Before Versailles (72 page)

ODAY THE COURT TRAVELED TO
V
AUX-LE-
V
ICOMTE TO THE FÊTE
the Viscount Nicolas was holding. The road from Paris was clogged with carriages driving along at a snail’s pace one after another, people hanging out windows to call greetings to passersby on horseback. All roads in the region were solid with carriages and riders. Some of the court had left at dawn. The public courtyard of Fontainebleau and the stables were in an uproar. Coachmen, grooms, postilions, stable hands, and link boys had several hundred courtiers to place in carriages or on horseback.

For a month or more, there had had been talk of nothing else but this party and the beauty of Vaux-le-Vicomte. Those who had visited during its construction repeated what they’d observed: it had more fountains than any palace or château in France; the viscount had diverted a river to create its water beauties; a major poet was in the midst of writing a long poem about the beauty of the place; a royal painter, gardener, and architect had combined to create what was a miracle of composition, this last from Monsieur, who had visited the château recently and who had been talking about its charms ever since.

Louis paced as he waited for his wife. Maria Teresa was late, as she was more and more often, making him wait, an unbearable habit of his mother’s that his wife seemed to have adopted. Philippe and Henriette had already set off with all their friends and household, and so he wouldn’t see Louise until he arrived at Vaux-le-Vicomte. He was irritable. For his court to have been talking about the viscount the way it had for weeks, to see the way the courtiers fawned and simpered, set his teeth on edge. Now his mother’s confessor was silenced, telling the viscount what Louis wished. What he didn’t know was if the viscount realized that he and Philippe might not be the sons of Louis XIII. The Mazarinades seemed to hint at such knowledge, and what a weapon that was against his reign. The man had uncanny luck; even the weather bowed to his will. The skies were clear and blue, and there was enough of a breeze to cool off afternoon heat.

Suddenly, he saw his mother’s ladies appear like a cloud of beautiful butterflies and walk toward carriages. Someone called to him to say that the queen mother had ordered them to go on to Vaux-le-Vicomte without her, and then D’Artagnan approached him, his face somber in a way that alarmed Louis, and for a moment the thought crossed his mind that Maria Teresa had gone into labor, that his dauphin might be born too early, but he saw that D’Artagnan held out something in his hand. It was the ring he’d given Cinq Mars.

“If your majesty might come with me?” D’Artagnan said, and they walked into the dim cool of a vestibule where Louis saw ten or more of his best musketeers gathered.

“It’s dangerous, your majesty,” D’Artagnan said, as he hurried Louis through the labyrinth of chambers that would place them in the queen mother’s part of the palace. “Cinq Mars is with her majesty and Madame de Motteville, and he demands to see you.”

They walked into his mother’s antechamber, filled with her guards, their faces taut. D’Artagnan knocked upon the door of Anne’s most private room. “His majesty is here,” he called. Just before the door opened, he said to Louis, “You don’t have to go inside, sir—”

But the door was opening a crack, and Louis stepped through it, with D’Artagnan right behind him. His mother sat upright in a chair. She was fully dressed, but Louis saw at once something was wrong. Hovering beside her, her eyes like dark holes in her face, was Madame de Motteville.

“I never meant—” she said at the sight of Louis, but Cinq Mars’s words cut over hers.

“Silence, woman! Get out, lieutenant!” From behind them, from his position against a wall, Cinq Mars pointed the dueling pistol he carried at Louis.

“I remain with his majesty,” said D’Artagnan.

Every sense suddenly on alert, Louis turned so that he could see Cinq Mars completely. The man looked as if he’d just stumbled out of the forest, his clothing dirty, his hair in knots, his face a grimace in stone. There was fresh blood on his shirt. His wound is open, thought Louis, his mind moving rapidly, and he can make only one shot with that pistol. It held only one shot.

“What is it, captain? What is this about?” Louis said.

“He’s dead.”

As the words were said, Louis realized what lay in his mother’s lap: the iron mask, its straps hanging down her skirts like flaccid arms. “How? When?”

“He jumped from the roof into the sea. He died on the rocks.”

In his mind’s eye, Louis could see the lonely old monastery, the sea practically crashing against one side, the roof, the sun, the jagged rocks, the body hurtling toward them.

“Lock the doors,” Cinq Mars ordered D’Artagnan, “now.”

“Put down the pistol,” said Louis. “You’ve traveled a long way to bring me sad news. Let me order food and wine for you, and we’ll speak of this—”

“Will that be before or after I kill your mother?”

Madame de Motteville screamed and threw herself on Anne as Louis took yet another step toward Cinq Mars.

“Back! Now!” Cinq Mars aimed the pistol at him, and Louis met the man’s eyes, read the determination in them, and stepped back. Someone will die today, he thought over all rushing through his head, how to disarm him, how to persuade him to put down the pistol, how to attack him if necessary.

“Get it over with, you coward,” Anne hissed. “Do you think I care whether I live or die? Shoot me, and have done with it!”

Cinq Mars shouted for Madame de Motteville to move, and she did, running straight at him as Louis ran forward, too, and they collided into each other and Cinq Mars, knocking him backward, into the wall, as the pistol discharged, and they all fell and Anne shrieked and covered her face with her hands.

D’Artagnan ran to the tangle on the floor, Cinq Mars, Madame de Motteville, the king of France.

Louis was the first to move. “She’s bleeding.” He jerked off his doublet, wadded the cloth into the wound at Motteville’s breast.

Cinq Mars grabbed her from Louis. “My God, my God, my darling girl, my sweet, oh, no,” he said, pulling her into his arms, beginning to weep like a man whose heart can bear no more.

Pounding and thudding and shouts sounded on the other side of the door, and D’Artagnan unlocked it, rapped out orders, and five of Louis’s best men ran into the chamber. Cinq Mars stood, made a lunge for the table where Anne sat, and seized a letter opener, its blade as sharp as any knife.

Anne pulled down the edge of her black gown, so that one milk-white breast was almost completely bared. “Do your worst,” she spat at him.

Every man in the chamber ran toward Cinq Mars, who took the blade in both hands, raised it high, and plunged it into his chest, near the reopened wound, falling against one of the younger musketeers who tried to stop him. Both of them crashed to the floor. The musketeer pushed at Cinq Mars and scrambled to stand, but Cinq Mars was unmoving.

“Clear my mother’s guard out of the antechamber, get Madame de Motteville in bed, and find my physician,” said Louis. There was blood on the snow-white shirt he wore.

Anne knelt beside her lady-in-waiting now, cradling her head in her lap, holding the wad of Louis’s doublet against the wound. “Place her in my bed,” she ordered the musketeers.

“If he’s alive, take the captain to Paris, to the Bastille,” said Louis.

D’Artagnan got down on his knees to examine Cinq Mars.

“He was my child, too, more mine than hers,” breathed Cinq Mars. “The child of my heart.” He closed his eyes.

D’Artagnan pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and laid it over Cinq Mars’s face. “Dead, sire.”

Louis went into his mother’s bedchamber. His mother had begun to clean Madame de Motteville’s wound with water.

“Will she die?” Louis asked.

“Hard to say. There’s cloth in the wound, which could mean infection. I saw it all the time on the battlefield,” Anne answered.

A physician was in the chamber now, and Anne handed him the bloody cloth.

“It’s my fault. I let him in. I’m sorry,” murmured Madame de Motteville.

Louis led his mother to the window, away from listening ears. Anne looked dazed, frail in a way he’d never seen before. “I must be leaving.” He spoke to her gently. He felt as if he’d been thrown from off a horse and hit the ground hard. He couldn’t imagine how she felt.

“I’ll follow you shortly.”

“It isn’t necessary that you go, Mother. We’ve lost a member of our family.”

She looked from him to the window, to the trees and lawn. He wondered if that was what she was really seeing. “It’s better he’s dead. He should have died years ago.”

Anger and grief surged through Louis. “Aren’t you even going to weep?”

“My tears dried up long ago. Don’t look at me like that. You don’t know what it’s like to give birth to a child you can’t acknowledge, and you never will. Men receive the pleasure of the act. Women receive the burden and the shame.”

“You possess a heart of stone.”

“Queens don’t survive without growing hearts of stone. What of you, off to a fête at which you are guest of honor given by a man who has served this kingdom for years, a man you intend to arrest. We do what we must to protect the throne,” she said. “Our hearts grow cold.”

“Who is my father?”

She closed her eyes. “I will not dignify that question with an answer.”

She walked away from him, back toward her closet with its saints’ portraits, crosses, relics under glass, its too many chairs and tables, its portrait of the cardinal. She pulled the bell cord to summon a servant as she passed it.

Louis followed. He wanted to strike her, wanted to shake her until she begged for mercy, but a servant appeared and stood in the frame of the door, big-eyed at the sight of overturned chairs and blood on the floor of this chamber.

“Clean this up,” Anne said, “and send for my dresser and my confessor.”

“I wouldn’t advise that. Your confessor is a conduit to the viscount. He’s been telling him what you confess for years.”

She gave what he thought was a bark of laughter, but in the middle of the guffaw, he realized the laughter was a wail. She sank to the floor, huddled into herself the way he had seen innumerable wives and mothers and daughters grieve their dead soldiers on a battlefield. Her dresser appeared in the middle of her ragged sobbing, and Louis waved her away to wait, and the woman leaned against a wall, her hand on her mouth at the sight of the blood and disarray everywhere, at the sight of the most regal woman at court wailing like a peasant. Louis couldn’t force himself to go and comfort her. Finally, Anne lay on her back and stared up at a ceiling that was painted in expensive gilt, each honeycomb with a crown and her initial in it.

“I’ll make your excuses to the viscount,” Louis told his mother.

“Change your shirt. There’s blood on it.”

“Mother—”

“You’ll need a tale to satisfy people’s curiosity about this, because they are already talking, I do assure you. You,” she said to the dresser, “wine for me, right now, and my hair, I think we’ll just redo my hair. And some rouge, perhaps.” And to Louis, she continued, “Treachery always comes from the place you least expect it. Remember that. At least my beloved didn’t have to hear of this. It would have broken his heart. He always hoped he could bring the child to live in one of his houses. Fool. His heart was always softer than mine. I loved him for that. Mother of God, I feel a hundred years old.”

He helped her up, grasped the iron mask and carried it to his own bedchamber, set it on an ornate table, waving away his master of the household, who’d come to find out what the delay was. As La Porte pulled a fresh shirt over his head, Louis began to shake. “Leave me,” he ordered.

He sat down in a chair to get some kind of command of himself. He could reach out and touch the mask, a contraption of iron and leather that someone had fashioned to hide a boy who hadn’t asked to be born. Bands of iron tightened around his heart, and it felt, for a moment, as if they would kill him. He sat until his breath began to even. He must live until his or her death in a marriage with a woman he did not love and did not desire. He must outwit those who raped his kingdom, and there would always be someone else once the viscount was vanquished. He must leave the question of his father unanswered, must bury the very fact of the question the way he’d buried his best dog so that it might not be used against him. He must forever and a day distrust his only brother because the power that came with the throne seduced the best of men.

He stood.

La Porte appeared as if by magic. They continued his dressing without either of them saying a word. He would ride miles today as if nothing had happened, smile, dance, be able to do no more than speak a few words to the woman he loved, whose kindness and sincerity were a solace he had not known he so craved. The boy was dead. All his years of sacrifice and, because he’d killed himself, Cinq Mars could not be buried in hallowed ground. It was too much, and yet he must continue on with this day. That was his iron mask, strapped to the face of his soul, and only death would ever undo its grip.