I could not refuse, and went to her. “The King has returned early, M. le Duc?” she said.
“Yes, madame,” I answered. “He had a fancy to discuss affairs to-day, and we lost the hounds.”
“Together?”
“I had the honour, Madame.”
“You do not seem to have agreed very well?” she said, smiling.
“Madame,” I answered bluntly, “his Majesty has no more faithful servant; but we do not always agree.”
She raised her hand, and, with a slight gesture, bade her ladies stand back, while her face lost its expression of good-temper, and grew sharp and dark. “Was it about the Conde?” she said, in a low, grating voice. “No, madame,” I answered; “it was about certain provisions. The King’s ear had been grossly abused, and his Majesty led to believe—”
“Faugh!” she cried, with a wave of contempt, “that is an old story! I am sick of it. Is she still at Brussels?”
“Still, madame.”
“Then see that she stops there!” her Majesty retorted, with a meaning look.
And with that she dismissed me, and went into the chateau. I proposed to rejoin the King; but, to my chagrin, I found, when I reached the closet, that he had already sent for Varennes, and was shut up with him. I went back to my rooms therefore, and, after changing my hunting suit and transacting some necessary business, sat down to dinner with Nicholas, the King’s secretary, a man fond of the table, whom I often entertained. He kept me in talk until the afternoon was well advanced, and we were still at table when Maignan appeared and told me that the King had sent for me.
“I will go,” I said, rising.
“He is with the Queen, your Excellency,” he continued.
This somewhat surprised me, but I thought no evil; and, finding one of the Queen’s Italian pages at the door waiting to conduct me, I followed him across the court that lay between my lodgings and her apartments. Two or three of the King’s gentlemen were in the anteroom when I arrived, and Varennes, who was standing by one of the fire-places toying with a hound, made me a face of dismay; he could not speak, owing to the company.
Still this, in a degree, prepared me for the scene in the chamber, where I found the Queen storming up and down the room, while the King, still in his hunting dress, sat on a low chair by the fire, apparently drying his boots. Mademoiselle Galigai, the Queen’s waiting-woman, stood in the background; but more than this I had not time to observe, for, before I had reached the middle of the floor, the Queen turned on me, and began to abuse me with a vehemence which fairly shocked me.
“And you!” she cried, “who speak so slow, and look so solemn, and all the time do his dirty work, like the meanest cook he has ennobled! It is well you are here! ENFIN, you are found out — you and your provisions! Your provisions, of which you talked in the wood!”
“MON DIEU!” the King groaned; “give me patience!”
“He has given me patience these ten years, sire!” she retorted passionately. “Patience to see myself flouted by your favourites, insulted and displaced, and set aside! But this is too much! It was enough that you made yourself the laughing-stock of France once with this madame! I will not have it again — no: though twenty of your counsellors frown at me!”
“Your Majesty seems displeased,” I said. “But as I am quite in the dark—”
“Liar!” she cried, giving way to her fury. “When you were with her this morning! When you saw her! When you stooped to—”
“Madame!” the King said sternly, “if you forget yourself, be good enough to remember that you are speaking to French gentlemen, not to traders of Florence!”
She sneered. “You think to wound me by that!” she cried, breathing quickly. “But I have my grandfather’s blood in me, sire; and no King of France—”
“One King of France will presently make your uncle of that blood sing small!” the King answered viciously. “So much for that; and for the rest, sweetheart, softly, softly!”
“Oh!” she cried, “I will go: I will not stay to be outraged by that woman’s presence!”
I had now an inkling what was the matter; and discerning that the quarrel was a more serious matter than their every-day bickerings, and threatened to go to lengths that might end in disaster, I ignored the insult her Majesty had flung at me, and entreated her to be calm. “If I understand aright, madame,” I said, “you have some grievance against his Majesty. Of that I know nothing. But I also understand that you allege something against me; and it is to speak to that, I presume, that I am summoned. If you will deign to put the matter into words—”
“Words!” she cried. “You have words enough! But get out of this, Master Grave-Airs, if you can! Did you, or did you not, tell me this morning that the Princess of Conde was in Brussels?”
“I did, madame.”
“Although half an hour before you had seen her, you had talked with her, you had been with her in the forest?”
“But I had not, madame!”
“What?” she cried, staring at me, surprised doubtless that I manifested no confusion. “Do you say that you did not see her?”
“I did not.”
“Nor the King?”
“The King, Madame, cannot have seen her this morning,” I said, “because he is here and she is in Brussels.”
“You persist in that?”
“Certainly!” I said. “Besides, madame,” I continued, “I have no doubt that the King has given you his word—”
“His word is good for everyone but his wife!” she answered bitterly. “And for yours, M. le Duc, I will show you what it is worth. Mademoiselle, call—”
“Nay, madame!” I said, interrupting her with spirit, “if you are going to call your household to contradict me—”
“But I am not!” she cried in a voice of triumph that, for the moment, disconcerted me. “Mademoiselle, send to M. de Bassompierre’s lodgings, and bid him come to me!”
The King whistled softly, while I, who knew Bassompierre to be devoted to him, and to be, in spite of the levity to which his endless gallantries bore witness, a man of sense and judgment, prepared myself for a serious struggle; judging that we were in the meshes of an intrigue, wherein it was impossible to say whether the Queen figured as actor or dupe. The passion she evinced as she walked to and fro with clenched hands, or turned now and again to dart a fiery glance at the Cordovan curtain that hid the door, was so natural to her character that I found myself leaning to the latter supposition. Still, in grave doubt what part Bassompierre was to play, I looked for his coming as anxiously as anyone. And probably the King shared this feeling; but he affected indifference, and continued to sit over the fire with an air of mingled scorn and peevishness.
At length Bassompierre entered, and, seeing the King, advanced with an open brow that persuaded me, at least, of his innocence. Attacked on the instant, however, by the Queen, and taken by surprise, as it were, between two fires — though the King kept silence, and merely shrugged his shoulders — his countenance fell. He was at that time one of the handsomest gallants about the Court, thirty years old, and the darling of women; but at this his APLOMB failed him, and with it my heart sank also.
“Answer, sir! answer!” the Queen cried. “And without subterfuge! Who was it, sir, whom you saw come from the forest this morning?”
“Madame?”
“In one word!”
“If your Majesty will—”
“I will permit you to answer,” the Queen exclaimed.
“I saw his Majesty return,” he faltered— “and M. de Sully.”
“Before them! before them!”
“I may have been mistaken.”
“Pooh, man!” the Queen cried with biting contempt. “You have told it to half-a-dozen. Discretion comes a little late.”
“Well, if you will, madame,” he said, striving to assert himself, but cutting a poor figure, “I fancied that I saw Madame de Conde—”
“Come out of the wood ten minutes before the King?”
>
“It may have been twenty,” he muttered.
But the Queen cared no more for him. She turned, looking superb in her wrath, to the King. “Now, sir!” she said. “Am I to bear this?”
“Sweet!” the King said, governing his temper in a way that surprised me, “hear reason, and you shall have it in a word. How near was Bassompierre to the lady he saw?”
“I was not within fifty paces of her!” the favourite cried eagerly.
“But others saw her!” the Queen rejoined sharply. “Madame Paleotti, who was with the gentleman, saw her also, and knew her.”
“At a distance of fifty paces?” the King said drily. “I don’t attach much weight to that.” And then, rising, with a slight yawn. “Madame,” he continued, with the air of command which he knew so well how to assume, “for the present, I am tired! If Madame de Conde is here, it will not be difficult to get further evidence of her presence. If she is at Brussels, that fact, too, you can ascertain. Do the one or the other, as you please; but, for to-day, I beg that you will excuse me.”
“And that,” the Queen cried shrilly— “that is to be—”
“All, madame!” the King said sternly. “Moreover, let me have no prating outside this room. Grand-Master, I will trouble you.”
And with these words, uttered in a voice and with an air that silenced even the angry woman before us, he signed to me to follow him, and went from the room; the first glance of his eye stilling the crowded ante-chamber, as if the shadow of death passed with him. I followed him to his closet; but, until he reached it, had no inkling of what was in his thoughts. Then he turned to me.
“Where is she?” he said sharply.
I stared at him a moment. “Pardon, sire?” I said. “Do you think that it was Madame de Conde?”
“Why not?”
“She is in Brussels.”
“I tell you I saw her this morning!” he answered. “Go, learn all you can! Find her! Find her! If she has returned, I will — God knows what I will do!” he cried, in a voice shamefully broken. “Go; and send Varennes to me. I shall sup alone: let no one wait.”
I would have remonstrated with him, but he was in no mood to bear it; and, sad at heart, I withdrew, feeling the perplexity, which the situation caused me, a less heavy burden than the pain with which I viewed the change that had of late come over my master; converting him from the gayest and most DEBONAIRE of men into this morose and solitary dreamer. Here, had I felt any temptation to moralise on the tyranny of passion, was the occasion; but, as the farther I left the closet behind me the more instant became the crisis, the present soon reasserted its power. Reflecting that Henry, in this state of uncertainty, was capable of the wildest acts, and that not less was to be feared from his imprudence than from the Queen’s resentment, I cudgelled my brains to explain the RENCONTRE of the morning; but as the courier, whom I questioned, confirmed the report of my agents, and asseverated most confidently that he had left Madame in Brussels, I was flung back on the alternative of an accidental resemblance. This, however, which stood for a time as the most probable solution, scarcely accounted for the woman’s peculiar conduct, and quite fell to the ground when La Trape, making cautious inquiries, ascertained that no lady hunting that day had worn a yellow feather. Again, therefore, I found myself at a loss; and the dejection of the King and the Queen’s ill-temper giving rise to the wildest surmises, and threatening each hour to supply the gossips of the Court with a startling scandal, the issue of which no one could foresee, I went so far as to take into my confidence MM. Epernon and Montbazon; but with no result.
Such being my state of mind, and such the suspense I suffered during two days, it may be imagined that M. Bassompierre was not more happy. Despairing of the King’s favour unless he could clear up the matter, and by the event justify his indiscretion, he became for those two days the wonder, and almost the terror, of the Court. Ignorant of what he wanted, the courtiers found only insolence in his mysterious questions, and something prodigious in an activity which carried him in one day to Paris and back, and on the following to every place in the vicinity where news of the fleeting beauty might by any possibility be gained; so that he far outstripped my agents, who were on the same quest. But though I had no mean opinion of his abilities, I hoped little from these exertions, and was proportionately pleased when, on the third day, he came to me with a radiant face and invited me to attend the Queen that evening.
“The King will be there,” he said, “and I shall surprise you. But I will not tell you more. Come! and I promise to satisfy you.”
And that was all he would say; so that, finding my questions useless, and the man almost frantic with joy, I had to be content with it; and at the Queen’s hour that evening presented myself in her gallery, which proved to be unusually full.
Making my way towards her in some doubt of my reception, I found my worst fears confirmed. She greeted me with a sneering face, and was preparing, I was sure, to put some slight upon me — a matter wherein she could always count on the applause of her Italian servants — when the entrance of the King took her by surprise. He advanced up the gallery with a listless air, and, after saluting her, stood by one of the fireplaces talking to Epernon and La Force. The crowd was pretty dense by this time, and the hum of talk filled the room when, on a sudden, a voice, which I recognised as Bassompierre’s, was lifted above it.
“Very well!” he cried gaily, “then I appeal to her Majesty. She shall decide, mademoiselle! No, no; I am not satisfied with your claim!”
The King looked that way with a frown, but the Queen took the outburst in good part. “What is it, M. de Bassompierre?” she said. “What am I to decide?”
“To-day, in the forest, I found a ring, madame,” he answered, coming forward. “I told Mademoiselle de la Force of my discovery, and she now claims the ring.”
“I once had a ring like it,” cried mademoiselle, blushing and laughing.
“A sapphire ring?” Bassompierre answered, holding his hand aloft.
“Yes.”
“With three stones?”
“Yes,”
“Precisely, mademoiselle!” he answered, bowing. “But the stones in this ring are not sapphires, nor are there three of them.”
There was a great laugh at this, and the Queen said, very wittily, that as neither of the claimants could prove a right to the ring it must revert to the judge.
“In one moment your Majesty shall at least see it,” he answered. “But, first, has anyone lost a ring? Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Lost, in the forest, within the last three days, a ring!”
Two or three, falling in with his humour, set up absurd claims to it; but none could describe the ring, and in the end he handed it to the Queen. As he did so his eyes met mine and challenged my attention. I was prepared, therefore, for the cry of surprise which broke from the Queen.
“Why, this is Caterina’s!” she cried. “Where is the child?”
Someone pushed forward Mademoiselle Paleotti, sister-in-law to Madame Paleotti, the Queen’s first chamberwoman. She was barely out of her teens, and, ordinarily, was a pretty girl; but the moment I saw her dead-white face, framed in a circle of fluttering fans and pitiless, sparkling eyes, I discerned tragedy in the farce; and that M. de Bassompierre was acting in a drama to which only he and one other held the key. The contrast between the girl’s blanched face and the beauty and glitter in the midst of which she stood struck others, so that, before another word was said, I caught the gasp of surprise that passed through the room; nor was I the only one who drew nearer.
“Why, girl,” the Queen said, “this is the ring I gave you on my birthday! When did you lose it? And why have you made a secret of it?”
Mademoiselle stood speechless; but madame her sister-in-law answered for her. “Doubtless she was afraid that your Majesty would think her careless,” she answered.
“I did not ask you!” the Queen rejoined.
She spoke harshly and suspiciously, looking from the ring to the trembling girl.
The silence was such that the chatter of the pages in the anteroom could be heard. Still Mademoiselle stood dumb and confounded.
“Well, what is the mystery?” the Queen said, looking round with a little wonder. “What is the matter? It IS the ring. Why do you not own it?”
“Perhaps mademoiselle is wondering where are the other things she left with it!” Bassompierre said in a silky tone. “The things she left at Parlot the verderer’s, when she dropped the ring. But she may free her mind; I have them here.”
“What do you mean?” the Queen said. “What things, monsieur? What has the girl been doing?”
“Only what many have done before her,” Bassompierre answered, bowing to his unfortunate victim, who seemed to be paralysed by terror: “masquerading in other people’s clothes. I propose, madame, that, for punishment, you order her to dress in them, that we may see what her taste is.”
“I do not understand?” the Queen said.
“Your Majesty will, if Mademoiselle Paleotti will consent to humour us.”
At that the girl uttered a cry, and looked round the circle as if for a way of escape; but a Court is a cruel place, in which the ugly or helpless find scant pity. A dozen voices begged the Queen to insist; and, amid laughter and loud jests, Bassompierre hastened to the door, and returned with an armful of women’s gear, surmounted by a wig and a feathered hat.
“If the Queen will command mademoiselle to retire and put these on,” he said, “I will undertake to show her something that will please her.”
“Go!” said the Queen.
But the girl had flung herself on her knees before her, and, clinging to her skirts, burst, into a flood of tears and prayers; while her sister-in-law stepped forward as if to second her, and cried out, in great excitement, that her Majesty would not be so cruel as to —
“Hoity, toity!” said the Queen, cutting her short, very grimly. “What is all this? I tell the girl to put on a masquerade — which it seems that she has been keeping at some cottage — and you talk as if I were cutting off her head! It seems to me that she escapes very lightly! Go! go! and see, you, that you are arrayed in five minutes, or I will deal with you!”
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 204
