Volume I Part 12 (1/2)
M. de Soissons urged and expostulated in vain; the minister was inflexible; and at length the Prince withdrew, but not before he had given vent to his indignation with a bitterness which convinced his listener that thenceforward all kindly feeling between them was at an end.
But if the Count thus suffered himself to be defeated by a first refusal, Madame de Verneuil was by no means inclined to follow his example. Baffled but not beaten, she resolved upon returning to the charge; and accordingly she drove to the residence of the minister, and met him at the door of his closet as he was about to proceed to the Louvre, in order to have an interview with the King.
There was an expression of haughty defiance in the eye of the favourite, and a heightened colour upon her cheek, which at once betrayed to Sully the purpose of her visit; while he on his side received her with a calm courtesy which was ill-calculated to inspire her with any hope of success; and she had scarcely seated herself before he gave her reason to perceive that he was as little inclined to temporize as herself. When they met he held in his hand a roll of paper, which, even after she had entered the apartment, he still continued to grasp with a pertinacity that did not fail to attract her attention.
”And what may be the precious doc.u.ment, Monsieur le Ministre,” she demanded flippantly, ”of which you find it so impossible to relax your hold?”
”A precious doc.u.ment indeed, Madame,” was the abrupt reply, ”and one in which you figure among many others.” So saying, he unrolled the scroll, and read aloud a list of edicts, solicited or granted, similar to that of the Comte de Soissons, one of which bore her own name.
”And what are you about to do with it?” she asked.
”To make it the subject of a remonstrance to his Majesty.”
”Truly,” exclaimed the Marquise, no longer able to control her rage, ”the King will be well-advised should he listen to your caprices, and by so doing affront twenty individuals of the highest quality. Upon whom should he confer such favours as these, if not upon the Princes of the Blood, his cousins, his relatives, and his mistresses?”
”That might be very well,” replied the minister, totally unmoved by her insolence, ”if the King could pay these sums out of his own privy purse; but that they should be levied upon the merchant, the artizan, and the labourer, is entirely out of the question. It is they who feed both him and us; and one master is enough, without their being compelled to support so many cousins, relatives, and mistresses.” [220]
Madame de Verneuil could bear no more; but rising pa.s.sionately from her chair, she left the room without even a parting salutation to the plain-spoken minister, who saw her depart with as much composure as he had seen her enter; and quietly rolling up the obnoxious doc.u.ment which had formed the subject of discussion between them, he in his turn got into his carriage, and proceeded to the Louvre.
Furious alike at her want of success and at the affront which had been put upon her, the Marquise drove from the a.r.s.enal to the hotel of M. de Soissons; where, still smarting under the rebuff of the uncompromising Duke, she did not scruple sufficiently to garble his words to give them all the appearance of a premeditated and wilful insult to the Prince personally. She a.s.sured him that in reply to her remark that the relatives of the monarch possessed the greatest claim upon his liberality, M. de Sully had retorted by the observation that the King had too many kinsmen, and that it would be well for the nation could it be delivered from some of them.
This report so exasperated M. de Soissons, that on the following morning he demanded an audience of the sovereign, during which he bitterly inveighed against the arrogance and presumption of the minister, and claimed instant redress for this affront to his honour and his dignity as a Prince of the Blood; haughtily declaring that should the King refuse to do him justice, he would find means to avenge himself.
The unseemly violence of the Count, by offending the self-respect of the monarch, could not have failed, under any circ.u.mstances, to defeat its own object; but aware as he was that Sully had sought only the preservation of his master's interests, Henry was even less inclined than he might otherwise have been to yield to a dictation of this imperious nature. The very excess of his indignation consequently rendered him calm and self-possessed, and thus at once gave him a decided advantage over his excited interlocutor. Instead of retorting angrily, and involving himself in an undignified dispute, he replied to the intemperate language of the Count by calmly inquiring if he were to understand that M. de Sully had addressed the obnoxious remark which was the subject of complaint to the Prince himself, or if it had merely been reported to him by a third person. To this question M. de Soissons impatiently replied that the insult had not indeed been uttered to himself personally, but that the individual by whom it was communicated to him was above all suspicion; while he moreover considered that his a.s.surance of its truth ought to suffice, as he was incapable of falsehood.
”Were it so, cousin,” said Henry coldly, ”you would differ greatly from the other members of your family, especially your elder brother; but since you appear to place so perfect a reliance on the veracity of your informant, you have only to name him to me, and to explain precisely what he alleges to have pa.s.sed, and I shall then understand what is necessary to be done, and will endeavour to satisfy you as far as I can reasonably do so.”
M. de Soissons was not, however, prepared to involve Madame de Verneuil in a quarrel which threatened the most serious results; and he consequently declared that he had plighted his word not to divulge the ident.i.ty of his informant; a promise which he, moreover, considered to be utterly unnecessary, as he was ready to pledge himself to the entire truth of what he had advanced.
”So, cousin,” said the King with an ambiguous smile, ”you screen yourself under the shadow of an oath from revealing to me what I desire to know; then I, in my turn, swear not to believe one syllable of your complaint beyond what M. de Sully may himself report to me; for I hold his veracity in as great estimation as you do that of the nameless partisan to whom you are indebted for the fine story you have inflicted upon me.”
It was in somewhat the same frame of mind in which the Marquise had quitted the finance minister that M. de Soissons, as the King rose and thus indicated the termination of the interview, pa.s.sed from the royal closet; nor did he retire until he had indulged in such unrestrained threats of vengeance that Henry considered it expedient to despatch Zamet without delay to the a.r.s.enal to warn Sully to be upon his guard against the impetuous Prince, and not to venture abroad without a sufficient suite; while at the same time the messenger was instructed to inquire if the obnoxious expression had indeed been used, and to whom.
On being apprised of the visit which had been paid by Madame de Verneuil to the Duke, the King instantly comprehended the whole intrigue, and at once declared that it was useless to search further; as he well knew that she possessed both malice and invention enough to distort the words of the minister to her own purposes; an admission which indicated for the moment a considerable decrease of infatuation on the part of her royal lover.[221]
That this had, however, already become evident, was exemplified by the fact that upon some rumour of the kind being addressed to the d.u.c.h.esse de Rohan, coupled with an inference that the infidelity of Madame de Verneuil had become known to the King, the young d.u.c.h.ess had gaily replied: ”What could he antic.i.p.ate? How was it possible for love to nestle between a mouth and chin which are always interfering with each other?” [222]
It is scarcely doubtful that the present incautious proceeding of the Marquise tended to shake the confidence which Henry had hitherto felt in an affection so admirably simulated that it might have inspired trust in an individual of far inferior rank. He could not overlook the fact that Madame de Verneuil had presumed to declare herself hostile to his favourite minister, and had even made a tool of one of the Princes of the Blood; an affront to himself which he resented after his accustomed fas.h.i.+on, by withdrawing himself from her society, and a.s.siduously appearing in the private circle of the Queen.
On this occasion, however, week succeeded week, and the monarch still continued to avoid the enraged favourite; and even occasionally alluded to her with a contempt which stung her haughty and presumptuous spirit beyond endurance. She saw her little Court melting away, her flatterers dispersing, and her friends becoming estranged; nor could she conceal from herself that if she failed shortly to discover some method of estranging Henry from the Queen, and once more a.s.serting her own influence, all her greatness would be scattered to the winds. Her vanity was also as deeply involved as her ambition, for she had hitherto believed her power over the affections of the King to be so entire that he could not liberate himself from her thrall; yet now, in the zenith of her beauty, in the pride of her intellect, and in the very climax of her favour, she found herself suddenly abandoned, as if the effort had not cost a single struggle to her royal lover.
Marie de Medicis, meanwhile, was happy. She cared not to look back upon the past; she sought not to look forward into the future; to her the present was all in all, and she began to encourage bright dreams of domestic bliss, by which she had never before been visited since the first brief month of her marriage. So greatly indeed did her new-born happiness embellish the exulting Queen, that it was at this period that the profligate monarch declared to several of his confidential friends, that had she not been his wife, his greatest desire would have been to possess her as a mistress.[223] The whole of her little Court felt the influence of her delight; she lavished on all sides the most costly gifts; she surrounded the King with amus.e.m.e.nts of every description, and day after day the heart of the irritated favourite was embittered by the reports which reached her of the unprecedented gaiety and splendour of the Queen's private circle.
As the dissension which had arisen between Sully and the Comte de Soissons rather increased in intensity than yielded to the royal expostulation, Henry resolved to give a public proof of his continued regard for the minister; and for this purpose he caused him to be informed that on his way to Normandy (whither he was about to proceed in order to investigate the truth of certain rumours which had reached him of a meditated insurrection in that province) he would pa.s.s by Rosny, and should claim his hospitality for one day with his whole Court. As the King was on the eve of his departure, Sully at once left the capital, and by travelling with great speed, he reached the chateau four days before his expected guests, for whose reception he made the most magnificent preparations of which so brief an interval would admit. As the approaches to the domain were not yet completed, and it was necessary to level the road by which their Majesties would arrive, the Duke, in order to accomplish this object, incautiously caused a ca.n.a.l by which it was traversed, and over which the bridge was still unbuilt, to be dammed up; and this arrangement made, he directed his whole attention to the internal decorations of the castle. Unfortunately, however, while his royal and n.o.ble guests were still seated at the elaborate and costly banquet which had been prepared for them, a terrific storm burst over the edifice, and information was brought to the host that the waters had become so swollen as to have overflowed their banks, while the pent-up ca.n.a.l which he had just driven back had inundated the court, and was pouring itself in a dense volume through the offices. The alarm instantly became general; the Queen, the Princesses, and the ladies of the Court sought refuge in the upper rooms of the castle, whither, as the danger momentarily increased, they were soon followed by Henry and his retinue; and meanwhile Sully gave instant orders that workmen should be despatched to clear the bed of the ca.n.a.l, and thus afford an escape for the invading element. This was happily accomplished without any loss of life, and the accident entailed no further evil consequence than the destruction of all the fruits and confectionary by which the banquet was to have terminated.[224] After this misadventure the Court proceeded to Caen, where at the close of a patient investigation the King withdrew the government of the city from M. de Crevecoeur-Montmorency, who was accused of being engaged in a treasonable correspondence with the Duc de Bouillon, the Comte d'Auvergne, and the Duc de la Tremouille, his relative, and bestowed it upon M. de Bellefonds.[225] Thence the royal party removed to Rouen, where Henry succeeded in re-establis.h.i.+ng perfect order throughout the whole province of Lower Normandy.
On his return to Paris the King learnt that M. de Soissons, who had declined to accompany him in his journey, so deeply resented his visit to Rosny, the purpose of which he had comprehended upon the instant, that he had resolved in consequence to quit the kingdom. As the voluntary expatriation of the Princes of the Blood tended alike to weaken his resources and to undermine his authority, Henry at once directed MM. de Bellievre and de Sillery to wait upon the Count, and to a.s.sure him that, so soon as he produced certain proof of the culpability of the Duc de Sully, he should receive ample satisfaction for the alleged affront, but that until such proof was furnished he should continue to protect the minister, and to consider him innocent of the offence imputed to him. The Chancellor was, moreover, instructed to inquire into the motive which had induced the Prince to declare his intention of leaving France.
To this message M. de Soissons coldly replied by observing that he had been insulted by the Duke, to whom he had given no cause of offence; but that as it nevertheless appeared by the statement to which he had just listened, that it was the pleasure of his Majesty to defend the accused rather than the accuser, he considered that he need not advance any further reason for absenting himself from the kingdom. After the departure of MM. de Bellievre and de Sillery, however, the Prince requested the Duc de Montbazon[226] and the Comte de St. Pol[227] to wait upon the sovereign, in order to explain to him his reason for quitting the country; to a.s.sure him of the regret which he felt that recent circ.u.mstances had left him no other alternative; and to entreat his Majesty to pardon him if he ventured to take his leave through the medium of these his friends, rather than, by appearing in person, incur the risk of aggravating his displeasure.
Having seen the two n.o.bles depart upon their mission, M. de Soissons mounted his horse and at once proceeded to Paris, to make the necessary preparations for the journey which he contemplated; but before he had taken any definite measures to that effect he was rejoined by his friends, who had been directed by the King to follow him with all speed, and to explain to him that he had altogether mistaken the message entrusted to the Chancellor, as the only protection which his Majesty had declared his intention of affording to M. de Sully was against his own threats of personal violence; while in the second place they were instructed to inform him that the King strictly enjoined him not to quit Paris, as a want of obedience upon this point would prove very prejudicial to his Majesty's interests; and finally, they were authorized to a.s.sure him that, in the event of his compliance with the royal wishes, he should receive ample satisfaction for the affront of which he complained.