Between Two Kings

by Lawrence Ellsworth

  “Ah, Reverend, you set my heart free. The rest are mere peccadilloes.”

  “Tell me.”

  “There’s gambling.”

  “A worldly pursuit, to be sure, but your position required you to keep a grand house and entertain your guests.”

  “I loved to win, though.”

  “No one plays to lose.”

  “I cheated. A little.”

  “You took your advantage. Move on.”

  “That’s it, Reverend! I feel no other burden on my conscience. Give me my absolution, and my soul will be ready, when God calls it, to ascend unhindered to his throne.”

  The Theatine neither moved nor spoke.

  “What are you waiting for, Reverend?” said Mazarin.

  “The final statement.”

  “Final statement of what?”

  “Of the confession, Monseigneur.”

  “But I’m finished.”

  “Oh, no! Your Eminence is mistaken.”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Think hard.”

  “I’ve thought as hard as I could.”

  “Then I’ll assist your memory.”

  “Let’s see.”

  The Theatine coughed several times. “You have not spoken to me of avarice, another mortal sin, nor of the millions,” he said.

  “What millions, Reverend?”

  “Why, your millions, Monseigneur.”

  “Mon père, that money belongs to me; why should I speak of it?”

  “Because, you see, on that our opinions differ. You say that money is yours, and I think it belongs to others.”

  Mazarin raised a cold hand to his sweating forehead. “What do you m-mean?” he stammered.

  “This: Your Eminence has gained a great deal of wealth in the service of the king…”

  “Hmph. A great deal? It’s not that much.”

  “In any event, where did this wealth come from?”

  “From the State.”

  “Which means, from the king.”

  “But what do you conclude from that, Reverend?” said Mazarin, starting to tremble.

  “I can reach no conclusion without a list of your revenues. Let’s add it up: you have the Bishopric of Metz.”

  “Yes.”

  “The Abbacies of Saint-Clément, Saint-Arnoud, and Saint-Vincent, also in Metz.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have the Abbey of Saint-Denis, one of the loveliest properties in France.”

  “Yes, Reverend.”

  “You have the Abbey of Cluny, a rich living.”

  “I have that.”

  “And that of Saint-Médard, at Soissons, with income of a hundred thousand livres.”

  “I can’t deny it.”

  “Plus, that of Saint-Victor at Marseilles, one of the richest abbeys of the South.”

  “Yes, mon Père.”

  “Over a million a year. With the income of the cardinalate and the ministry, call it two million.”

  “But…”

  “Over ten years, that’s twenty million… and twenty million at interest that compounds to fifty per cent gives, in ten years, another twenty million.”

  “For a Theatine father, you’re quite an accountant!”

  “Since 1644, when Your Eminence granted our order the monastery we occupy near Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I have reckoned the society’s accounts.”

  “And mine as well, I see, Reverend.”

  “One must know a little bit about everything, Monseigneur.”

  “Well, then! Your conclusion?”

  “I conclude that your baggage is too heavy to carry across the threshold of Paradise.”

  “So, I’m… I’m damned?”

  “Unless you make restitution, yes.”

  Mazarin uttered a pitiful cry. “Restitution! But, good Lord, to whom?”

  “To the master of this money—to the king!”

  “But it’s the king who gave it all to me!”

  “Not so! The king signed no such decrees.”

  Mazarin sighed and groaned. “Absolution,” he said. “Absolution!”

  “Impossible, Monseigneur. Restitution,” replied the Theatine. “Restitution!”

  “But you absolved me of the other sins before. Why not this one?”

  “Because,” replied the reverend, “to absolve you of this sin is a crime for which the king would never absolve me, Monseigneur.”

  Upon which, the confessor stood and, sighing with unease, left the same way he had come.

  “Oh, my God,” groaned the cardinal. “Holà! Come here, Colbert—I’m sick, very sick!”

  XLVI The Bequest

  Colbert emerged from behind the curtains. “Did you hear?” said Mazarin.

  “Alas! Yes, Monseigneur.”

  “Is he right? Is that money ill-gotten?”

  “A Theatine, Monseigneur, is a bad judge on matters of finance,” Colbert replied coldly. “However, it may be that, by his theological lights, Your Eminence has made some mistakes. We often find it so… when we die.”

  “The first mistake is that of dying.”

  “True, Monseigneur. But on whose behalf does he think you’re mistaken? That of the king.”

  Mazarin shrugged his shoulders. “As if I hadn’t saved his State and its finances!”

  “That cannot be denied, Monseigneur.”

  “It can’t? Then, I’ve earned no more than a legitimate salary, despite what my confessor thinks?”

  “Beyond all doubt.”

  “And I can retain for my family, always so needy, the better part of what I’ve earned!”

  “I see no obstacle to that, Monseigneur.”

  “I was sure, Colbert, that if I consulted you, you’d give me good advice,” replied Mazarin with joy.

  Colbert made his sour miser’s grimace. “Monseigneur,” he interrupted, “we must consider whether the Theatine’s words are not some sort of snare.”

  “A snare? Why? The Theatine is an honest man.”

  “He believed Your Eminence was at death’s door, since Your Eminence summoned him for confession. Did I not hear him say to you, ‘Distinguish what the king has given you from what you’ve earned for yourself’? Recall, Monseigneur, if he said something like that to you, though in the terms of a Theatine father.”

  “He might have.”

  “In which case, Monseigneur, I’d say you’ve been required by the father to…”

  “To make restitution?” cried Mazarin in alarm.

  “I… wouldn’t disagree.”

  “To make full restitution! You can’t mean it. You talk like the confessor!”

  “Restitution of a part—that is to say, His Majesty’s part—or else, Monseigneur, there could be trouble. Your Eminence is too able a politician to ignore the fact that at this moment the king doesn’t have even a hundred fifty thousand livres in his coffers.”

  “That is not my business,” said Mazarin triumphantly, “but rather that of Monsieur le Surintendant Fouquet, whose accounts you’re aware of, as I’ve shared them with you in recent months.”

  Colbert pinched his lips at the name of Fouquet. “His Majesty,” he said between his teeth, “has no money but that collected by Monsieur Fouquet; your fortune, Monseigneur, would look like food to the starving.”

  “Yes, but I’m not the king’s superintendent of finances, I have my own sources. I’m sure I can find something to help His Majesty, some legacy, but… I can’t neglect my own family…”

  “A meager legacy will dishonor and offend the king. Bequeathing a mere part to His Majesty is as much as admitting that what you’re keeping wasn’t legitimately acquired.”

  “Monsieur Colbert!”

  “I thought Your Eminence did me the honor to ask for my advice.”

  “Yes, but you’re ignorant of the principal details of the issue.”

  “I’m ignorant of nothing, Monseigneur; for ten years I’ve reviewed every column of figures calculated in France and have engraved them so deeply on
my memory that, from the disbursals of Monsieur Le Tellier, who is reliable, to the secret skimming of Monsieur Fouquet, who is fraudulent, I could recite, line by line, every expenditure from Marseilles to Cherbourg.”

  “I suppose you’d have me throw all my money into the king’s coffers!” cried Mazarin sardonically, from whom the gout then wrenched several painful groans. “Then the king would have nothing to blame me for, but he’d amuse himself at my expense with my millions, and rightly so.”

  “Your Eminence has misunderstood me. I did not at all mean that the king should spend your money.”

  “To me it seems clearly otherwise, since you advise me to give it to him.”

  “Ah!” replied Colbert. “That’s because Your Eminence, preoccupied with the problem, completely overlooks the character of His Majesty Louis XIV.”

  “How so?”

  “I believe his character, if I may dare to say so, centers on the sin that Monseigneur confessed just now to the Theatine.”

  “You may so dare. What sin is that?”

  “It is pride. Pardon, Monseigneur, I mean majesty; kings don’t show pride, that’s a mere human emotion.”

  “Pride will do—and yes, you’re right. So?”

  “So, Monseigneur, if I’ve reasoned correctly, Your Eminence has only to offer all his fortune to the king, and without delay.”

  “Why is that?” asked Mazarin, intrigued.

  “Because the king won’t accept the entire amount.”

  “What? A young man without money who’s consumed by ambition?”

  “Indeed.”

  “A young man who wishes me dead.”

  “Monseigneur…”

  “To inherit, yes, Colbert—yes, he’d like me dead, so he can inherit. Triple fool that I am not to have seen it! But I’ll thwart him.”

  “You will. Because if the bequest is made in the right form, he’ll refuse it.”

  “Come, now!”

  “I’m certain of it. A young man who’s accomplished nothing, who yearns for recognition, who burns to be the sole ruler, won’t take anything just handed to him—he wants to achieve everything on his own. This prince, Monseigneur, won’t be content with the Palais Royal left to him by Richelieu, nor the magnificent Palais Mazarin that you’ve built, nor the Louvre of his ancestors, nor even with Saint-Germain where he was born. I predict that all that does not come from him, he will scorn.”

  “And you guarantee that if I give my forty million to the king…”

  “If the bequest is couched in certain terms, I guarantee he’ll refuse it.”

  “What terms are these?”

  “I can write them out if Monseigneur wishes me to.”

  “But what advantage will I gain from this?”

  “An enormous one. No one will be able to accuse Your Eminence of the rampant avarice of which the pamphleteers reproach the most brilliant mind of the century.”

  “You’re right, Colbert, you’re right. Go to the king on my behalf and present him my will and testament.”

  “Your bequest, Monseigneur.”

  “But he might accept it! What if he accepts it?”

  “Even then, you’d still have thirteen million for your family, and that’s no small sum.”

  “But then you’d be a fool—or a traitor.”

  “And I’m neither one nor the other, Monseigneur. You seem very much afraid that the king will accept it, but oh! Be more afraid if he doesn’t.”

  “If he doesn’t agree, we must make sure he overlooks the thirteen million I have in reserve. But… yes, I will do it. Yes. Ah, but here comes the pain again! Weakness overcomes me—I’m very ill, Colbert; it’s near the end.”

  Colbert trembled. The cardinal was very ill indeed: he was sweating profusely in his bed of pain, and the frightening pallor of his face, streaming with perspiration, was a sight to touch the heart of the most hardened physician. It clearly touched Colbert, for he rushed from the room, calling Bernouin to come to the sick man’s aid, and then exited into the corridor.

  There, walking back and forth, with a pensive expression that made his vulgar visage almost noble, shoulders hunched, neck extended, lips twitching to his tumbling thoughts, he nerved himself up for a risky endeavor. Meanwhile, no more than ten paces away, just the other side of a wall, his master writhed in anguish with pitiful cries, thinking no longer of the treasures of the earth, nor the joys of paradise, but of the horrors of hell.

  While hot towels, topical ointments, and tonics were feverishly administered by Guénaud, who’d been recalled to the cardinal’s side, Colbert, holding his big head in both hands to suppress his own fever of ideas, considered the wording of the bequest that he would submit to Mazarin at the first opportunity his illness allowed. The cries at the approach of death from the cardinal, that pillar of the past, seemed to stimulate the genius of this thick-browed thinker who was already turning toward the new sun that would regenerate the future.

  Colbert returned to Mazarin when reason also returned to the patient, and persuaded him to dictate a bequest in the following terms:

  As I prepare to appear before God, the master of all men, I pray that the king, who was my master upon earth, will repossess the abundance which his kindness has granted me, and which my family will be happy to see pass into his illustrious hands. The details of my property have been prepared whenever His Majesty requests, or when the last breath passes from the lips of his devoted servant.

  Jules, Cardinal de Mazarin

  The cardinal sighed as he signed this. Colbert sealed the packet and carried it immediately to the Louvre, where the king had just returned. Then he went home, rubbing his hands together with the satisfaction of a workman on a job well done.

  XLVII How Anne of Austria Gave Louis XIV One Sort of Advice and Monsieur Fouquet Gave Him Another

  The news of the cardinal’s condition had already spread, and it attracted at least as many people to the Louvre as the news of the marriage of Monsieur, the king’s brother, once that had been officially announced.

  No sooner had Louis XIV returned home, still pondering the things he’d seen and heard that evening, when the audiencer announced that the same crowd of courtiers who, that morning, had attended his lever, had returned to attend his coucher112—a favor that, during the reign of the cardinal at Court, had been rarely accorded to the king, who’d seen them flock instead to the cardinal despite the king’s displeasure. But with the minister down, as we’ve seen, with a serious attack of gout, the flock of flatterers flew to the throne. Courtiers have an amazing instinct for sensing events in advance, a supreme science that makes them diplomats divining political difficulties, generals foretelling the outcomes of battles, and doctors diagnosing diseases. Louis XIV, who had learned this lesson from his mother, among others, understood from this turnout that His Eminence Monseigneur Cardinal Mazarin must be very ill indeed.

  Anne of Austria had scarcely finished escorting the young queen to her chambers, reclaiming the ceremonial tiara from her brow, when she returned to seek out her son in his study. There, alone, disturbed, and with an unquiet heart, he allowed himself, as if to exercise his will, to indulge in surging waves of terrible anger. His was a royal anger that forced events when it broke out, but which, thanks to his burgeoning self-control, never erupted in more than brief outbursts. In fact, his confidant Saint-Simon113 later mentioned his astonishment when, fifty years later, he lost his temper at a little lie told by his son the Duc de Maine, and the result was a hail of blows with a cane on a poor lackey who’d pilfered a biscuit.

  The young king was thus in the grip of a sad fury and said to himself when he saw his reflection in a mirror, “O King! King in name, but not in fact. O Phantom, rather, vain image that you are! Lifeless statue that has no power beyond provoking a reflexive salute from courtiers, when will you raise your velvet-clad arm and tighten your silken-gloved fist? When will you be able to open your lips to do other than sigh or smile at the stupid immobility of the other statues in the
gallery?”

  Smacking his forehead with his hand, suddenly desperate for air, he went to the window where he saw some cavaliers below, chatting in animated whispers. These gentlemen were just curious onlookers, eager subjects for whom a king is a wondrous curiosity, like a rhinoceros, crocodile, or serpent.

  He struck his forehead again and said, “King of France! Some title! People of France! What a mob of creatures! I’ve just returned to my royal palace of the Louvre, my horses are still steaming, and I caught the attention of barely twenty people who watched as I passed… Twenty? What am I saying? No, not even twenty interested in the King of France, not even ten King’s Archers to guard my house—archers, people, guards, everyone is at the Palais Royal. Why, dear God? Don’t I, the king, have the right to ask that?”

  “Because,” said a voice responding to his own, from the study doorway, “the Palais Royal is home to all the money—in other words, all the power—of he who would reign.”

  Louis turned suddenly; the voice was that of Anne of Austria. The king shuddered, then advanced toward his mother and said, “I hope Your Majesty paid no attention to those vain remarks that just show how the solitude and sorrow of kings can affect even the happiest personality.”

  “I paid attention to only one thing, my son: that you were complaining.”

  “Me? Not at all,” said Louis XIV. “No, really, you’re mistaken, Madame.”

  “Then what were you doing, Sire?”

  “I imagined I was under the eye of my tutor and was developing an argument for debate.”

  “My son,” replied Anne of Austria, shaking her head, “you’re wrong to be ashamed of your words, and wrong not to take me into your confidence. The day will come, maybe as soon as tomorrow, when you’ll need to remember this axiom: ‘Gold is the only power, and those who have that power are the only true kings.’ ”

  “You don’t mean to cast blame on those who’ve gained wealth under my rule, do you?” asked the king.

  “No,” said Anne of Austria sharply. “No, Sire, those who became wealthy under your rule are rich because you willed it, and I have no envy or complaint against them. They have doubtless served Your Majesty well enough for Your Majesty to permit them to attend to their own recompense. That’s not what I hear in your words that reproaches me.”