Part 13

— Wait, my lord... One more precaution to take.

— What is it?

— We are here on the main road: riders or carriages may pass, traveling as we are, and, seeing us stopped, would think we are in trouble. Let us avoid offers of help that would embarrass us.

— Order the postilion to hide the carriage in a side alley.

— That is precisely what I meant to do, my lord.

Aramis made a sign to the mute, whom he touched. The latter dismounted, took the two lead horses by the bridle, and led them into the velvety heather, onto the mossy grass of a winding lane, at the end of which, on this moonless night, the clouds formed a curtain blacker than inkblots.

That done, the man lay down on a bank near his horses, which were cropping the young shoots of the mast on either side.

— I am listening, said the young prince to Aramis; but what are you doing there?

— I am unloading the pistols we no longer need, my lord.

Chapter CCXV — The Tempter

— My prince, said Aramis, turning in the carriage toward his companion, weak creature that I am, mediocre in mind, inferior in the order of thinking beings, never have I conversed with a man without penetrating his thought through that living mask thrown over our intelligence, so as to seize its manifestation. But tonight, in the shadow where we are, in the reserve I see in you, I shall be able to read nothing in your features, and something tells me I shall have difficulty drawing a sincere word from you. I beseech you, then, not for love of me, for subjects should weigh nothing in the scale princes hold, but for love of yourself, to retain each of my syllables, each of my inflections, which, in the grave circumstances we are engaged in, will each have their sense and their worth, as important as any ever uttered in the world.

— I am listening, repeated the young prince with decision, desiring nothing, fearing nothing from what you are about to tell me.

And he sank still deeper into the thick cushions of the carriage, trying to hide from his companion not only his sight but even the supposition of his person.

The shadow was black, and it descended, broad and opaque, from the summit of the interlaced trees. That carriage, closed by a vast roof, would not have received the slightest particle of light, even had a luminous atom slipped between the columns of mist that spread through the woodland lane.

— My lord, resumed Aramis, you know the history of the government that now directs France. The king emerged from a captive childhood like yours, obscure like yours, narrow like yours. Only, instead of having, as you did, the slavery of prison, the obscurity of solitude, the narrowness of hidden life, he had to suffer all his miseries, all his humiliations, all his constraints in broad daylight, under the pitiless sun of royalty; a place drowned in light, where every spot appears sordid filth, where every glory appears a stain. The king has suffered, he bears a grudge, he will take revenge. He will be a bad king. I do not say he will shed blood like Louis XI or Charles IX, for he has no mortal injuries to avenge, but he will devour the money and the livelihood of his subjects, because he has suffered injuries of interest and of money. I therefore clear my conscience at the outset when I consider face to face the merits and faults of this prince, and, if I condemn him, my conscience absolves me.

Aramis paused. It was not to listen whether the silence of the wood was still the same, it was to recover his thought from the depths of his mind, it was to give that thought time to embed itself deeply in the mind of his interlocutor.

— God does well all that He does, continued the Bishop of Vannes, and of this I am so persuaded that I long ago congratulated myself on having been chosen by Him as depositary of the secret I helped you discover. The God of justice and foresight needed a sharp, persevering, convinced instrument to accomplish a great work. That instrument is me. I have the sharpness, I have the perseverance, I have the conviction; I govern a mysterious people who have taken for their device the device of God: Patiens quia aeternus!

The prince made a movement.

— I guess, my lord, said Aramis, that you raise your head, and that this people I command astonishes you. You did not know how to deal with a king. Oh! my lord, king of a very humble people, king of a very disinherited people: humble, because it has force only in crawling; disinherited, because never, almost never in this world, does my people reap the harvests it sows or eat the fruit it cultivates. It works for an abstraction, it agglomerates all the molecules of its power to form a man, and to this man, with the product of its drops of sweat, it composes a cloud whose genius this man must in turn make a halo, gilded by the rays of all the crowns of Christendom. There is the man at your side, my lord. That is to say he has drawn you from the abyss in a great design, and that he wishes, in this magnificent design, to raise you above the powers of the earth, above himself.

The prince lightly touched Aramis's arm.

— You speak to me, he said, of that religious order of which you are the head. It results, for me, from your words, that the day you wish to precipitate him whom you have raised, the thing will be done, and that you will hold under your hand your creature of the day before.

— Undeceive yourself, my lord, replied the bishop, I would not take the trouble to play this terrible game with Your Royal Highness if I did not have a double interest in winning the match. The day you are raised, you will be raised forever, you will overturn the step as you mount, you will send it rolling so far that its sight will never even recall to you its right to your gratitude.

— Oh! sir.

— Your movement, my lord, comes from an excellent nature. Thank you! Believe well that I aspire to more than gratitude; I am assured that, arrived at the summit, you will judge me still more worthy to be your friend, and then, between us two, my lord, we shall do such great things that they will long be spoken of in the centuries.

— Tell me plainly, sir, tell me without veils, what I am today and what you pretend I shall be tomorrow.

— You are the son of King Louis XIII, you are the brother of King Louis XIV, you are the natural and legitimate heir of the throne of France. In keeping you near him, as they kept Monsieur, your younger brother, the king reserved to himself the right of being legitimate sovereign. Only the physicians and God could dispute his legitimacy with him. Physicians always prefer the king who is to the king who is not. God would be in the wrong to harm an honest prince. But God willed that you be persecuted, and this persecution consecrates you today king of France. You had therefore the right to reign, since it is contested; you had therefore the right to be declared, since you are sequestered; you are therefore of divine blood, since they dared not shed your blood as that of your servants. Now, see what He has done for you, this God you have so often accused of having done all against you. He has given you the features, the stature, the age and the voice of your brother, and all the causes of your persecution are going to become the causes of your triumphal resurrection. Tomorrow, the day after, at the first moment, royal phantom, living shadow of Louis XIV, you will sit upon his throne, whence the will of God, entrusted to the execution of a man's arm, will have precipitated him without return.

— I understand, said the prince, they will not shed my brother's blood.

— You alone will be arbiter of his destiny.

— This secret of which they abused me...

— You will use it with him. What did he do to hide it? He hid you. Living image of himself, you would betray the plot of Mazarin and Anne of Austria. You, my prince, will have the same interest in hiding him who resembles you prisoner, as you will resemble him king.

— I return to what I said to you. Who will guard him?

— Who guarded you.

— You know this secret, you have made use of it for me. Who else knows it?

— The queen mother and Mme de Chevreuse.

— What will they do?

— Nothing, if you wish it.

— How so?

— How will they recognize you, if you act so that one does not recognize you?

— That is true. There are graver difficulties.

— Speak, prince.

— My brother is married; I cannot take my brother's wife.

— I shall arrange that a repudiation be consented to by Spain; it is the interest of your new policy, it is human morality. All that is truly noble and truly useful in this world will find its account in it.

— The king, sequestered, will speak.

— To whom do you wish him to speak? To the walls?

— You call walls the men in whom you will have confidence.

— If need be, yes, Your Royal Highness. Besides...

— Besides?...

— I meant that the designs of God do not stop on so fair a road. Every plan of that scope is completed by results, like a geometrical calculation. The king, sequestered, will not be for you the embarrassment you were for the reigning king. God made that soul proud and impatient by nature. He has, moreover, softened it, disarmed it, by the use of honors and the habit of sovereign power. God, who willed that the end of the geometrical calculation of which I had the honor to speak to you be your advent to the throne and the destruction of what is hurtful to you, has decided that the vanquished will soon end his sufferings with yours. He has therefore prepared this soul and this body for the brevity of the agony. Put in simple private prison, sequestered with your doubts, deprived of all, with the habit of a solid life you resisted. But your brother, captive, forgotten, restricted, will not support his injury, and God will take back his soul at the appointed time, that is to say soon.

At this moment of Aramis's dark analysis, a night bird uttered from the depths of the woods that plaintive and prolonged hooting which makes every creature start.

— I would exile the dethroned king, said Philippe with a shudder; that would be more humane.

— The good pleasure of the king will decide the question, replied Aramis. Now, have I well posed the problem? have I well brought the solution according to the desires or the foresights of Your Royal Highness?

— Yes, sir, yes; you have forgotten nothing, if not however two things.

— The first?

— Let us speak of it at once with the same frankness we have just put into our conversation, let us speak of the motives that can bring about the dissolution of the hopes we have conceived, let us speak of the dangers we run.

— They would be immense, infinite, frightful, insurmountable, if, as I told you, everything did not concur to render them absolutely null. There are no dangers for you or for me, if the constancy and intrepidity of Your Royal Highness equal the perfection of that resemblance nature has given you with the king. I repeat to you, there are no dangers, there are only obstacles. That word, which I find in all languages, I have always ill understood; if I were king, I would have it erased as absurd and useless.

— Indeed, sir, there is a very serious obstacle, an insurmountable danger you forget.

— Ah! said Aramis.

— There is conscience that cries out, there is remorse that tears.

— Yes, it is true, said the bishop; there is weakness of heart, you remind me of it. Oh! you are right, it is an immense obstacle, it is true. The horse that fears the ditch jumps into the middle and kills itself! The man who crosses steel trembling leaves to the enemy blade days through which death passes! It is true! it is true!

— Have you a brother? said the young man to Aramis.

— I am alone in the world, replied he in a voice dry and nervous as the trigger of a pistol.

— But you love someone on earth? added Philippe.

— No one! Indeed, I love you.

The young man plunged into a silence so deep that the sound of his own breath became a tumult for Aramis.

— My lord, resumed he, I have not said all I had to say to Your Royal Highness: I have not offered my prince all that I possess for him of salutary counsels and useful resources. It is not a question of making a flash shine in the eyes of him who loves shadow; it is not a question of making the magnificences of cannon rumble in the ears of the gentle man who loves repose and the fields. My lord, I have your happiness all ready in my thought; I am going to let it fall from my lips, gather it preciously for yourself, who have so loved the sky, the verdant meadows and the pure air. I know a land of delights, an unknown paradise, a corner of the world where, alone, free, unknown, in the woods, in the flowers, in the living waters, you will forget all that human folly, temptress of God, has just told you of miseries a moment ago. Oh! listen to me, my prince, I do not jest. I have a soul, you see, I divine the abyss of yours. I will not take you incomplete to throw you into the crucible of my will, my caprice or my ambition. All or nothing. You are bruised, sick, almost extinguished by the surplus of breath you have had to give since one hour of liberty. It is a certain sign for me that you will not wish to continue to breathe largely, lengthily. Let us hold then to a humbler life, more suited to our strength. God is my witness, I attest His omnipotence, that I wish to draw your happiness from this trial wherein I have engaged you.

— Speak! Speak! said the prince with a vivacity that made Aramis reflect.

— I know, resumed the prelate, in Lower Poitou, a district whose existence no one in France suspects. Twenty leagues of country, that is immense, is it not? Twenty leagues, my lord, and all covered with water, with grass and rushes, the whole mingled with islands laden with wood. These great marshes, clothed with reeds like a thick mantle, sleep silent and deep under the smile of the sun. A few families of fishermen measure them lazily with their great rafts of poplar and alder, whose floor is made of a bed of reeds, whose roof is woven of solid rushes. These boats, these floating houses, go at adventure under the breath of the wind. When they touch a shore, it is by chance, and so softly, that the fisherman who sleeps is not awakened by the shock. If he has wished to land, it is that he has seen the long bands of rails or lapwings, of ducks or plovers, of teal or snipe, of which he makes his prey with the trap or with the lead of the musket. The silvered shads, the monstrous eels, the nervous pikes, the pink and gray perches, fall in mass into his nets. One has only to choose the fattest pieces, and let the rest escape. Never a man of the towns, never a soldier, never anyone has penetrated into this country. The sun there is gentle. Certain masses of earth retain the vine and nourish with a generous sap its beautiful black and white clusters. Once a week, a boat goes to fetch, at the common oven, warm yellow bread whose smell attracts and caresses from afar. You will live there like a man of ancient times. Powerful lord of your poodle dogs, your lines, your guns and your beautiful reed house, you will live there in the opulence of the hunt in the fullness of security; you will pass thus years at the end of which, unrecognizable, transformed, you will have forced God to remake you a destiny. There are a thousand pistoles in this bag, my lord; it is more than enough to buy all the marsh of which I have spoken; it is more than enough to live there as many years as you have days to live; it is more than enough to be the richest, the freest and the happiest of the region. Accept as I offer you, sincerely, joyously. Right from this carriage here, we are going to detach two horses. The mute, my servant, will conduct you, walking by night, sleeping by day, to the country of which I speak, and at least I shall have the satisfaction of telling myself that I have rendered my prince the service he has chosen. I shall have made a happy man. God will know more thanks for having made a happy man than for having made a powerful man. It is quite otherwise difficult! Well! what do you answer, my lord? Here is the money. Oh! do not hesitate. In Poitou, you risk nothing, save to catch the fevers. Yet the sorcerers of the country may be able to cure you for your pistoles. In playing the other part, the one you know, you risk being assassinated on a throne or strangled in a prison. On my soul! I say it, now that I have weighed the two, on my life! I would hesitate.

— Sir, replied the young prince, before I resolve, let me descend from this carriage, walk on the earth, and consult that voice which God makes speak in free nature. Ten minutes, and I shall answer.

— Do so, my lord, said Aramis, bowing with respect, so solemn and august had been the voice that had just expressed itself thus.

Chapter CCXVI — Crown and Tiara

Aramis had descended before the young man and held the door open for him. He saw him set foot on the moss with a shudder of the whole body, and make around the vehicle a few embarrassed steps, almost staggering. One would have said the poor prisoner was unaccustomed to walking on the earth of men.

It was the 15th of August, toward eleven o'clock at night: heavy clouds, presaging the storm, had invaded the sky, and under their folds hid all light and all perspective. Barely did the ends of the alleys detach themselves from the thickets by an opaque gray half-light which, after a certain time of examination, became sensible amid that complete obscurity. But the perfumes that rise from the grass, those more penetrating and fresher ones exhaled by the essence of the oaks, the tepid and unctuous atmosphere that enveloped him wholly for the first time in so many years, that ineffable enjoyment of liberty in open country, spoke a language so seductive to the prince that, whatever that reserve, we would almost say that dissimulation of which we have tried to give an idea, he let himself be surprised by his emotion and uttered a sigh of joy.

Then, little by little, he raised his heavy head, and breathed the different layers of air, as they offered themselves charged with aromas to his expanded face. Crossing his arms on his chest, as to prevent it from bursting at the invasion of that new felicity, he deliciously inhaled that unknown air which runs by night under the dome of the high forests. That sky he contemplated, those waters he heard murmur, those creatures he saw stir, was it not reality? Was not Aramis a fool to believe there was aught else to dream of in this world?

Those intoxicating pictures of country life, exempt from cares, fears and constraints, that ocean of happy days which incessantly mirrors before every young imagination, there is the true bait to which a wretched captive, worn by the stone of the dungeon, etiolated in the so rare air of the Bastille, may be taken. It was that, one recalls, which Aramis had presented him in offering both the thousand pistoles the carriage contained and that enchanted Eden which the deserts of Lower Poitou hid from the eyes of the world.

Such were the reflections of Aramis while he followed, with an anxiety impossible to describe, the silent march of the joys of Philippe, which he saw gradually sink into the depths of his meditation.

Indeed, the young prince, absorbed, no longer touched the earth but with his feet, and his soul, flown to the feet of God, besought Him to accord a ray of light to that hesitation whence must issue his death or his life.

That moment was terrible for the Bishop of Vannes. He had not yet found himself in presence of so great a misfortune. That soul of steel, accustomed to play in life among obstacles without consistency, never finding itself inferior or vanquished, was it going to fail in so vast a plan, for not having foreseen the influence that a few tree leaves watered with a few liters of air exercised on a human body?

Aramis, fixed in the same place by the anguish of his doubt, contemplated then that dolorous agony of Philippe, who sustained the struggle against the two mysterious angels. This torture lasted the ten minutes the young man had asked. During that eternity Philippe ceased not to look at the sky with a supplicating, sad and humid eye. Aramis ceased not to look at Philippe with an avid, inflamed, devouring eye.

Suddenly, the young man's head inclined. His thought descended again upon the earth. One saw his gaze harden, his brow wrinkle, his mouth arm itself with a fierce courage; then that gaze became fixed once more; but, this time, it reflected the flame of worldly splendors; this time, it resembled the gaze of Satan on the mountain, when he reviewed the kingdoms and the powers of the earth to make of them seductions for Jesus.

The eye of Aramis became as soft as it had been dark. Then, Philippe seizing his hand with a rapid and nervous movement:

— Come, said he, come where the crown of France is to be found!

— Is that your decision, my prince? replied Aramis.

— It is my decision.

— Irrevocable?

Philippe deigned not even to reply. He looked resolutely at the bishop, as if to ask him whether it were possible that a man ever went back on a course adopted.

— Those looks are darts of fire that paint characters, said Aramis, bowing over Philippe's hand. You will be great, my lord, I answer for it.

— Let us resume, if you please, the conversation where we left it. I had told you, I believe, that I wished to come to an understanding with you on two points: the dangers or the obstacles. That point is decided. The other, those are the conditions you would pose me. It is your turn to speak, M. d'Herblay.

— The conditions, my prince?

— Doubtless. You will not stop me on the road for a trifle such as this, and you will not do me the injury of supposing I believe you without interest in this affair. Thus, without evasion and without fear, open to me the bottom of your thought.

— Here I am, my lord. Once king...

— When will that be?

— It will be tomorrow evening. I mean in the night.

— Explain to me how.

— When I shall have put a question to Your Royal Highness.

— Put it.

— I had sent to Your Highness a man of mine, charged to remit to you a notebook of notes written finely, drawn up with sureness, notes which permit Your Highness to know thoroughly all the persons who compose and will compose your court.

— I have read all those notes.

— Attentively?

— I know them by heart.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”