“Oh,” murmured Gaston, “don’t worry, my dear little sister, I’ll be on guard.” And, opening a desk, he locked the letter in a secret drawer.
As for the queen mother, as soon as the Duc d’Orléans had departed, she took leave of her daughter-in-law and returned to her apartment, where she undressed, donned her night-clothes, and then dismissed her women.
Left alone, she pulled a bell-sash hidden by curtains. Within moments, a man of forty-five to fifty, with a yellow face and black hair, eyebrows, and mustache, answered the bell, entering through a door hidden by the tapestry.
This man was musician, physician, and astrologer to the queen mother. He was, sad to say, the successor of Henri IV, of Vittorio Orsini, Concino Concini, Bellegarde, Bassompierre, and Cardinal Richelieu: the Provençal Vautier, who had made himself a doctor to manage her body and an astrologer to manage her mind.
Richelieu’s fall, if you can call it such, had been succeeded by the rise of Cardinal Bérulle, a fool, and of Vautier, a charlatan—and those who knew what influence he had on the queen mother said that, if anything, his exceeded that of the cardinal.
Vautier came into the antechamber outside the queen’s bedroom. “Quick, quick,” she said, “bring here, if you have it, the liquid that reveals the invisible writings!”
“Yes, Madame,” Vautier said, drawing a flask from his pouch. “Your Majesty’s needs are never forgotten! Here it is. Did Your Majesty finally receive the letter she was expecting?”
“Right here,” said the queen mother, taking the letter from her bosom. “Just a few insignificant lines from the Duke of Savoy. But it’s obvious he has something more important to tell me, or he wouldn’t send such a banal letter in care of one of my husband’s bastards.”
She handed the letter to Vautier, who unfolded and read it. “Indeed,” he said, “there must be more to it than that.”
The apparent writing, as previously shown, was five or six lines at the top of the page in the hand of Charles-Emmanuel. But given the axiom that one must always read between the lines, it was clearly time to call on the chemical expertise of Vautier.
One thing was certain: if some invisible message was hidden in the letter from the Duke of Savoy, it would be below the last line, on the remaining three-quarters of the page.
Vautier dipped a brush in the liquid he’d prepared and carefully washed the bottom part of the letter. As the brush moistened the white surface, lines immediately began to form here and there, and after five minutes of such treatment, the following advice was distinctly visible:
“Pretend to oppose your son Gaston’s fervent courtship of Marie de Gonzague. If an Italian campaign is decided upon despite your opposition, get Gaston command of the army as a pretext for separating him from La Gonzague. The cardinal-duke, whose sole ambition is to be the foremost general of our age, will resign in protest. The king will accept the inevitable!”
Marie de Médicis and her adviser shared a look. “Do you have any better advice to offer me?” asked the queen mother.
“No, Madame,” he replied. “I have always found it wise to follow the advice of the Duke of Savoy.”
“Then let’s follow it,” Marie de Médicis said with a sigh. “We can’t be in a worse position than we are now. Have you consulted the heavens, Vautier?”
“This evening I spent an hour atop Catherine de Médicis’s observatory.”
“And what say the stars?”
“They promise Your Majesty complete triumph over your enemies.”
“So be it,” said Marie de Médicis, and presented the astrologer a hand somewhat distorted by fat, but still attractive, which he kissed respectfully.
And they withdrew into the bedchamber together and closed the door behind them.
Alone in her room, Anne of Austria listened to the receding footsteps of Gaston d’Orléans and of her mother-in-law. When the sound had completely faded, she slowly rose, pushed her petite feet into her Spanish slippers of sky-blue satin embroidered with gold, and sat down next to her vanity. From a drawer she took out a small canvas bag containing iris powder, a perfume she preferred for her clothes above all others, and which her mother-in-law had brought her from Florence. This powder she sprinkled on the blank second page of the letter from Gonzalès de Cordova—just as, by different means, the same result was obtained from the note from Christine to Gaston, and from that of Charles-Emmanuel to the queen mother.
Under the powder, letters soon appeared on the sheet sent from Gonzalès de Cordova to the queen. This message was from King Philip IV himself. She read:
Sister, I know from our good friend Monsieur de Fargis of the plan by which, in the event of the death of King Louis XIII, you promise to marry his brother and heir to the throne, Gaston d’Orléans. However, it would be even better if, at the time of Louis’s death, you were with child.
The Queens of France have a great advantage over their husbands in that they can produce dauphins without them, an ability their husbands lack.
Ponder this incontestable truth, and as you do not need my letter to inspire your meditations—burn it.
—Philip
The queen, after reading this letter from her brother the king a second time, no doubt in order to engrave its every word upon her memory, took it by one of its corners, put it to the candle, set it alight, and held it in the air until the fire consumed it, illuminating her beautiful hand and making the tips of her fingernails glow pink. Only then did she drop the letter, which dissolved into thousands of sparks before it struck the floor. But, to reinforce her memory, she then transcribed the entire letter on paper, and locked it in a secret drawer in her desk.
She then returned slowly to her bed and slipped her satin dressing gown from her shoulders to her hips, emerging like Venus in a wave of silver. She lay down slowly and with a sigh dropped her head on her pillow, murmuring, “Oh, Buckingham! Buckingham!”
And thereafter only a few stifled sobs troubled the silence of the royal chamber.
XI
The Red Sphinx
In the gallery of the Louvre there hangs a portrait by the Jansenist painter Philippe de Champaigne depicting Cardinal Richelieu as he truly was, a figure fine, keen, and vigorous.
Unlike the Flemish, his countrymen, or the Spanish, his masters, Philippe de Champaigne was spare in his use of color, avoiding the bright hues seen in the palettes of Rubens and Murillo. In fact, he bathed the somber minister in a flood of half-light, as if emerging from the twilight of politics, he whose motto was Aquila in Nubibus—an eagle in the clouds. The image could be more flattering, but that would elevate a lie above the truth.
Study this portrait, all you men of conscience who would, after two and a half centuries, resurrect the illustrious dead and get a sense of this physical and moral genius, a man maligned by his contemporaries, ignored and almost forgotten during the following century, who found the respect he was entitled to by posterity only after two hundred years in the grave.
This portrait has the power to stop one short and almost force contemplation. Is it a man or is it a ghost, that creature in the red robe, white cappa magna, Venetian collar, and red biretta, with the broad forehead, gray hair and mustache, piercing gray eyes, and hands fine, though thin and pale? This figure, burning with eternal fever, seems alive only in the flush of the cheeks. Does it not feel like the more you contemplate this portrait, the less you know if it’s a living being or, like Saint Bonaventure, a dead man returned from beyond the grave to write his own memoirs? Does it not seem as if he might suddenly emerge from the canvas, step out of the frame, and walk up to you, causing you to recoil as if from a ghost?
What is clear and undeniable in this painting is that it depicts a man of mind and intelligence, and nothing more. Here is neither heart nor spirit—fortunately for France. In the vacuum of the monarchy between Henri IV and Louis XIV, with a king so weak and diffident and a Court so turbulent and dissolute, among princes so greedy and faithless, to bring order out of chaos re
quired a brain above all.
God created this terrible automaton, placed by Providence exactly between Louis XI and Robespierre, in order to crush the great nobles, as Louis XI had crushed his “grand vassals,” and as Robespierre would crush the aristocrats. From time to time, like red-stained comets, there appear these machines of history, these great harvesters that advance of their own accord, cropping the field of state, remorseless, relentless, stopping only when their work of scything is done.
So Richelieu would have appeared to you on that evening of December 5, 1628, when, aware of the hatred that surrounded him, he was nonetheless intent on the great projects he contemplated: exterminating heresy in France, driving the Spanish from Milan, and expelling Austria from Tuscany. He it is who appears before you in his study, trying to speak without betraying himself, to see without revealing, that impenetrable minister whom the great historian Michelet called the Red Sphinx.
He had left the ballet when his intuition told him that the queen’s absence had a political cause behind it, which could only mean a threat to him. Something poisonous was brewing in the royal chambers, those few narrow rooms that caused him more toil and trouble than the whole rest of the wide world. He went home sad, tired, almost disgusted, murmuring like Luther, “There are times when our Lord seems to tire of the game and just lays His cards on the table.”
He was well aware that what was threatened was not just his power, but his life. His hair shirt was made of the points of daggers. He felt that he was, in 1628, where Henri IV had been in 1606: everyone wanted his death. Worst of all was that even Louis XIII hated him. The king was Richelieu’s sole support, but at any moment the cardinal might take the fall for any royal failure. A man of genius, he might have borne this if he’d been healthy and vigorous, like his idiot rival Bérulle; but the ongoing shortage of money, the continual need to invent new resources, the fact that at any given moment there were a dozen Court plots against him, kept him in constant anxiety. That was the source of the fever that reddened his cheeks, while making his forehead and hands as pale as ivory. Add to this endless religious disputes, the rage they inspired in him, and the need to suppress all his bitterness and fury, and he was burning up from within, never more than inches from death.
It was a wonder that he wasn’t dead twice over. Fortunately, the king somehow sensed that, if Richelieu were gone, his kingdom was lost. On the other hand, Richelieu knew that if the king died, he had less than twenty-four hours to live: hated by Gaston, by Anne of Austria, by the queen mother, by Monsieur de Soissons from exile, by the two jailed Vendômes—hated by the whole nobility—hated, moreover, by all of Paris for having forbidden public duels, he knew the best he could hope for was to die the same day the king did—in the same hour, if possible.
Only one person was faithful to him in this endless game of seesaw, when good and bad fortune followed each other so rapidly that the same day brought both storm and sun. This was his niece and adopted daughter, Madame de Combalet, whom we’ve seen at the Hotel de Rambouillet in the Carmelite habit she’d worn since the death of her husband.
The first thing the cardinal did upon entering his house in the Place Royale was to knock on a certain panel. Three doors opened simultaneously: from one appeared Guillemot, his confidential valet; from another appeared Charpentier, his secretary; from the third came Rossignol, his decoder of dispatches.
“Has my niece returned?”
“This very moment, Monseigneur,” replied the valet.
“Tell her I need to spend tonight at work, and ask her if she wants to visit me here or would prefer that I go to her.”
The confidential valet closed his door and went to execute his orders.
The cardinal turned to Charpentier. “Have you seen Father Joseph?” he asked.
“He’s been here twice tonight,” said the secretary, “and says he must speak to Monseigneur this evening.”
“If he comes back a third time, bid him enter. Monsieur Cavois commands in the guard chamber?”
“Yes, Monseigneur.”
“Tell him not to leave. I may need his services tonight.”
The secretary retired.
“And you, Rossignol,” asked the cardinal, “did you solve the cipher in the letter I gave you? You know, the one taken from the papers of Senelle, the royal physician, on his return from Lorraine.”
“Yes, Monseigneur,” the code-master replied in a pronounced southern accent. He was a small man of forty-five to fifty whose habit of stooping made him almost hunchbacked. His most salient feature was a long nose that could have supported three or four pairs of glasses, though he made do with only one. “It couldn’t have been simpler. The king is called Céphale, the queen Procris, Your Eminence the Oracle, and Madame de Combalet Venus.”
“Good,” said the cardinal. “Give me the key to the cipher. I’ll read the dispatch myself.”
Rossignol bowed and began to withdraw.
“By the way,” added the cardinal, “remind me tomorrow to give you a bonus of twenty pistoles.”
“Monseigneur has no other orders for me?”
“No, return to your office and prepare the cipher key for me. Have it ready when I call for it.”
Rossignol backed away, bowing to the ground.
As the door closed behind him, a bell quietly sounded from within the cardinal’s desk. He opened a drawer and found the bell still trembling. His immediate response was to press his finger upon a small button that must have communicated with the apartment of Madame de Combalet, for less than a minute later she appeared across the room in yet another doorway.
A great change had taken place in her attire: gone were her veil and bandeau, her scapular and wimple, and now she was dressed only in a sheer tunic confined at the waist by a leather belt. Her beautiful auburn hair, released from restraint, fell in silken curls to her shoulders above a décolletage considerably more generous than a strict Carmelite would have allowed, displaying the curve of her bosom beneath a bouquet of violets and rosebuds—a bouquet indicating both birth and beauty, and one we’ve previously remarked upon, though at Madame de Rambouillet’s it had been on her shoulder.
The deep brown of her blouse highlighted the white satin of her elegant neck and her beautiful hands; and, as its fabric was not imprisoned in the iron corset common at that period, its folds were free to drape her shapely form.
At the sight of this adorable creature, who appeared in a heavenly cloud of perfume, and who was, at twenty-five, in the full flower of her beauty, made even more lovely and graceful by the simplicity of her outfit, the cardinal’s furrowed forehead relaxed, his somber face lit up, and he stretched his arms toward her, saying, “Oh! Come to me, Marie.”
The young woman needed no encouragement and came to him with a charming smile. She detached her bouquet, brushed it against her lips, and presented it to her uncle.
“Thank you, my lovely child,” said the cardinal, who, under the pretext of scenting the bouquet, brought it to his own lips. “Thank you, beloved daughter.”
Then, drawing her toward him and kissing her on the forehead as a father would his child, he said, “I love these flowers, as fresh as you, and scented like you. . . .”
“We are yours a hundred times over, dear Uncle. You said you wanted to see me? It would make me happy to know you needed me.”
“I always need you, my dear Marie,” said the cardinal, regarding his niece with delight, “but tonight I need you more than ever.”
“Oh, my good Uncle!” said Madame de Combalet, trying to kiss the cardinal’s hands, who resisted by drawing her own hands to his lips. “I see you’re worried again tonight.” She added, with a sad smile, “By now, I think you’d be accustomed to worries. What do they matter, so long as you succeed?”
“Yes,” said the cardinal, “I know. I shouldn’t be simultaneously high and low, happy and unhappy, powerful and helpless—but so I am, as you know better than anyone, Marie. Public success brings no private happiness. You lo
ve me with all your heart—don’t you?”
“With all my heart! With all my soul!”
“After the death of Chalais, you remember, I seemed to have won a major victory: I had the queen, the two Vendômes, and the Comte de Soissons on their knees before me. I pardoned them—and what did they do in return for my pardon? They chose to attack me in my very heart. They know I love nothing in the world so much as you, that your presence is as necessary to me as the air I breathe, as the sun that shines. Yet they condemn you for living with that ‘damned priest,’ that ‘man of blood.’ Live with me? Yes, you live with me, and more than that—I live because of you! Yet this life, so devoted on your side, so pure on mine, so that even seeing you as lovely as you are now, within my arms, no idea of sin has crossed my mind—this life, of which we should be proud, they denounce as a disgrace. You were so frightened of them, you renewed your vow to take the veil and enter a convent. I even had to ask the Pope, with whom I was in conflict, for the favor of a brief delay of your retreat. Worried? How should I not be worried? They can kill me, that’s nothing—at the siege of La Rochelle I risked my life twenty times over. But if I’m dismissed, exiled, or imprisoned, how am I to live apart from you?”
“My beloved Uncle,” said the beautiful Carmelite, bestowing on the cardinal a look that seemed to reflect more than the tenderness of a niece for her uncle, and perhaps even more than the love of a daughter for her father, “when I took that vow, though you’d been as good as it’s possible to be, I didn’t know you as I know you now—didn’t love you as I love you today. I made a vow, but the Pope has waived it; and today, that vow is no more. Today I swear that no matter what, I’ll follow you wherever you go: palaces and prisons are all the same to me. Wherever a heart may be, it lives where it loves. Well, my dear Uncle, my heart is with you, for I love you and will always love you.”
“Yes, but when they defeat me, will the victors allow you to continue your devotion to me? Look, Marie, what I fear more than dismissal, more than lost power, more than thwarted ambition, is to be separated from you. Oh! If I had to fight only Spain, Austria, and Savoy, that would be nothing. But to have to fight the very people who surround me, those whom I made rich, happy, and powerful! I dare not raise my foot to crush them, vipers and scorpions though they are. This is what wearies me to despair. My foreign enemies, Spinola, Wallenstein, Olivares—who are they? I can deal with them; they’re not my true enemies, my true rivals. My real rival is this Vautier, my real enemy is Bérulle—or else some stranger awaiting me in a shadowy alcove, a man whose name I don’t know, of whose existence I’m entirely unaware. Me, I write tragedies—yet I know of no play darker than the drama I enact! Thus, even while battling the English fleet, while tearing down the walls of La Rochelle by sheer force of genius—I say it, though I speak of myself—I had to reach beyond our current army to raise twelve thousand more French troops so the Duc de Nevers, legitimate heir to Mantua and Montferrat, can win his inheritance. It would be enough if I just had to fight Philip IV, Ferdinand II, and Charles-Emmanuel, that is to say, Spain, Austria, and Savoy. But this astrologer Vautier ‘sees in the stars’ that the army will never pass over the mountains, while the pious Bérulle fears that the success of Nevers might imperil the ‘understanding’ between His Catholic Majesty of Spain and His Most Christian Majesty of France. They send word through the queen mother to Créqui, that same Créqui I made a peer of the realm, a Marshal of France, the Governor of Dauphiné—that Créqui who also hopes to become constable, at the expense of Montmorency, that Créqui whom nothing will sate. And suddenly there is hunger in the army, which causes desertion, and who benefits but Savoy? And who is it who prepares to roll boulders from the mountains of Savoy upon French troops—who but a Queen of France, Marie de Médicis? She who is the daughter of an assassin, and the niece of a defrocked cardinal who poisoned his own brother and sister-in-law.