“How many men have you here?” inquired the King, without making any other reply to the question addressed to him.
“What for, sire?”
“How many men have you, I say?” repeated the King, stamping upon the ground with his foot.
“I have the musketeers.”
“Well; and what others?”
“Twenty guards and thirteen Swiss.”
“How many men will be required to—”
“To do what, sire,” replied the musketeer, opening his large, calm eyes.
“To arrest M. Fouquet.”
D’Artagnan fell back a step. “To arrest M. Fouquet!” he burst forth.
“Are you going to tell me that it is impossible!” exclaimed the King, with cold and vindictive passion.
“I never say that anything is impossible,” replied d’Artagnan, wounded to the quick.
“Very well; do it, then.”
D’Artagnan turned on his heel, and made his way towards the door; it was but a short distance, and he cleared it in half a dozen paces; when he reached it he suddenly paused, and said, “Your Majesty will forgive me, but, in order to effect this arrest, I should like written directions.”
“For what purpose—and since when has the King’s word been insufficient for you?”
“Because the word of a king, when it springs from a feeling of anger, may possibly change when the feeling changes.”
“A truce to set phrases, monsieur; you have another thought besides that?”
“Oh, I, at least, have certain thoughts and ideas, which, unfortunately, others have not,” d’Artagnan replied impertinently.
The King, in the tempest of his wrath, hesitated, and drew back in the face of d’Artagnan’s frank courage, just as a horse crouches on its haunches under the strong hand of a bold and experienced rider. “What is your thought?” he exclaimed.
“This, sire,” replied d’Artagnan: “you cause a man to be arrested when you are still under his roof; and passion is alone the cause of that. When your anger shall have passed away you will regret what you have done; and then I wish to be in a position to show you your signature. If that, however, should fail to be a reparation, it will at least show us that the King is wrong to lose his temper.”
“Wrong to lose his temper!” cried the King, in a loud, passionate voice. “Did not my father, my grandfather too, before me, lose their temper at times, in Heaven’s name?”
“The King your father and the King your grandfather never lost their temper except when under the protection of their own palace.”
“The King is master wherever he may be.”
“That is a flattering, complimentary phrase which cannot proceed from any one but M. Colbert; but it happens not to be the truth. The King is at home in every man’s house when he has driven its owner out of it.”
The King bit his lips, but said nothing.
“Can it be possible?” said d’Artagnan; “here is a man who is positively ruining himself in order to please you, and you wish to have him arrested! Mordioux! Sire, if my name were Fouquet, and people treated me in that manner, I would swallow at a single gulp all the fireworks and other things, and I would set fire to them, and blow myself and everybody else up to the sky. But it is all the same; it is your wish, and it shall be done.”
“Go,” said the King; “but have you men enough?”
“Do you suppose I am going to take a whole host to help me? Arrest M. Fouquet! why that is so easy that a mere child might do it! It is like drinking a glass of bitters: one makes an ugly face, and that is all.”
“If he defends himself?”
“He! not at all likely. Defend himself when such extreme harshness as you are going to practise makes the man a very martyr! Nay, I am sure that if he has a million of francs left, which I very much doubt, he would be willing enough to give it in order to have such a termination as this. But what does that matter? It shall be done at once.”
“Stay,” said the King; “do not make his arrest a public affair.”
“That will be more difficult.”
“Why so?”
“Because nothing is easier than to go up to M. Fouquet in the midst of a thousand enthusiastic guests who surround him, and say, ‘In the King’s name, I arrest you.’ But to go up to him, to turn him first one way and then another, to drive him up into one of the corners of the chess-board in such a way that he cannot escape; to take him away from his guests, and to keep him a prisoner for you, without one of them, alas! having heard anything about it,—that indeed is a real difficulty, the greatest of all, in truth; and I hardly see how it is to be done.”
“You had better say it is impossible, and you will have finished much sooner. Heaven help me, but I seem to be surrounded by people who prevent me from doing what I wish.”
“I do not prevent your doing anything. Are you decided?”
“Take care of M. Fouquet, until I shall have made up my mind by to-morrow morning.”
“That shall be done, sire.”
“And return, when I rise in the morning, for further orders; and now leave me to myself.”
“You do not even want M. Colbert, then?” said the musketeer, firing this last shot as he was leaving the room. The King started. With his whole mind fixed on the thought of revenge, he had forgotten the cause and substance of the offence.
“No, no one,” he said; “no, no one here! Leave me!”
D’Artagnan quitted the room. The King closed the door with his own hands, and began to walk up and down his apartment at a furious pace, like a wounded bull in an arena, dragging after him the coloured streamers and iron darts. At last he began to take comfort in the expression of his violent feelings.
“Miserable wretch that he is! not only does he squander my finances, but with his ill-gotten plunder he corrupts secretaries, friends, generals, artists, and all, and tries to rob me of the one to whom I am most attached. And that is the reason why that perfidious girl so boldly took his part! Gratitude! and who can tell whether it was not a stronger feeling—love itself?” He gave himself up for a moment to his bitter reflections. “A satyr!” he thought, with that abhorrent hate with which young men regard those more advanced in life, who still think of love. “A man who has never found opposition or resistance in any one, who lavishes his gold and jewels in every direction, and who retains his staff of painters in order to take the portraits of his mistresses in the costume of goddesses.” The King trembled with passion as he continued—“He pollutes and profanes everything that belongs to me! He destroys everything that is mine. He will be my death at last, I know. That man is too much for me; he is my mortal enemy, and he shall fall! I hate him—I hate him—I hate him!” and as he pronounced these words, he struck the arm of the chair in which he was sitting violently over and over again, and then rose like one in an epileptic fit. “To-morrow! to-morrow! oh, happy day!” he murmured, “when the sun rises, no other rival will that bright orb have but me. That man shall fall so low, that when people look at the utter ruin which my anger shall have wrought, they will be forced to confess at least that I am indeed greater than he.” The King, who was incapable of mastering his emotions any longer, knocked over with a blow of his fist a small table placed close to his bedside, and in the bitterness of feeling from which he was suffering, almost weeping, and half-suffocated by his passion, he threw himself on his bed, dressed as he was, and bit the sheets in the extremity of his passion, trying to find repose of body at least there. The bed creaked beneath his weight, and with the exception of a few broken sounds, which escaped from his overburdened chest, absolute silence soon reigned in the chamber of Morpheus.
45
High Treason
THE UNGOVERNABLE FURY WHICH took possession of the King at the sight and at the perusal of Fouquet’s letter to La Vallière by degrees subsided into a feeling of pain and extreme weariness. Youth, invigorated by health and lightness of spirits, and requiring that what it loses should be immediately restored—y
outh knows not those endless, sleepless nights, which enable us to realise the fable of the vulture unceasingly feeding on Prometheus. In instances where the man of middle life, in his acquired strength of will and purpose, and the old man, in his state of exhaustion, find an incessant augmentation of their bitter sorrow, a young man, surprised by the sudden appearance of a misfortune, weakens himself in sighs, and groans, and tears, in direct struggles with it, and is thereby far sooner overthrown by the inflexible enemy with whom he is engaged. Once overthrown, his struggles cease. Louis could not hold out more than a few minutes, at the end of which he had ceased to clench his hands, and to burn up with his looks the invisible objects of his hatred; he soon ceased to attack with his violent imprecations not M. Fouquet alone, but even La Vallière herself; from fury he subsided into despair, and from despair to prostration. After he had thrown himself for a few minutes to and fro convulsively on his bed, his nerveless arms fell quietly down; his head lay languidly on his pillow; his limbs, exhausted from his excessive emotions, still trembled occasionally, agitated by slight muscular contractions; and from his breast only faint and infrequent sighs still issued. Morpheus, the tutelary deity of the apartment, towards whom Louis raised his eyes, wearied by his anger and reddened by his tears, showered down upon him the sleep-inducing poppies with which his hands were filled; so that the King gently closed his eyes and fell asleep. Then it seemed to him, as it often happens in that first sleep, so light and gentle, which raises the body above the couch, the soul above the earth—it seemed to him, we say, as if the god Morpheus, painted on the ceiling, looked at him with eyes resembling human eyes; that something shone brightly, and moved to and fro in the dome above the sleeper; that the crowd of terrible dreams which thronged together in his brain, and which were interrupted for a moment, half revealed a human face, with a hand resting against the mouth, and in an attitude of deep and absorbed meditation. And strange enough, too, this man bore so wonderful a resemblance to the King himself, that Louis fancied he was looking at his own face reflected in a mirror; with the exception, however, that the face was saddened by a feeling of the profoundest pity. Then it seemed to him as if the dome gradually retired, escaping from his gaze, and that the figures and attributes painted by Lebrun became darker and darker as the distance became more and more remote. A gentle, easy movement, as regular as that by which a vessel plunges beneath the waves, had succeeded to the immovableness of the bed. Doubtless the King was dreaming, and in his dream the crown of gold, which fastened the curtains together, seemed to recede from his vision, just as the dome, to which it remained suspended, had done, so that the winged genius which, with both its hands, supported the crown, seemed, though vainly so, to call upon the King, who was fast disappearing from it. The bed still sank. Louis, with his eyes open, could not resist the deception of this cruel hallucination. At last, as the light of the royal chamber faded away into darkness and gloom, something cold, gloomy, and inexplicable in its nature seemed to infect the air. No paintings, nor gold, nor velvet hangings, were visible any longer, nothing but walls of a dull grey colour, which the increasing gloom made darker every moment. And yet the bed still continued to descend, and after a minute, which seemed in its duration almost an age to the King, it reached a stratum of air, black and still as death, and then it stopped. The King could no longer see the light in his room, except as from the bottom of a well we can see the light of day. “I am under the influence of a terrible dream,” he thought. “It is time to awaken from it. Come! let me wake up.”
Every one has experienced what the above remark conveys; there is hardly a person who, in the midst of a nightmare whose influence is suffocating, has not said to himself; by the help of that light which still burns in the brain when every human light is extinguished, “It is nothing but a dream after all.” This was precisely what Louis XIV said to himself; but when he said, “Come, come! wake up,” he perceived that not only was he already awake, but still more, that he had his eyes open also; he then looked all round him. On his right hand and on his left two armed men stood silently, each wrapped in a huge cloak and the face covered with a mask; one of them held a small lamp in his hand, whose glimmering light revealed the saddest picture a King could look upon. Louis could not help saying to himself that his dream still lasted, and that all he had to do to cause it to disappear was to move his arms or to say something aloud; he darted from his bed, and found himself upon the damp moist ground. Then, addressing himself to the man who held the lamp in his hand, he said,—
“What is this, monsieur, and what is the meaning of this jest?”
“It is no jest,” replied in a deep voice the masked figure that held the lantern.
“Do you belong to M. Fouquet?” inquired the King, greatly astonished at his situation.
“It matters very little to whom we belong,” said the phantom; “we are your masters now; that is sufficient.”
The King, more impatient than intimidated, turned to the other masked figure. “If this is a comedy,” he said, “you will tell M. Fouquet that I find it unseemly and improper, and that I desire it should cease.”
The second masked person to whom the King had addressed himself was a man of huge stature and vast circumference. He held himself erect and motionless as a block of marble. “Well,” added the King, stamping his foot, “you do not answer!”
“We do not answer you, my good monsieur,” said the giant in a stentorian voice, “because there is nothing to answer.”
“At least tell me what you want?” exclaimed Louis, folding his arms with a passionate gesture.
“You will know by-and-by,” replied the man who held the lamp.
“In the meantime tell me where I am.”
“Look.”
Louis looked all around him; but, by the light of the lamp which the masked figure raised for the purpose, he could perceive nothing but the damp walls which glistened here and there with the slimy traces of the snail. “Oh! oh! a dungeon,” said the King.
“No, a subterranean passage.”
“Which leads—”
“Will you be good enough to follow us?”
“I shall not stir from hence!” cried the King.
“If you are obstinate, my dear young friend,” replied the taller and stouter of the two, “I will lift you up in my arms, will roll you up in a cloak, and if you are stifled there, why, so much the worse for you.”
And as he said this he disengaged from beneath his cloak a hand of which Milo of Crotona would have envied him the possession, on the day when he had that unhappy idea of rending his last oak. The King dreaded violence, for he could well believe that the two men into whose power he had fallen had not gone so far with any idea of drawing back, and that they would consequently be ready to proceed to extremities, if necessary. He shook his head, and said: “It seems I have fallen into the hands of a couple of assassins. Move on, then.”
Neither of the men answered a word to this remark. The one who carried the lantern walked first, and the King followed him, while the second masked figure closed the procession. In this manner they passed along a winding gallery of some length, with as many staircases leading out of it as are to be found in the mysterious and gloomy palaces of Ann Radcliff’s creation. All these windings and turnings, during which the King heard the sound of falling water over his head, ended at last in a long corridor closed by an iron door. The figure with the lamp opened the door with one of the keys he wore suspended at his girdle, where, during the whole of the time, the King had heard them rattle. As soon as the door was opened and admitted the air, Louis recognised the balmy odours which are exhaled by the trees after a hot summer’s day. He paused, hesitatingly, for a moment or two; but his huge companion who followed him thrust him out of the subterranean passage.
“Another blow,” said the King, turning towards the one who had just had the audacity to touch his sovereign; “what do you intend to do with the King of France?”
“Try to forget that word,” replie
d the man with the lamp, in a tone which as little admitted of a reply as one of the famous decrees of Minos.ad
“You deserve to be broken on the wheel for the word you have just made use of,” said the giant, as he extinguished the lamp his companion handed to him; “but the King is too kind-hearted.”
Louis, at the threat, made so sudden a movement, that it seemed as if he meditated flight; but the giant’s hand was in a moment placed on his shoulder, and fixed him motionless where he stood. “But tell me, at least, where we are going,” said the King.
“Come,” replied the former of the two men, with a kind of respect in his manner, and leading his prisoner towards a carriage which seemed to be in waiting.
The carriage was completely concealed amid the trees. Two horses, with their feet fettered, were fastened by a halter to the lower branches of a large oak.
“Get in,” said the same man, opening the carriage door, and letting down the step. The King obeyed, seated himself at the back of the carriage, the padded door of which was shut and locked immediately upon him and his guide. As for the giant, he cut the fastenings by which the horses were bound, harnessedthem himself, and mounted on the box of the carriage, which was unoccupied. The carriage set off immediately at a quick trot, turned into the road to Paris, and in the forest of Sénart found a relay of horses fastened to trees in the same manner as the first horses had been, and without a postilion. The man on the box changed the horses, and continued to follow the road towards Paris with the same rapidity, and entered the city about three o’clock in the morning. The carriage proceeded along the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and, after having called out to the sentinel “by the King’s order,” the driver conducted the horses into the circular enclosure of the Bastille, looking out upon the courtyard, called La Cour du Gouvernement. There the horses drew up, reeking with sweat, at the flight of steps, and a sergeant of the guard ran forward. “Go and wake the governor,” said the coachman, in a voice of thunder.
Man in the Iron Mask (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 41
