Angelique - Part 5. The Court of Miracles Chapter 10 - Read online

SEPTEMBER CAME, cold and rainy.
“Here comes Homicide,”1 Black-Bread growled, taking refuge by the fire, with dripping rags. The damp wood hissed in the hearth. For once, the burghers and wealthy traders of Paris did not wait for All Saints to unpack their winter clothes and get a blood-letting, according to the traditions which recommended this surrender to the surgeon’s lancet four times a year, at the change of seasons.
But the noblemen and the beggars had other topics to worry them than talk of die rain and the cold. All the high personages at Court and in finance were stunned by the arrest of the exceedingly rich Controller- General of Finance, Monsieur Fouquet. All the low personages of the streets were wondering about the turn which the struggle between Calembredaine and Rodogonc the Egyptian would take.
The arrest of Monsieur Fouquet had struck like a bolt from the blue. Only a few weeks earlier, the King and the Queen Mother, received at Vaux-le-Vicomte by the sumptuous Controller-General, had once again admired the magnificent chateau designed by the architect Le Vau, con-templated the murals by the painter Le Brun, savoured Vatel’s cooking, strolled through Le Notre’s splendid gardens, which were cooled by waters piped by the engineer Francini and channelled into ponds, grottoes, jets and fountains. And finally the whole Court had been able to applaud, in the open-air theatre, a most witty comedy, Les Facheux, by a young playwright called Moliere.
Then, when the last torches had been extinguished, everybody had gone to Nantes for the assembly of the Estates of Brittany. It was here that on a certain morning a musketeer by the name of d’Artagnan presented him¬self before Fouquet, as the latter was stepping into his carriage.
“That is not what you must ride in, sir,” the officer said, “but enter this sedan-chair with the bars at the windows which you see a few steps away.”
“What? What does this mean?”
“That I am arresting you in the name of the King.”
“The King is my master,” murmured the Controller-General, who had gone very pale, “but for his glory I could have wished him to act more overtly.” ,
The affair once again bore the seal of Mazarin’s royal pupil. It was not
' Slang for ‘winter’.
without some resemblance to the arrest which had occurred a year ago of a great Toulousian vassal, the Comte de Peyrac, who had been burned as a sorcerer in the Place de Greve.
But amid the panic and alarm into which the Controller-General’s fall from favour had plunged the Court, nobody thought of drawing a parallel in connection with the tactics adopted once again on this occasion.
The great gave little time to thought. However, they knew that Fouquet’s accounts would show not only the traces of his peculations, but also the names of all those whose support he had paid for. There was even talk of certain highly compromising documents by which great noblemen and even Princes of the blood had sold themselves to the crafty financier at the time of the Fronde.
No, no one as yet recognised in this second arrest—more spectacular and more strikingly sudden than the first—the same dictatorial hand.
Louis XIV alone, as he broke the seals of a dispatch advising him of uprisings in Languedoc, which had been fomented by a Gascon gentle¬man of the name of d’Andijos, sighed: “It was high time!”
The squirrel, struck by lightning at the height of his ascent, hurtled down from branch to branch. It was high time! Brittany would not rise up in arms for Fouquet, as Languedoc had rebelled for the other, that strange man who had had to be burned alive in the Place de Greve.
The nobility, on whom Fouquet had lavished his prodigality, did not defend him, for fear of following him into adversity. And the Controller- General’s immense wealth would pour into the coffers of the State, which was only right. The artists—Le Vau, Le Brim, Frandni, Le Notre, and even the gay Moliere and down to Vatel—all the artists whom Fouquet had picked and kept with their teams of designers, painters, workmen, gardeners, actors, kitchen-boys, would henceforth work for a single master. They would be sent to Versailles, that ‘house of cards’ lost among forests and swamps, where Louis XIV had taken the gentle La Valliereinto his arms for the first time. In honour of this burning, secret love, the most dazzling monument of all would be erected there to the glory of the Sun King.
As for Fouquet, prolonged investigations would be required. The squirrel would be locked up in a fortress. He would be forgotten. . . .
Angelique had no leisure to meditate over these fresh events. Fate decreed that the fall of the man to whom Joffrey de Peyrac had secretly been sacrificed was to follow close upon his victory. But for Angelique it came too late. She did not try to remember, to understand. . . . The great ones of the world passed, plotted, betrayed, returned to favour, dis¬appeared. An authoritative and impassive young King levelled the heads around him with a relentless scythe. The little poison-casket remained hidden in a turret of the Chateau du Plessis-Belliere.
Angelique was now but a nameless woman, who clasped her children to her heart and watched winter approach with apprehension.
The Court was like an ant-heap demolished by a sudden vicious kick.
The underworld seethed in the expectation of a battle that promised to be terrible.
The Queen and the flower-sellers of the Pont-Neuf were waiting for a Dauphin.
The gipsies were coming into Paris. . . .
The battle of the Fair of Saint-Germain, which steeped the famous Parisian fair-ground in blood on its opening day, was a cause of bewilder¬ment to all those who later tried to discover its origins.
Lackeys could be seen belabouring students, noblemen running their swords through the bodies of mountebanks, women were raped on the very pavement, coaches set afire. And nobody understood whence the first spark had come.
But one man was not unaware. He was a fellow called Desgrez, a man with book-learning and a variegated past. Desgrez had just been given the post of police-captain at the Chatdet. Greatly feared by all, he was beginning to be talked about as one of the cleverest policemen in the capital. The young man was subsequently to win renown by effecting the arrest of the greatest poisoner of the time and, perhaps, of all time, the Marquise de Brinvilliers, just as in 1678 he was the first to lift the veil from the famous poison drama which was to bespatter, by its revelations, even the steps of the throne.
Meanwhile, it was generally conceded at the close of the year 1661 that the policeman Desgrez and his dog Sorbonne were the two inhabitants of Paris who were most familiar with the city’s nooks and corners and with its peculiar fauna.
For some time Desgrez had been following the rivalry which set two mighty bandit chiefs, Calembredaine and Rodogone the Egyptian, against each other for ownership of the area of the fair-ground of Saint-Germain. He also knew them to be rivals in love for the favours of an emerald-eyed woman who was called the Marquise of the Angels.
Shortly before the opening of the fair, he sensed the strategic moves inside the underworld. Although but a minor police officer, he managed, on the very morning of the opening of the fair, to wrest an authorisation from his superiors to bring up the entire police force of the capital to the approaches of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. He could not prevent the
outbreak of the battle, which spread with lightning speed and extreme fierceness, but he suppressed it just as suddenly and brutally as it had started, swiftly putting out the fires, organising in a defensive action the sword-bearing gentlemen who happened to be there, and effecting mass arrests. Dawn was just breaking after that bloody night when twenty rogues of note were led out of town to the grim common gibbet of Montfaucon.
To be sure, the fame of the Fair of Saint-Germain amply justified the bitter fight waged by the gangs of Paris ruffians for the monopoly of its ‘pickings’. From October to December, and from February to Lent, the whole of Paris passed by there. The King himself was not above paying it a visit on certain evenings with his Court, and what a windfall for the cut-purses and coat-snatchers it was, this swarm of fabulous birds!
In the sixteenth century the monks of the Abbey of Saint-Germain- des-Prcs, of which the fair-ground was a dependency, had enclosed it in high walls which were fitted with gates and guard-rooms. There was, however, no admission fee. Two large wooden market-halls, which housed traders and mountebanks, were situated at the crossing of the rue du Four, the rue de Tournon and the rue des Quatre Vents. Towards the rue Garanciere, there was a vast area reserved for the cattle market.
Inside the compound could be found four hundred bays composed of shops under covered arcades, set out in a vast chequer-board criss-crossed with lanes. All around them a spacious area was provided for open-air stands and for the traffic of coaches, sedan-chairs and horses. The throng, however, was so dense that one could hardly move.
There was nothing that wasn’t sold at the Fair of Saint-Germain. The traders of the big provincial towns—Amiens, Rouen, Rheims—displayed samples of their business there. In the luxury shops there was a rush on dressing-gowns from Marseille, diamonds from Alenfon, comfits from Verdun. The Portuguese sold ambergris and dainty porcelain. The Pro¬vencal sold oranges and lemons. The Turk vaunted his Persian balsam, his scented essences from Constantinople. The Fleming offered his paint¬ings and cheeses. It was like a Pont-Neuf extended to a world-wide scale amid a din of bells, flutes, reeds, and drums. The showmen of animals and freaks attracted vast crowds. One came to see rats dance to the sound of a fiddle and two flies fight a duel with two blades of straw.
Among the spectators a ragged mob brushed shoulders with the richly- clad upper classes. Everybody flocked to the Fair of Saint-Germain to find there, in addition to the most variegated and glittering displays, a free- and-easy way of life that could be had nowhere else.
Everything was organised for sensual bliss. Riotous debauchery sprouted side by side with a roaring trade in gluttony. Wine-shops gleaming with gold and mirrors were cheek by jowl with gambling dens for card-games such as brelan and lansquenet There wasn’t a lad or a lass, stirred by the demon of love, who could not find satisfaction here.
But from time immemorial, the greatest attraction of the Fair of Saint- Germain had always been the gipsies. They were the princes of the fair, with their acrobats and fortune-tellers.
From midsummer onward one could see their caravans arrive, drawn by skinny old horses with braided manes, and loaded with women and children piled up higgledy-piggledy with their kitchen utensils, and stolen hams and chickens. The men, silent and arrogant, with long black hair under plumed hats, which shaded their flashing, coal-black eyes, carried long muskets over their shoulders.
The Parisians would stare at them with the same avid curiosity as their forefathers had done in 1427 when those eternal, dark-skinned wanderers had appeared before the walls of Paris for the first time. They had been called Egyptians, but were also referred to as Bohemians or Tziganes. The beggars acknowledged their influence on the origins of the laws of the underworld, and on All Fools’ Day the Due d’Egypte would walk abreast with the king of the underworld, and the high dignitaries of the Empire of Galilee preceded the arch-henchmen of the Great Coesre.
Rodogone the Egyptian, of gipsy origin himself, held of necessity a high rank among the rogues of Paris. It was only right and proper that he wanted to have sole command over the approaches to those magical sanctuaries, decorated with toads, skeletons and black cats, which the soothsayers, the ‘brown witches’ as they were called, set up in the centre of the Fair of Saint-Germain.
Calembredaine, however, as the master of the Gate of Nesle and of the Pont-Neuf, claimed this choice morsel for himself.
This rivalry could only end with the death of one or the other.
In the last days preceding the opening of the fair, numerous skirmishes broke out throughout the district. On the day before the opening, Calembredaine’s troops had to retreat in disorder and take refuge in the ruined Tower of Nesle while Rodogone the Egyptian established a kind of protective cordon around the district along the ancient moats and the Seine.
Calembredaine’s men gathered in the big hall around the table, from which Wood-Bottom was vociferating like a demon.
“I have seen this fight coming for months past. It’s your fault, Calem-bredaine ! Your woman has made you lose your wits. You are no fighter any more, so the other gang is getting cocky again. They feel that you are losing hold; they’ll line up with Rodogone to knock you over. I saw Blue Mathurin the other night. . . .”
Standing before die fire, against which his mighty frame stood out black, Nicholas wiped his blood-stained torso, pricked by a dagger-blow. He yelled louder than Wood-Bottom:
“We know you’re a traitor to the gang, that you assemble all the hench-men, that you go to see them, that you are preparing to take the place of the Great Coesre. But look out! I’ll warn Squat Rolin. . .
“You son of a bitch! You can’t do anything to me . . . ! Make no mistake, Calembredaine: if you retreat, you are done for. Rodogone will be merciless. It isn’t just the fair-ground he wants, but your woman whom you snatched .from him in the Churchyard of the Innocents. He wants her badly! He can’t have her unless you disappear. It’s him or you now.” Nicholas seemed to calm down.
“What do you want me to do ? All his gang, all those damned Egyptians are out there, right under our noses, and after the whacking we have just got it’s no good asking for more. We’d all get ourselves butchered.” Angelique went to her room, seized a cloak and put on her face the red velvet mask which she kept in a casket with other small odds and ends. Thus fitted out, she went down again amid the clamours.
The quarrel between Calembredaine and Wood-Bottom was assuming epic dimensions. The chief could easily have crushed the stunted man on his wooden platter, but Wood-Bottom’s authority was such that he was the one who dominated the situation.
At the sight of Angelique in her red mask, they lowered their voices a little.
“What’s this carnival for?” growled Nicholas. “Where are you going?” “I’m merely going to make Rodogone’s troops decamp. In an hour’s time the place will be cleaned up, gentlemen. You’ll be able to return to your posts.”
Calembredaine took Wood-Bottom to witness:
“Don’t you think she’s becoming more crack-brained every day?”
“I do, but after all, if it gives her bright ideas, let her go ahead. One never can tell with this confounded Marquise of the Angels. She’s reduced you to the state of a dish-cloth. The least she can do is repair the damage.”
Angelique dashed through the night towards the Gate of Saint-Jacques, and there tried to cross the moat. One of Rodogone’s Bohemians loomed up before her. She told him, in German gibberish, a complicated story of her being a shopkeeper at the Fair of Saint-Germain on her way back to
her stall. He let this masked woman, wrapped in a black cloak, pass. She ran straightway to a friend of hers, a mountebank who owned three enormous, formidable bears. Angeliquc had won the hearts of those three bears and their old master, as well as that of the youngster who collected the money.
The deal was quickly settled, on the strength of her bewitching smile.
Ten o’clock was striking from the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prcs when Rodogone’s men, keeping watch along the old moats, saw an enormous growling mass advancing towards them in the misty moon¬light. One of them, who tried to make out exactly who was trying to force their blockade, had his chest clawed by a mighty paw which tore his tunic and a sizeable lump of flesh.
The others, without waiting for more ample explanations, jumped over the ramparts. Some of them ran down to the Seine to warn their accom¬plices, but they too had received the same unpleasant visit. Most of the bandits were already in the river swimming to the Louvre bank and other more healthy places. To brawl, to kill one another in a frank duel with beggars and rogues, held no terror for valiant hearts. But none of Rodo¬gone’s men felt any inclination to grapple with a bear which, when it reared up on its hind legs, measured twice six feet!
Angelique calmly reappeared at the Tower of Nesle and notified the company that the whole district had been cleared of undesirables. Calem- bredainc’s staff went to reconnoitre and had to admit the fact.
Wood-Bottom’s hollow bursts of laughter made the ladies of the Faubourg tremble behind their bed-curtains.
“Oh la la! That Marquise!” he kept on repeating. “Talk about a miracle! . . .”
But Nicholas did not take the same view.
“You’ve made a deal with them to betray us,” he said, crushing Angelique’s wrists. “You’ve gone and sold yourself to Rodogone the Egyptian?”
To appease his jealous fury, she had to explain her manoeuvre.
This time, Wood-Bottom’s hilarity shook the rafters like a roll of thunder. Some neighbours appeared at their windows and shouted they’d come down with their swords or halberds to teach a lesson to those scoundrels who wouldn’t let decent people sleep. The half-man paid no heed. Dragging himself from cobble-stone to cobble-stone, he passed through the entire Faubourg Saint-Germain, roaring with laughter. For years to come, the beggars, gathered around a fire, would tell the story of the Marquise of the Angels and the three bears! ... *
This supreme stratagem did not prevent the final drama. Police- captain Desgrez was well advised when, on the morning of the first of October, he went to see Monsieur de Dreux d’Aubray, seigneur of Offemont and Villiers, Civil Lieutenant of the City of Paris, and persuaded him to post all his available police forces at die approaches to the fair¬ground of Saint-Germain.
The day, however, passed quiedy. Calembredaine’s men were in control among the swelling crowd. At dusk the coaches of high society began to drive up.
Amid the thousands of torches lit at every stand, the fair assumed the appearance of an enchanted palace. Angelique was at Calembredaine’s side and together they watched the varying fortunes of an animal fight: two bulldogs against a wild boar. The crowd, who adored these cruel spectacles, crushed against the fences around the small arena.
Angelique was a little tipsy, having drunk muscatel, raw cider and cinnamon water in succession at the lemonade-vendor’s stand. Lavishly and without scruples she spent the money from a purse which Nicholas had handed her. She was collecting puppets and pastries for Florimond.
For once, in order to pass unnoticed—for he had an inkling that the policemen were lying in wait—Nicholas was closely shaven and dressed in a somewhat more decent outfit than his ordinary disguise. With his wide hat concealing his disquieting eyes, he looked like an impecunious country bumpkin who had come to have fun at the fair.
Everything was forgotten. It was the Fair of Saint-Germain. The lights were reflected in shiny eyes; one remembered the fine fairs of one’s child¬hood in hamlets and villages.
Nicholas had put his arm around Angelique’s waist. It was his particular way of holding her. It gave her the impression of being completely enclosed in one of those iron hoops that are riven round a prisoner’s waist. But this forceful hold was not always unpleasant. Tonight, for instance, enfolded in this sinewy arm, she felt slim and supple, weak and protected. Her hands full of sweets, toys and small scent-flasks, she was enthralled by this animal fight, was shouting and stamping with the public when the fierce, black mass of the boar, tossing off his attackers, sent one of the dogs flying, with a ripped belly, from the tip of his tusks.
Suddenly, facing them from the other side of the arena, she saw Rodogone the Egyptian.
He was holding a long, thin dagger poised on his finger-tips. The weapon came whizzing over the animal fight. Angelique jumped aside, pulling her companion with her. The blade passed a few centimetres from Nicholas’s neck and landed in the throat of a curio-dealer. Struck as if by lightning, the man flung up his arms in a spasm, unfolding the flaps of his gaudy-coloured cloak. For a moment he looked like an enormous pinned butterfly. Then he crumpled up on the ground.
It was the spark that made the Fair of Saint-Germain explode.