Part 14

— And understood? Pardon, I may ask that of the poor abandoned one of the Bastille. It goes without saying that in a week, I shall have nothing more to ask of a mind like yours, enjoying its freedom in its omnipotence.

— Question me, then: I wish to be the schoolboy to whom the learned master makes repeat the appointed lesson.

— Concerning your family, first, my lord.

— My mother, Anne of Austria? all her sorrows, her sad illness? oh! I know her! I know her!

— Your second brother? said Aramis, bowing.

— You have joined to those notes portraits so marvelously traced, drawn and painted, that I, by these pictures, have recognized the people whose characters, customs and histories your notes pointed out to me. My brother is a handsome brunette, pale of face; he does not love his wife Henriette, whom I, I Louis XIV, have somewhat loved, whom I still love coquettishly, though she made me weep so much the day she wished to banish Mlle de La Vallière.

— You will take care with the eyes of that one, said Aramis. She sincerely loves the present king. The eyes of a loving woman are not easily deceived.

— She is blonde, she has blue eyes whose tenderness will reveal her identity to me. She limps a little, she writes a letter every day to which I have M. de Saint-Aignan reply.

— That one, do you know him?

— As if I saw him, and I know the latest verses he made for me, as well as those I composed in answer to his.

— Very well. Your ministers, do you know them?

— Colbert, an ugly and gloomy face, but intelligent, hair covering his forehead, a large, heavy, full head: mortal enemy of M. Fouquet.

— As for that one, let us not trouble ourselves.

— No, because, necessarily, you will ask me to exile him, will you not?

Aramis, filled with admiration, contented himself with saying:

— You will be very great, my lord.

— You see, added the prince, that I know my lesson marvelously well, and, God willing, with you afterward, I shall scarcely be mistaken.

— You still have a pair of rather troublesome eyes, my lord.

— Yes, the captain of the musketeers, M. d'Artagnan, your friend.

— My friend, I must say.

— He who escorted La Vallière to Chaillot, he who delivered Monck in a chest to King Charles II, he who served my mother so well, he to whom the crown of France owes so much that it owes him all. Will you ask me also to exile that one?

— Never, Sire. D'Artagnan is a man to whom, at a given moment, I undertake to tell everything; but beware, for, if he uncovers us before that revelation, you or I will be taken or killed. He is a man of action.

— I shall see to it. Speak to me of M. Fouquet. What do you mean to do with him?

— One moment more, I beg you, my lord. Pardon, if I seem to lack respect in always questioning you.

— It is your duty to do so, and it is also your right.

— Before passing to M. Fouquet, I should have a scruple to forget another friend of mine.

— M. du Vallon, the Hercules of France. As for that one, his fortune is assured.

— No, it is not of him I wished to speak.

— Of the Count de La Fère, then?

— And of his son, our son, all four of us.

— That boy who is dying of love for La Vallière, from whom my brother unfaithfully took her! Be at ease, I shall know how to have her restored to him. Tell me one thing, M. d'Herblay: does one forget injuries when one loves? does one pardon the woman who betrayed? Is it one of the customs of the French mind? is it one of the laws of the human heart?

— A man who loves profoundly, as Raoul de Bragelonne loves, ends by forgetting his mistress's crime; but I know not if Raoul will forget.

— I shall provide for it. Is that all you wished to tell me of your friend?

— That is all.

— To M. Fouquet, now. What do you count on my doing with him?

— The superintendent, as in the past, I beg you.

— So be it! but he is today first minister.

— Not quite.

— There will have to be a first minister for an ignorant and embarrassed king such as I shall be.

— Your Majesty will need a friend?

— I have but one, it is you.

— You will have others later: never so devoted, never so zealous for your glory.

— You shall be my first minister.

— Not at once, my lord. That would give too much umbrage and surprise.

— M. de Richelieu, first minister of my grandmother Marie de Médicis, was but bishop of Luçon, as you are bishop of Vannes.

— I see that Your Royal Highness has profited well from my notes. This miraculous perspicacity fills me with joy.

— I know well that M. de Richelieu, by the queen's protection, soon became cardinal.

— It will be better, said Aramis bowing, that I be first minister only after Your Royal Highness has had me named cardinal.

— You shall be so within two months, M. d'Herblay. But that is very little. You would not offend me in asking for more, and you would afflict me in stopping there.

— So I have something further to hope for, my lord.

— Speak, speak!

— M. Fouquet will not always keep the affairs, he will age quickly. He loves pleasure, compatible today with his work, thanks to the remainder of youth he enjoys; but this youth depends on the first sorrow or the first illness he meets. We shall spare him the sorrow, because he is a gentleman and a noble heart. We shall not be able to save him the illness. Thus, it is decided. When you have paid all M. Fouquet's debts, restored the finances to order, M. Fouquet may remain king in his court of poets and painters; we shall have made him rich. Then, become first minister of Your Royal Highness, I may think of my interests and yours.

The young man looked at his interlocutor.

— M. de Richelieu, of whom we spoke, said Aramis, made the very great mistake of attaching himself to governing only France. He left two kings, King Louis XIII and himself, enthroned on the same throne, whereas he could have installed them more conveniently on two different thrones.

— On two thrones? said the young man dreamily.

— Indeed, pursued Aramis tranquilly: a cardinal first minister of France, aided by the favor and support of the Most Christian King; a cardinal to whom the king his master entrusts his treasures, his army, his council, that man would make a vexatious double use of his resources in applying them to France alone. Besides, added Aramis, plunging to the bottom of Philippe's eyes, you will not be a king like your father, delicate, slow and weary of all; you will be a king of head and sword; you will not have enough of your states: I should restrain you there. Now, never must our friendship be, I will not say altered, but even touched by a secret thought. I shall have given you the throne of France, you shall give me the throne of Saint Peter. When your loyal, firm and armed hand shall have for twin the hand of a pope such as I shall be, neither Charles V, who possessed two thirds of the world, nor Charlemagne, who possessed it entire, shall come up to your belt. I have no alliances, I have no prejudices, I do not throw you into the persecution of heretics, I shall not throw you into family wars; I shall say: 'To us two the universe; to me for the souls, to you for the bodies.' And, as I shall die first, you will have my inheritance. What say you of my plan, my lord?

— I say that you render me happy and proud, merely in having understood you, M. d'Herblay; you shall be cardinal; cardinal, you shall be my first minister. And then you will indicate what must be done that you be elected pope; I shall do it. Ask me for guarantees.

— It is useless. I shall never act save in making you gain something; I shall never mount without having hoisted you to the higher step; I shall always keep far enough from you to escape your jealousy, near enough to maintain your profit and watch over your friendship. All contracts in this world are broken, because the interest they contain tends to lean to one side only. Never between us shall it be thus; I have no need of guarantees.

— So... my brother... will disappear?...

— Simply. We shall lift him from his bed by means of a floor that yields to the pressure of the finger. Asleep beneath the crown, he shall wake in captivity. Alone, you shall command from that moment, and you shall have no dearer interest than that of keeping me near you.

— True! Here is my hand, M. d'Herblay.

— Permit me to kneel before you, Sire, most respectfully. We shall embrace the day when both of us shall have on our brows, you the crown, I the tiara.

— Embrace me this very day, and be more than great, more than clever, more than sublime genius: be good to me, be my father!

Aramis almost softened in hearing him speak. He thought he felt in his heart a movement till then unknown; but this impression soon faded.

'His father! thought he. Yes, Holy Father!'

And they took their places again in the carriage, which ran rapidly along the road to Vaux-le-Vicomte.

Chapter CCXVII — The Château of Vaux-le-Vicomte

The château of Vaux-le-Vicomte, situated a league from Melun, had been built by Fouquet in 1656. There was then but little money in France. Mazarin had taken all, and Fouquet spent the rest. Only, as certain men have fruitful faults and useful vices, Fouquet, in sowing millions in this palace, had found the means to reap three illustrious men: Le Vau, architect of the building, Le Nôtre, drawer of the gardens, and Le Brun, decorator of the apartments.

If the château of Vaux had a fault that could be reproached to it, it was its grandiose character and its gracious magnificence; it is still proverbial today to number the acres of its roofing, whose repair is in our days the ruin of shrunken fortunes as is the whole epoch.

Vaux-le-Vicomte, when one has crossed its wide grille, sustained by caryatids, unfolds its principal body of lodging in the vast court of honor, bordered by deep moats which a magnificent stone balustrade bounds. Nothing nobler than the central avant-corps, hoisted on its flight of steps like a king on his throne, having around it four pavilions forming the corners, and whose immense Ionic columns rise majestically to the full height of the building. The friezes adorned with arabesques, the pediments crowning the pilasters give everywhere richness and grace. The domes, surmounting all, give amplitude and majesty.

This house, built by a subject, resembles far more a royal house than those royal houses of which Wolsey believed himself forced to make gift to his master for fear of rendering him jealous.

But, if magnificence and taste shine in a special place of this palace, if something may be preferred to the splendid ordering of the interiors, to the luxury of gildings, to the profusion of paintings and statues, it is the park, it is the gardens of Vaux. The jets of water, marvelous in 1653, are still marvels today; the cascades drew the admiration of all kings and all princes, and as for the famous grotto, theme of so many famous verses, dwelling of that illustrious nympth of Vaux whom Pélisson made speak with La Fontaine, we shall be excused from describing all its beauties, for we would not wish to awaken against us those criticisms that Boileau was then meditating:

_These are but festoons, these are but astragals._ _........................_ _And I escape scarcely through the garden._

We shall do as Despréaux, we shall enter this park aged only eight years, and whose summits, already superb, were opening blushing at the first rays of the sun. Le Nôtre had hastened the pleasure of his Mæcenas; all the nurseries had given trees doubled by culture and active manures. Every tree of the neighborhood that offered a fair hope had been taken with its roots, and planted alive in the park. Fouquet could well buy trees to adorn his park, since he had bought three villages and their contents to enlarge it.

M. de Scudéry says of this palace that, to water it, M. Fouquet had divided a river into a thousand fountains and united a thousand fountains into torrents. This M. de Scudéry says many other things in his _Clélie_ of this palace of Valterre, which he minutely describes the delights.

We shall be wiser to send curious readers to Vaux than to send them to _Clélie_. However, there are as many leagues from Paris to Vaux as volumes in _Clélie_.

This splendid house was ready to receive _the greatest king in the world_. The friends of M. Fouquet had conveyed thither, some their actors and their sets, others their equipages of statuaries and painters, others again their finely pointed pens. It was a matter of risking many impromptus.

The cascades, little docile, though nymphs, overflowed with a water more brilliant than crystal; they poured upon the tritons and bronze nereids foamy waves irising in the fires of the sun.

An army of servants ran by squads in the courts and in the vast corridors, while Fouquet, arrived only that morning, walked calm and clear-sighted, to give the last orders, after his stewards had passed their review.

It was, as we have said, the 15th of August. The sun fell straight on the shoulders of the marble and bronze gods; it warmed the water of the conchs and ripened in the orchards those magnificent peaches that the king should regret fifty years later, when at Marly, lacking fine species in his gardens which had cost France double what Vaux had cost, the great king said to someone:

— You are too young, you, to have eaten M. Fouquet's peaches.

O memory! O trumpets of fame! O glory of this world! He who knew so well in merit; he who had gathered the inheritance of Nicolas Fouquet; he who had taken from him Le Nôtre and Le Brun; he who had sent him for all his life to a state prison, he recalled only the peaches of that vanquished, stifled, forgotten enemy! Fouquet had vainly thrown thirty millions into his basins, into the crucibles of his statuaries, into the writings of his poets, into the portfolios of his painters; he had vainly believed to make men think of him. A peach burst forth vermilion and fleshy between the lozenges of a trellis, under the greenish tongues of its sharp leaves, this little of vegetable matter that a dormouse crunched without thinking of it, sufficed the great king to resurrect in his memory the lamentable shadow of the last superintendent of France!

Surely Aramis had distributed the great masses, had taken care to have the gates guarded and the lodgings prepared, Fouquet occupied himself no more but with the whole. Here, Gourville showed him the dispositions of the fireworks; there, Molière led him to the theater; and finally, after having visited the chapel, the salons, the galleries, Fouquet came down exhausted, when he saw Aramis on the staircase. The prelate made him a sign.

The superintendent came to join his friend, who stopped him before a large picture barely finished. Scrimmaging on this canvas, the painter Le Brun, covered with sweat, stained with colors, pale with fatigue and inspiration, threw the last strokes of his rapid brush. It was that portrait of the king they awaited, with the ceremonial habit, that Percerin had deigned to show in advance to the bishop of Vannes.

Fouquet placed himself before this picture, which lived, so to speak, in its fresh flesh and in its moist warmth. He looked at the figure, calculated the work, admired, and, finding no reward worthy of this work of Hercules, he passed his arms around the painter's neck and kissed him. M. the superintendent had just spoiled a habit of a thousand pistoles, but he had rested Le Brun.

It was a fine moment for the artist, it was a painful moment for M. Percerin, who, he too, walked behind Fouquet, and admired in Le Brun's painting the habit he had made for His Majesty, object of art, said he, which had its equal only in the wardrobe of M. the superintendent.

His grief and his cries were interrupted by the signal that was given from the top of the house. Beyond Melun, in the already bare plain, the sentinels of Vaux had glimpsed the cortege of the king and the queens: His Majesty was entering Melun with his long file of carriages and horsemen.

— In an hour, said Aramis to Fouquet.

— In an hour! replied the latter, sighing.

— And that people who ask themselves what use royal feasts serve! continued the bishop of Vannes, laughing his false laugh.

— Alas! I, who am not people, ask myself that too.

— I shall answer you in twenty-four hours, my lord. Put on your good face, for it is a day of joy.

— Well! believe me if you will, d'Herblay, said the superintendent with expansiveness, pointing with his finger at Louis's cortege on the horizon, he loves me little, I love him not much, but I know not how it comes about that, since he approaches my house...

— Well! what?

— Well! since he draws near, he is more sacred to me, he is the king to me, he is almost dear to me.

— Dear? yes, said Aramis, playing on the word, as, later, the abbé Terray with Louis XV.

— Do not laugh, d'Herblay, I feel that, if he wished it well, I should love this young man.

— It is not to me that must be said that, resumed Aramis, it is to M. Colbert.

— To M. Colbert! cried Fouquet. Why?

— Because he will have you given a pension on the king's private purse, when he is superintendent.

This shaft launched, Aramis bowed.

— Where are you going then? resumed Fouquet, grown somber.

— To my rooms, to change clothes, my lord.

— Where have you lodged, d'Herblay?

— In the blue chamber of the second floor.

— The one that looks out above the king's chamber?

— Precisely.

— What a constraint you have taken there! To condemn yourself not to stir!

— All night, my lord, I sleep or read in my bed.

— And your people?

— Oh! I have but one person with me.

— So few!

— My reader suffices me. Adieu, my lord, do not fatigue yourself too much. Keep yourself fresh for the king's arrival.

— Shall you be seen? shall one see your friend du Vallon?

— I have lodged him near me. He is dressing.

And Fouquet, saluting with head and smile, passed like a commander in chief who visits outposts, when the enemy has been signaled to him.

Chapter CCXVIII — The Wine of Melun

The king had indeed entered Melun with the intention of only crossing the town. The young monarch was thirsty for pleasures. During the whole journey, he had glimpsed La Vallière but twice, and, divining that he could speak to her only at night, in the gardens, after the ceremony, he was in haste to take his lodgings at Vaux. But he counted without his captain of musketeers and also without M. Colbert.

Like Calypso, who could not console herself for the departure of Ulysses, our Gascon could not console himself for not having divined why Aramis had M. Percerin asked for the exhibition of the king's new habits.

'It is nevertheless certain,' said this mind flexible in its logic, 'that the bishop of Vannes, my friend, does that for something.'

And to rack his brains most uselessly.

D'Artagnan, so well supple to all the intrigues of court; D'Artagnan, who knew Fouquet's situation better than Fouquet himself, had conceived the strangest suspicions at the statement of this feast which would have ruined a rich man, and which became an impossible, insensate work for a ruined man. And then, the presence of Aramis, returned from Belle-Île and named grand master of ceremonies by M. Fouquet, his persevering immixture in all the superintendent's affairs, the visits of M. de Vannes to Baisemeaux, all that murk had deeply tormented D'Artagnan for some weeks.

'With men of Aramis's stamp,' said he, 'one is strongest only sword in hand. So long as Aramis played the man of war, there was hope to overcome him; since he doubled his cuirass with a stole, we are lost. But what does Aramis want?'

And D'Artagnan dreamed.

'What matters it to me! after all, if he means only to overthrow M. Colbert?... What else can he want?'

D'Artagnan scratched his forehead, that fertile soil whence the plow share of his nails had so often turned up fair and good ideas.

He had the idea of approaching M. Colbert, but his friendship, his oath of old, bound him too much to Aramis. He drew back. Besides, he hated that financier.

He wished to open himself to the king. But the king would understand nothing of his suspicions, which had not even the reality of a shadow.

He resolved to address himself directly to Aramis, the first time he saw him.

'I shall take him between two candles, directly, brusquely,' said the musketeer to himself. 'I shall put my hand on his heart, and he will tell me... What will he tell me? yes, he will tell me something, for, blood and thunder! there is something underneath!'

More tranquil, D'Artagnan made his travel preparations, and gave his care that the king's military household, still very inconsiderable, was well commanded and well ordered in its moderate proportions. It resulted, from these gropings of the captain, that the king put himself at the head of the musketeers, of his Swiss and a picket of French guards, when he arrived before Melun. One would have said a small army. M. Colbert looked on these men of sword with much joy. He wanted yet a third more.

— Why? said the king.

— To do more honor to M. Fouquet, replied Colbert.

'To ruin him the faster,' thought D'Artagnan.

The army appeared before Melun, whose notables brought the king the keys, and invited him to enter the Hôtel de Ville to take the wine of honor.

The king, who expected to pass beyond and gain Vaux at once, grew red with vexation.

— What is the fool who earned me this delay? he grumbled between his teeth, while the master alderman made his speech.

— It is not I, replied D'Artagnan; but I believe well it is M. Colbert.

Colbert heard his name.

— What pleases M. d'Artagnan? asked he.

— It pleases me to know if you are he who had the king enter into the wine of Brie?

— Yes, monsieur.

— Then it is to you the king gave a name.

— Which, monsieur?

— I know not too well... Wait... imbecile... no, no... fool, fool, stupid, that is what His Majesty said of him who earned him the wine of Melun.

D'Artagnan, after this broadside, calmly caressed his horse. M. Colbert's big head swelled like a bushel.

D'Artagnan, seeing him so ugly with anger, did not stop on the way. The orator went ever on; the king reddened visibly.

— Blood and thunder! said the musketeer phlegmatically, the king will have an apoplexy. Where the devil did you get that idea, M. Colbert? You have no luck.

— Monsieur, said the financier, drawing himself up, it was inspired in me by my zeal for the king's service.

— Bah!

— Monsieur, Melun is a town, a good town that pays well, and which it is useless to displease.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”