Before Versailles (77 page)

Chapter 40

HE
M
ARSHALL DE
G
RAMONT RODE THROUGH THE GATES OF
Vaux-le-Vicomte. The viscount wasn’t there; he was in the province of Brittany with the king, who was presiding over a meeting of the provincial assembly, but the château was bustling with people—workmen, servants, family, and visitors—for stories about the magnificence of the fête and the château’s beauty were already spreading throughout France and beyond its borders, and people came daily to see it.

The marshall tossed the reins of his horse to a stable boy and walked toward one of the sets of handsome outbuildings. They flanked the front courtyards of the château and made their own world. He walked upstairs, waving away Guy’s servant, and opened the door to the chambers in which Guy was staying. His son was bent over a table, writing. The marshall watched him for a long moment, until, finally aware that he was being watched, Guy raised his head and, startled to see who stood there, jumped to his feet, dropping his pen. “Sir! I thought you were in Brittany.”

“So I was.”

“How is the viscount?”

But his father didn’t answer, instead walked forward to the table strewn with papers and rummaged through them. Guy put out his hand, as if to stop him.

“He told me it was so,” said the marshall, “but I wanted to see for myself.” He held up a paper, Guy’s handwriting scrawled across it.

“Buggerer of goats, buggerer of boys, buggerer in all ways,” he read, his voice indifferent, as if the words weren’t slurs of the worst kind. He let go the paper and, slowly, it drifted to the floor.

“How you shame me,” he said. His hands moved through other papers on the table, until he was holding up a pamphlet, the one from which the damning words came, its type tiny and curving and difficult to read. “How came you by this?”

Guy closed his eyes a moment. “At the Palais-Royal shops, I saw an old wooden chest, curious carving on it, which amused me, and so I bought it. Inside were a hundred or more of these old Mazarinades.” He smiled so that his father wouldn’t see the pain he felt at his father’s contempt. “They made interesting reading for someone who was a boy in the civil wars. A crime to let them be forgotten, I thought.” He shrugged, insouciance covering mortification.

“Where is this chest?”

Guy pointed.

“You will burn its contents and these papers upon the table, now, in my presence, please.”

He stood in silence as Guy lit a fire, brought paper after paper to it, and burned them.

When the last pamphlet was curling in the flames, Guy said, “Have you come to arrest me or to banish me?”

“I would have done either, most gladly, but his majesty was kinder than I am.”

“His majesty?” Guy cut in. “Did not the viscount tell you of this?”

“I’ve had little conversation with the viscount, who busies himself receiving relatives and friends and those who come to worship at the shrine of his importance. His majesty requests your presence in a regiment. He reads you well. War will cool your fire or kill you, one or the other. He has the grace not to be angry with you for my sake, for the sake of your growing up together, for the sake of his brother’s affection for you, but I am angry for him. Why did you do this?”

For old time’s sake, thought Guy, because they were there, because I wanted to make him tremble, because it amused me, because I could, because I’m bored, because I’m bad.

When there was no answer, his father said, “You are to leave this place today and go to your mother in Paris and take your leave of her. The orders for your military service are with my chamberlain.” He held out his hand. “Farewell.”

Just like that, they were finished. Guy knew better than to argue or cajole. He knelt to kiss his father’s hand, looked into his father’s face and saw there was no softness there, for his father’s code of conduct was rigid and unchanging. He listened to his father’s retreating footsteps on the stairs as outside the window he heard servants calling to one another. Before the viscount had left for Brittany, he and Guy and a visitor had sat drinking and talking in the château’s glorious salon, the gardens visible everywhere their eyes fell. The visitor was an English count, who had traveled across the channel specifically to see Vaux-le-Vicomte, to meet the viscount. Talk had drifted, as talk will when the wine is good and the afternoon better, to the vagaries of life, and the Englishman had quoted to them from his book of prayer, translating the words slowly, and sometimes badly, into French. The race is not to the swift, he’d said, nor the battle to the strong, nor riches to men of understanding nor favor to men of skill, but time and chance happen to them all. Guy didn’t know why he thought of those words, but they remained in his head all the way to Paris.

N
ICOLAS STEPPED INTO
the sedan chair that would take him back to the house of a cousin where he slept during this sojourn in Brittany. The king had kept him after this morning’s council meeting to talk about the gift of money which the provincial assembly had presented the crown, and the conversation, easy, complimentary, had lifted Nicolas’s mood. He’d had a fever, then chills, since the fête, disturbing dreams and images playing in his mind. Those around him were in a kind of fever themselves, his wife and certain of his friends convinced he was to be arrested, urging him to retreat to Belle Isle and remain there. Yet there was no warning from her majesty, from her confessor, from poor, ill Madame de Motteville. To go to Belle Isle would be such an open move, such a direct hit. It would splinter to pieces his summer of soothing the king, would stir up the hornet’s nest he very much imagined his majesty’s temper when crossed might be.

“There’s people who want to talk to you, your greatness,” one of the sedan-chair bearers told him. “Shall we stop?”

A crowd was gathered before the town’s cathedral, petitioners with requests for who knew what—Brittany was after all the seat of his power, where he’d begun as a local official—and Nicolas felt both ennui at the obligations of his position and satisfaction at this evidence of his importance. The king simply needed time to accept Nicolas’s importance, that was all. “Yes,” he said.

It was a mistake he would mull over for the rest of his life.

S
ACRED FINGERS OF
the Christ, thought D’Artagnan, breaking into a sweat, have I missed him? The viscount wasn’t in the courtyard. He put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, and some fifteen musketeers were immediately at his side.

“Follow me,” he ordered, and he ran out of the courtyard, through the castle’s gate, but there, in the distance, in front of the town cathedral, was the viscount’s sedan chair, its bearers having set it to the ground, because people had crowded to present the viscount with petitions. “Surround the chair,” D’Artagnan told his men.

“A message for the viscount!” he said loudly as he pushed through the crowd.

Nicolas pulled himself up and out of the chair and took off his hat in a gesture of courtesy, smiling his charming smile. “Lieutenant d’Artagnan, what have you for me?”

D’Artagnan was curt. “I arrest you by the king’s orders.”

People stepped back. The chair bearers looked at one another. Nicolas’s hat dropped out of his hands and into the dirt. “May I see the warrant?”

D’Artagnan gave it to him. He stared down at the words for a long time, and when he raised his eyes again, his face was white, the way it had been when his fever first began.

“Let’s effect this without a fuss,” he said, and he sat back down in the sedan chair, his hands gripped tight on its arms as he stared straight ahead.

W
AITING
, L
OUIS STOOD
at a window in the castle of the Duke of Brittany. In the courtyard below were musketeers. He’d told everyone he was going hunting as an excuse for their presence, but they were assembled to chase down the viscount, if need be. Behind him, now that his council meeting was over, mingled courtiers and friends, various ministers and local officials and members of the prominent Breton families.

Have we spun the game too long? thought Louis. Was it a mistake to come to Brittany? Regiments stood ready to land on the viscount’s island. A messenger from its governor had been captured in the early hours of this morning with a message for the viscount. The note, hidden in the heel of the messenger’s boot, warned the viscount of the presence of the king’s troops. Am I too late? thought Louis. Colbert was convinced the viscount would bolt, would commence a war from his island. Had D’Artagnan failed? Had the viscount eluded him?

A musketeer came running through the castle’s gate. He saw Louis at the window and waved his hat back and forth. Louis closed his eyes, then he turned around to face the men assembled here, not a woman among them. He’d left his love, his wife, the ladies who graced his mettlesome, proud, self-seeking court, as well as his brother, at Fontainebleau, where they would be safest. Under his shirt, in a pocket sewn in his doublet, was one of Louise’s gloves. He moved his hand to it, touching it for good luck.

The chamber was gradually silencing as men realized the king was watching them. One conversation after another ended, and they waited. Everyone who was important was here, several officers of the crown, his royal cousins.