Part 17
Fouquet saw the pallor and guessed nothing of the ill; Colbert saw the anger and rejoiced at the approach of the storm.
Fouquet’s voice drew the young prince from his savage reverie.
“What ails you, Sire?” the surintendant asked with gracious courtesy.
Louis made an effort upon himself, a violent effort.
“Nothing,” he said.
“I fear Your Majesty is suffering.”
“I am suffering, indeed; I have already told you so, monsieur, but it is nothing.”
And the king, without waiting for the end of the fireworks, turned toward the château.
Fouquet accompanied the king. Everyone followed behind them.
The last rockets burned sadly for themselves alone.
The surintendant tried to question Louis XIV further, but obtained no reply. He supposed there had been a quarrel between Louis and La Vallière in the park; that a falling-out had resulted from it; that the king, little given to sulking by nature, but wholly devoted to his rage of love, was taking a hatred to the world since his mistress sulked at him. This idea sufficed to reassure him; he even wore a friendly and consoling smile for the young king, when the latter wished him good night.
It was not all over for the king. He had to undergo the service. This evening service was to be performed with full ceremony. The morrow was the day of departure. The guests must needs thank their host and pay him a courtesy for his twelve millions.
The only thing Louis found amiable toward Fouquet in dismissing him were these words:
“Monsieur Fouquet, you shall hear from me; pray have M. d’Artagnan brought here.”
And the blood of Louis XIII, who had dissembled so much, then boiled in his veins, and he was quite ready to have Fouquet’s throat cut, as his predecessor had had the maréchal d’Ancre assassinated. He therefore disguised the dreadful resolution under one of those royal smiles which are the lightning-flashes of coups d’État.
Fouquet took the king’s hand and kissed it. Louis shuddered through all his body, but let his hand be touched by the lips of M. Fouquet.
Five minutes later, d’Artagnan, to whom the royal order had been transmitted, entered the chamber of Louis XIV.
Aramis and Philippe were in theirs, ever attentive, ever listening.
The king did not leave his captain of musketeers the time to reach his armchair.
He ran to him.
“See to it,” he cried, “that no one enters here.”
“Very well, Sire,” replied the soldier, whose eye had long since analyzed the ravages of that countenance.
And he gave the order at the door, then, returning to the king:
“There is something new with Your Majesty?” said he.
“How many men have you here?” asked the king, without otherwise answering the question put to him.
“For what purpose, Sire?”
“How many men have you?” repeated the king, stamping his foot.
“I have the musketeers.”
“After?”
“I have twenty guards and thirteen Swiss.”
“How many men are needed to...”
“To...?” said the musketeer with his calm, large eyes.
“To arrest M. Fouquet.”
D’Artagnan stepped back.
“Arrest M. Fouquet!” said he with emphasis.
“Are you going to say likewise that it is impossible?” cried the king with a cold and hateful rage.
“I never say a thing is impossible,” replied d’Artagnan, wounded to the quick.
“Well! do it!”
D’Artagnan turned on his heel without delay and made for the door.
The space to cross was short: he covered it in six paces. There, halting:
“Pardon, Sire,” said he.
“What?” said the king.
“To make this arrest, I should like a written order.”
“To what purpose? And since when does the word of the king not suffice you?”
“Because a king’s word, born of a feeling of anger, may change when the feeling changes.”
“No phrases, monsieur! You have another thought.”
“Oh, I always have thoughts, I do, and thoughts that others unhappily do not have,” replied d’Artagnan impertinently.
The king, in the heat of his outburst, bent before this man, as the horse bends its hocks under the robust hand of the tamer.
“Your thought?” he cried.
“Here it is, Sire,” answered d’Artagnan. “You are having a man arrested while you are still in his house: that is out of anger. When you are no longer angry, you will repent. Then I wish to be able to show you your signature. If that repairs nothing, at least it will show us that the king is wrong to put himself in a passion.”
“Wrong to put himself in a passion!” howled the king in frenzy. “Is not the king my father, is not my grandfather wont to do so, body of Christ?”
“The king your father, the king your grandfather never put themselves in a passion save in their own houses.”
“The king is master everywhere as in his own house.”
“That is a flatterer’s phrase, and must come from M. Colbert, but it is not a truth. The king is in his own house in any dwelling, when he has driven out the proprietor.”
Louis bit his lips.
“What!” said d’Artagnan, “here is a man who ruins himself to please you, and you would have him arrested? Mordioux! Sire, if I were called Fouquet and such a thing were done to me, I would swallow ten fireworks at a gulp, and set fire to them to blow myself and all the rest up. All the same, you wish it, I am going.”
“Go!” said the king. “But have you enough men?”
“Do you think, Sire, I am going to take an anspessade with me? Arrest M. Fouquet—why, it is so easy that a child would do it. M. Fouquet to arrest is a glass of absinthe to drink. One makes a wry face, and that is all.”
“If he defends himself?...”
“Him? Come now! Defend himself, when a rigor such as that makes him king and martyr! Why, if he has a million left, which I doubt, I wager he would give it to have that very end. Come, Sire, I am going.”
“Wait!” said the king.
“Ah! what is it?”
“Do not make his arrest public.”
“That is more difficult.”
“Why?”
“Because nothing is simpler than to go, amid the thousand enthusiastic persons surrounding him, and say to M. Fouquet: ‘In the king’s name, monsieur, I arrest you!’ But to go to him, turn him about, twist him, stick him in some corner of the chessboard, so that he does not escape; to steal him from all his guests, and keep him prisoner for you, without one of his ‘alas!’ being heard—that is a real, true, supreme difficulty, and I give it at a hundred to one against the most skillful.”
“Say rather: ‘It is impossible!’ and you will be done the sooner. Ah! my God, my God! am I surrounded only by those who hinder me from doing what I will!”
“I hinder you from doing nothing. Is it settled?”
“Keep M. Fouquet until tomorrow, when I shall have taken a resolution.”
“It shall be done, Sire.”
“And return at my levee to take my new orders.”
“I shall return.”
“Now, leave me alone.”
“You have not even need of M. Colbert?” said the musketeer, loosing his last arrow at the moment of departure.
The king started. Wholly given up to vengeance, he had forgotten the corpus delicti.
“No, no one,” said he; “no one here! Leave me!”
D’Artagnan departed. The king shut his door himself, and began a furious pacing in his chamber, like the wounded bull that drags after him his banderilles and the barbs of the hooks. At length, he fell to easing himself with cries.
“Ah! the wretch! not only does he rob me of my finances, but, with that gold, he corrupts secretaries, friends, generals, artists; he takes from me even my mistress! Ah! that is why that perfidious creature defended him so bravely!... It was gratitude!... Who knows?... perhaps even love.”
He sank for an instant into these painful reflections.
“A satyr!” he thought, with that profound hatred which great youth bears toward mature men who still think of love; “a faun who hunts after gallantry and has never found any rebels! a womanish man, who gives flowerets of gold and diamond, and who has painters to portray his mistresses in the costume of goddesses!”
The king shuddered with despair.
“He defiles everything of mine!” he went on. “He ruins everything of mine! He will kill me! This man is too much for me! He is my mortal enemy! This man shall fall! I hate him!... I hate him!... I hate him!...”
And, as he said these words, he struck repeated blows upon the arms of the fauteuil in which he sat and from which he rose like an epileptic.
“Tomorrow! tomorrow!... Oh, fair day!” he murmured; “when the sun shall rise, having none but me for rival, that man shall fall so low, that, in seeing the ruins my anger shall have made, men will at last own that I am greater than he!”
The king, unable to master himself longer, overturned with a blow of his fist a table placed near his bed, and, in the pain he felt, almost weeping, suffocating, he went to fling himself upon his sheets, clothed as he was, to bite them and there find repose of body.
The bed groaned under that weight, and, save a few sighs escaping the panting breast of the king, nothing more was heard in the chamber of Morpheus.
Chapter CCXXIII — Lèse-majesté
That exalted fury, which had seized the king at the sight and reading of Fouquet’s letter to La Vallière, melted by degrees into a painful fatigue.
Youth, full of health and life, needing to repair at the instant itself what it loses, youth knows not those endless insomnia which realize for the unhappy the fable of the ever-renewing liver of Prometheus. Where the mature man in his strength, where the old man in his exhaustion, find a continual alimentation of grief, the young man, surprised by the sudden revelation of evil, enervates himself in cries, in direct struggles, and lets himself be thrown more quickly by the inflexible enemy he combats. Once thrown, he suffers no more.
Louis was tamed in a quarter of an hour; then he ceased to clench his fists and to burn with his glances the invincible objects of his hatred; he ceased to accuse with violent words M. Fouquet and La Vallière; he fell from fury into despair, and from despair into prostration.
After he had stiffened and twisted for some moments upon the bed, his inert arms fell back to his sides. His head languished upon the lace pillow, his exhausted limbs shuddered, agitated by slight muscular contractions, his breast let filter no more than rare sighs.
The god Morpheus, who reigned as sovereign in that chamber to which he had given his name, and toward whom Louis turned his eyes made heavy by anger and red with tears, the god Morpheus poured upon him the poppies wherewith his hands were full, so that the king gently closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Then it seemed to him, as happens in the first sleep, so sweet and so light, which lifts the body above the couch, the soul above the earth, it seemed to him that the god Morpheus, painted on the ceiling, looked at him with eyes all human; that something shone and stirred in the dome; that the swarms of sinister dreams, for an instant displaced, left bare a man’s face, the hand pressed to his mouth, and in the attitude of a contemplative meditation. And, strange thing, that man resembled the king so nearly, that Louis believed he saw his own face reflected in a mirror. Only, that face was saddened by a feeling of deep pity.
Then it seemed to him, little by little, that the dome fled, escaping his view, and that the figures and attributes painted by Le Brun grew dark in a progressive distance. A soft, equal, measured movement, like that of a vessel plunging beneath the wave, had succeeded the immobility of the bed. The king was dreaming, no doubt, and, in that dream, the golden crown which held back the curtains was withdrawing like the dome to which it remained suspended, so that the winged genius, who, with both hands, upheld that crown, seemed vainly to call the king, who was disappearing far from her.
The bed sank ever lower. Louis, his eyes open, let himself be deceived by that cruel hallucination. At length, the light of the royal chamber growing dark, something cold, somber, inexplicable invaded the air. No more paintings, no more gold, no more velvet curtains, but walls of a dull gray, whose shadow thickened more and more. And yet the bed descended still, and, after a minute which seemed a century to the king, it reached a layer of air black and frozen. There it stopped.
The king no longer saw the light of his chamber save as, from the bottom of a well, one sees the light of day.
“I am having a dreadful dream!” he thought. “It is time to wake. Come, let us wake!”
Everyone has experienced what we here describe. There is no one who, in the midst of a stifling nightmare, has not said to himself, by aid of that lamp which watches at the bottom of the brain when all human light is extinguished, there is no one who has not said: “It is nothing, I dream!”
Such was what Louis XIV had just said to himself; but at these words: “Let us wake!” he perceived that not only was he awake, but moreover that his eyes were open. Then he cast them about him.
On his right and on his left stood two armed men, each wrapped in a wide mantle and with face covered by a mask.
One of these men held in his hand a small lamp whose red gleam lit the saddest spectacle a king could behold.
Louis told himself that his dream continued, and that, to make it cease, it sufficed to move his arms or make his voice heard. He sprang from the bed, and found himself upon a damp floor. Then, addressing him of the two men who held the lamp:
“What is this, monsieur,” said he, “and whence comes this jest?”
“It is no jest,” answered in a hollow voice that one of the two masked men who held the lantern.
“Are you of M. Fouquet?” asked the king, somewhat abashed.
“Little matters to whom we belong!” said the phantom. “We are your masters, that is all.”
The king, more impatient than intimidated, turned toward the second mask.
“If this be a comedy,” said he, “you will tell M. Fouquet that I find it unseemly, and I order that it cease.”
This second mask, to whom the king addressed himself, was a man of very tall stature and vast girth. He held himself straight and motionless as a block of marble.
“Well!” added the king, stamping his foot, “you do not answer me?”
“We do not answer you, my little sir,” said the giant in a stentorian voice, “because there is naught to answer you, save that you are the first ‘bore,’ and that M. Coquelin de Volière forgot you in the number of his.”
“But, in short, what would you with me?” cried Louis, crossing his arms with anger.
“You shall know later,” answered the lamp-bearer.
“Meanwhile, where am I?”
“Look!”
Louis looked indeed; but, by the lamplight which the masked man lifted, he perceived only damp walls, whereon here and there shone the silvery trail of slugs.
“Ho! ho! a dungeon?” said the king.
“No, a subterranean.”
“Leading to?...”
“Be pleased to follow us.”
“I shall not budge from here,” cried the king.
“If you play the mutinous, my young friend,” replied the stouter of the two men, “I will lift you, I will roll you in a mantle, and, if you suffocate therein, faith! so much the worse for you.”
And, in saying these words, he who spoke drew, from beneath that mantle wherewith he threatened the king, a hand which Milo of Crotona would have been glad to possess on the day that unhappy idea came to him of splitting his last oak.
The king conceived a horror of violence, for he understood that these two men, in whose power he found himself, had not advanced thus far to retreat, and, consequently, would push the matter to the end. He shook his head.
“It appears I have fallen into the hands of two assassins,” said he. “Let us march!”
Neither of the two men answered this speech. He who held the lamp marched first; the king followed him; the second mask came after. Thus they traversed a long and sinuous gallery, checkered with as many stairways as one finds in the mysterious and gloomy palaces of Anne Radcliffe. All these turnings, during which the king several times heard noises of water above his head, ended at length in a long corridor closed by an iron door. The lamp-man opened this door with keys he bore at his belt, where, throughout the route, the king had heard them jingle.
When this door opened and gave passage to the air, Louis recognized those embalmed scents which exhale from trees after the hot days of summer. For an instant he halted, hesitating, but the robust guardian who followed him pushed him out of the subterranean.
“Once again,” said the king, turning toward him who had just committed that audacious act of touching his sovereign, “what would you do with the King of France?”
“Try to forget that word,” answered the lamp-man, in a tone which admitted no more reply than the famed decrees of Minos.
“You should be broken on the wheel for the word you have just uttered,” added the giant, extinguishing the light which his companion passed him, “but the king is too humane.”
At this threat, Louis made so abrupt a movement, that one might have believed he wished to flee, but the giant’s hand pressed upon his shoulder and fixed him in his place.
“But, in short, where are we going?” said the king.
“Come,” answered the first of the two men with a sort of respect, and, conducting his prisoner toward a carriage which seemed to wait, “come.”
That carriage was entirely hidden in the foliage. Two horses, with their legs hobbled, were attached, by a halter, to the low branches of a great oak.
“Mount,” said the same man, opening the carriage door and letting down the step.
The king obeyed, seated himself in the depth of the vehicle, whose padded and locked door closed at once upon him and his conductor. As for the giant, he cut the hobbles and bonds of the horses, harnessed them himself, and mounted the unoccupied box. Thereupon the carriage set off at a great trot, gained the road to Paris, and, in the forest of Sénart, found a relay attached to trees like the first horses. The man on the box changed the team and continued rapidly his route toward Paris, where he entered about three in the morning. The carriage followed the faubourg Saint-Antoine, and, after crying to the sentinel: “Order of the king!” the coachman guided the horses into the circular enclosure of the Bastille, leading to the court of the Governor’s house. There the horses stopped, smoking, at the steps of the perron. A sergeant of the guard came running.
“Bid M. the governor wake,” said the coachman in a voice of thunder.
Save that voice, which might have been heard from the entrance of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, all remained calm in the carriage as in the castle. Ten minutes later M. de Baisemeaux appeared in his dressing-gown upon the threshold of his door.
“What now,” asked he, “and what do you bring me there?”
The lantern-man opened the carriage door and said two words to the coachman. Straightway the latter descended from his box, took a musket which he kept beneath his feet there, and pressed the muzzle of the weapon to the prisoner’s breast.
“And fire, if he speaks!” added aloud the man who was descending from the vehicle.
“Good!” replied the other, without further remark.
This recommendation made, the conductor of the king mounted the steps, at the top of which the governor awaited him.
“Monsieur d’Herblay!” cried the latter.
“Hush!” said Aramis. “Let us enter your rooms.”
“Oh, my God! And what then brings you at this hour?”
“An error, my dear Monsieur de Baisemeaux,” answered Aramis tranquilly. “It seems that, the other day, you were right.”
“In what regard?” asked the governor.
“Why, in regard to that order of release, dear friend.”
“Explain that to me, monsieur... no, my lord,” said the governor, suffocated alike by surprise and terror.
“It is very simple: you remember, dear Monsieur de Baisemeaux, that an order of liberation was sent you?”
“Yes, for Marchiali.”
“Well! was it not, we all thought it was for Marchiali?”
“Doubtless. Yet recall that I doubted; that I would not; that it was you who constrained me.”
“Oh, what a word you use there, dear Baisemeaux!... engaged, that is all.”
“Engaged, yes, engaged to give him up to you, and that you took him away in your carriage.”
“Well, my dear Monsieur de Baisemeaux, it was an error. It was recognized at the ministry, so that I bring you a king’s order to set free... Seldon, that poor devil of a Scot, you know?”
“Seldon? You are sure, this time?...”
“Why, read it yourself,” added Aramis, handing him the order.
“But,” said Baisemeaux, “this order, it is the one that has already passed through my hands.”
“Indeed?”
“It is the one I attested to you having seen the other evening. Egad! I know it by the blot of ink.”
“I know not if it is that one; but be that as it may, I bring it to you.”
“But then, the other?”
“Which other?”
“Marchiali?”
“I bring him back to you.”
“But that does not suffice me. To take him back, a new order is needed.”
“Pray do not say such things, dear Baisemeaux; you talk like a child! Where is the order you received, touching Marchiali?”
Baisemeaux ran to his strongbox and drew it thence. Aramis seized it, coldly tore it in four pieces, brought the pieces near the lamp and burned them.
“But what are you doing?” cried Baisemeaux at the height of fright.
“Consider the situation a little, dear governor,” said Aramis with his imperturbable tranquillity, “and you shall see how simple it is. You no longer have any order justifying Marchiali’s exit.”
“Eh! my God, no! I am a lost man!”
“But not at all, since I bring you Marchiali back. From the moment I bring him back, it is as if he had not gone out.”
“Ah!” made the abashed governor.
“Assuredly. You will shut him up this instant.”
“I should think so!”
“And you will give me that Seldon whom the new order frees. Thus your accounts are in order. Do you understand?”
“I... I...”
“You understand,” said Aramis. “Very well!”
Baisemeaux joined his hands.
“But in short, why, after taking Marchiali, do you bring him back?” cried the unhappy governor in a paroxysm of grief and tenderness.
“For a friend like you,” said Aramis, “for a servant like you, no secrets.”
And Aramis brought his mouth near Baisemeaux’s ear.
“You know,” continued Aramis in a low voice, “what resemblance there was between that unhappy man and...”
“And the king, yes.”
“Well! the first use Marchiali made of his liberty was to maintain, guess what?”
“How would you have me guess?”
“To maintain that he was the King of France.”
“Oh, the wretch!” cried Baisemeaux.
“It was to clothe himself in garments like the king’s and set himself up as usurper.”
“Goodness of Heaven!
“Stories of the world, in your language.”