At ten in the morning, the Sieur de La Coste, ensign in the King’s Guards, followed by two exempts and a squad of archers, came to demand of Clément, the city registrar, all the keys of the doors, chambers, and offices of the Hôtel de Ville. The keys were instantly rendered up to him, each with its label of location, and from that moment La Coste commanded all the doors and corridors.
Duhallier, Captain of the City Guards, came in his turn at eleven o’clock, bringing with him fifty archers who were immediately assigned to guard duty at all the various doors of the hôtel. At three o’clock came the rest of Duhallier’s guards, a company of Swiss, and des Essarts’s company of the Gardes Françaises.
At six in the evening the guests began to arrive. As they entered, they were ushered to their assigned places on the tiered scaffolds in the great hall.
At nine o’clock the wife of the First President of Parliament arrived. After the queen, she was the most important lady invited to the fête, so she was received personally by the aldermen and placed in a loge opposite to that designated for Her Majesty.
At ten o’clock a collation of sweets and preserves was laid out for the king in a small side chamber, served on the city’s formal silver service, which was guarded by four archers.
At midnight shouting and cheering could be heard from outside. The king was approaching along the streets from the Louvre to the Hôtel de Ville, which were lit for the occasion by colored lanterns.
At the sound of the cheers, the Paris Aldermen, attired in their finest robes and preceded by six sergeants holding flambeaux, went to welcome the king. They met him on the steps of the hôtel: the merchants’ provost offered the official welcome, to which His Majesty replied with an apology for coming so late, laying the blame on Monsieur le Cardinal, who had detained him until eleven o’clock discussing affairs of State.
His Majesty, in full ceremonial dress, was accompanied by His Royal Highness Monsieur, by the Comte de Soissons;67 the Grand Prior,68 the Duc de Longueville, the Duc d’Elbeuf, the Comte d’Harcourt, and the Comte de La Roche-Guyon; by Monsieur de Liancourt, Monsieur de Baradas,69 the Comte de Cramail, and the Chevalier de Souveray.
Everyone noticed that the king seemed melancholy and preoccupied.
Dressing rooms had been prepared for the king and Monsieur, as well as the queen and Madame la Présidente, each containing costumes for a masque. The gentlemen and ladies of Their Majesties’ suite were to dress, two at a time, in another pair of rooms.
Before entering his dressing room, the king asked to have someone notify him the moment the cardinal arrived.
Half an hour after the appearance of the king the cheering resumed, heralding the arrival of the queen. The aldermen, preceded by their sergeants, went out to meet their royal guest.
As the queen entered the great hall, everyone could see that, like the king, she appeared sad—and moreover, genuinely fatigued.
As she entered, the curtain on a small loge drew back and the pale face of the cardinal appeared, above the costume of a Spanish cavalier. His eyes were fixed on those of the queen and a smile of terrible joy passed over his lips—for the queen wasn’t wearing her diamond studs.
The queen paused briefly to receive the compliments of the city aldermen and to acknowledge the salutations of their ladies. Suddenly, the king appeared with the cardinal at one of the doors of the hall. The cardinal was speaking to him in a low voice, and the king was very pale.
The king made his way through the press, unmasked and with the ribbons of his doublet barely tied. He approached the queen, and in a strained voice he said, “Madame, tell me, if you please, why you haven’t worn your diamond studs, when you know I particularly wanted you to be seen in them.”
The queen looked about and saw the cardinal behind the king, smiling a diabolical smile.
“Sire,” replied the queen, her own voice strained, “I was afraid that, in a great crowd like this, something might happen to them.”
“And you were wrong, Madame! If I gave you such a gift, it was so you would appear in them. You were wrong, I tell you!”
The king’s voice trembled with anger, astonishing everyone within earshot, for no one understood what was really going on.
“Sire,” said the queen, “they’re in the Louvre, of course. I can send for them, if that accords with Your Majesty’s wishes.”
“Do so, Madame, do so—and as soon as possible. The ballet starts within the hour.”
The queen bowed in submission and followed the ladies who were to conduct her to her dressing room. The king turned on his heel and went to complete his own costume.
A wave of dismay and confusion passed through the great hall. Everyone had noticed there was some kind of trouble between the king and the queen, but as they’d spoken in low voices everyone nearby had respectfully drawn back, so nobody had heard much of anything. The violins began wailing with all their might, but nobody paid any attention to them.
The king was the first to leave his dressing room. He wore a most elegant hunting costume, and Monsieur and the other nobles were dressed to match. This was the costume most becoming to the king, and he truly looked like the first gentleman of his realm.
The cardinal approached the king and presented him with a small, exquisite box. The king opened it and found two diamond studs within. “What does this mean?” he asked the cardinal.
“Oh, nothing,” the cardinal replied. “Only, if the queen has her studs, which I presume to doubt—count them, Sire. If you find only ten, ask Her Majesty who could have taken the two you see here.”
The king looked at the cardinal as if he wanted to interrogate him, but before he could utter a question the room erupted in applause and cries of admiration. If the king looked like the first gentleman of his realm, tonight the queen was beyond doubt the most beautiful woman in France. As with her husband, a hunting costume became her marvelously well: she wore a beaver hat with blue feathers, an overskirt of pearl-gray velvet with diamond clasps, and an underskirt of blue satin embroidered with silver. On her left shoulder glittered the diamond studs, on a broad bow of the same blue as the feathers and underskirt.
The king trembled with joy, the cardinal with anger. The queen had her studs—but had she ten, or twelve? At this distance they couldn’t count them.
The violins immediately sounded the fanfare that began the ballet. The king advanced toward Madame la Présidente, his partner for the dance, and His Royal Highness Monsieur led out the queen. They took their places and the ballet began.
The king was placed opposite the queen, and each time he passed her he peered closely at the studs, but was never able to count them all. A cold sweat shone on the cardinal’s brow.
The ballet had sixteen movements and lasted an hour. It concluded amid the applause of the entire hall, as each lord led his lady to her place. However, the king took advantage of his privileged position to leave his own partner and advance eagerly toward the queen.
“I thank you, Madame,” he said to her, “for deferring to my wishes, but I think you lack two studs. Allow me to return them to you.” And he held out the pair of studs the cardinal had given him.
“Why, Sire!” cried the young queen, pretending surprise. “You’re giving me two more? Then I shall have fourteen!”
The king hesitated, and then counted. There were twelve studs on Her Majesty’s shoulder.
His Majesty called over the cardinal and asked, in a severe tone, “What does this mean, Monsieur le Cardinal?”
“It means, Sire,” replied the cardinal, after the briefest pause, “that I wanted to present these two studs to Her Majesty, but didn’t dare to offer them myself, so I adopted this means of doing so.”
“And I’m all the more grateful to Your Eminence,” said Anne of Austria, with a smile that proved she wasn’t deceived by this ingenious bit of gallantry, “as I’m certain these two studs cost you more than the other dozen cost His Majesty.” The queen bowed to the king and cardinal, then walked majestic
ally off toward her dressing room.
The attention focused in the first part of this chapter on the high and mighty has diverted the story for an instant from the young man to whom Anne of Austria owed her unprecedented triumph over the cardinal. Abashed, ignored, jostling in the crowd near one of the doors, he watched from afar this scene that made sense to only four persons: the king, the queen, His Eminence, and himself.
The queen had just reentered her dressing room, and d’Artagnan was preparing to leave the hall, when he felt a light touch on his shoulder. He turned and saw a young woman who made a sign to him to follow her. This woman’s face was concealed by a black velvet domino mask, but despite this precaution, which was taken more against others than against him, he instantly recognized his usual guide, the lively and clever Madame Bonacieux.
They had scarcely seen each other the night before in the apartment of Germain the Swiss, where d’Artagnan had gone to ask for her. She’d been in such a hurry to tell the queen the good news of her messenger’s happy return that they’d barely had time to exchange more than a few words. Now d’Artagnan followed Madame Bonacieux through the crowd, driven by both love and curiosity. He wanted to stop her, take hold of her and look at her, if only for a moment, all the more so as the corridors they traversed became more deserted—but, quick as a bird, she always glided out from between his hands. When he started to speak, she placed her finger on her mouth in a charming but imperative little gesture that reminded him that he was under the command of another, a power that he must blindly obey, without comment or complaint.
At last, after a series of turns and detours, Madame Bonacieux opened a door and led the young man into a lightless closet. She repeated the sign for silence. Then she opened slightly a second door hidden behind a tapestry, and a sliver of bright light streamed into the closet. She touched him lightly on the cheek and disappeared back through the door to the corridor.
D’Artagnan remained frozen for a moment, asking himself where he was, but the ray of light that came in through the half-open door brought with it a warm breath of perfumed air and the conversation of two or three women, in language at once respectful and elegant. The word “Majesty,” repeated several times, made it clear to him that he was in a closet adjoining the queen’s dressing room.
The young man stood in the shadows and waited.
The queen seemed gay and happy, which astonished her women, who were used to seeing her nearly always anxious and careworn. The queen attributed her joy to the beauty of the ball and the pleasure she’d taken in dancing the ballet—and as it wasn’t permitted to contradict the queen, whether she smiled or wept, her ladies outdid each other in praising the gallantry of Messieurs the Aldermen of Paris.
Although d’Artagnan didn’t know the queen, he easily distinguished her voice from that of the others because of its slight foreign accent and by that natural tone of authority inherent in the speech of sovereigns. He heard her approach his closet and backed away from the door. As he watched, the shadow of a human form eclipsed the light from the dressing room.
Then a hand and arm, lovely in form and whiteness, slipped through the gap in the tapestry. D’Artagnan immediately knew that here was his reward. He knelt, took the hand, and brushed it respectfully with his lips; then the hand was withdrawn, leaving in his own an object he recognized as a ring. Immediately the door closed and d’Artagnan found himself in complete darkness.
He put the ring on his finger and again waited; there was evidently more to come. After the reward for his devotion must come the reward for his love. Besides, though the ballet was over, the evening was scarcely begun: supper was to be served at three, and the clock of nearby Saint-Jean had only just struck two-thirty.
Little by little the sound of voices diminished in the neighboring chamber as one by one the occupants departed. Then the corridor door of d’Artagnan’s closet quietly opened and Madame Bonacieux darted in.
“You, at last!” cried d’Artagnan.
“Silence!” said the young woman, placing her hand on the young man’s lips. “Silence! And go back the way you came.”
“But where and when will I see you again?” d’Artagnan said desperately.
“You’ll find a note in your rooms that will tell you. Now go! Go!”
At these words she opened the door to the corridor and pushed d’Artagnan out of the closet. D’Artagnan, docile, obeyed like a child—which proved beyond doubt that he was really in love.
XXIII
The Rendezvous
D’Artagnan returned home as fast as his feet could take him, and though it was three in the morning, and he had to traverse some of the nastiest quarters in Paris, trouble passed him by. Everyone knows that God watches over drunkards and lovers.
He found the door of his staircase open, ran up the steps, and knocked lightly, in the manner prearranged with Planchet, whom he’d sent home two hours earlier from the Hôtel de Ville, with orders to wait up for him. The lackey came and opened the door. “Has anyone brought a letter for me?” d’Artagnan asked eagerly. “No one has brought a letter, Monsieur,” replied Planchet, “but one has come on its own.”
“What does that mean, dolt?”
“What it means is that, though I’d had the key to the door in my pocket the whole time I was out, when I came in I found a letter on the green baize table in your bedchamber.”
“And where is this letter?”
“I left it where it was, Monsieur! It’s not natural for letters to enter people’s houses this way. If the window had been open, even a little, I’d think nothing of it; but no, it was shut tight. Take care, Monsieur—there’s some sort of sorcery in this.”
Despite Planchet’s warning, the young man had already darted into the bedchamber and opened the letter. It was from Madame Bonacieux:
I owe you a thousand thanks, and I want you to have all of them. This evening, around ten o’clock, be in Saint-Cloud, in front of the pavilion on the corner of Monsieur d’Estrées’s estate.
C.B.
Reading this letter, d’Artagnan felt his heart swell and clench in that happy lover’s spasm that torments and caresses. It was the first such note he’d ever received, and his first call to a lover’s tryst. He felt himself at the gates of the earthly paradise of love; his heart was so drunk with joy, he thought it would melt.
“You see, Monsieur?” said Planchet, watching his master’s face go from red to white to red again. “I was right, wasn’t I? A letter that appears like that can only bring bad news.”
“This time you were wrong, Planchet,” said d’Artagnan, “and to prove it, here’s a crown for you to drink my health with.”
“Much obliged for the crown, Monsieur, and I promise to do as you ask with it—but still, letters that find their own way into closed houses . . .”
“Fall from heaven, my friend, fall from heaven!”
“You mean, it’s all right?” asked Planchet.
“My dear Planchet, I’m the happiest of men!”
“Then may I take advantage of Monsieur’s happiness and go to bed?”
“Yes, go!”
“May the blessings of heaven descend upon you, Monsieur. But still, that letter . . .” And Planchet retired, shaking his head worriedly, despite d’Artagnan’s generosity.
Left alone, d’Artagnan read and reread his letter, then kissed twenty times over the lines that had been traced by the hand of his beautiful mistress. Finally he took himself to bed, where he slept, dreaming golden dreams.
At seven the next morning he rose and called Planchet, who opened the door at the second call, his face still lined with his anxiety of the night before. “Planchet,” said d’Artagnan, “I’m going out, perhaps for all day. You’re at liberty until seven o’clock this evening when you must be prepared to go, with two horses ready.”
“Go!” said Planchet. “So we’re off again to have more holes poked into our hides.”
“Bring your musketoon and pistols.”
“
Just as I thought!” cried Planchet. “I knew it! It’s that lousy letter!”
“Stop worrying, mallet-head. We’re just going on a pleasant little outing.”
“Right! Like that pretty little trip the other day, when it rained bullets and sprouted steel traps.”
“All right, if you’re really afraid, I’ll go without you,” said d’Artagnan. “I’d rather travel alone than with a chicken-heart.”
“Oh, that’s harsh, Monsieur!” said Planchet. “I thought you’d seen me in action.”
“Yes, but I thought maybe you’d used up all your courage in one episode.”
“Then I’ll show Monsieur that there’s still some left. But I must beg you not to spend it too quickly, if you want it to last.”
“Do you think you might have a bit available for this evening?”
“I hope so.”
“Good. I’m counting on you.”
“I’ll be ready at the time you said—but I thought Monsieur had only one horse in the guards’ stables.”
“There may be only one now, but by this evening there’ll be four.”
“So, we went on that journey just to get spare horses?”
“Exactly,” said d’Artagnan. He clapped Planchet on the back and left.
Monsieur Bonacieux was standing in his doorway. D’Artagnan had planned to pass the worthy mercer without speaking to him, but the man greeted him so warmly that he thought he ought to stop and chat for a moment.
Besides, it’s nearly impossible to avoid being a little condescending to a husband whose wife has set a rendezvous with you that evening in Saint-Cloud, in front of Monsieur d’Estrées’s pavilion! d’Artagnan approached with the friendliest air he could muster.
Their talk naturally touched on the poor man’s incarceration. Monsieur Bonacieux, who didn’t know that d’Artagnan had heard his conversation with the stranger of Meung, related to his young tenant his persecutions at the hands of that monster, Monsieur de Laffemas, whom he called the cardinal’s hatchet man, and went on at length about the Bastille: the locks, the bars, the dungeons, the chains, and the instruments of torture.