by Robert Merle
Despite the delicious fare our dinner was an exceedingly sad affair and none of us had much appetite. Giacomi insisted on accompanying me back to the rue de Béthisy, where the admiral lived, and during our lengthy walk there, we could see the increasing agitation and aggression of the Parisians. Their growing rumble of angry voices brought to mind an anthill that a hunter has just accidentally decapitated.
When I reached Coligny’s bedside, I was told that he was sleeping, so I went downstairs to the great hall, where an ever-increasing number of Huguenots had gathered to express their outrage. Needing some time to reflect on the dark cloud that was rapidly forming over our heads, I stepped outside onto the little square in front of the house. Pacing up and down, I consulted my watch and discovered it was just two o’clock, and, remembered that Ambroise Paré had promised to return during the afternoon to relieve me, and so I watched anxiously for any sign of him. In the midst of my reflections, I heard a loud noise coming from the rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain and saw a detachment of the king’s guards emerge from that street into the rue de Béthisy, wearing white ceremonial jerseys, known as gambesons, decorated with silver frills. They were preceded by trumpeters, walking in closed ranks and sounding their instruments at full blast to announce the king. On all sides, windows were thrown open, despite the August heat, and the occupants leant out to watch, but no one came out into the street because of their fear of the guards. In the middle of the procession, flanked by two guards who never left his side, marched the king—tall, thin and bent, his face so drawn by worry that he seemed twice as old as his years. Following him came the queen mother, all in black but resplendent in her pearls and glittering jewellery, looking younger than her son. On her right marched the Duc d’Anjou, his handsome, pale face looking especially inscrutable, and on her left came the Duc d’Alençon, her third son, who looked like the runt of the litter, and whose face wore a false, mean and fearful look that did him no honour.
The guards lined up in double rows in front of the admiral’s house, and the king walked up, graciously greeting the gentlemen gathered there. They answered his greeting, bowing respectfully enough in response, but took no more notice of the queen mother and her two other sons than a fish would an apple. It was clear that, if they suspected that the king had had no hand in this murderous attack, as his visit to the wounded man was meant to prove, they could not be assured of the same degree of innocence for Catherine and the Duc d’Anjou. These last were known to mightily detest the Huguenot leader, the queen mother because he wanted to steal the authority she held over her son and Anjou because Coligny, fearing his power, had attempted to have him effectively banished by making him king of Poland.
Once upstairs, the king asked if there were a doctor present, so I stepped forward, explaining that I was filling in for Mazille and Paré and that the wounded man was resting, but could receive him if he wished, but only for a moment. The king stepped up to the bed curtains, which one of his guards raised so he could see the admiral, and Coligny, hearing their approach, opened his eyes.
“Ah, my father!” said the king (for this is indeed what he called him). “I’m very sorry to see you wounded and brought so low.”
“’Tis true, sire,” replied the admiral, who appeared to be quite comforted by the honour bestowed on him by this royal visit, “but the only affliction I feel is that I am prevented by my wound from showing my king how much I desire to do him service.”
“You will recover, my father,” the king assured him. “And by God, I tell you, I’ll bring your enemies to justice. In the house from which they fired on you, we found an old woman and a lackey, who’ve been thrown in jail and will be tortured. Do you approve of the judges I’ve named to investigate this case?”
“Of course, sire,” said the admiral, “if you believe in them. Only, I beg you to add one of your masters, Cavagnes, to the list.”
“It will be done,” said the king.
“Sire,” whispered the admiral, signalling to me to withdraw, “I would like you to remember…”
But I didn’t hear the rest, and as I turned away, I caught Anjou’s eye and decided to greet him, along with the queen mother and his brother. This was not easy, since they were surrounded—almost imprisoned—by a wall of Huguenot gentlemen, who, grumbling and complaining audibly, walked back and forth around them, clearly refusing to pay them the respect they were owed. Albert de Gondi, Catherine’s confidant, who normally looked so sly and disdainful, was visibly shaken by this demonstration. I could see the Duc d’Alençon’s lips trembling and that he was rolling his eyes wildly like a rabbit. Catherine and the Duc d’Anjou put on better faces, but I could see that they, too, were looking very pale and that Catherine was pouting furiously. It was easy to see that they would have preferred to be a thousand leagues from there.
Just as I was bowing to the queen mother and to Anjou and Alençon, I was joined by Monsieur de Mazille and the orderly Cornaton. The queen mother appeared very relieved to have finally encountered in this den of Huguenots people who would treat her with respect, and asked Mazille if Paré had extracted the bullet, to which Mazille replied that he had, and she was shown the ball, which was made of copper.
Turning it over and over in her fingers, which were adorned with rings set with the finest jewels in the world, the queen said, with visibly false concern:
“It’s very large! Did the admiral suffer much when it was extracted?”
“Very much,” answered Mazille, “but he neither groaned nor fainted.”
“Yes, I can well imagine!” replied Catherine. “I know of no man in the world more magnanimous than Monsieur de Coligny.”
Such praise brought Mazille and me up short, so surprised were we to hear such hypocritical flattery directed at this man from those fleshy lips.
“I’m very glad,” Catherine continued, looking at us with those protuberant eyes that didn’t really see us, “that the bullet didn’t remain lodged in the wound, since it may have been poisoned.”
I was dumbfounded by these sinister words, since pubic opinion had so frequently associated Catherine with the word poison, especially after the deaths of Coligny’s two brothers, Odet de Châtillon and d’Andelot, not to mention Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre, who’d died so suddenly and mysteriously at the Louvre after having signed the marriage contract between Henri and Margot. Coligny himself had nearly been assassinated two years previously by means of a white powder the would-be assassin had almost succeeded in administering to him. Monsieur de Mazille, though a papist, was an honest man and was as shocked and ashamed by Catherine’s impudent words as I, and, lowering his eyes, said nothing. And those words would have been left hanging awkwardly in the air had not Cornaton, obsequious as ever, cried in his dove-like simplicity:
“Ah, Madame! But we were on the lookout for that! We treated the wound with an elixir to combat the poison, in case the bullet had been coated with it!”
The queen mother visibly bit her lip at this news, and her heavy eyelids closed over her eyes for a moment. I wanted to kill poor Cornaton for his stupid indiscretion, certain as I was that it was not in the admiral’s interest for his enemies to believe he was out of danger—in which case, God only knew, there’d be a second attempt on his life by the very people who had inflicted the first.
At this, Albert de Gondi (a Florentine himself, who’d been assigned to Charles IX in his youth and had wholly corrupted him), looked knowingly at the queen mother and, understanding better than anyone else what she was plotting (having so long been her confidant), said in very suave tones, his sly eyes shining:
“It’s my opinion, Madame, that it would be better to transport the admiral to the Louvre where the king can at least protect him from popular sentiment, given how inflamed the Parisians have become against him.”
“Nay, Madame,” Monsieur de Mazille interjected immediately, perhaps because he understood what Gondi was up to, or perhaps because he was simply speaking his conscience as a good doctor
, “we mustn’t consider it! It would be extremely dangerous to move the admiral now, and expose him to the contagion of the air.”
The queen mother, who had, for several minutes already, been growing increasingly anxious at the private conversation that was taking place between the king and the admiral behind his bed curtains, said that she wished to ask Coligny herself, and approached the bed, making a sign to the guards to raise the curtains; but, truth to tell, I got there first, and was happily surprised to see the admiral looking much better than I feared, given his age, the blow he’d received, the terrible pain he’d endured from the amputation of his finger and the operation on his elbow. Such was the enormous influence his powerful soul exercised over his body.
As I reached Coligny’s bedside, preceding the queen mother, ostensibly to open a path for her through the press of gentlemen in the room, I heard the admiral warn the king about “the deadly designs of certain people” (he meant the Guise family) “against his person and his crown”—a sentence he interrupted as soon as he saw the queen mother, suspecting, no doubt, that she would not soon be warning her son about this threat.
It seemed to me that the admiral spoke to the queen mother with some stiffness, as if he suspected her of not being as afflicted as she wished to appear. In any case, he declined absolutely to be transported to the Louvre—though the king begged him to reconsider—arguing that here he was very well looked after by the king’s doctors and surgeons, for which he thanked His Majesty most profusely. When the king answered that he would punish the perpetrators of this cowardly attack, the queen mother went further, proclaiming that the attack did not merely affect the admiral but was “a great outrage against the king”, and:
“If today we tolerate this, tomorrow, they’ll be bold enough to strike inside the Louvre itself.” To which she added with great conviction: “Although I’m only a woman, I believe we should put an end to this!”
The admiral thanked her for these sentiments, but, deeply honest man that he was, and wholly unaccustomed to pretence, his expression of gratitude had a very icy feel to it. Of course it’s true that the queen mother had laid it on a bit thick, and that it was very difficult to be taken in by such honeyed words that so reeked of hypocrisy.
The king and royal family had scarcely departed the admiral’s lodgings, preceded and followed by their cadre of guards and trumpets, before the Prince de Condé and Henri, king of Navarre arrived. However, Coligny, overcome with fatigue from the previous visit, had drifted off to sleep, and Mazille refused to let them see him, especially since he was now trembling somewhat with fever from his wound, and they had just administered some theriacal water to calm the effects of the poison.
As a consequence, the princes came back downstairs to the large hall and sequestered themselves in Cornaton’s room, where they held ex abrupto a council of war among the principal Protestant leaders. I recognized among this group Geoffroy de Caumont, La Force and his two sons, the Comte de La Rochefoucauld, Montgomery, Briquemaut, Guerchy and Ferrières, whose clear and incisive mind greatly impressed me as soon as he began to speak.
“I believe,” he began in a loud and grave voice, which astonished me since he seemed so small and frail, “that the attempt on the admiral’s life is the first act in a tragedy, which, from all appearances, will end with the mass murder of all his followers. Ever since the wedding of Navarre, we’ve been getting information from all sides that is so clear and so manifest that all you have to do is open your eyes and ears to see it. ‘This marriage,’ said one of the most important people in the country scarcely a week ago, ‘will cause much more blood to flow than wine.’ And I have it on good authority that a president of the parliament advised a Protestant gentleman to quit Paris with his family and withdraw for the present to his house in the country. Moreover, Monsieur de La Rochefoucauld can tell you the warning he received from Monsieur de Monluc before his departure for Poland.”
“What did he tell you, Foucauld?” asked Navarre, who’d been listening with great interest to Monsieur de Ferrières.
“Well,” said La Rochefoucauld, “I remember only too well what Monluc whispered to me: ‘No matter what caresses the court lavishes on you, be careful not to fall for them. Too much confidence will cast you into great peril. Flee while it’s still possible.’”
“All we have to do is look around us,” continued Jean de Ferrières, “and what do we see? Paris is armed to the teeth, and if the populace falls on us, we’ll be outnumbered a hundred to one, with chains blocking all the bridges, the city gates locked tight and the public squares occupied by the bourgeois militias.”
“So what do you conclude, Ferrières?” asked Condé.
“That we must escape from this trap!” replied Monsieur de Ferrières with great vehemence. “Without another moment’s delay! We must put Coligny on a litter, get on our horses, swords in hand, and get out of Paris!”
“Move the admiral?” cried Téligny. “It’s unthinkable! Monsieur de Mazille, who can’t join us in here because he’s a papist, believes that it’s very dangerous to move the patient and expose him to the contagion of the air!”
“The admiral has seen worse than this,” argued Monsieur de Guerchy. “After Moncontour, he ordered the entire retreat from his litter, since he’d been wounded in the cheek by a pistol shot.”
“The wound wasn’t so serious,” countered Téligny.
“Well!” I broke in. “I’ve never seen a face wound that wasn’t serious!”
My intervention reminded the lords present that I was a doctor, and one of them said, “And what do you think, Monsieur de Siorac, of this idea of transporting the admiral?”
“That it’s dangerous and uncomfortable, to be sure, but that it’s a risk worth taking if there’s greater danger in staying here.”
“But wait!” cried Téligny with some heat. “Who can believe the admiral is in danger when you see what great favour he enjoys with the king, who condescended to come and visit him in his lodgings?”
“I’m not a very suspicious man by nature,” said my cousin, Caumont, “but I found something very sinister in this display of courtesy. The entire scene had a false ring to it. And I remember all too well what a pleasant face François de Guise put on with my older brother only two hours before he had him killed.”
“Come now, Caumont,” countered Téligny, “the king is not Guise. I know his heart far too well.”
Téligny’s naivety made everyone in the room uneasy, not just because of his manifest simplicity, but because no one dared to contradict him, at least in public, except by silence. And what a long and uncomfortable silence followed, in which the only thing that mattered was precisely what was not said.
“I nevertheless believe that we should all flee without delay,” said Jean de Ferrières finally in a low but firm voice.
I could see that all of those present were inclined to agree with this, with the exception, alas, of the most important among them: the admiral’s son-in-law and the two royal princes, Condé and Navarre—especially Navarre, who, as the king’s brother-in-law would need to be very careful, which he didn’t fail to demonstrate.
“Leaving Paris,” he said with his Béarnaise accent, which lent such a mellifluous sound to his every word that they sounded like waves lapping at pebbles on a beach, “would not be easy for the admiral. If he asked the king’s leave to do so, he wouldn’t obtain it. But if he didn’t ask, he would insult the king, and we’d have to fear the consequences both for the admiral and for the possibility of peace.”
“And, of course, for Navarre himself,” I thought to myself. If the Huguenots disobeyed the king, his position at court, where he was practically a hostage, would be very uncomfortable at best.
Both because of Navarre’s position in the kingdom and because of his own reputation, his opinion had a considerable effect on those present, though it failed to persuade them entirely, given the way the rock that was threatening our lives seemed to shake and sway uncertainly ri
ght over our heads.
“Well then,” proposed Téligny, “why don’t we go and ask for the admiral’s opinion rather than continue to argue? Isn’t he still our leader?”
At this, Jean de Ferrières threw his arms up in frustration, given how convinced he was that the admiral, in his inflexible and heroic firmness, would decide against leaving, since he lacked in political acumen the enviable flexibility he’d always displayed in war, where he was never so great as when, after an apparent defeat, he would slip away from the enemy only to return to sting him quickly and flee again.
“But the admiral is asleep,” observed Guerchy, “and Mazille did not even allow the royal princes to disturb him.”
“Let’s send Monsieur de Siorac to talk to him,” suggested Téligny. “Since he’s a doctor, he’ll know whether he can ask him the question we’ve been debating without tiring him too much.”
I agreed immediately, left the room and went up to the first floor to ask Monsieur de Mazille if I could speak to the patient.
“He’s not as poorly as we’d believed,” said Mazille. “He is by nature so robust and so firm in his resolve that it’s a marvel to watch him struggle against his infirmity.”
“Is he sleeping?”
“No. He’s lying there with his eyes open, doubtless planning great things.”
This moved me more than I can say. Monsieur de Mazille, papist that he was, was honest enough to understand that Coligny was not a man who thought only about himself, but one who, quite the contrary, considered only the interests of the people.
Stepping over to his bedside, I gently lifted the curtain and the admiral looked at me with eyes that, even in the shadows of the bed, seemed to me as clear and luminous as ever. I told him what we’d been debating in Cornaton’s chambers downstairs.
