The Red Sphinx: A Sequel to the Three Musketeers

  “He’d had a quarrel in a cabaret,” Souscarrières continued, “and was all worked up about it.”

  “Indeed he had,” said Richelieu, following the line the unsuspecting Souscarrières had opened for him, “in the Inn of the Painted Beard.”

  “Monseigneur!” cried Souscarrières, astonished.

  “Where he went,” Richelieu continued, at the risk of overplaying his hand, but keen to know everything, “to see if, by means of a certain Étienne Latil, he might be able to rid himself of his rival, the Comte de Moret. Fortunately, instead of finding a cutthroat, he found an honest swashbuckler who refused to dip his hands in royal blood. So you see, my dear Monsieur Michel, that between drawing your sword in a church, dueling with Villaudry, complicity in the murder of Étienne Latil, and having an encounter with the Marquis de Pisany, I could have you beheaded four times over—if only you had two quarters of nobility instead of being a full-blooded commoner.”

  “Alas, Monseigneur!” said Souscarrières, badly shaken. “But you heard me declare that I owe my life to your magnanimity!”

  “And your wits, my dear Monsieur Michel.”

  “Ah! If only Monseigneur would allow me to use my wits in the service of Your Eminence,” Souscarrières cried, throwing himself at the cardinal’s feet, “I’d be the happiest of men!”

  “God forbid I should refuse—for I have need of men like you.”

  “Yes, Monseigneur, men of wit and—dare I say it—devotion!”

  “. . . Whom I will hang on the day their devotion ends.”

  Souscarrières started. “Oh! But that will be never,” he said. “How could I ever forget all I owe to Your Eminence?”

  “Hmm. Consider, my dear Monsieur Michel: you hold your fortune in your hands—but I hold the end of the noose in mine.”

  “If only Your Eminence would deign to tell me how to employ these wits that he’s been so good as to recognize.”

  “As to that . . .”

  “I listen with full attention!”

  “Well, then . . . suppose I grant you the patent on this invention from England?”

  “The patent on sedan chairs?” cried Souscarrières, who was beginning to see, taking shape before him, that fortune which the cardinal said he held in his hands, but which until now had been no more than a dream.

  “Half of it,” said the cardinal, “only half. I reserve the other half for a boon I wish to grant.”

  “Monseigneur wishes to reward another’s wits as well?” ventured Souscarrières.

  “No, something rarer than brains. Devotion.”

  “Monseigneur is the master. If I’m given half the patent, half is what I’ll settle for.”

  “Indeed. So you’ll have half the sedan chairs in Paris; two hundred, let’s say.”

  “Yes, as you say, Monseigneur, two hundred.”

  “That makes four hundred chair porters. Well, Monsieur Michel, let’s suppose these four hundred porters are intelligent, that they note where they take their customers and pay attention to what they say. Suppose further that the head of their company was also intelligent, and that he related to me, and to me alone, all that was seen and heard. Finally, suppose this man took in twelve thousand francs a year—though it could easily be twenty-four thousand—and that, instead of being called merely Michel, he wished to be called Messire Pierre de Bellegarde, Marquis de Montbrun and Seigneur de Souscarrières. I’d say, my dear friend, take as many names as you like—the more, the better! As for the names you’ve already appropriated, you may have to defend them against those you’ve claimed them from, but, rest assured, I won’t give you the slightest trouble about them.”

  “You’re serious about this, Monseigneur?”

  “Quite serious, my dear Monsieur Michel. I’m granting you the patent for half the sedan chairs in circulation in Paris. Tomorrow your partner, who will already have signed for the other half, will bring you a letter for you to sign in your turn. Does that suit you?”

  “And what will this letter state about my obligations to you?” Souscarrières asked hesitantly.

  “Nothing at all, dear Monsieur Michel. That matter, you understand, is between you and me. Complete confidentiality is essential. Peste! If my connection were known, all would be lost. It must not be revealed to Monsieur or the queen. You must always speak of me as a tyrant who persecutes the queen, and say you can’t understand how King Louis XIII can live under a yoke as heavy as mine.”

  “But I could never say such things!” cried Souscarrières.

  “Well, if you try hard enough, you might find that you can. So, we’re agreed. Your chairs will become all the rage, stifling the competition, and the entire Court will refuse to travel anywhere except by chair—especially if yours have two seats and very thick curtains.”

  “Does Monseigneur have any specific instructions for me?”

  “Indeed! I particularly recommend the ladies to you: Madame la Princesse first of all, then Mademoiselle Marie de Gonzague, Madame de Chevreuse, and Madame de Fargis. Then the men: the Comte de Moret, Monsieur de Montmorency, Monsieur de Chevreuse, and the Comte de Cramail. I leave out the Marquis de Pisany; thanks to you, we don’t have to worry about him for a few days.”

  “Monseigneur shall have nothing to worry about at all. And when should I start this operation?”

  “As soon as possible. You should begin within the week, unless you lack the funds to do so.”

  “No, Monseigneur. Indeed, this is the kind of affair I’ll attend to personally.”

  “In that case, proceed—but if you need to, you can contact me directly.”

  “You yourself, Monseigneur?”

  “Yes. Haven’t I an interest in the matter? But pardon me, here’s Cavois, who seems to have something to say. He’s the one who will bring you the little agreement to sign tomorrow, and as he will be aware of all its conditions—even those between us alone—he’s the one who will remind you of them, should you forget. Come in, Cavois, come in. You see monsieur here, do you not?”

  “Yes, Monseigneur,” Cavois said, obeying the cardinal’s order.

  “Good. He’s my friend—but only among those who come to see me between ten o’clock at night and two in the morning. To me, and to me alone, he’ll be known as Monsieur Michel; to everyone else he’s Messire Pierre de Bellegarde, Marquis de Montbrun, Seigneur de Souscarrières. Goodbye, dear Monsieur Michel.”

  Souscarrières bowed to the ground and departed, unable to believe his good luck and wondering if the cardinal was serious, or was merely mocking him. But considering the cardinal’s many concerns, he eventually realized that the cardinal didn’t have time to make fun of him, and in all probability had been quite serious.

  As for the cardinal, convinced that he’d managed to recruit the efforts of a capable ally, his good humor had returned, and it was in his most pleasant voice that he called out, “Madame Cavois! Come in, Madame Cavois!”

  XIV

  In Which the Cardinal Begins

  to See the Chessboard Clearly

  The words were barely out of his mouth before the cardinal saw a petite woman enter, aged twenty-five to twenty-six, nimble, dainty, with her nose in the air, and seemingly not at all intimidated by being in his presence. “You called, Monseigneur,” she said, speaking first, with a strong Languedoc accent. “Here I am!”

  “Good! And yet Cavois said you might not want to come.”

  “I, not come when you do the honor to call for me? What should I fear? Your Eminence didn’t ask me to come alone.”

  “Madame Cavois!” the captain of the guards growled in warning.

  “‘Madame Cavois’ all you like. Monseigneur called me here for a reason, for this or for that. Does he want to talk to me? Let him talk to me. Does he want me to talk to him? Then I’ll talk to him.”

  “For this and for that, Madame Cavois,” said the cardinal, signaling his guard captain not to interfere with the conversation.

  “No need to silence him, Monseigneur,” said
Madame Cavois. “If I tell him to shut up, he’ll shut up. Or maybe he wants us to think he’s in charge here?”

  “Monseigneur, please excuse her! She doesn’t know the Court, and . . .”

  “Let Monseigneur ask my pardon! Look at you yawning, Cavois. Why, it’s Monseigneur who owes me an apology.”

  “What!” said the cardinal, laughing. “I’m the one who needs to be pardoned?”

  “Certainly! Is it Christian to keep people who love each other eternally separated, as you do?”

  “Ah! So you love him, then—your husband?”

  “How could I not love him? You know how I first knew it, Monseigneur?”

  “No, but please tell me, Madame Cavois. It interests me enormously.”

  “Mireille, Mireille!” said Cavois, trying to call his wife to order.

  “Cavois, Cavois!” laughed the cardinal, imitating his guard captain.

  “Well, I’m the daughter of a gentleman of quality from Languedoc, you know. While Cavois is the son of a Picardy squire.”

  Cavois twitched.

  “That doesn’t mean I look down on you, Louis. My father’s name was de Serignan, and in Catalonia he was a brigadier, no less. I was a widow by name of Lacroix, very young, childless, and, I can say without bragging, very pretty.”

  “You still are, Madame Cavois,” said the cardinal.

  “Well, I was pretty. I was sixteen then, and I’m twenty-six now, with eight children, Monseigneur.”

  “What, eight children? You’ve had eight children from your wife, you dog, yet you complain to me when I keep you from sleeping with her?”

  “Why, you complained, my dear Cavois!” cried Mireille. “Oh, you little love, let me kiss you!”

  And, despite the presence of the cardinal, she threw her arms around her husband’s neck and kissed him.

  “Madame Cavois!” cried the guard captain, trembling, while the cardinal, his good humor completely restored, choked with laughter.

  “To go on, Monseigneur,” said Madame Cavois, still carelessly embracing her husband. “He was with Monsieur de Montmorency in those days, so it wasn’t surprising that, though he’s a Picard, he’d come to Languedoc. Once there, he sees me and falls in love with me, but he isn’t very rich, and I’m well off, so the idiot won’t declare himself. But he picks a quarrel with somebody, and the day before he’s to fight, he goes to a notary and makes a will in my favor, leaving me what? Everything he has, no more and no less—to me, who didn’t even know he loved me. So I go to the notary’s house to visit his wife, who is a friend of mine, and she says, ‘Do you know what? If Monsieur Cavois dies, you inherit all he has.’ ‘Monsieur Cavois? Who’s that?’ ‘You know, that handsome lad.’ And he was good-looking in those days, Monseigneur. He’s declined a bit since then, but no matter: I don’t love him any the less for it. Isn’t that so, Cavois?”

  “Monseigneur,” Cavois said, beseechingly, “you’ll forgive her, won’t you?”

  “What do you say, Madame Cavois?” said Richelieu. “Shall we put this whiner out the door?”

  “Oh, no, Monseigneur! I see him little enough as it is. So, my friend tells me he loves me like crazy, that he’s fighting a duel the next day, and that if he’s killed he leaves me his entire estate. This moves me, you understand, and I tell my father, my brothers, and my friends all about it. The next morning I ride out to try to stop this encounter between Cavois and his opponent. But I arrive too late! Monsieur, here, who has a deft hand, has already given his opponent two sword wounds. Himself, nothing—he comes through safe and sound. I throw my arms around his neck and say to him, ‘If you love me so, you must marry me. You shouldn’t suppress such desires.’ And he married me.”

  “His desires weren’t long suppressed, it seems,” said the cardinal.

  “No, but now, Monseigneur, he’s no happier than that other rascal. Since he’s been in service to Your Eminence, I have to manage all his affairs. On the rare occasions he comes home, he’s sluggish and dull. I caress him, call him my little Cavois, my little husband, and make myself as pretty as I can to please him. He never hears any whining, any complaints or reproaches. But I swear, it’s as if he’s all used up.”

  “I can see by all this that Master Cavois is more important to you than the rest of the world.”

  “Oh, yes, Monseigneur!”

  “More than the king?”

  “I wish the king every prosperity—but if the king dies, I won’t die, whereas if my poor Cavois died, the only thing I’d want would be to go with him.”

  “More than the queen?”

  “I respect Her Majesty. However, I find that, for a Queen of France, she doesn’t have enough children. If the king had a misfortune we’d all be in trouble, and for that I blame her.”

  “More than . . . me?”

  “I believe even more than you, Monseigneur. You don’t do it to hurt me, but he wears himself out for you, and sometimes you take him away with you, even to war, as you did for almost a year at La Rochelle, and that doesn’t please me.”

  “But,” said Richelieu, “if the king died, if the queen died, if I died—if everybody died—what would you two do on your own?”

  Madame Cavois laughed and gave her husband a sidelong glance. “Well!” she said. “We’d do . . .”

  “Yes, what would you do?”

  “We’d do what Adam and Eve did, Monseigneur, when they were alone together.”

  The cardinal laughed with them. “So,” he said, “you have eight children in the house?”

  “Your pardon, Monseigneur, but there are only six. It pleased the Lord to take two of them.”

  “Oh. You will make up your loss, I’m sure.”

  “I hope so—isn’t that so, Cavois?”

  “Well, then; we must provide for these poor children.”

  “They’re not suffering, Monseigneur, thank the Lord.”

  “Yes, but if I’m taken by death, they will suffer.”

  “Heaven preserve us from such a misfortune!” the two spouses cried.

  “I hope it will preserve you, and me as well. Meanwhile, we must look to the future. Madame Cavois, I am granting you, in share with Monsieur Michel, called Pierre de Bellegarde, Marquis de Montbrun, and Seigneur de Souscarrières, one-half of the monopoly on all sedan chairs in Paris.”

  “Oh! Monseigneur!”

  “And now, Cavois,” continued Richelieu, “go off with your wife, if she’s still satisfied with you, or I’ll put you under arrest and confine you to her bedroom for a week.”

  “Oh, Monseigneur!” cried the husband and wife, throwing themselves at his feet and kissing his hands.

  The cardinal held his hands out to them. “What the devil are you muttering there, Monseigneur?” asked Madame Cavois, who didn’t know Latin.

  “The loveliest phrases of the Gospel, which, unfortunately, cardinals are forbidden to preach. Now go!”

  And he pushed them out of that study where, in just two hours, so much had happened.

  Left alone, the cardinal’s expression resumed its usual gravity. “Come,” he said, “let’s summarize and recapitulate the events of the evening.” And, drawing a notebook from his pocket, with a pencil he wrote the following:

  The Comte de Moret arrived eight days ago from Savoy. In love with Madame de la Montagne. Rendezvous with La Fargis at the Inn of the Painted Beard. He, disguised as a Basque, she as a Catalan. Charged, in all probability, with letters to the two queens from Charles-Emmanuel. Étienne Latil assassinated for refusing to kill the Comte de Moret. Pisany, rejected by Madame de Maugiron, wounded by Souscarrières. Saved by his hump.

  Souscarrières granted patent for sedan chairs and recruited as intelligence chief in secular counterpart to du Tremblay, chief of religious intelligence.

  The queen absent from the ballet due to a migraine.

  “And what else? Let’s see.” He searched his memory. “Ah!” he suddenly said. “There’s that letter taken from the bag of the king’s doctor, Senelle, and sol
d to du Tremblay by his valet. Let’s see what it says, now that Rossignol has had time to solve the cipher.”

  And he called, “Rossignol! Rossignol!”

  The little man in spectacles reappeared.

  “The letter and its code?” asked the cardinal.

  “Right here, Monseigneur.”

  The cardinal took them. “Very good,” he said. “Until tomorrow, then—and if I’m pleased with the translation, it’s worth forty pistoles to you instead of the usual twenty.”

  “Then I hope Your Eminence will be satisfied.”

  Rossignol withdrew. The cardinal opened the letter and read it. Here, verbatim, is what it said:

  If Jupiter is driven from Olympus, he can take refuge in Crete. Minos will offer him hospitality with great pleasure. But Cephalus’s health can’t be sustained. In the event of his death, why shouldn’t Jupiter marry Procris? The rumor at Court is that Oracle wants to get rid of Procris so as to marry Cephalus to Venus. Meanwhile, if Jupiter continues to woo Hebe in a pretense of passion, Juno must feign disapproval. It’s important, even at this late hour, that Oracle be fooled into believing Jupiter is in love with Hebe.

  —Minos

  “Now,” said the cardinal, after reading this, “let’s see the cipher.”

  The cipher, as we’ve said, accompanied the letter. We reproduce it here for our readers.

  CEPHALUS THE KING

  PROCRIS THE QUEEN

  JUPITER MONSIEUR

  JUNO MARIE DE MÉDICIS

  OLYMPUS THE LOUVRE

  ORACLE THE CARDINAL

  VENUS MADAME DE COMBALET

  HEBE MARIE DE GONZAGUE

  MINOS CHARLES IV, DUC DE LORRAINE

  CRETE LORRAINE

  Replacing the real names with their substitutes created the following dispatch, which shows that Rossignol had not exaggerated its importance:

  If Monsieur is driven from the Louvre, he can take refuge in Lorraine. The Duc de Lorraine will offer him hospitality with great pleasure. But the king’s health can’t be sustained. In the event of his death, why shouldn’t Monsieur marry the queen? The rumor at Court is that the cardinal wants to get rid of the queen so as to marry the king to Madame de Combalet. Meanwhile, if Monsieur continues to woo Marie de Gonzague in a pretense of passion, Marie de Medi-cis must feign disapproval. It’s important, even at this late hour, that the cardinal be fooled into believing Monsieur is in love with Marie de Gonzague.