The Cat and the King (19 page)

There was something suddenly almost touching about poor Savonne as he blurted this out. He seemed only half his age: he seemed a good deal younger, indeed, than Mademoiselle de Valois. But I knew that I had to shock him into his senses.

“It is not only on such formal occasions that you would look upon her if you remain in court. You might be called upon to witness her accouchement of a grandchild of France. How would you like to see your beloved under
those
conditions?”

Savonne said nothing to this; he simply turned away, and I was struck by a nasty thought.

“Perhaps you think you might have a personal connection with the birth that would make the sight less unpleasant?” I asked sarcastically. “Let me remind you, my friend, how carefully the daughters of France are watched.”

“Oh, Saint-Simon, you think you know everything!” he exclaimed in disgust. “But in a lot of ways you're very naive. You've never gone in for love affairs, and you haven't learned that where there's a will, there's a way.”

“A will!” I cried. “Do you mean to say you have a will to debase the blood royal of France? After all our talk, all our vows? I thought we were at least agreed on
that
principle. I thought we were united in the idea of the king and his true seed as the source of government under God! And now you're willing to risk engendering a child on the king's own granddaughter-in-law!”

“Well, anyway,” Savonne growled, flushing, “my blood is as good as the king's! The Savonnes go back to Clovis!”

As I looked in stupefaction at the broad back that he now turned to me, I became aware of a scurry of feet on the gravel. It was a royal usher.

“Monsieur le due de Saint-Simon!” he exclaimed, breathless. “The king desires your immediate presence. In the Garden of Apollo!”

I walked as fast as I could, without running, to the indicated spot. The king, as usual when he suffered from gout, was in his wheelchair, a bergère mounted on a platform with three small rollers, one in front, two in back, and covered by a palanquin. It was pushed by two deaf mutes, in scarlet, so that its occupant might enjoy security when talking as he was driven about. As I came up, the wheelchair moved forward, and I, but none of the encircling courtiers, followed.

“Monsieur de Saint-Simon,” the king began in his rare amiable tone, “I consider that you have shown yourself a good friend to my family. There have been moments in the past, it is true, when I was somewhat less sure of that, but your good influence on my nephew, the due d'Orléans, has more than made up for it. I consider that you have been a major factor in keeping his wildness under control, and that your good wife has contributed in no small degree to the harmony that exists between my daughter and him.”

How impossible it is to convey the effect of those grave, measured tones! The king seemed never to stammer, never to be reduced, like the rest of us, to an “er” or an “ah.” He chewed his words like his food, slowly and deliberately. Had I not had carefully to watch my step in keeping abreast of his chair, I should not for a moment have taken my fascinated gaze from those great glassy eyes. I attempted now to convey to the king some sense of the satisfaction that these compliments brought me, but he raised his hand to indicate that he wished to continue.

“I have always been aware that my nephew was a man of exceptional parts, and the time may well be near at hand when his advice and counsel will be needed by the state. I am an old man, Monsieur de Saint-Simon, and my son is not a young one. We must look to the future. That is why I am telling you how it gratifies me that you and the duchesse de Saint-Simon are on the terms that you are with the due and duchesse d'Orléans. I am sure that you will be pleased to hear that I have decided to marry my granddaughter, Mademoiselle de Valois, to the due de Berry.”

I allowed my hands to come together in a little clap of joy. “Oh, sire, what a wise and wonderful match!”

“There had been,” the king continued, giving no heed to my explosion, “some consideration of a union between the due de Berry and another granddaughter of mine, but this seemed too good an occasion to tighten our ties with the House of Orléans. Now let me explain where all this concerns
you.
” My heart suddenly sank as I saw the direction his next words were taking. “Mademoiselle de Valois has a lively personality and strong enthusiasms. While these can be assets in a princess, they can also, if not controlled, become liabilities. My grandson is amiable and affectionate but far too trusting. He will easily fall under his wife's influence. I must have, as her lady of honor, someone whom I can absolutely trust to keep her in line. The lady I propose is Madame la duchesse de Saint-Simon!”

It was all I could do to keep from reeling. So this was where all my dreams and ambitions and loyalties were to end up: that I should be the consort of the lady of honor to a child of a bastard! That I should bow my knee to, place the seal of my arms on, the very system that had ben my peculiar abomination!

“If you will pardon me, sire, for even hesitating in the face of so great and undeserved an honor, would it be presumptuous of me to inquire if the rank of the duchesse de Saint-Simon does not entitle her to be lady of honor to the duchesse de Bourgogne?”

“But that position is already filled,” the king answered easily. “If the duchesse du Lude should ever relinquish it, it would be time enough to consider your wife's qualifications.” Oh, yes, he had thought it all out. He knew he had me!

“Would it be possible, sire, for me to have twenty-four hours in which to consult my wife?”

“But that's quite unnecessary, my dear fellow. Madame de Maintenon has already done so and finds her delighted to accept the post. Madame de Maintenon, I do not hide from you, had favored the candidacy of Mademoiselle de Bourbon to marry Berry. One of the conditions of her change of mind was that Madame de Saint-Simon should head the Berry household. So there you are. It all depends on you!”

Of course, I knew it didn't. But when such a king as Louis XIV professed to ask your permission to marry two of his grandchildren to each other, what did you do? The valves of the great golden gates of his courtesy had swung them slowly open. There was nothing for me to do now but enter.

“Madame la duchesse de Saint-Simon will be only too delighted to serve you, sire!”

The king at once signaled his attendants to turn his wheelchair back to his entourage, and he made the announcement then and there, both of the marriage and of my wife's appointment. I did not even have the chance to speak to Gabrielle before she became the mistress of a household of five hundred persons, with a larger apartment at Versailles and a salary greater than my whole income! She had proved herself the more skillful courtier, but at what kind of court? The court of absolutism and bastardy, the court that I had dedicated my life to purifying!

The king's chair was now turned back towards the palace, and behind it, people crowded up to congratulate me. Some, I suspected, were sarcastic, but the majority meant well enough. We had all, I could only conclude grimly, been made parts of the Versailles system.

I
T WAS
not long after these events that the royal family was struck with a series of deaths that seemed to threaten its very survival. First Monseigneur died, at the age of fifty, stricken with smallpox, and the entire court gathered at midnight at Versailles to watch the return of our ancient monarch from his son's deathbed at Meudon. As the reader can imagine, this news was hardly dire to me. At a single stroke, all the elaborate plottings of Madame la Duchesse and her cabal were swept away. The only thing that astonished me was the attitude of the due d'Orléans, who wept genuine tears of regret for this cousin who had so hated and persecuted him. I urged him to take his sorrow to the privacy of his chamber, for he was bound to be accused of the most odious hypocrisy.

But the next blow was far, far worse, the greatest tragedy that France has had to sustain in my lifetime. The charming, the enchanting duchesse de Bourgogne suddenly sickened and slipped away from us, followed in a few days' time, horror of horrors, by her inconsolable husband and the elder of his two infant sons, the due de Bretagne. The king had lost three heirs apparent in less than two years, and the succession now depended on the fragile life of an infant. Who would be regent? Presumably the stupid Berry! And then
he
died, childless, as a result of a riding accident, leaving the king (except for the Spains) with a single delicate twoyear-old boy for all his legitimate posterity! Even I began to have sinful doubts about a God who allowed the bastards so to multiply and the licit issue to wither on the vine.

A silver lining to our cloud of woe was the still tighter unification of all classes of our country around our stricken and embattled old sovereign. The allies had missed their opportunity, and when the Treaty of Ryswick was finally signed to end the most devastating of all wars, we found ourselves, however exhausted and impoverished, still in possession of the bulk of the territorial advantages gained in the king's earlier campaigns. And, of course, Philippe V remained king of Spain, although this, as I had long suspected, turned out to be no great advantage to our country.

I had hoped to find another silver lining in the rise of the fortunes of the due d'Orléans, who had every claim now, as second heir to the throne, to act as regent for the infant Louis XV, Bourgogne's second son, when the latter should succeed. Yet this prospect was muddied by the absurd but persistent rumor that Orléans had caused the due and duchesse de Bourgogne to be poisoned. Anyone who knew him knew how incapable he would have been of poisoning the devil himself, but people
didn't
know him, or understand him, and his laboratories at St.-Cloud and the Palais-royal were regarded by the superstitious as embassies of hell. I have no doubt that Madame la Duchesse was heaping brushwood on the fires of suspicion; it was rumored that the king himself, convinced by the ever-vindictive Maintenon, had not rejected the accusation out of hand. I cannot emphasize more strongly how bad the situation had become than by pointing out that, in the most sycophantic of courts, the king's own nephew and second heir to the throne, the probable future regent of the land, was shunned by all but the Saint-Simons!

In the meanwhile the bastards were at work again. It began to look as if their hour might strike at last. Madame la Duchesse and Madame de Maintenon became passionate allies in promoting the regency of the due du Maine. Madame de Maintenon, Gabrielle reported to me, usually so tactful with the king, was now positively shrill in her arguments that only this pretty bastard son, the king's favorite of all the litter, could save the House of Bourbon from extinction and oblivion. I felt that my old nightmare was at last coming true.

The news broke like thunder one hot summer morning that the king, by simple edict to be registered with the parlement of Paris, had raised the due du Maine and the comte de Toulouse to the rank of princes of the blood with rights to succeed to the throne on the extinction of the older branches! When I rushed to our apartment to tell Gabrielle, I found that she already knew. But she seemed, as usual, perfectly composed.

“What you must do immediately is call upon the due du Maine and congratulate him. Everyone is going there. Let's not be the last!”

I stared. “Do you really expect
me,
Gabrielle, having held all my life to the principles of which you are well aware, to be guilty at this point of such an apostasy?”

“It's not an apostasy, Louis; it's a form.” Gabrielle had taken to using my Christian name ever since she had become a lady of honor. “If, in the new reign, Maine should be the ruling force, this will have been your chance to make up for all the snubs he's suffered from you. If not, it will be only a bit of politeness that nobody will remember.”

“Except
me.
It would be a dead weight on my conscience!”

“Really, Louis, you're being even more unreasonable than usual. You owe it to Maine as a family matter. After all, he's your cousin.”

“I do not acknowledge him!” I cried indignantly. Never before had Gabrielle dared to fling in my teeth that Madame de Montespan had been a cousin of my mother's, relating me, indubitably, to her illegal as well as her legal spawn.

“You can't just think of yourself in these matters,” Gabrielle continued inexorably. “You must think of your sons. Why should you deny them their place in the sun? It's all very well for you to say that you'd rather die than live in a France where Maine was king...”

“King!” I almost shrieked. “Do you have to go that far? We're only talking about a possible regency.”

“Not at all. We've had four deaths in the direct royal line since 1711. How many more would we need, under the new edict, before Maine succeeded?”

I did not have to count, but I did, to prolong the agony of having to answer her. The weak baby dauphin. Orléans and his little boy. The young due de Bourbon and his two younger brothers. The young Conti. “Seven,” I almost whispered.

“And most of them mere boys who haven't had the pox. Oh, it could happen, Louis. Besides, how do you know that the king, now he has the bit in his teeth, won't put Maine
ahead
of the young Condés and Contis, distantly related as they are and hardly known to the public? Maine is his son—the son of Louis the Great!”

I decided that there was no point arguing further the rights or wrongs of the matter with Gabrielle. There were issues that the female of our species simply could not—or would not—see. Had Gabrielle found herself transported in time and space to the court of Attila the Hun, she would have found no difficulty in qualifying as lady-in-waiting to one of his concubines. But her words about our poor two undersized boys, the “beagles,” as they were cruelly known at court, cut deeply into my heart. Should I sacrifice them to my principles? Was I being selfish in my idealism? I had stood by while Gabrielle became lady of honor to Madame de Berry. I had even fostered the Berry marriage. How could I make my sons pay
now
for such scraps of ideals as I had left? I should have been hanged for a lamb!