Angelique - Part 7. Versailles Chapter 2 - Read online

As A RESULT OF THIS MEETING, Angelique frequently saw the Due de Lauzun and the Marquis de Montespan in the Tuileries and on the Cours- la-Reine. They, in turn, introduced their friends to her. And, gradually, the faces of the past reappeared. One day, as she was driving along the Cours with Peguilin, her carriage passed that of the Grande Mademoiselle, who recognised her. Nothing was said. Was it prudence or indifference? Each of them had so many fish to fry!
After first avoiding her, Athenais de Montespan had suddenly taken a fancy to her and asked her to her house. She had noticed that the chocolate- shop keeper was no chatterbox but was admirably adept in rejoinders.
Madame Scarron, whom Angelique saw frequently at the Monte- spans’, introduced her to Ninon de Lenclos.
Angelique was rather proud, too, to figure on the list of persons whom Mademoiselle de Montpensier admitted to the gardens of the Luxem¬bourg. One day as she arrived there, the caretaker’s wife opened the gate for her in the absence of her husband.
Angelique began to stroll along the beautiful walks bordered with willows and clumps of magnolias. After a moment she became aware that the garden, usually full of animation, was almost deserted that day. She saw only two liveried footmen, running as fast as they could and diving into the bushes. And that was all. Intrigued and vaguely perturbed, she continued her lonely stroll.
As she was passing by a small rocky cave, she thought she heard a slight noise and, turning round, perceived a human shape squatting in a shrub. ‘It must be some rogue,’ she thought, ‘one of Wood-Bottom’s underlings about to perpetrate some mischief. It would be rather fun to catch him unawares and talk thieves’ slang to him, just to see the face he’ll make.'
She smiled at the idea. It certainly did not happen every day that a cut- purse on the prowl had the opportunity of finding himself face to face with a great lady who used the unmistakable language of the Tower of Nesle and the Faubourg Saint-Denis. ‘And afterwards I'll give him my purse to help him recover his wits, poor fellow!’ she thought, delighted at this piece of mischief that would have no witness.
However, as she was stealthily approaching, she saw that the man was richly dressed, although his clothes were mild-soiled. He was on his knees, and propped on his elbows in a peculiar posture. Suddenly he turned his head nervously, as if cocking his ears, and she recognised the Due d’Enghien, the Prince de Conde’s son. She had met him during the promenades in the Tuileries, or on the Cours-la-Reine. He was a very dashing youngster, but said to be intractable in matters of etiquette, and somewhat unrestrained.
Angelique noticed that he was very pale, and wore a wild, frightened expression.
‘What's he doing there? Why is he hiding? What's he afraid of?’ she wondered, gripped by a vague uneasiness.
After a short hesitation, she withdrew noiselessly, and returned to the broad walks of the garden. She passed the caretaker, who goggled with bewilderment on seeing her.
“Oh, Madame! What are you doing here? Do withdraw quickly!”
“Why? You know quite well that I am on Mademoiselle de Mont- pensier's list. And, besides, your wife let me in.”
The caretaker glanced around with distress. Angelique was always very generous with him.
“May Madame forgive me,” he whispered, coming closer, “but my wife doesn’t know the secret I shall confide to you: the garden is closed to the public today, for we’ve been hunting, ever since morning, for His Highness the Due d'Enghien, who imagines he is a rabbit.”
And as the young woman stared at him round-eyed, hq touched his forehead with his finger.
“Yes, the poor boy, it comes over him from time to time. Apparently it’s a sickness. When he thinks he is a rabbit or a partridge, he is afraid of getting killed and runs away to hide. We’ve been looking for him for hours.”
“He’s in the shrubbery, near the little grotto. I saw him.”
“Good God! We must tell His Highness the Prince. Ah! here he is.”
A sedan-chair was approaching. The Prince de Conde put his head out of the window.
“What are you doing here, Madame?” he asked furiously.
The caretaker hastened to intervene:
“Monseigneur, Madame has just seen His Lordship near the rockery.”
“Ah! good. Open the door for me. Help me to get down, damn it! Don’t make so much noise, you’ll frighten him. You there, go and fetch his first chamber-valet, and you, go and collect all the men you can find and post them at the gates. . . .”
A few moments later, Angelique heard frantic leaps in the shrubbery, then swift running. The Due d’Enghien emerged and rushed past at full speed. But two servants in pursuit managed to grab him and hold him back. He was promptly surrounded and restrained. His chamber-valet talked to him gently:
“Nobody’ll kill you, Monscigneur . . . Nobody’ll lock you up in a cage. . . . You’ll be released presently and will be able to run in the fields again.”
The Due d’Enghien was ashen. He did not say a word, but in his eyes there was the pathetic, questioning expression of a hunted animal. His father approached. The young man struggled furiously, although still in silence.
“Take him away,” said the Prince de Conde. “Send for his physician and his surgeon. Have him bled, purged and, above all, tied up. I don’t feel like playing another game all over again tonight. I’ll give a thrashing to whoever lets him escape again.”
The group moved away. The Prince came back towards Angelique, who had witnessed this sad scene, profoundly shaken; she looked almost as white as the poor sick man.
Conde posted himself before her and fixed her with a sombre stare.
“Well!” he said, “you saw him? He is grand, isn’t he, the descendant of the Condes, the Montmorcncys! . . . His great-grandfather had manias, liis grandmother was mad. I had to marry the daughter. At die time, she was already beginning to pull her hairs out, one by one, with tweezers. I knew that my progeny would suffer for it, but I had to marry her all the same. It was an order of King Louis XIII. And there you have my son! Sometimes he fancies he’s a dog and struggles not to bark before the King.
Or else, he thinks he’s a bat and is afraid of knocking against the wainscot of his apartment. The other day, he felt he was turning into a plant and his servants had to water him—funny, isn’t it? You aren’t laughing?” “Monseigneur . . . how can you believe for a second that I would want to laugh? . . . Of course, you don’t know me. . . .”
He cut her short with a sudden smile that brightened his gruff face: “Ido! Indeed! I know you well, Madame Morens. I have seen you at Ninon’s and elsewhere. You are as gay as a young girl, beautiful as a courtesan, and you have the soothing heart of a mother. Moreover, I suspect you of being one of the cleverest women in the kingdom. But you don’t display the fact, for you are sly and you know that men are afraid of learned ladies.”
Angflique smiled in her turn, surprised by this unexpected declaration. “You flatter me, Monseigneur . . . and I should be curious to know who gave you this information about me. . .
“I don’t need any informers,” he said, in the brusque, churlish manner of a warrior. “I have observed you. Haven’t you noticed that I often looked at you? I believe you are a little afraid of me. And yet, you are not shy. . .
Angelique raised her eyes to the victor of Lens and Rocroi. This wasn’t the first time that she had thus looked up at him. But the Prince had certainly not the faintest recollection of the little grey quail who had stood up to him and to whom he had said: “I’ll wager that when you are a woman men will hang themselves for having met you!”
She had always believed that she harboured a deep grudge against the Prince de Conde, and she had to defend herself against a feeling of sym¬pathy and understanding that rose up between them. Didn’t he have them spied upon for years, herself and her husband, by the butler Clement Tonne!? Hadn’t he inherited Joffrey de Peyrac’s possessions? Angelique had been asking herself for a long time how she might manage to learn exactly what part the Prince de Conde had played in her tragedy. Chance was serving her strangely.
“You haven’t answered,” said the Prince. “Is it true, then, that I intimidate you?”
“No! But I feel quite unworthy to converse with you, Monseigneur. Your fame ...” '
“Pah! my fame—you are far too young to know anything about it. My weapons are rusty, and if His Majesty does not make up his mind to give a lesson to the rascally Dutch or Englishmen, I may well risk dying in my bed. As for conversing, Ninon has told me a hundred times that words are not bullets that you shoot into your opponent’s stomach,
and she alleges that I still haven’t quite learned the lesson. Ha! Ha!”
He broke into noisy laughter, and casually took her arm.
“Do come. My carriage is waiting outside, but when I walk Гт obliged to lean on a charitable arm. That’s what I owe my fame: pains caught in the waterlogged marshes, making my leg drag like an old man’s on certain days. Will you keep me company? Your presence seems the only one I could possibly bear after the painful day. Do you know my Hotel de Beautreillis?”
Angelique said with a beating heart:
“No, Monseigneur.”
“They say it’s one of the prettiest things that old Mansard built. Per-sonally, I don’t like being there, but I know that the ladies rave about the beauty of the house. Come and have a look at it.”
Although reluctant to admit it, Angelique appreciated the honour of being seated in the carriage of a Prince of the blood, whom the passers-by acclaimed in the street.
She was surprised by the attentiveness shown to her by her companion. It was generally said that the Prince de Conde, ever since his friend Marthe du Vigean had entered into the Carmelite order of the Faubourg Saint? Jacques, no longer granted women the consideration which the nobility of France was accustomed to show them. All he asked of them was a purely physical pleasure and, for years now, he had not been known to have any¬thing but passing affairs with women of rather low standing. In the drawing-rooms his rudeness towards the fair sex discouraged the best intentions. This time, however, the Prince seemed to be making an effort to please his companion.
The carriage turned into the courtyard of the Hotel de Beautreillis.
Angelique mounted the marble terrace. Every detail of this bright and harmonious residence spoke to her of Joffrey de Peyrac. He had wanted its lines to be as supple as vine tendrils on the wrought-iron balconies and balustrades, he had planned those carved gilt wood friezes framing the smooth high planes of marble or mirror, those statues and busts, those stone animals and birds, ubiquitous as the graceful spirits of a happy home.
“You don’t say anything?” said the Prince de Conde in surprise, after they had inspected the two storeys of reception-rooms. “Generally my visitors emit parrot-like exclamations. Is the house not to your liking? You are supposed to know a good deal about arranging a home.”
They were in a small drawing-room, with blue satin hangings em¬broidered with gold. A wrought-iron screen of exquisite design separated them from the long gallery which overlooked the gardens. At the back of the room the fire-place, flanked by two carved lions, bore a fresh wound on its pediment. Angelique raised her arm and put her hand over it.
“Why has this ornament been broken?” she asked. “It’s not the first breakage I’ve noticed. Why, even at the windows of this drawing-room the pattern has been effaced in some places.”
The face of His Lordship clouded over.
“They are the ciphers of die former owner of the house. I had them chipped off. I’ll have them repaired some day. Though I’m damned if I know when! . . . I prefer spending my money on the installations of my country house at Chantilly.”
Angelique kept her hand over the maimed coat-of-arms.
“Why didn’t you leave them as they were?”
“The sight of that man’s coat-of-arms gave me a displeasure. He was a cursed man!”
“A cursed man?” she echoed.
“Yes. A nobleman who manufactured gold by means of a secret the devil had imparted to him. He was burned at the stake. And the King made me a present of his possessions. I am not yet quite sure that His Majesty was not seeking to bring me bad luck by his gift.”
Angelique had walked slowly over to the window and was looking out.
“Did you know him, Monseigneur?”
“Whom? The damned nobleman? . . . Why no, and thank God for it.”
“I think I remember the case,” she said, frightened at her own boldness and yet quite composed. “Wasn’t he a man from Toulouse, a Monsieur . . . dc Peyrac?”
“Yes, indeed,” he agreed, with indifference.
She passed her tongue over her dry lips.
“Wasn’t there some talk that he had been sentenced above all, because he held some wicked secret about Monsieur Fouquct, who was still so powerful at that time?”
“That’s possible. Monsieur Fouquet considered himself the king of France for a long time. He had enough money for that. He made lots of people do all sorts of foolish things. Me, for example. Ha! Ha! Ha! . . . Ah well, all that is over and done with.”
Angelique turned round to observe him. He had slumped into an arm¬chair and was tracing the rose pattern of the carpet with the tip of his cane. Though he had smirked bitterly at the memory of the foolish things Monsieur Fouquct had made him do, he had not reacted, to the hints concerning Joffrey de Peyrac. The young woman felt certain that he was not the one who had placed the butler Clement Tonncl in her home for years. Why should His Highness now trouble to remember that he had once wanted to poison Mazarin and that he had sold himself to Fouquet? He was quite busy enough trying to regain the favour of the still distrust¬ful young King.
“I was in Flanders at the time of Peyrac’s trial,” he resumed. “I did not follow the case. Never mind! I got the house and I confess I don’t much enjoy it. The sorcerer never lived here, apparently And yet I can’t help finding something sad and sinister about these walls. It’s like the decor set up for a scene that was never played. . . . The dainty objects assembled in it are waiting for a host who is not myself. I’ve kept on an old ostler who belonged to the Comte de Peyrac’s staff of servants. He claims he sees his ghost on certain nights. . . . It’s possible. I sometimes breathe a presence here which repels me and drives me away. I spend as little time as possible here. Do you also have this unpleasant impression?”
“No, on the contrary,” she murmured.
Her gaze roved around. ‘Неге I am at home,’ she thought. ‘I and my children are the hosts these walls are waiting for.’
“So you like the house?”
“I love it. It’s admirable. Oh! I’d like to live here!” she cried, clasping her hands over her heart with unexpected passion.
“You could live here if you wanted to,” said the Prince.
She spun round towards him. He fastened his still magnificent and im-perious look upon her, that look of which Monsieur Bossuct would eloquently say some day: “This Prince . . . who bore victory in his eyes. . . .”
“Live in it?” repeated Angclique. “In what capacity, Monseigneur?”
He smiled again and got up abruptly to go over to her.
“There! I am forty-four years old, I am no longer young, but I am not yet old. I sometimes have pains in my knees, that’s a fact, but the rest is still sound. I talk to you straight from the shoulder. I believe I make a tolerable lover. I don’t think you’ll be shocked by this declaration. I don’t know where you come from, but something tells me that you must have heard worse things in your life and, anyway, I’m not trying to catch you off your guard. I never beat about the bush with women; I think it’s pointless to hem and haw when there’s always the same question at the end: ‘Do you want to, or don’t you? . . .’ No, don’t answer yet. I want you to know just what the few advantages are which I can offer you. You’ll have a pension—yes, I know, you are very rich. Well, listen! I'll give you Bcautreillis House, since you like it. I’ll look after your sons and will recommend them for a good education. I also know that you are a widow and rather jealous of your reputation for chastity. It’s true that this
is a precious asset, but . . . consider that I am not asking you to lose your reputation for some low rogue. And since you mentioned my fame, allow me to point out that ”
He hesitated with a genuine and rather touching modesty.
“—that it is not dishonourable to be the mistress of the great Conde. That's the way it is in our society. I’ll present you everywhere. . . . Why this sceptical and just a trifle disdainful smile, Madame?”
“Because,” said Angelique, smiling, “I was remembering a ditty which old Hurlurot, an old mountebank, sings at street-comers:
Les princes sont d' etratiges gens.
Heureux qui ne les connaitguere;
Plus heureux qui n en a quejaire. . . ,”1
“A plague on your insolence!” he shouted with feigned fury.
He took her by the waist and pulled her towards him :
“That’s what I like about you, my dear,” he said in a restrained voice. “For I’ve noticed that in your profession as a woman you have the warrior’s reckless boldness. You attack at the right moment, you turn the opponent’s weakness to account with Machiavellian skill and you deal him terrible blows. But you do not withdraw fast enough to your positions. I am holding you now . . . ! How fresh and firm you are! You have a sound, reassuring little body ... ! Ah! I’d so much like you to listen to me not as a Prince, but as I am, a poor, rather unhappy man. You are so different from the cold-hearted coquettes!”
He leaned his cheek against Angelique’s hair.
“There is in your golden hair one grey strand that moves me. It seems that, under your air of youth and gaiety, you have the experience which great griefs bestow. Am I wrong?”
“No, Monseigneur,” Angelique replied obediently.
She was thinking that if someone had told her that very morning that before die night was out she would be in the arms of the Prince de Conde and would be leaning her head submissively against that august shoulder, she would have protested that life could never be so mad. But her life had never been simple, and she was beginning to get used to the surprises sprung on her by fate.
“Since my youth,” he continued, “I have never loved but a single woman. I was not always faithful to her, but I loved her alone. She was beautiful, gentle, and the companion of my soul. The intrigues and
1 Princes are odd folk.
Lucky are those who don't know them;
Luckier still those who don't need them. . . .
722
conspiracies which ceaselessly cropped up to part us eventually tired her. Since she took the veil, what is there left for me? I’ve known only two loves in all my life: her and war. My beloved has retired to a convent, and that rascal Mazarin signed the Peace of the Pyrenees. I am nothing more than a representative dummy who pays court to the young King in the hope of obtaining—goodness knows when—some military governorship and perhaps a command if he’d chance to have the good idea of demand¬ing the Queen’s dowry from the Flemings. There is talk of it. . . . But let’s not go into that—I don’t want to bore you. Seeing you has kindled in me a flame which I thought was dead. The death of the heart is the worst thing. . . . I would like to keep you near me. . . .”
Angdique had gently disengaged herself while he was speaking; she stepped back a little.
“Monseigneur . . .”
“It’s yes, isn’t it?’’he said anxiously. “Oh! I beg of you . . . What is holding you back?’’
He bit his lips.
“Lord! You are formidable. No matter! Idesireyoujustasyouarc.’’
He could not understand the dilemma he was putting her in. What would she have answered, had he made his proposition to her in some other place? She did not know.
But here, in this house where she found herself for the first time, she was surrounded by ghosts. Next to the Prince de Conde, risen from the past, with his slightly old-fashioned air, there stood the luminous, hard outline of Philippe in his pale satins and, behind them, a masked wraith, clothed in black velvet and silver, with a single blood-red ruby on his finger, the cursed nobleman who had been her master and her only love.
Among all of them, whom life or death had set free, she alone remained a captive of the old tragedy.
“What’s the matter?” asked the Prince. “Why are there tears in your eyes? Have I hurt you in any way? Do stay here, where you seem to like it. Let me love you. I’ll be discreet. . .
She shook her head slowly:
“No, it's impossible, Monseigneur.”