The Cat and the King (6 page)

“I said that every issue had to be trivial!” I cried. “It's not so. There
is
one great one before us. Will you stand by and allow your cousin Chartres to be married to Mademoiselle de Blois? Will you see a grandson of France wed to the king's bantling?”

“My dear fellow, what can I do?”

“You can talk to Chartres. I'll go with you. He looks up to you. He admires you greatly. Oh, he's told me so! We can stiffen him!”

Conti seemed to consider this. A shadow passed across his face. “Poor Chartres, he doesn't deserve it. He's really a fine young fellow, you know. People don't understand him, because he's shy and blunt. Well, what can we lose?” He shrugged his shoulders. “The king hates me, anyway.”

“Because you showed up what a coward Maine is!”

“Perhaps just a bit, by contrast. But who wouldn't be a hero compared to poor Maine?” Here he burst into his high laugh. “But I never intended it, so help me!”

I returned stubbornly to my point. “Will you go with me and talk to Chartres?”

“You really think it will do any good?”

“I think there's a chance. Monsieur is very proud of his blood. He can hardly relish seeing his own son wed to a bastard. If Chartres puts up a fight, Monsieur may take his side. And I wonder if the king will really cross his only brother in a matter so dear to him.”

Conti seemed to weigh all this. “How does the Chevalier stand on this?”

The Chevalier de Lorraine, sinister character, was the damned soul of Monsieur.

“He may have promised the king his help in getting Monsieur's consent in return for supporting the Lorrainers in the alms-bag matter.”

“Then it'll be a tough one.” Yet Conti looked up at me now with his bright smile. “Why should we fear a tough one? Can it be tougher than Neerwinden? Saint-Simon, I'm your man!”

It was agreed that we should go into Paris the very next day and see Chartres at the Palais-royal. Conti permitted me to enlist Savonne in our cause. I was much excited, but when I told Gabrielle that night, I was surprised at her silence. I forgot everything, however, when she told me that she was pregnant again.

P
HILIPPE DUC DE
C
HARTRES
, only son of Monsieur and only nephew of the king, was just my age, and he and I had known each other since childhood. Chartres had in common with his older cousin Conti a great attraction for women, but it was almost the only quality they shared. He was stocky, muscular, crude and outspoken. He was not handsome, but he had good eyes, which fixed you with a faintly sneering but not altogether unfriendly challenge. “What's your game?” he seemed to be asking. “What's there in this for you? Oh, come now, you must have a game. I know I do.” He was afraid of nobody but of his funny little father and of his uncle. He loved to drink and to womanize, and, as he was too independent to make any secret of his disorderly life, he was in constant bad odor at court, which, in turn, reintensified his natural rebelliousness.

He came to Versailles rarely and passed most of his time in the immense Palais-royal, which Richelieu had built for himself and bequeathed to the crown. This edifice was the scene of widely varying entertainments. Chartres would give dinner parties (I was never invited nor did I wish to be) behind closed doors, where the servants would retire after leaving the meal and the wines, and where every sort of debauch would then take place. Monsieur, on the other hand, an unabashed homosexual (the only one, be it added, whom the king tolerated), and his lifelong crony, the Chevalier de Lorraine, held gatherings in which beautiful young men, not always of proper pedigree, predominated. “Madame,” a big, hefty, plain-spoken German princess, who was as much of a man as her husband was a woman, preferred to spend her time at Versailles. I think she was in love with her royal brother-in-law, but the poor old cow-bull would never have had a chance with him, even in the pre-Maintenon days.

When Conti, Savonne and I called at the Palais-royal, we were ushered into the great gallery that Richelieu had hung with the portraits of those who, in his opinion, had made France great. I remember it as a somewhat curious selection, ranging from Dunois to Jeanne d'Arc to Louis XI to Bayard, and ending, of course, with Richelieu. We did not at first perceive Chartres, who was sitting at the far end, but as soon as he saw us, he jumped up.

“They're going to make me marry her!” he exclaimed. “They're going to make me marry the bastard!”

“Your father hasn't consented?” I cried in dismay.

“No, but he will. The Chevalier will make him. The Chevalier will do anything for money, and Father will do anything for him.”

“Then you must refuse!”

“That's all very well for you to say, Saint-Simon. But would you have refused
your
father?”

“If he'd asked me to marry a bastard? Yes! It is probably the only thing I would have refused him. I'd have cut my throat had he bade me to. But to make a match so degrading... never! And I'm not a grandson of France!”

“Conti's brother didn't worry about it,” Chartres pointed out sullenly, glancing at his cousin, who had turned to the great portrait of Richelieu by Philippe de Champaigne. “
He
was the one who started the fashion.”

“Ah, but he died of the shame of it,” Conti replied, without turning his gaze from the great cardinal. “He is a sorry precedent to cite. I wonder what old Hawkeye here would have said. I think he would have kept the royal blood pure. Look at the history in this gallery! The men who made France great. Guesclin, Montfort, Bayard, Dunois, look at them all, nobles and warriors. Why, the room seems to throb with the muffled sound of their tramping feet! Surely they would not have bowed to the spawn of Montespan and Vallière!”

Had the mocking note disappeared from Conti's velvet tone? Was I making a fool of myself in thinking that I could detect even a faint tremor of something like passion in it, passion that he had always professed to consider as not in the best of taste in a society that worshiped the superficial, a society he both deplored and enjoyed? He walked several paces down the gallery and paused before Jeanne d'Arc. “I suppose if this dear lady were alive today she'd ask for the rank of foreign princess, like our silly Lorraine friends. But she lived in a nobler time.” He turned now and walked deliberately back to Chartres. “Believe me, cousin,” he said in his gentlest tone, “your father will bless you for your disobedience. Nobody cares for our blood more than Monsieur. Nobody has cared more for the prestige of our house. To see his only son misallied might be as fatal to him as a bad marriage was to my brother. He may give in to the king out of momentary weakness, but he will repent of it later. And then how he will cherish you for standing out!”

The double doors at the end of the gallery were now flung open, as is done only for a son of France, and we stiffened to attention. Monsieur came briskly in, his high heels clicking on the parquet. He was a fantastic combination of inconsistencies: dignity and effeminacy; authority and coyness; serenity and nerves. His head, with the huge black perruque, beady eyes and large, aquiline, Medicean nose, rose from a mass of ruff, ribbons and diamonds like an owl's above a messy nest. The Chevalier, who followed him, had a boy's face at sixty, a handsome boy's face, but there was something tight and sinister about that unlined skin. One felt it might suddenly crack, like an aged apple.

“Have I interrupted you young people in some naughty project?” Monsieur demanded, looking with a malignant gleam from one to the other of us. “I trust my disreputable son is not leading you gentlemen into trouble? You, too, Savonne? Beware of him!”

“On the contrary, Monsieur, I'm afraid I was boring these young men with a lecture in history,” Conti replied, indicating the Champaigne portrait. “I was holding forth on the domestic policies of the great cardinal.”

“A very capable man. But people exaggerate his accomplishments. They give him credit for everything that was done in my father's reign.”

“May I take the liberty of saying how passionately I agree with your royal highness!” I burst out. “I have always regarded Louis XIII as the greatest of our monarchs! I learned it at my father's knee.”

Monsieur cackled merrily. “Don't let my brother catch you saying so! But it's all right, Saint-Simon. Your father was a good man and a loyal friend. He told me some funny stories about the cardinal. Do you know that when Richelieu lived here, he used to have apoplectic fits? Oh, dear, yes! He would imagine he was a horse and run up and down the corridors, whinnying and stamping. Such a scandal! The palace would have to be shut up tight. But people
would
talk. You do your father credit, Saint-Simon. I am sure he would be happy to know that you are so well married and settled.” Here he sighed and glanced at his son. “Would that we could say the same of my boy here.”

“I shall be happy to marry, father, any lady whom
you
select.”

“Whom
I
select?” Monsieur glanced briefly at the Chevalier, who remained impassive. It was obvious to the five of us that Chartres was implying that, left to himself, without fear of the king, or the Chevalier, his father would never pick a bastard for a daughter-in-law. “And just what do you mean by your emphasis, sir? Do I detect an impertinence?”

“None whatever. I simply meant that—blindfolded if you will—I shall be happy to take the hand of any woman in Europe who represents your own choice.”

“Would that not be any woman whom your father
named?
” the Chevalier put in, with a sneer in his tone.

“My father is not the head of his family,” Chartres replied impassively.

“That will be enough, my boy,” Monsieur said testily. “I think you
are
on the verge of impertinence. Is he not, Conti? We shall cut him off at this point before he dabbles with treason.” Monsieur, with a snort, turned his attention to Conti. “Tell me, cousin, how you select your pages. You have the handsomest at court. The Chevalier and I were talking about it as we came through the courtyard. We heard you were here, so we looked for your livery. And, of course, there it was, on a
beauty!
We paused to have a little chat with him. Such a clever young fellow. So devoted to
you,
cousin.”

As Conti merely bowed in silence, Monsieur turned again to me. He did me the honor to lead me aside for a word in private.

“Don't get too mixed up with my boy and his parties, Saint-Simon. You've still got a reputation to lose. But if you would care to come to one of my little gatherings here, very select, you know, you would be welcome.”

We chattered on this way, he increasingly friendly, I circumlocutory, elaborately polite, for though I had no wish to be associated with the inmates of the Palais-royal, neither did I want to arouse the ire of a touchy prince. I knew that his taste was for boys, but as I was smaller than average and young-looking for my age, I was by no means sure of being exempted from Monsieur's favored classification, and indeed his civilities that day were very warm.

I made my exit as best I could and joined Conti and Savonne in the courtyard. Before getting into his carriage, the former turned to give me a brief warning.

“Watch out. The Chevalier has his eye on us. Old Maintenon will know in an hour that we've spoken against the marriage.”

C
ONTI
was right. In less than a week's time I felt a chill in the atmosphere at court. My old friend, the due de Beauvillier, told me that the king had again spoken unfavorably of my re-signing my commission and had cited the sorry effect of my example on Savonne. And when the latter presented himself at Madame de Maintenon's he was informed that he would not be received. When he told me this, much shocked and chagrined, I decided to ask Gabrielle if she could find out anything. She was to spend the afternoon at the apartments of “Madame,” the duchesse d'Orléans, playing cards, and I waited in the vestibule until she came out. When she did so, I took her for a stroll to the Basin of Latona, where she confirmed that I was in the bad books of the Maintenon. Madame, who was passionately opposed to her son's marriage to the bastard, had as good as told her so.

“She said you were in
her
good books, anyway,” Gabrielle added. “Not that that does us much good. Poor lady, nobody listens to her;

“But everyone's against the marriage!” I exclaimed indignantly.

“Yes, but they don't
do
anything about it. And then there's this business about Madame Guyon. Did you know she's been sent to the Bastille?”

“My God, no! Why?”

“The king's confessor has persuaded him that she's a Jansenist, and she's shut up until a clerical commission can study the case. Of course, Madame de Maintenon dropped her like a hot potato as soon as she picked up the first whiff of her ill favor.”

I whistled. “So
that
's why poor Savonne found her doors shut. It seems a bit hard, considering that he only met the Guyon through her.”

“No, Madame de Maintenon is perfectly consistent. Anyone who met the Guyon
only
in her apartment is all right. But Savonne met her twice more—at the duchesse du Lude's—
after
the wind had changed.”

“I see. These are the distinctions on which our lives depend! But I think I had better somehow explain Savonne's innocence to the king.” I paused, but Gabrielle said nothing. “Don't you think the king should know
how
Savonne got into this?”

“Suppose you speak to Monsieur.”

“Monsieur?”

“If Savonne is really in trouble, it's not over Madame Guyon. It's over the marriage. What I think you should do is give Monsieur a hint of the price you're all paying. He likes you. And he has to be basically on your side about the marriage. He can't object to your wanting a proper match for his own son, even if the king forces him to consent to this one. So, if we lose, and Chartres has to marry Mademoiselle de Blois, he can make your peace with the king.”