiss, with a haughtiness I could barely credit; she then stood glowering at me and ordered me to be seated without the faintest trace of a smile and in the most cutting tone. She herself remained standing and began pacing back and forth in front of me without another word, darting looks at me from time to time as if they were arrows from a crossbow. She was a lively brunette with few charms to recommend her, other than her constant movement. La Vasselière was not without some resemblance to Alizon, but she was a full head taller and her black eyes expressed only variations of disgust as opposed to my sweet seamstress’s inevitably benevolent looks. She was robed in white satin, with gold embroidery and strings of pearls, finery as splendid as that of any of the ladies of the court. Her white-laced collar was adorned with a multitude of little diamonds and other precious stones.
“My cousin,” she said, coming to a halt in the middle of the room, “may I ask you to satisfy my curiosity?”
“Madame,” I replied, with a smile that hardly masked the impatience I felt, “I would be happy to satisfy it if only I knew who was asking the question: Mademoiselle de La Vasselière, or Marianne?”
“Monsieur chevalier,” she countered without the slightest sign that I’d shaken her haughtiness, “this Marianne whom you presume to name is my dearest and closest friend. But she who is speaking to you here, with all the weight that her relationship derives from him, is the cousin of the Duc de Guise.”
“Madame!” I exclaimed, leaping to my feet and making her a deep bow. “Although I am a faithful and devoted servant of my king, I am not ignorant of the respect I owe to a great lord who is second only to the king of France.”
This said, I sat down again, knowing full well that this phrase had only partially satisfied her, and not wishing to go any further in the contentment that I’d just provided her.
“Some people think,” she said with a les
s-than-generous look in her jet-black eyes, “that it is the Duc d’Épernon who is second to the king in this kingdom. And it may be surmised that you share this belief, since you cured him of the cankers in his throat.”
“Madame,” I answered stiffly, “I care for, cure and do whatever is necessary to heal those the king orders me to attend to. If he ever ordered me to offer medical attention to the Duc de Guise I would not leave the latter’s bedside until I’d cured whatever malady beset him.”
“Well, that’s good!” replied La Vasselière curtly.
After which, finally understanding that I could not be shaken from this position, she seated herself in an armchair, arranged her skirts about her with care and, suddenly staring at me intently, snapped:
“Who was this Mundane fellow? Where did he come from? What was he doing among your servants? What happened to the letter he was carrying? To whom was it addressed?”
“Madame,” I replied with exquisite calm, “I shall answer this hailstorm of questions if you would only be so good as to answer a single one of mine. Why did Marianne kill him?”
“She didn’t intend to,” she answered with surprising animation, “but when she tried to lift the heavy chest to take the letter, she was surprised by the Englishman, who’d pretended to be asleep, and when he grabbed and unsheathed his sword, she had no recourse but to draw her dagger, throw herself at him and stab him.”
“So many times!”
“Yes, because he had his hands around her neck and was choking her!”
“I thank you, Madame,” I breathed after a moment of silence, “for this report, which certainly reveals Marianne to be more humane than I’d thought.”
“I’ll tell her so,” replied La Vasselière with a grain of irony. “She’ll be charmed to learn of your feelings.”
After this, I urged her to repeat her own questions, having asked mine only to allow me time to calculate my answers.
“As for Mundane,” I said, temporizing, “I’m unable to satisfy your curiosity at this time. I know neither who he was nor where he came from. All I know is that the king ordered me to include him in my retinue and to provide him protection and any help he required. Which is why, when he asked me at Pamiers to arrange a meeting with the king of Navarre, I got my father to help with this.”
“Who is, if I’m not mistaken, a Huguenot,” she observed. “And you, Monsieur?”
“As for me,” I improvised, “as you know very well, Madame, I go to Mass and to confession.”
“With your words or with your heart?”
“Well, now, Madame,” I replied stiffly; and, rising to my feet, I exclaimed, “This inquisition is intolerable! I will answer to my confessor on this matter, not to you!”
“Sit down, my cousin,” she soothed, smiling for the first time. “If you find this question offensive, I withdraw it, and will content myself with the information you’ve provided that Mundane met Navarre thanks to your father. Which, of course, we already knew.”
And which, of course, I suspected, otherwise how would Guise’s people have known about the letter and the importance attached to it? Which also explained the counterfeit frankness with which she praised my “honesty”.
“And to whom,” she asked, “was this letter addressed?”
“There was no address on the letter,” I said, looking her directly in her blue eyes.
“So to whom did you deliver it?”
“To the king, judging that it must be of very great portent if someone had been ready to kill the messenger in order to obtain it, and then attempted to kill a second man once the letter had been delivered.”
To which, without batting an eyelid, Mademoiselle de La Vasselière replied with utter calm:
“Unfortunately, you happened to witness a murder which could have inculpated my closest friend, and me as well, since you couldn’t help learning my name, living at court as you do.”
“Madame,” I answered with a feigned look of surprise, “you astonish me! Can you imagine that the king would have accused a cousin of the Duc de Guise of any wrongdoing?”
“I realized as much afterwards, which is why there was no further attempt on your life. Especially since, dear cousin, in the letter you addressed to me, you showed yourself to be more open to our position than I would have thought, by liberating your prisoner and refusing to incriminate the major-domo of this house, who, since he is not a nobleman, could have been hanged. In truth, I don’t give a fig about his life. But I do worry about the stain his death would have caused to our family.”
“Well, Madame,” I cried, attempting to convey a sudden bout of honesty, “had I known sooner of your good offices towards me, I could have been spared my voluntary exile!”
“Voluntary, Monsieur!” gasped La Vasselière. “You mean you weren’t sent into exile for the disgrace you caused to the throne?!”
“Well, not as entirely as I pretended,” I said, again counterfeiting some confusion. “I was also seeking to protect myself from you. I had to leave Épernon’s bedside, so it’s true that the king was quite unhappy with me since he would have wanted me to continue my cure of the duc.”
“Monsieur my cousin,” said La Vasselière, rising, “I am truly charmed that you have been so forthcoming with me as to share the truth about your exile, since we knew of course that it was feigned and that the king’s treasurer had provided you with 2,000 écus on the eve of your departure from Paris.”
“Well!” I thought. “My Guisard friends have ears everywhere! I was right to let slip this bit of truth. As Henri has often said, the best and most Machiavellian lie is the one that’s closest to the truth!”
“Madame,” I observed, looking her directly in the eye, “I am also delighted that you’ve become so much more amicable!”
“Amicable?” she queried, raising an eyebrow. “I will only be so, in fact, if you have the good fortune to please Madame de Montpensier, who will receive you shortly, if you’ll please await her here.”
And at this, she made a small curtsey, and left me astonished at the frigid haughtiness of this wench, who, to serve Guise, hadn’t hesitated to prostitute herself to an English gentleman in an inn, stab him to death with her own hands, and then steal my horse.
“Shortly” certainly did not describe the length of time I had to wait. For more than an hour, I had ample opportunity to meditate on the peril in which I found myself, given that I was in the hands of these maenads who took no more account of the life of a man than of that of their cat, or of a mouse for that matter. They called you “my cousin”, but they could, just as easily, throw you into a sack at night and drop you in the Seine from one of their windows overlooking that river. Thus it is that religious zeal has come to override every moral consideration in this strange century!
I was left to kick my heels for a long time, stewing in the most absolute disquiet—and you can imagine, dear reader, how much worse it would have been had I learnt the fate that the Guise faction had reserved for poor Captain Le Pierre. Eventually, the same great hulk of a lackey reappeared to lead me to his mistress, but instead of taking me to a princely salon in which I would confront the elegantly attired sister of the Duc de Guise, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, I was taken to a small chamber in which the only furniture was a great gilded bed, whose curtains of white brocade had been drawn, hiding from my sight the person who occupied its interior, but whose voice I could hear as she loudly scolded her chambermaid, who was attempting to put in order a room strewn from one end to the other with various clothes, shoes and other feminine accoutrements.
“Yes, I am sure,” whined this voice bitterly, “that it was you, Frédérique, and none other, who mislaid the draft of the letter that Henri sent to Felipe, which I had in my hands only yesterday.”
“Madame,” replied Frédérique, whom I took to be from Lorraine given how tall, robust, blonde and blue-eyed she was, with broad shoulders and a large bosom that looked more muscular than inviting, “that cannot be. I never t
ouch your papers! I’ve got enough to do just sorting out this mess, in which a bitch wouldn’t be able to find her pups! If I don’t straighten this room it’ll look more like a pigsty than a princess’s chamber!”
“That’s enough, you silly wench!” said the voice, reaching an everhigher pitch and nastiness. “You’ve got too sharp a tongue, it seems to me! But you’ll be talking out of the other side of your mouth if I have to have you whipped in front of the entire household for your impertinence! So I’m a boar’s sow and live in a sty?”
“Madame,” Frédérique replied without batting an eyelid or pausing in her work, “you are assuredly the most beautiful princess in the universe, but may the Devil throttle me if you’re not also the most disorderly! And I won’t have you blaming me for misplacing the duc’s letter, which you must have put in your basket without thinking about it! It’s probably been burnt by this time.”
“And why burnt, you hussy?”
“Because,” hissed Frédérique, slapping her hardy right breast with the flat of her hand, “you’ve told me a hundred times to burn the contents of your basket every morning! A hundred times, by my faith!” she protested, slapping herself again. “And may the Blessed Virgin and her Divine Son strike me dead if I’m lying!”
“It’s you, you idiot,” snarled the duchesse from behind her curtains, “who threw the letter in the basket! I never would have discarded a letter written by my beloved brother! And, sadly, now this letter has been burnt thanks to you, whore’s bastard that you are!”
“I’m no bastard!” gasped Frédérique, badly stung by this phrase, and, pulling herself up to her full height, she countered, “I know both my mother and my father, who were well-to-do labourers in the countryside around Metz. And you know very well, Madame, that at court there are any number of high ladies who couldn’t make the same claim!”
At this, the hulk of a lackey, who must have grown impatient with this endless bickering, presumed to cough.
