The Cat and the King (7 page)

I had to admit that this was shrewd, even if it struck me as a bit ignoble to make personal plans for shelter in the event of the wreck of a noble scheme.

“But Monsieur's so volatile,” I objected. “Everything depends on who's last been with him. And where.”

“Where?”

I placed a protective arm about her waist. “Ah, my innocent, we mustn't peek too closely into the private life of our sovereign's brother.”

But my wife's demure little smile did not in the least convey the innocence that I had assumed. “You mean what Chartres refers to as ‘Papa's little weakness'?”

“Oh, you know.”

“Is it not a loyal wife's duty to know what goes on in court?”

I sighed. “I suppose so. But I hate to have your pure little mind contaminated with such filth.”

“My ‘pure little mind' can take in worse than that. Be sure when you go to Monsieur that the Chevalier is not with him.”

I arched my eyebrows. “Do you think it's safe for me to be alone with Monsieur?”

Gabrielle's smile showed a new sophistication, of which I could not quite approve. “Oh, I guess you can take care of yourself.”

“Even against the fluttering hands of royalty? I can hardly knock down a son of France.”

But she continued to smile as if we were consciously playing a scene. “A loyal subject must suffer many things,” she said demurely. “I'm sure there's a dispensation under the circumstances.”

Something tore in my heart, and the sky seemed as suddenly dark as if the clouds had been pulled shut by frantic hands.

“You mean that I should... should...!” I paused, gasping.

“I meant nothing at all,” she said quickly.

“But you did!” I almost shouted. “You think I should let Monsieur bugger me!”

My wife paled, and her eyes flashed as I had never seen them flash. “Sir!”

What could I say? What could I do but apologize? For a few minutes I thought I must have offended her so deeply that there could never again be a question of true intimacy between us. And, then, in another flash, I saw that I was forgiven. Yet it struck me that Gabrielle's quick return to her normal demeanor of self-containment might mean that she had not been really upset at all, that she took these things for granted and that I, poor ninny, was just someone to be discreetly handled. And if
that
were so, how could she truly love me? Did she regard me as a task to be performed, the usual silly ass of a husband that a helpless girl found herself married off to, one who had to be cajoled and manipulated so that she and her children might rise in the world and not be buried in the avalanche induced by his blindness? Did I not know about those cynical mothers who warned their daughters in the cradle about the “myths” of honor that men so crazily cared about?

Gabrielle now proceeded to make matters even worse. She tried to relieve our tension with a silly anecdote. She told me that Imbert de Torrence had solved his problem with Monsieur by letting it be known at St. Cloud that he had a contagious skin disease!

At this, I left her without a word. I found myself walking down the Royal Alley to the Canal, and from there into the woods. When I turned back at last it was beginning to be dark. As I came out of the forest it occurred to me for a moment that I was lost, but then through the trees I caught the glint of water and realized that I was near the edge of the Canal at the bottom of the “green carpet.” As I approached the Basin of Apollo and then started to circle it, I had a curious sensation of being drawn along by the marble border. It was as if some long tentacle of Le Nôtre's landscape gardening had reached out to recapture me from the tangled wilderness and was now handing me to another tentacle, and then another, so that I was lifted from alley to alley, across grassy swards and graveled paths, up steps, past fountains and over terraces, the patterns becoming more meshed, more rigid, more complicated as I proceeded, until I was delivered safely back to the heart of the great palace itself.

I did not see Gabrielle at the
jeu du roi.
She had gone to our
rooms
. But I knew now what I had to do for Savonne. After the supper, I stepped boldly forward, as the king rose, to show that I requested a word. What was my dismay to meet the full glare of the royal countenance in terrible anger!

“You quit my service, and now you wish to run my court! That will do, sir! I have nothing to say to you!”

He moved on, and I stepped quickly back. But the place that I had occupied might have been scooped out of an iceberg. I felt all around me at once the mortal chill of my disfavor.

T
HE DAYS
that followed only confirmed my disgrace. It was an appalling experience to be out of favor with the king at Versailles. You saw it reflected in everybody's behavior, from the way your valet handed you your blouse to the way Madame de Maintenon looked through you as she passed you coming out of chapel. Some of it might have been your imagination, but most of it was not. For Versailles was the king's home as well as his palace; his moods quickly permeated its hundreds of galleries and apartments. We were like schoolchildren under a strict headmaster whose presence was felt everywhere.

Savonne, too, was in trouble, and I advised him to get out of court and go to his mother's in Anjou until the Guyon affair blew over. I even found that I could sense a difference in the attitude of so staunch an old friend as the due de Beauvillier. He advised me to re-apply for my old commission!

What turned my disgrace, however, from a bleak desert to what was almost a verdant garden was Gabrielle's attitude. It was as if she welcomed it as a chance to make up for having shocked me. A man must have an ally if he is not to perish in the void of royal disfavor. The feeling of being utterly alone, a bell without a clapper surrounded by noise, a single current running against the ocean, can be unbearable. But if there is a hand to squeeze your own, an arm to be slipped under yours, a sympathetic murmur in your ear, you can face the world. Gabrielle seemed to have waited for adversity to show what her true mettle was.

“Of course we're going to the reception tonight! Do you want people to think you're cowed?”

Never a word about the fatal consequences of my failing to heed her advice! Never a syllable about my unjust indignation! Almost simultaneously with my first doubts about Gabrielle came the flood tide of my reassurance. I was actually a happy man in the crowded rooms that night.

Chartres was there, brooding as usual. I joined him in his corner and asked if there was any news about his marriage.

“I had a talk with my ‘bride' today,” he replied with a sneer. “Or rather she ‘received' me, at Madame de Maintenon's. For don't think for a minute, Saint-Simon, that Mademoiselle de Blois shares your low opinion of her origin. She believes that the child of majesty outranks a mere nephew.”

“Even a lawful nephew?” I demanded. It angered me that even a chit of a girl should also reason so absurdly. “Even a grandson of France? And does she consider that she greatly honors you in offering you a mother-in-law who was not married to her father?”

“Oh, we never speak these days of Madame de Montespan,” he said with a jeering laugh. “We have nothing as vulgar as a mother. We sprang from the brain of Zeus, like Athena!”

“I suppose it's Madame de Maintenon who has taught her such arrogance.”

“Well, if you've got to be a bastard, you may as well be an arrogant one. And speaking of arrogance, I hear that Madame la Duchesse is giving Conti the devil of a time.”

“Why?”

“Because he took my side!”

I stared at him in surprise. “I thought she didn't care about her sister.”

“She may not. But when it comes right down to it, those bastards always stick together.” Chartres now laughed so loudly and crudely that several persons standing nearby glanced around. “Can't you see poor Conti, snatching a quick one between the jeu du roi and the supper, huffing and puffing away, in terror that Monsieur le Due may barge in and catch them at it? And all the while his mistress of the marble skin, her lovely thighs twisted around his torso, is murmuring in honeyed tones how nice it would be if her baby sister married a real prince!” Here he stamped on the floor with a snort of disgust as his mood changed. “And we men are crazy enough to think these little cunts care about us!”

“Please, someone may hear you!”

“And Savonne has taken to his heels. And you're in the king's shit house! Let's hope, anyway, if worse comes to worst, that the little Blois has as luscious an ass as they say her big sister has!”

Chartres had a way of thrusting his sexuality into his discourse with men as if to reduce the world around him to a stable of rutting horses where he was the major stallion. There was something undeniably attractive in his very coarseness, a masculinity that rode contemptuously over rank, precedence and Godliness; a rude way of stating that grandson of France or no, prick for prick, he was your equal and very likely your superior. I could not approve of his atheism or of his morals or even of his tolerance of immorality in others, but I never had the smallest doubt about his honesty. Chartres was fundamentally on the side of the angels.

“Let us trust that you never have to make that discovery,” I rejoined.

“Anyway,” he exclaimed, hitting me on the back, “it might be a way of screwing the king!”

I
DECIDED
to discuss these developments with Conti, and hearing, the next morning, that he was hunting the boar with the dauphin at Meudon, I rode out there. I arrived late for the hunt, but soon caught up with the stragglers, and I found Conti riding alone across a pasture. He reined up to let me come abreast of him. The hounds, he explained, had lost the scent for the third time, and he was bored.

I asked him if he thought that Savonne's trouble could possibly have any relation to the Guyon business. He shook his head.

“No, no, it has to be the marriage. There's no doubt about it. One of my pages quit me. He went, you may not be surprised to hear, to the Palais-royal.” Conti cantered ahead suddenly as he said this. I followed, admiring his perfect seat. He and his horse might have been a centaur.

“I suppose he will find life there more amusing,” I remarked with a smirk as I came abreast of him again. “Is he the one Monsieur so admired?”

“He is. And the worst kind of gossip, too.”

“Well, what can he gossip about?”

“What do you
think
he can gossip about, Saint-Simon?”

Conti pulled up his mare and gave me an odd look. There was a seeming defiance in it, yet also a kind of shyness, and perhaps something of an appeal. As I pulled up and stared back at him, in what was now a constrained silence, it seemed to me that this appeal might have been articulated as: “Oh, come now, haven't you ever been tempted... and, if not, can't you sympathize... haven't you any
imagination?
” He spurred his horse and cantered ahead again. I picked up my reins and followed.

“Sir!” I cried, but he kept right on going.

For some ten minutes I must have ridden across country behind him, my thoughts in a tumble. I even wondered if I should not go home and consult Gabrielle about the mores of my own sex. For if she knew all about Monsieur and his minions, perhaps she could tell me how it was that a man who enjoyed the favors of the most dazzling and (by all reports) the most demanding woman in court could have the inclination, or even the energy, to dally with page boys. I had always abominated the “Italian” vice. Yet somehow its grip on a man as attractive as Conti seemed to put matters in a different light.

But
why
should that be, I asked myself hotly, unless I had no morals at all?

We trotted now, and I endeavored to pull my thoughts together with some coherence. After all, the vice was widespread. Had not even the sainted Louis XIII been accused of it? My father used strenuously to deny this, but a man as upright as Beauvillier had told me himself that
his
father had once found young Cinq-Mars naked in the king's chamber when he had burst in with an important military dispatch. Perhaps it was simply a Bourbon trait. Or might it have been that Conti was so attracted to beauty in human beings that he had to pay tribute to it in whichever sex it appeared? But what kind of a question was
that?

I reined up for a moment and let Conti get farther ahead. My pulses were throbbing, and I felt my tongue thick and dry in my mouth. Was it conceivable that I was attracted by the vision of Conti with a pretty page? Where was my advocacy of the prince taking me? No, no, this had to be madness. I was simply putting as good a frame as I could around an odious picture. Conti was an exceptional man, a peerless soldier, a great prince. Nothing that he did could be really odious, for the simple reason that he brought so much charm to the doing of it. An exception had to be made for him in my mind and heart.

Once I saw my way, I became calmer. I spurred my horse ahead and caught up with the man who was still my hero. I reminded myself of the sexual habits of Julius Caesar, of Alexander the Great, of Hadrian.

“I just want to say, sir, that nothing—nothing under the sun—can affect my high regard for you!”

He reached over to touch my shoulder. He made all his gestures exquisite. “I know you are strict in your views, so your generosity is the more appreciated.” For a few moments we rode on in a silence that with any other companion would have been awkward. As it was, I felt a curious elevation of spirits. Then Conti's mood seemed suddenly to alter again. His voice, when he spoke, was grating as I had never heard it. “Do you know something, Saint-Simon? Things would have been different had I been given a command. But what in the name of Christ is a man to do when he's married off to a dwarf of a cousin and kept dancing his heels on parquet floors?”