The Sun King Conspiracy (16 page)

F
OR the fourth time in only a few minutes, Fouquet looked up from the documents he was annotating and let his gaze stray through the window to linger on the shadows of the waning day. He sighed, set down his bundle of papers on a little side table next to the three-branched candlestick which provided light for his work, and closed his eyes. Was it tiredness that prevented him from working with his usual efficiency?

‘Monsieur Superintendent, Monsieur d’Orbay requests an audience.’

Opening his eyes again, Fouquet saw that the servant had entered without a sound and was standing in front of him. He looked at him for a moment, then nodded.

The servant left, closing the door behind him. Surprised, Fouquet closed his inkwell.
D’Orbay, again?

He had just stood up when the door reopened. The servant stood aside to allow the architect to enter. He took off his cloak and hat, and Fouquet indicated one of the two armchairs which stood beside the fire.

‘So, François, here you are again,’ said the Superintendent as he sat down. ‘Kindly tell me what this is all about instead of jumping around like a lunatic!’

D’Orbay made an obvious effort to calm himself and sat down.

‘That lad you saw this afternoon, that lad you saw after I left, the one I met in your waiting room …’

Fouquet frowned in puzzlement.

‘Molière’s secretary?’

‘The very same.’

‘What terrible thing has he done to bring you back here this evening?’

Fouquet’s sarcasm died when he saw the architect’s marble-like expression.

‘Do you know his name, Nicolas?’

The Superintendent shrugged his shoulders, admitting ignorance.

‘Gabriel … Gabriel something?’

‘Gabriel de Pontbriand, Nicolas, his name is Gabriel de Pontbriand. Does that not mean anything to you?’

Fouquet shook his head.

‘Why, should it?’

‘What if I were to tell you that it is also the name of a man who calls himself Charles Saint John, and that it was their astounding similarity which caused me to recognise Gabriel?’

Fouquet started.

‘What! What are you saying? Are you sure?’ he went on in more measured tones.

‘Certain,’ replied d’Orbay. ‘I had a terrible shock when I noticed him in your anteroom. Your Gabriel is the son of our Brother André de Pontbriand, whom you know by the name of Charles Saint John.’

The ensuing silence lasted for quite some time.

‘Gabriel de Pontbriand …’ murmured the Superintendent.

‘The coincidence is most disturbing,’ said d’Orbay, noting Fouquet’s sudden look of dismay, ‘and I must confess that the shock
I felt this afternoon turned my blood to ice. Our mission is too fragile and its importance too great to ignore such coincidences. That is why I wanted to put you on your guard without delay, even if I am the first person to acknowledge that we must not overreact. We have enough to do without allowing ourselves to be distracted. After all, this young man’s parentage may play no part in the troubles he has brought upon himself …’

‘I’m sure you are right, but all the same we must be vigilant. In any event, you were right to alert me. When I think that I granted him my protection and hospitality, without having an inkling … Yes,’ nodded the Superintendent in response to d’Orbay’s look of surprise, ‘he told me of attacks and threats, and gave me such a sincere and romantic account of his flight to Paris, incognito, to escape the mediocre life his protector had in store for him that I invited him to take refuge at Vaux, until things have calmed down.’

‘Well, so much the better,’ exclaimed the architect. ‘At Vaux we shall have him under our control, and it will be easier both to watch over him and to ensure that he does not intend to disrupt our plans. Let us take advantage of this respite to bring his entanglements out into the open and find out why there is so much hostility towards him. That would be the best way to rid ourselves of this disagreeable feeling of doom we both seem to harbour.’

‘What exactly does he know, in your opinion?’

D’Orbay frowned sceptically.

‘There is no reason why he should know anything. Or be capable of leading our enemies to us, or attract their attention. He knows nothing of his father and has not seen him for fifteen years, we can be certain of that.’

Once again, Fouquet remained silent for a moment.

‘Increased activity by Mazarin’s agents, Colbert and his police, that burglary … and now this ghost returning to haunt us. It’s all very worrying.’

He seemed lost in thought, then turned towards the architect.

‘When did you say the delivery was to take place?’

‘The Secret will leave Rome in a month,’ d’Orbay replied, lowering his voice. ‘It will be here one month later. And at Vaux a few days after that. Everything will be in place for the summer.’

Fouquet clasped his hands in front of his face.

‘Pray Heaven that we find the formula between now and then. Otherwise …’

‘Otherwise we shall act without it,’ d’Orbay interrupted him. The Superintendent glanced out of the window. ‘I know what you’re thinking, François. I understand your impatience. I too have confidence in the work we have carried out. I too believe that Vaux can become the temple of a new political era, which may finally re-establish the Truth of things in accordance with the reality of Christ’s teaching. But I do not want to overestimate our strength.’

He gazed at the architect and smiled.

‘Mine in particular, François.’

D’Orbay picked up his cloak from the armchair where he had left it and threw it over his shoulders.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘we shall talk of this again when the time comes.’

Looking up, he met the Superintendent’s shining eyes.

‘But fear not: you will persuade him,’ he declared, pulling on his gloves. ‘You will persuade him, I am sure of it.’

‘God willing,’ whispered Fouquet when the door had closed behind the architect. ‘God willing …’

‘I
T is time for us to part, Madame …’

The Queen shivered as she heard the thin thread of the Cardinal’s voice in which she could now barely detect the musical, melodious tones that had been so dear to her. Anne of Austria had been sitting for a long time in an armchair at the sick man’s bedside, absorbed in her prayers, and thought Mazarin was asleep. Forcing herself to smile, her gaze lingered on the emaciated features, yellowish complexion and closed eyes of the sick man. It was almost as if life had abandoned him already. She took his hand but did not reply, fearing that her words would betray her emotion, and chose instead to caress the Chief Minister’s cold, motionless fingers.

‘How hard it is to leave this world for a better one. And yet my cares are melting away: I no longer think of my paintings or my books. And hardly even about the State. This I dare to tell you, and you alone … But do not weep, Madame,’ went on the Cardinal in a fading voice, making an effort to open his eyes in the dim light to look at the face of the Queen, who was finding it increasingly difficult to hold back her tears. ‘I trust the King’s judgement, and his maturity. What is more, I am reassured by the knowledge that you will always be at his side. What better support can a son hope for than that of a loving, experienced mother?’

The Queen could not suppress a sob.

‘That of a father,’ she whispered with great difficulty.

Mazarin stiffened and closed his eyes again. Freeing his hand, he raised it gently to the Queen’s lips as if to silence her.

‘There are words, Madame, which must never be spoken for fear that the walls have ears; words that our hearts know to keep as a secret between themselves,’ he said slowly but firmly.

Then he relaxed, as if these few words had cost him an excessive effort.

Silence. Sitting perfectly still, Anne of Austria once again allowed herself to consider the madness of that secret which had for years ruled her life as a woman constrained by queenly duties. Slowly it came back to her, in successive waves resurfacing from her past: the memory of her early years of dissembling, which had become an increasing necessity as she faced up to the inexorable attraction drawing her to the young Mazarin. More than thirty years had elapsed since then, and the ambitious young man with the plump face and sparkling gaze had been transformed into this impassive, dying sphinx with hollow cheeks and dead eyes. Yet the spark was still there, uniting the Queen of France and the Chief Minister via a secret, invisible yet indissoluble bond. Anne of Austria relived the days when she had been deeply distressed by the French populace’s rejection of her foreign parentage, then by the suspicions of her husband, King Louis XIII, and his Chief Minister, Cardinal de Richelieu. Who had supported her when they accused her of conspiring against her adopted homeland on behalf of her native country? Only Mazarin, also a foreigner, an Italian whose accent people mocked. He had understood her, defended her, helped her. Understood her, and loved her … He had never wavered, never once failed her. And the silence which had been imposed upon them, far from driving them apart, had united them in unrivalled complicity,
sealed by the sight day after day, month after month, year after year, of a growing boy who was destined to be King of France …

Now it was the Cardinal’s turn to clasp the Queen’s hands in his. He brought his lips close to her ear.

‘This secret, Madame, is greater than we are and does not belong to us except in so far as we must ensure it disappears with us. When I still had boundless strength, I was arrogant in omitting to destroy all the clues which might reveal it. I kept the letters you sent me after the birth, Madame, and the contract drawn up between us to bear witness before God that we were committing no sin that He in his mercy could not absolve. I knew that I should destroy them, but I could not bring myself to do it.’

The Cardinal’s voice cracked and he remained silent for a moment before continuing:

‘I gave my secretary orders to remove those documents from their hiding place in my apartments …’

Suddenly realising, the Queen shuddered with terror:

‘The theft!’

The Cardinal nodded.

‘Yes, Madame. Those papers are amongst the ones that were stolen, for I do not believe they were delivered up to the flames. That is why it is a matter of urgency to retrieve them. I was hoping to carry out that task myself, but we must now face facts. You will have to undertake it, Madame, in our joint names. God be praised, the documents are coded and, I believe, indecipherable.’

With an enormous effort the Cardinal propped himself up on one elbow, his lips almost touching the Queen’s ear:

‘But no one must know, Madame. Colbert will be invaluable to you, but he cannot know anything about the real content. You alone must bear the secret, which the King himself – the King above all
–,’ he corrected himself, ‘must not know. Retrieve the papers and destroy them.’

‘How incautious you were, Jules,’ murmured the devastated Queen, in a tone of voice that held no hint of reproach.

Then, in a firmer tone:

‘Do not worry, I shall protect the Kingdom. You may lay down your burden; I shall carry it for both of us,’ she said, gently stroking the dying man’s moist brow.

The Cardinal managed a small, painful smile. He parted his lips but this time it was she who placed a finger over his mouth.

‘Shh! No more talking; you’re tiring yourself. We don’t need words any more, do we?’ She added in a trembling voice, ‘We never
have
needed words, my dear.’

‘Alas Madame, that is not all I have to tell you. We lack time, so listen carefully to what I am about to say. Those papers, Madame, were contained in a leather document case with a sheaf of other papers which were also coded, but by other people and in a code I do not know. They contain a secret for which people have already killed, a secret much more terrible perhaps than our own, a secret which could change France’s destiny even more radically.’

At these words, the Queen shivered.

‘Madame, those papers came into my possession years ago, when the Fronde was setting the country alight and the conspirators thought they were nearing their goal of toppling the State. I know the price that certain of those faction members place upon the papers. The man who was in possession of them, and who was arrested by my police officers, succeeded in escaping, but he abandoned the documents and no one knew where they were. Nobody has yet managed to reveal their secret. I had resolved to destroy them too, in time, convinced that if this secret could not be possessed it must
be destroyed. The Devil’s beauty must not be gazed upon. Repeat my words to Colbert; make him understand that these papers may place our position and the monarchy in danger, that he must not let anything stand in the way of finding them. Anyone who compromises the search must be pushed aside. Anyone who might appropriate them himself must be rendered incapable of doing harm. Satisfy yourself that he has retrieved and destroyed them, Madame. And then our secret will disappear too. Go, Madame, it is time,’ he concluded, pulling the bell-cord to summon his personal valet.

As the valet entered, the white hands of the Queen and the dying man clasped one last time, then the Queen stood up.

‘Tell Monsieur Colbert that the Queen wishes to see him in her apartments immediately.’

B
ERTRAND Barrême wrenched the pince-nez from the bridge of his prominent nose. His other hand passed lightly over the four sheets of paper laid out before him, then pulled back as if suddenly burned. Holding the pince-nez between two fingers, the mathematician pointed another finger at Gabriel, who stood motionless on the other side of the table.

‘Where the devil did you find this, young man?’

Gabriel stammered but did not reply. The fat man in the tight silk dressing gown impatiently wobbled nearer to him. His face was very close to Gabriel’s now, and the young man could see every little line at the corners of his eyes and on the crown of his almost-bald pate. Only his youthful voice betrayed the true age of the thirty-year-old who looked like an old man.

‘These papers?’ he repeated. ‘Who did you get them from?’

‘Do they mean anything to you?’ Gabriel asked. Barrême looked at him suspiciously and returned to the table with a grunt.

‘Possibly, yes, but they are incomplete …’

Putting his pince-nez back on, he bent over the sheets of paper once more, scanning them in the same worried and cautious manner.

‘Do you know any mathematics, Monsieur?’

‘A little,’ ventured Gabriel. ‘I know a little geometry and algebra …’

‘Codes,’ interrupted Barrême, ‘are a mathematical game. They are also signatures. Hundreds exist, but in the end there are not many families of them, and inventions in the field are very rare. In the twenty years I’ve been working in this area, I’ve very rarely had cause to be surprised …’

‘But you are by this? Is it something you’re unfamiliar with?’

Gabriel immediately regretted his words when he saw Barrême’s angry expression. He clenched his fists and forced himself to control his impatience.

‘No, young man. Do not be in such haste that you make the wrong deduction! I am certainly not in the presence of something I do not know, but on the contrary something which I do know, or rather recognise. I would describe it more as a distant memory.’

Noting Gabriel’s impatience, the mathematician remained silent for a moment to add weight to what he was about to say.

‘If I ask you where you obtained these documents, it’s because I have not seen them for almost fifteen years. I was very young then, and my father had sent me to stay in Tuscany and Rome, to learn accounting techniques and the sciences from the Italian masters. Perhaps the quality of my work attracted attention,’ mused the mathematician with undisguised vanity. ‘Anyway, one evening, I was summoned to a palace in Rome, in an atmosphere of great secrecy, to work on encoding some documents – this document was one of them,’ he specified, extracting one of the four sheets.

‘So you know the code?’ Gabriel exclaimed, unable to control himself.

A black look from the fat man stopped him short.

‘Do you never listen? Barbin told me you were hot-headed, but not to this extent! Monsieur Molière is fortunate that he is an artist and not a geometrician with you by his side …’

Gabriel lowered his head and opened his mouth to apologise, but Barrême waved his attempt away; he had been interrupted too often already.

‘Well no, I do not know the code. In fact that is why I remember this document: I encoded it, but did not read it …’

Gabriel looked utterly lost, which seemed to please Barrême.

‘Yes, yes, without reading it, or at least only reading a section that had been extracted from it, rendering its meaning totally incomprehensible. I imagine other coding experts like myself were working on the other parts.’

Disappointment was written all over Gabriel’s face.

‘This is scarcely going to help you with your play, is it?’ the man went on suspiciously. ‘But listen to what happened next. After I’d finished my work, I was asked to wait in the same palace for several hours, and then the document was brought back to me so that I could encode it once again. This is the classic technique of the double code, an Italian speciality. What was rather less classic, however, was the nature of the process applied to my first encoding while I was waiting: I had never seen it before and have never seen it since. How can I explain it to you simply?’ He looked at Gabriel, pleased with himself. ‘That code was not mathematical: it was, you might say, harmonic or aesthetic. That is to say that it was not based, I am certain, on objective mathematical logic but on a subjective perception. That code was beautiful, young man, beautiful in the manner of a cathedral, not beautiful like an equation!’

Still lost for words, Gabriel looked again at the sheets of paper. They told him nothing and seemed to him to be no more than a heap of cabalistic signs and impenetrable figures. While he was looking, longing to see something new, Barrême had come up behind him. Just a few drops of sweat still betrayed his fleeting excitement, and
in his eyes there was doubt once again as to the young actor’s real intentions.

‘There is something else I remember: the appearance of the man who brought the documents that evening, and who paid me handsomely for my trouble.’

Gabriel jumped when he realised that the man was staring intently at him.

‘He was just the same size and build as you, with hair like yours and his features, yes, yes, as I recall they were very similar to yours …’

White as a sheet, the young man blurted out a few words of thanks and an invitation to the forthcoming play as he feverishly gathered up the documents.

As he watched him leave, Barrême shrugged and took off his pince-nez. Why did the prospect of setting to work on developing the new accounting system ordered by the Cardinal’s department suddenly seem so uninspiring? Was it the strange memory which had suddenly reappeared before his eyes, or seeing those features from the past on the face of that young man?

He got to his feet, dressed hurriedly and went out, scarcely taking the time to lock his door.

Twenty minutes later, he was knocking at the door of a private residence in Rue de la Verrerie. As soon as it opened a fraction, he pushed it inwards.

‘I must see Monsieur d’Orbay without delay,’ he barked. ‘Tell Monsieur d’Orbay that I am here!’