The making of a king (23 page)

" He told me to shoot with the arquebus," he said ; nor could anything more be extracted from him.

The time of a final parting, with no farewell taken, between father and son was approaching. The dislike of the boy to the idea of his own sovereignty was once more apparent when, at the opening of the year 1609, the celebration of Twelfth Night was again under discussion.

" I will not be the King," he said ; " I will not. Put in no bean," he added in a whisper to one of his attendants, " so that there may be no King."

" Monsieur," explained his nurse, " if God is King, you must fill His place."

" I will not do it," he reiterated obstinately.

" What, Monsieur ! you refuse to fill God's place ? "

He stopped short, evidently startled.

" He ! that is for papa to do," he said ; and only

on receiving the explanation that at Saint-Germain the duty devolved upon him would he consent to perform the part.

A fortnight later the contemplated change was accomplished. The bojf was removed from the chateau to the Louvre, and transferred from the tutelage of Madame de Montglat to that of the gouverneur, M. de Souvre. Louis was to put away childish things, to be weaned from his toys, to discard the term papa ; and, seated in dignity at his father's table, to be served by his own page.

In some verses published " by permission" and entitled, " L'Adieu de Monseigneur le Dauphin partant de Saint-Germain/' the event was celebrated :

Adieu done, sans adieu, fideles Germaniques,

Jamais je n'oublieray le chateau ny le lieu,

Ou j'ai 6t6 nourri sous les lois pacifiques

De mon Prince et mon roi que j'honore apres Dieu.

" La sage Montglat," having instructed him in the faith, was now to surrender her charge to the brave Souvre to be taught valour.

Of the boy's prosaic sentiments with regard to the change little indication is given save the fact that, asked some months earlier by the Queen whether he would be marri at being removed from mamanga he answered laconically in the negative.

As his tutor he had been given a certain Des Yveteaux, who enjoyed a specially bad reputation, and was endowed, says Lestoile ironically, with all the good qualities required to make a true and perfect courtier of that day. The appointment had been made by Henri, in spite of all that could be said to dissuade

him, and notwithstanding the Queen's tearful entreaties. Des Yveteaux had, Henri said, educated Cesar de Vendome well, and would do still better by the Dauphin. Remonstrance was useless ; nevertheless, when the tutor returned thanks, as in duty bound, to the Queen, she told him plainly that no acknowledgments were due to her ; had she been believed, he would not have obtained his post.

Souvre, on the contrary, was held to be not unworthy of the charge bestowed upon him, being one of the most accomplished and well-conducted men attached to the Court.

The change from Saint-Germain to the Louvre must have been great. Not Madame de Montglat alone, but Louis's brothers and sisters were left behind, meetings taking place only for the future when they were brought to Paris for a few days or he paid them a brief visit at the chateau. The comparative freedom of the country was replaced by the restraints of a city. The Dauphin was not, however, deprived of the companionship of playmates of his age, and was surrounded in Paris by the same band of enfants fhonneur as before, boys drawn from the most illustrious houses of France, who formed a miniature household upon which he continued to rehearse the art of ruling, jealous of any attempt to interfere with the exercise of his authority. Out riding, his " little gentlemen " marched before him, two and two, taking rank by their length of service ; he reviewed the company, armed, before the King, who took a "singular pleasure" in the show, and kept the roll-call of his comrades, written in his >wn hand. A precocious disciplinarian, he permitted

no discourtesy between the boys ; and what Heroard terms u la premiere justice de sa chambre " was held when one of them had given the other the lie, and was made to expiate the insult by a whipping. On other occasions he would protest against too summary a method of dealing with their delinquencies.

" It is their gouverneurs who flatter them," he said, when, two of the boys having been detected dicing with some lacqueys, M. de Souvre pronounced them incorrigible and would have had them sent back to their homes ; " they must be told of it." Louis himself had no love of flattery ; and possibly, even at eight, he had learnt to appraise it at its just value.

No outsider was permitted to chastise those belonging to his household.

" You are not my equerry," he told the Due de Longueville sharply, when that young gentleman, aged fourteen, offered his services to correct the enfants d'honneur. " See how bold he is," he added in an aside to a bystander. " He is no equerry of mine."

Louis was himself, in spite of his new dignities, by no means exempted from the discipline of the rod. The birch had been brought into requisition, and though he received his chastisement with an air of bravado, and declared he felt no pain, it is evident that he stood in no little terror of its application.

More important than his studies was the recurrent question, as the boy grew older, as to the influences under which he was to be brought. Of the King's desires upon this point there can be no doubt, nor can it be questioned that it would have been to the one friend to whom he gave his entire confidence that

he would have wished his son to turn. In spite of visits to the Arsenal, however, the same dislike of Sully as formerly is apparent in the boy. " He was at the Arsenal three or four days ago," wrote Malherbe. " I heard a gentleman who was there say that M. de Sully gave him a great reception ; but that, whatever he did, he paid him no attention, and scarcely so much as looked at him."

It may be that the sentiments instilled and fostered by Louis's early training were supplemented by the jealousy always a marked feature of his character. For the King's affection for his minister was ever strengthening. Quarrels, of course, continued to take place — with a man so hot-tempered as Henri it could not have been otherwise ; and Guidi, always bitterly hostile to the Duke, reported one such incident in particular which had threatened to end in Sully's resignation. The King, resenting what he considered undue favour shown by the minister to the Guises, had sent to remind him of Biron, and, further, had hinted that he was in the vicinity of the Bastille, where Auvergne was still expiating his treason in captivity. The violence of the rebuke, if truly reported, stamped it as the outcome of a mood of blind passion ; and a few days later all was as before. Guidi might continue to believe that the Duke's favour was on the decline, and remonstrate with the Queen for acting as his protectress, saying she was nourishing a poisonous serpent who would in time prove a danger to herself, the Dauphin, and the realm ; but Guidi was a stranger, and saw what he desired to see. In truth, the Arsenal was more and more becoming to the

King a retreat, where he could find a refuge from the pomp and ceremony inseparable from life in the palace, from the need of guarding his lips from any word capable of being turned to his disadvantage, and from the private annoyances ever recurrent in the neighbourhood of his wife.

" You are the only man to whom I open my heart," he wrote to the minister in the course of this last autumn of his life, " and from whose counsels 1 draw most comfort."

That same autumn, too, he was present when the contract of marriage between young Rosny and Mademoiselle de Cr6quy was signed ; thus showing that he owed the young man no ill-will for his refusal to change his faith at his dictation in order to wed his own daughter. Both King and Queen affixed their signatures to the document, " which was all that passed," says Malherbe, "save that the King commanded the lovers to kiss each other."

Apart from the wisdom upon which Henri had learnt to rely, and the never-failing sympathy at his service, the grave statesman was capable, to a remarkable extent, of adapting himself to the humour of the soldier of fortune who retained to the end something of the boy ; and during this last year Henri had shown his appreciation of the entertainment he found at the Arsenal by causing rooms to be set apart for his use whensoever he should be disposed to lodge there for a few days. On these occasions no officers of his household were to accompany him ; there was to be none of the burden and formality of State ; Sully providing what was necessary and receiving a certain

sum yearly to defray the expenses of his royal guest.

The arrangement had come about in an unpremeditated fashion. On a certain day in March a lacquey had arrived from Chantilly, where Henri then was, with a note from his master to bid Sully expect him on the following morning, and begging that he would provide dinner, with fish, for a dozen persons.

Sully was familiar with his master's tastes. He made ready ragouts such as Henri loved ; and, moreover, when the company rose from table, cards and dice were produced, with a purse of four thousand pistoles for the King, and a like sum, as a loan, to defray the gambling expenses of his attendants. Henri showed that his preferences in food and amusement had been correctly divined.

" Come and embrace me, Grand-Maitre," he said, " for I love you, as I ought, and I am so well pleased with being here that I will likewise sup and sleep ; for I will not go to the Louvre to-day, for reasons I will tell you when I have finished playing.'*

He would, he added, take a drive, and desired that, on his return, he should find no one at the Arsenal save those he himself brought or sent. Nor did his satisfaction end here, resulting in the retreat afforded by the Arsenal being made at all times available.

No doubt Sully was proud of the position he filled, and possibly, by an unwise display of a consciousness of power, he threw down a challenge to his enemies they were not slow, as soon as his master was gone, to take up. It was said that he had told Queen

Marguerite that she, like the rest of France, was under his jurisdiction; only three persons being exempt from it, namely, the King, the Queen, and the Dauphin. " Thus," added Malherbe, " may the fortunate speak ; but to do so is to forget nhe power of Fortune, and her threats of last winter."

So far chance, as well as his master, had favoured the Duke, and an incident in particular which might have come near to being fatal to the confidence reposed by the King in his minister had, by a happy chance, produced the opposite effect, and had turned to Sully's advantage. The facts were these. Certain matters, believed by Henri to have been mentioned by him to the minister alone, had become public property ; and, in spite of Sully's asseveration, upon oath, that he had not been guilty of divulging them, it was hardly possible that a doubt should not have remained in his master's mind, not of his friend's fidelity, but of his discretion and prudence. The affair was in this condition when, by a piece of singular good luck, it was placed in the Duke's power to clear himself from all suspicion and to bring home the guilt to the true culprit. A letter addressed by the King's friend and confessor, Cotton, to a brother Jesuit came into the minister's possession ; wherein was contained all the information in question. Putting the incriminating document into Henri's hands at their next meeting, Sully made his justification. It was entirely successful. Unable to deny that he had spoken openly to the priest, the King, after reading the letter twice over, made a significant comment upon its contents.

" I confess," he said, " that there is more of loyalty and honour in you, and of truth in your words—wicked Huguenot that you are—than in many Catholics, even ecclesiastics, devout and scrupulous as they appear. And I will say no more to you upon this subject."

Whether by reason of his indiscretion or from other causes, the influence of Pere Cotton suffered, according to Guidi, a temporary eclipse. It did not prove lasting; and, having gone twice running to hear Mass in the Jesuit church, the King gave those about him to understand that it had not been done without a purpose, but " that the world might know that he loved Pere Cotton and his Order more than ever."