Part 26

The riding, the bathing in the Seine, the spectacles, the dinners beneath the leaves, the balls along the great canal, the concerts—all this would have been enough to kill, not a slender and frail woman, but the most robust Swiss of the castle.

It is true that, as regards dancing, concerts, and walks, a woman is far stronger than the most vigorous child of the thirteen cantons.

But, however extended a woman's strength may be, it has a limit, and it could not long withstand such a regimen.

As for Monsieur, he did not even have the satisfaction of seeing Madame abdicate her royalty in the evening.

In the evening, Madame occupied a royal pavilion with the young queen and the queen mother.

It goes without saying that the Chevalier de Lorraine never left Monsieur, and came to pour his drop of gall upon every wound that Monsieur received.

The result was that Monsieur, who had at first felt quite merry and rejuvenated since Guiche's departure, relapsed into melancholy three days after the court's installation at Fontainebleau.

Now it happened that one day, toward two o'clock, Monsieur, who had risen late and had bestowed even more care than usual upon his toilet, it happened that Monsieur, who had heard nothing of the day's plans, formed the project of gathering his own court and carrying Madame off to sup at Moret, where he had a fine country house.

He therefore made his way toward the pavilion of the queens, and entered, much astonished at finding there none of the royal household.

He entered quite alone into the apartments.

A door on the left opened onto Madame's lodgings, one on the right onto the young queen's.

Monsieur learned from a linen maid who was at work in his wife's rooms that everyone had departed at eleven o'clock to go bathe in the Seine, that this outing had been made into a great festival, that all the calashes had been arranged at the park gates, and that the departure had taken place more than an hour before.

"Good!" said Monsieur to himself. "The idea is a happy one; it is oppressively hot; I would gladly bathe."

And he called his people... No one came.

He called into Madame's rooms; everyone had gone out.

He went down to the stables.

A groom told him that there were no longer any calashes or carriages.

Then he ordered that two horses be saddled for him, one for himself, one for his valet de chambre.

The groom replied politely that there were no horses left.

Monsieur, pale with anger, went back up to the queens' apartments.

He entered even into the oratory of Anne of Austria.

From the oratory, through a half-opened tapestry, he caught sight of his young sister-in-law kneeling before the queen mother and seeming all in tears.

He had neither been seen nor heard.

He approached softly to the opening and listened; the spectacle of that grief piqued his curiosity.

Not only was the young queen weeping, but she was also complaining.

"Yes," she was saying, "the king neglects me, the king concerns himself only with pleasures, and with pleasures in which I do not share."

"Patience, patience, my daughter," replied Anne of Austria in Spanish.

Then, still in Spanish, she added counsels that Monsieur did not understand.

The queen answered with accusations mingled with sighs and tears, among which Monsieur often distinguished the word *banos*, which Marie-Thérèse accentuated with the vexation of anger.

"The baths," said Monsieur to himself, "the baths. It seems it is the baths that vex her."

And he sought to stitch together the fragments of phrases he understood, one after another.

However, it was easy to guess that the queen was bitterly complaining, and that if Anne of Austria was not consoling her, she was at least trying to console her.

Monsieur feared being surprised listening at the door; he took the course of coughing.

The two queens turned at the noise.

Monsieur entered.

At the sight of the prince, the young queen rose precipitately and wiped her eyes.

Monsieur knew his world too well to question, and knew politeness too well to remain silent; he therefore bowed.

The queen mother smiled at him agreeably.

"What do you wish, my son?" said she.

"I?... Nothing..." stammered Monsieur; "I was looking..."

"For whom?"

"My mother, I was looking for Madame."

"Madame is at the baths."

"And the king?" said Monsieur in a tone that made the queen tremble.

"The king also, the whole court also," replied Anne of Austria.

"And you, madame?" said Monsieur.

"Oh! as for me," said the young queen, "I am the dread of all who divert themselves."

"And I too, it would seem," resumed Monsieur.

Anne of Austria made a mute sign to her daughter-in-law, who withdrew in a flood of tears.

Monsieur frowned.

"A sorry household this is," said he. "What think you of it, my mother?"

"But... no... no... everyone here seeks his pleasure."

"That is precisely what saddens those whom that pleasure inconveniences."

"How you say that, my dear Philippe!"

"My faith! my mother, I say it as I think it."

"Explain yourself; what is the matter?"

"Why, ask my sister-in-law, who but now was telling you her troubles."

"Her troubles... what?..."

"Yes, I was listening; by chance, I confess, but still I was listening... Well! I heard too much of my sister complaining of Madame's famous baths."

"Ah! folly..."

"No, no, no, when one weeps, one is not always mad... *Banos*, said the queen; does not that mean baths?"

"I repeat to you, my son," said Anne of Austria, "that your sister-in-law is possessed of a childish jealousy."

"In that case, madame," replied the prince, "I humbly accuse myself of having the same failing as she."

"You also, my son?"

"Certainly."

"You also are jealous of these baths?"

"Of course!"

"Oh!"

"How now! the king goes to bathe with my wife and does not take the queen? How now! Madame goes to bathe with the king, and I am not honored with the courtesy of being informed? And you would have my sister-in-law be content? and you would have me be content?"

"But, my dear Philippe," said Anne of Austria, "you are raving; you had M. de Buckingham dismissed, you had M. de Guiche exiled; do you now wish to send the king away from Fontainebleau?"

"Oh! such is not my pretension, madame," said Monsieur bitterly. "But I can well withdraw, I, and I shall withdraw."

"Jealous of the king! jealous of your brother!"

"Jealous of my brother! of the king! yes, madame, jealous! jealous! jealous!"

"My faith, monsieur," cried Anne of Austria, feigning indignation and anger, "I begin to believe you mad and a sworn enemy of my repose, and I quit the place, having no defense against such fancies."

She spoke, rose from her seat, and left Monsieur prey to the fiercest rage.

Monsieur remained a moment quite stunned; then, coming to himself to recover all his strength, he went down again to the stable, found the groom, asked him again for a carriage, asked him again for a horse; and upon his double reply that there was neither horse nor carriage, Monsieur snatched a horsecloth from the hands of a stable boy and began to pursue the poor devil with great blows of the whip all around the servants' court, despite his cries and excuses; then, breathless, spent, streaming with sweat, trembling in every limb, he went back up to his rooms, broke to pieces his prettiest porcelains, then threw himself, booted and spurred, upon his bed, crying:

"Help!"

Chapter CX — The Bath

At Vulaines, beneath impenetrable vaults of flowering osiers, of willows which, inclining their green heads, dipped the ends of their foliage in the blue water, a long, flat boat, with ladders hung with long blue curtains, served as refuge for the bathing Dianas, whom, at their issuing from the water, some twenty plumed Actaeons lay in wait for, galloping, ardent and full of covetousness, along the mossy and fragrant bank of the river.

But Diana, even the modest Diana, clad in the long chlamys, was less chaste, less impenetrable than Madame, young and beautiful as the goddess. For, despite the huntress's fine tunic, one saw her round white knee; despite the sounding quiver, one glimpsed her brown shoulders; whereas a long veil, folded a hundred times, enveloped Madame when she gave herself back into the arms of her women, and rendered her unapproachable to the most indiscreet as to the most piercing gazes.

When she remounted the stair, the poets present—and all were poets when it was a question of Madame—the twenty galloping poets stopped, and, with one voice, cried out that these were not drops of water, but truly pearls which fell from Madame's body and went to lose themselves in the happy river.

The king, center of these poetries and homages, imposed silence upon the amplifiers whose verve would not have run dry, and turned bridle, for fear of offending, even beneath the silken curtains, the modesty of the woman and the dignity of the princess.

There was therefore made a great emptiness in the scene and a great silence in the boat. From the movements, the play of folds, the undulations of the curtains, one divined the comings and goings of the women busied with their service.

The king listened smiling to the talk of his gentlemen, but one could guess in looking at him that his attention was not upon their discourse.

Indeed, scarcely had the noise of rings sliding upon the rods announced that Madame was dressed and that the goddess was about to appear, than the king, turning round on the instant and running to the water's edge, gave the signal to all those whom their service or their pleasure called to Madame's side.

Pages were seen to precipitate themselves, bringing with them the led horses; the calashes were seen, which had remained sheltered beneath the branches, to advance near the tent, besides that cloud of valets, bearers, and women who, during the masters' bath, had exchanged apart their observations, their criticisms, their discussions of interest—fleeting journal of that epoch, of which no one remembers, not even the waves, mirror of personages, echo of speeches; the waves, witnesses which God himself has hurled into immensity, as he has hurled the actors into eternity.

All that crowd encumbering the banks of the river, not counting a multitude of peasants drawn by the desire to see the king and the princess, all that crowd was, for eight or ten minutes, the most disordered, the most agreeable medley one could imagine.

The king had dismounted: all the courtiers had imitated him; he had offered his hand to Madame, whose rich riding habit displayed the elegant waist that stood out beneath that garment of fine wool, brocaded with silver.

Her hair, still damp and darker than jet, moistened her neck, so white and so pure. Joy and health shone in her beautiful eyes; she was rested, nervous, she breathed the air in long draughts beneath the embroidered parasol that a page carried for her.

Nothing tenderer, more gracious, more poetic than those two figures drowned beneath the rose-colored shadow of the parasol: the king, whose white teeth flashed in a continual smile; Madame, whose black eyes shone like two carbuncles in the micaceous reflection of the changeable silk.

When Madame had reached her horse, a magnificent Andalusian hackney, of a spotless white, a little heavy perhaps, but with an intelligent and fine head, in which one found again the mixture of Arab blood so happily united to Spanish blood, and with the long tail sweeping the earth, as the princess made herself lazy to reach the stirrup, the king took her in his arms, in such a way that Madame's arm found itself like a circle of fire about the king's neck.

Louis, withdrawing, involuntarily brushed with his lips that arm which did not move away. Then, the princess having thanked her royal squire, everyone was in the saddle at the same instant.

The king and Madame ranged themselves to let pass the calashes, the huntsmen, the couriers.

A good number of cavaliers, freed from the yoke of etiquette, gave rein to their horses and darted after the coaches which bore away the maids of honor, fresh as so many Orcades around Diana, and the whirlwinds, laughing, chatting, rustling, flew off.

The king and Madame kept their horses at a walk.

Behind His Majesty and the princess his sister-in-law, but at a respectful distance, the courtiers, grave or desirous of keeping within reach and under the king's eyes, followed, reining in their impatient horses, regulating their pace upon that of the king's courser and Madame's, and gave themselves up to all that the commerce of witty folk presents of sweetness and agreeableness, who courteously retail a thousand atrocious slanders upon the account of their neighbor.

In the stifled little laughs, in the reticences of that sardonic hilarity, Monsieur, that poor absent one, was not spared.

But one pitied, one groaned over the fate of de Guiche, and, it must be owned, the compassion was not there out of place.

Meanwhile the king and Madame having put their horses to their wind and repeated a hundred times all that the courtiers put into their mouths who made them talk, took the little hunting gallop, and then one heard resound beneath the weight of that cavalry the deep alleys of the forest.

To the low-voiced interviews, to the speeches shaped as confidences, to the words exchanged with a sort of mystery, succeeded noisy outbursts; from the huntsmen to the princes, gaiety spread abroad. Everyone began to laugh and cry out. Magpies and jays were seen to flee with their guttural cries beneath the waving vaults of the oaks, the cuckoo interrupted its monotonous plaint in the depths of the woods, finches and titmice flew off in clouds, while the does, roebucks, and hinds bounded, affrighted, amid the thickets.

That crowd, shedding, as in a train, joy, noise, and light upon its passage, was preceded, so to speak, to the castle by its own reverberation.

The king and Madame entered the town, both saluted by the universal acclamations of the crowd.

Madame hastened to go find Monsieur. She understood instinctively that he had remained too long outside that joy.

The king went to rejoin the queens; he knew he owed them, to one especially, amends for his long absence.

But Madame was not received at Monsieur's. She was answered that Monsieur was sleeping.

The king, instead of meeting Marie-Thérèse smiling as always, found in the gallery Anne of Austria, who, watching for his arrival, advanced to meet him, took him by the hand, and led him to her rooms.

What they said to each other, or rather what the queen mother said to Louis XIV, no one has ever known; but one could certainly have guessed it from the thwarted countenance of the king upon leaving that interview.

But we, whose trade is to interpret, as also to make the reader privy to our interpretations, should fail in our duty were we to leave him ignorant of the result of that meeting.

He will find it sufficiently developed, we hope at least, in the following chapter.

Chapter CXI — The Butterfly Hunt

The king, upon returning to his rooms to give some orders and to settle his ideas, found upon his toilet a little note whose writing seemed disguised.

He opened it and read:

"Come quickly, I have a thousand things to tell you."

It had not been long enough since the king and Madame had parted for those thousand things to be the sequel of the three thousand they had said to each other upon the road separating Vulaines from Fontainebleau.

Accordingly the confusion of the note and its precipitateness gave the king much to think upon.

He occupied himself somewhat with his toilet and set out to pay a visit to Madame.

The princess, who had not wished to seem to await him, had gone down into the gardens with all her ladies.

When the king had learned that Madame had left her apartments to go walking, he gathered all the gentlemen he could find at hand and invited them to follow him to the gardens.

Madame was hunting butterflies upon a great lawn bordered with heliotropes and broom.

She watched the most intrepid and youngest of her ladies run, and, her back turned to the arbor, awaited very impatiently the king's arrival, to whom she had assigned that rendezvous.

The crunching of several steps upon the sand made her turn. Louis XIV was bareheaded; he had struck down with his cane a small peacock butterfly, which M. de Saint-Aignan had picked up quite stunned upon the grass.

"You see, madame," said the king, "that I too hunt for you."

And he drew near.

"Gentlemen," said he, turning toward the gentlemen who formed his suite, "bring back as many to these ladies."

It was to dismiss everyone.

There was then seen a rather curious spectacle; the old courtiers, the obese courtiers, ran after the butterflies, losing their hats and charging, cane raised, the myrtles and broom as they would have done the Spaniards.

The king offered his hand to Madame, and with her chose for center of observation a bench covered with a roof of moss, a sort of chalet sketched by the timid genius of some gardener who had inaugurated the picturesque and the fanciful in the severe style of the gardening of that time.

This awning, garnished with nasturtiums and climbing roses, covered a backless bench, in such a way that the spectators, isolated in the midst of the lawn, saw and were seen from all sides, but could not be heard without themselves seeing those who might approach to listen.

From this seat, upon which the two interested parties placed themselves, the king made a sign of encouragement to the hunters; then, as if he had been discoursing with Madame upon the butterfly pierced with a golden pin and fixed to his hat:

"Are we not well here to talk?" said he.

"Yes, Sire, for I needed to be heard by you alone and seen by everyone."

"And I too," said Louis.

"My note surprised you?"

"Terrified! But what I have to tell you is more important."

"Oh! not so. Do you know that Monsieur shut his door against me?"

"Against you! and why?"

"Do you not guess?"

"Ah! madame! but then we both had the same thing to say to each other?"

"What happened to you, then, you?"

"You wish me to begin?"

"Yes. I have said all."

"My turn, then. Know that upon arriving I found my mother, who drew me to her rooms."

"Oh! the queen mother!" said Madame with uneasiness. "That is serious."

"I believe it. Here is what she said to me... But first, permit me a preamble."

"Speak, Sire."

"Has Monsieur ever spoken to you of me?"

"Often."

"Has Monsieur ever spoken to you of his jealousy?"

"Oh! even more often."

"Concerning me?"

"No, but concerning..."

"Yes, I know, Buckingham, Guiche."

"Precisely."

"Well, madame, here is that Monsieur now takes it into his head to be jealous of me."

"See there!" replied the princess, smiling maliciously.

"In short, it seems to me, we have never given cause..."

"Never! I at least... But how did you learn Monsieur's jealousy?"

"My mother represented to me that Monsieur had entered her rooms like a madman, that he had exhaled a thousand complaints against your... Pardon me..."

"Say on, say on."

"Against your coquetry. It appears Monsieur also meddles in injustice."

"You are very good, Sire."

"My mother reassured him; but he pretended he was reassured too often and would no longer be so."

"Would he not have done better not to trouble himself at all?"

"That is what I said."

"Confess, Sire, that the world is very wicked. What! a brother and a sister cannot converse together, take pleasure in one another's society, without giving rise to commentaries, to suspicions? For, after all, Sire, we do no wrong, we have no wish to do wrong."

And she looked at the king with that proud and provocative eye which lights the flames of desire in the coldest and wisest.

"No, it is true," sighed Louis.

"Do you know well, Sire, that if this continued I should be forced to make a scene? Come, judge our conduct: is it or is it not regular?"

"Oh! certainly it is regular."

"Alone often, for we take pleasure in the same things, we might stray into the bad; have we done so?... To me you are a brother, nothing more."

The king frowned. She continued.

"Your hand, which often meets mine, produces in me none of those thrills, that emotion... which lovers, for example..."

"Oh! enough, enough, I beg you!" said the king in torment. "You are pitiless and you will make me die."

"What then?"

"In short... you say clearly that you feel nothing beside me."

"Oh! Sire... I do not say that... my affection..."

"Henriette... enough, I ask you again. If you believe me of marble like yourself, undeceive yourself."

"I do not understand you."

"So be it," sighed the king, lowering his eyes. "Thus our meetings... our hand-pressings... our exchanged glances... Pardon, pardon... Yes, you are right, and I know what you mean."

He hid his head in his hands.

"Take care, Sire," said Madame quickly, "here is M. de Saint-Aignan looking at you."

"It is true!" cried Louis in fury; "never a shadow of liberty, never sincerity in relations... One thinks to find a friend, one has but a spy... a friend, one has but a... sister."

Madame was silent; she lowered her eyes.

"Monsieur is jealous!" she murmured with an accent nothing could render for sweetness and charm.

"Oh!" suddenly cried the king, "you are right."

"You see well," said she, looking at him in a way to burn his heart, "you are free; you are not suspected; one does not poison all the joy of your household."

"Alas! you know not yet: it is that the queen is jealous."

"Marie-Thérèse?"

"To the point of madness. This jealousy of Monsieur was born of hers; she wept, she complained to my mother, she reproached us those bathing parties so sweet to me."

"To me," said Madame's glance.

"Suddenly, Monsieur, listening, caught the word *banos*, which the queen pronounced with bitterness; that enlightened him. He entered in dismay, mixed into the talk, and quarreled my mother so sharply that she had to flee his presence; so that you have to deal with a jealous husband, and that I am about to see perpetually, inexorably, rise before me the specter of jealousy, with swollen eyes, wasted cheeks, sinister mouth."

"Poor king!" murmured Madame, letting her hand brush that of Louis.

He retained that hand, and, to press it without giving umbrage to the spectators who were seeking not so well the butterflies that they were not also seeking news and to comprehend some mystery in the king's and Madame's interview, Louis brought near his sister-in-law the expiring butterfly: both bent as if to count the thousand eyes of its wings or the grains of their golden dust.

Only, neither spoke; their hair touched, their breaths mingled, their hands burned one within the other.

Five minutes passed thus.

Chapter CXII — What One Catches in Hunting Butterflies

The two young people remained a moment with heads inclined beneath that double thought of nascent love which makes so many flowers spring up in the imaginations of twenty years.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”